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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tramping on Life, by Harry Kemp
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Tramping on Life
+       An Autobiographical Narrative
+
+Author: Harry Kemp
+
+Release Date: March 19, 2005 [EBook #15415]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAMPING ON LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Martin Pettit and the PG
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE AUTHOR OF _Tramping on Life_]
+
+
+
+
+TRAMPING ON LIFE
+
+AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE
+
+HARRY KEMP
+
+GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
+
+GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY, Inc.
+
+_Copyright, 1922, by_
+
+BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
+
+
+
+First Printing, September, 1922
+
+Second Printing, November, 1922
+
+Third Printing, January, 1923
+
+Fourth Printing, April, 1923
+
+Fifth Printing, July, 1923
+
+Sixth Printing, September, 1923
+
+Seventh Printing, November, 1923
+
+Eighth Printing, May, 1924
+
+Ninth Printing, November, 1924
+
+Tenth Printing, July, 1925
+
+Eleventh Printing, March, 1926
+
+Twelfth Printing, February, 1927
+
+
+
+_Printed in the United States of America_
+
+
+
+
+All in this book that is good and enduring
+and worth while for humanity, I
+dedicate to the memory of my wife,
+
+MARY PYNE
+
+
+_Waterbury, Connecticut,
+May 20, 1922._
+
+
+
+
+TRAMPING ON LIFE
+
+Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother.
+For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in her
+family. And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weakness
+in her. She was not even strong enough to suckle me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section of
+that great, steel-manufacturing city which was neither city, suburb, nor
+country,--but a muddy, green-splashed, murky mixture of all three.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They told me, when I was old enough to understand, that my mother was
+English, that her folks lived in Cleveland and owned a millinery and
+drygoods store there ... and that my father met my mother one day in
+Mornington. She was visiting an uncle who ran a candy store on Main
+Street, and, she girl-like, laughed and stood behind the counter, ready
+for a flirtation....
+
+My father was young, too. And he was employed there in the store,
+apprenticed to the candy-maker's trade. And, on this day, as he passed
+through, carrying a trayful of fresh-dipped chocolates, he winked at my
+mother and joked with her in an impudent way ... and she rebuffed him,
+not really meaning a rebuff, of course ... and he startled her by
+pulling off his hat and grotesquely showing himself to be entirely bald
+... for he had grown bald very young--at the age of sixteen ... both
+because of scarlet fever, and because baldness for the men ran in his
+family ... and he was tall, and dark, and walked with rather a military
+carriage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was four years old when my mother died.
+
+When she fell sick, they tell me, my grandfather did one of the few
+decent acts of his life--he let my father have a farm he owned in
+central Kansas, near Hutchinson. But my father did not try to work it.
+
+He was possessed of neither the capital nor knowledge necessary for
+farming.
+
+He went to work as clerk in a local hotel, in the rapidly growing town.
+Crazy with grief, he watched my mother drop out of his life a little
+more each day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father and mother both had tempers that flared up and sank as
+suddenly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had lung fever when I was a baby. That was what they called it then. I
+nearly died of it. It left me very frail in body.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As soon as I could walk and talk my mother made a great companion of me.
+She didn't treat me as if I were only a child. She treated me like a
+grown-up companion. I am told that I would follow her about the house
+from room to room, clutching at her skirts, while she was dusting and
+sweeping and working. And to hear us two talking with each other, you
+would have imagined there was a houseful of people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father's anguish over my mother's death caused him to break loose
+from all ties. His grief goaded him so that he went about aimlessly. He
+roamed from state to state, haunted by her memory. He worked at all
+sorts of jobs. Once he even dug ditches for seventy-five cents a day. He
+had all sorts of adventures, roaming about.
+
+As for me, I was left alone with my grandmother, his mother,--in the big
+house which stood back under the trees, aloof from the wide, dusty road
+that led to the mills.
+
+With us lived my young, unmarried aunt, Millie....
+
+My grandmother had no education. She could barely read and write.
+
+And she believed in everybody.
+
+She was stout ... sparse-haired ... wore a switch ... had kindly,
+confiding, blue eyes.
+
+Beggars, tramps, pack-peddlers, book-agents, fortune-tellers,--she lent
+a credulous ear to all,--helped others when we ourselves needed help,
+signed up for preposterous articles on "easy" monthly payments,--gave
+away food, starving her appetite and ours.
+
+When, child though I was, even I protested, she would say, "well,
+Johnnie, you might be a tramp some day, and how would I feel if I
+thought some one was turning you away hungry?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My Grandfather Gregory was a little, alert, erect, suave man,--he was a
+man whose nature was such that he would rather gain a dollar by some
+cheeky, brazen, off-colour practice than earn a hundred by honest
+methods.
+
+He had keen grey eyes that looked you in the face in utter, disarming
+frankness. He was always immaculately dressed. He talked continually
+about money, and about how people abused his confidence and his trust in
+men. But there was a sharpness like pointed needles in the pupils of his
+eyes that betrayed his true nature.
+
+Coming to Mornington as one of the city's pioneers, at first he had kept
+neck to neck in social prestige with the Babsons, Guelders, and the
+rest, and had built the big house that my grandmother, my aunt, and
+myself now lived in, on Mansion avenue....
+
+When the Civil War broke out, that streak of adventure and daring in my
+grandfather which in peace times turned him to shady financial
+transactions, now caused him to enlist. And before the end of the war he
+had gone far up in the ranks.
+
+After the war he came into still more money by a manufacturing business
+which he set up. But the secret process of the special kind of material
+which he manufactured he inveigled out of a comrade in arms. The latter
+never derived a cent from it. My grandfather stole the patent, taking it
+out in his own name. The other man had trusted him, remembering the
+times they had fought shoulder to shoulder, and had bivouacked
+together....
+
+My grandfather, though so small as to be almost diminutive, was spry and
+brave as an aroused wasp when anyone insulted him. Several times he
+faced down burly-bodied men who had threatened to kill him for his
+getting the better of them in some doubtful business transaction.
+
+For a long time his meanness and sharp dealings were reserved for
+outsiders and he was generous with his family. And my sweet, simple, old
+grandmother belonged to all the societies, charitable and otherwise, in
+town ... but she was not, never could be "smart." She was always saying
+and doing naïve things from the heart. And soon she began to disapprove
+of my grandfather's slick business ways.
+
+I don't know just what tricks he put over ... but he became _persona non
+grata_ in local business circles ... and he took to running about the
+country, putting through various projects here and there ... this
+little, dressy, hard-faced man ... like a cross between a weasel and a
+bird!
+
+He dropped into Mornington, and out again, each time with a wild,
+restless story of fortunes to be made or in the making!
+
+Once he came home and stayed for a longer time than usual. During this
+stay he received many letters. My grandmother noticed a furtiveness in
+his manner when he received them. My grandmother noticed that her
+husband always repaired immediately to the outhouse when he received a
+letter.
+
+She followed after him one day, and found fragments of a torn letter
+cast below ... she performed the disagreeable task of retrieving the
+fragments, of laboriously piecing them together and spelling them out.
+She procured a divorce as quietly as possible. Then my grandfather made
+his final disappearance. I did not see him again till I was quite grown
+up.
+
+All support of his numerous family ceased. His sons and daughters had to
+go to work while still children, or marry.
+
+My Aunt Alice married a country doctor whom I came to know as "Uncle
+Beck." My Uncle Joe, who inherited my grandfather's business-sense, with
+none of his crookedness, started out as a newsboy, worked his way up to
+half-proprietorship in a Mornington paper ... the last I heard of him he
+had money invested in nearly every enterprise in town, and had become a
+substantial citizen.
+
+My father still pursued his nomadic way of living, sending, very seldom,
+driblets of money to my grandmother for my support ... my uncle Jim went
+East to work ... of my uncle Landon I shall tell you later on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The big house in which my grandmother, my Aunt Millie, and I lived was
+looking rather seedy by this time. The receding tide of fashion and
+wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing
+city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great,
+flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one ... and a
+welter of strange people we then called the "low Irish" came to work in
+them, and our Mansion Avenue became "Kilkenny Row." And a gang of tough
+kids sprang up called the "Kilkenny Cats," with which my gang used to
+fight.
+
+After the "Low Irish" came the "Dagoes" ... and after them the "Hunkies"
+... each wilder and more poverty-stricken than the former.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Industrial Panic of '95 (it was '95, I think) was on ... always very
+poor since the breaking up of our family, now at times even bread was
+scarce in the house.
+
+I was going to school, scrawny and freckle-faced and ill-nourished. I
+had a pet chicken that fortunately grew up to be a hen. It used to lay
+an egg for me nearly every morning during that hard time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My early remembrances of school are chiefly olfactory. I didn't like the
+dirty boy who sat next to me and spit on his slate, rubbing it clean
+with his sleeve. I loved the use of my yellow, new sponge, especially
+after the teacher had taught me all about how it had grown on the bottom
+of the ocean, where divers had to swim far down to bring it up, slanting
+through the green waters. But the slates of most of the boys stunk
+vilely with their spittle.
+
+I didn't like the smell of the pig-tailed little girls, either. There
+was a close soapiness about them that offended me. And yet they
+attracted me. For I liked them in their funny, kilt-like, swinging
+dresses. I liked the pudginess of their noses, the shiny apple-glow of
+their cheeks.
+
+It was wonderful to learn to make letters on a slate. To learn to put
+down rows of figures and find that one and one, cabalistically, made
+two, and two and two, four!
+
+It always seemed an age to recess. And the school day was as long as a
+month is now.
+
+We were ready to laugh at anything ... a grind-organ in the street, a
+passing huckster crying "potatoes," etc.
+
+I have few distinct memories of my school days. I never went to
+kindergarten. I entered common school at the age of eight.
+
+My grandfather, after his hegira from Mornington, left behind his
+library of travels, lives of famous American Statesmen and Business
+Men, and his Civil War books. Among these books were four treasure
+troves that set my boy's imagination on fire. They were _Stanley's
+Adventures in Africa_, Dr. Kane's Book of _Polar Explorations_, _Mungo
+Park_, and, most amazing of all, a huge, sensational book called _Savage
+Races of the World_ ... this title was followed by a score of harrowing
+and sensational sub-titles in rubric. I revelled and rolled in this book
+like a colt let out to first pasture. For days and nights, summer and
+winter, I fought, hunted, was native to all the world's savage regions
+in turn, partook gleefully of strange and barbarous customs, naked and
+skin-painted. I pushed dug-outs and canoes along tropic water-ways where
+at any moment an enraged hippopotamus might thrust up his snout and
+overturn me, crunching the boat in two and leaving me a prey to
+crocodiles ... I killed birds of paradise with poison darts which I blew
+out of a reed with my nostrils ... I burned the houses of white settlers
+... even indulged shudderingly in cannibal feasts.
+
+The one thing that pre-eminently seized my imagination in _Savage Races
+of the World_ was the frontispiece,--a naked black rushing full-tilt
+through a tropical forest, his head of hair on fire, a huge
+feather-duster of dishevelled flame ... somehow this appealed to me as
+especially romantic. I dreamed of myself as that savage, rushing
+gloriously through a forest, naked, and crowned with fire like some
+primitive sun-god. It never once occurred to me how it would hurt to
+have my hair burning!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Aunt Millie was taken down with St. Vitus's dance, it afforded me
+endless amusement. She could hardly lift herself a drink out of a full
+dipper without spilling two-thirds of the contents on the ground.
+
+Uncle Beck, the Pennsylvania Dutch country doctor who married Aunt
+Alice, came driving in from Antonville, five miles away, once or twice a
+week to tend to Millie, free, as we were too poor to pay for a doctor. I
+remember how Uncle Beck caught me and whipped me with a switch. For I
+constantly teased Aunt Millie to make her scream and cry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Granma," I used to call out, on waking in the morning....
+
+"Yes, Johnnie darling, what is it?"
+
+"Granma, yesterday ... in the woods back of Babson's barn, I killed
+three Indians, one after the other." (The funny part of it was that I
+believed this, actually, as soon as the words left my mouth.)
+
+A silence....
+
+"Granma, don't you believe me?"
+
+"Yes, of course, I believe you."
+
+Aunt Millie would strike in with--"Ma, why do you go on humouring
+Johnnie while he tells such lies? You ought to give him a good
+whipping."
+
+"The poor little chap ain't got no mother!"
+
+"Poor little devil! If you keep on encouraging him this way he'll become
+one of the greatest liars in the country."
+
+A colloquy after this sort took place more than once. It gave me
+indescribable pleasure to narrate an absurd adventure, believe it myself
+in the telling of it, and think others believed me. Aunt Millie's scorn
+stung me like a nettle, and I hated her.
+
+In many ways I tasted practical revenge. Though a grown girl of
+nineteen, she still kept three or four dolls. And I would steal her
+dolls, pull their dresses for shame over their heads, and set them
+straddle the banisters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We took in boarders. We had better food. It was good to have meat to eat
+every day.
+
+Among the boarders was a bridge builder named Elton Reeves. Elton had a
+pleasant, sun-burnt face and a little choppy moustache beneath which his
+teeth glistened when he smiled.
+
+He fell, or pretended to fall, in love with gaunt, raw-boned Millie.
+
+At night, after his day's work, he and Millie would sit silently for
+hours in the darkened parlour,--silent, except for an occasional murmur
+of voices. I was curious. Several times I peeked in. But all I could see
+was the form of my tall aunt couched half-moonwise in Elton Reeve's lap.
+I used to wonder why they sat so long and still, there in the
+darkness....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once a grown girl of fourteen named Minnie came to visit a sweet little
+girl named Martha Hanson, whose consumptive widower-father rented two
+rooms from my grandmother. They put Minnie to sleep in the same bed with
+me....
+
+After a while I ran out of the bedroom into the parlour where the
+courting was going on.
+
+"Aunt Millie, Minnie won't let me sleep."
+
+Millie did not answer. Elton guffawed lustily.
+
+I returned to bed and found Minnie lying stiff and mute with fury.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Elton left, the bridge-work brought to completion. He had a job waiting
+for him in another part of the country.
+
+It hurt even my savage, young, vindictive heart to see Millie daily
+running to the gate, full of eagerness, as the mail-man came....
+
+"No, no letters for you this morning, Millie!"
+
+Or more often he would go past, saying nothing. And Millie would weep
+bitterly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have a vision of a very old woman walking over the top of a hill. She
+leans on a knobby cane. She smokes a corn-cob pipe. Her face is
+corrugated with wrinkles and as tough as leather. She comes out of a
+high background of sky. The wind whips her skirts about her thin shanks.
+Her legs are like broomsticks.
+
+This is a vision of my great-grandmother's entrance into my boyhood.
+
+I had often heard of her. She had lived near Halton with my Great-aunt
+Rachel for a long time ... and now, since we were taking in boarders and
+could keep her, she was coming to spend the rest of her days with us.
+
+At first I was afraid of this eerie, ancient being. But when she dug out
+a set of fish-hooks, large and small, from her tobacco pouch, and gave
+them to me, I began to think there might be something human in the old
+lady.
+
+She established her regular place in a rocker by the kitchen stove. She
+had already reached the age of ninety-five. But there was a constant,
+sharp, youthful glint in her eye that belied her age.
+
+She chewed tobacco vigorously like any backwoodsman (had chewed it
+originally because she'd heard it cured toothache, then had kept up the
+habit because she liked it).
+
+Her corncob pipe--it was as rank a thing as ditch digger ever poisoned
+the clean air with.
+
+Granma Wandon was as spry as a yearling calf. She taught me how to
+drown out groundhogs and chipmunks from their holes. She went fishing
+with me and taught me to spit on the bait for luck, or rub a certain
+root on the hook, which she said made the fish bite better.
+
+And solemnly that spring of her arrival, and that following summer, did
+we lay out a fair-sized garden and carefully plant each kind of
+vegetable in just the right time and phase of the moon and, however it
+may be, her garden grew beyond the garden of anyone else in the
+neighbourhood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following winter--and her last winter on earth--was a time of wonder
+and marvel for me ... sitting with her at the red-heated kitchen stove,
+I listened eagerly to her while she related tales to me of old settlers
+in Pennsylvania ... stories of Indians ... ghost stories ... she curdled
+my blood with tales of catamounts and mountain lions crying like women,
+and babies in the dark, to lure travellers where they could pounce down
+from branches on them.
+
+And she told me the story of the gambler whom the Devil took when he
+swore falsely, avowing, "may the Devil take me if I cheated."
+
+She boasted of my pioneer ancestors ... strapping six-footers in their
+stocking feet ... men who carried one hundred pound bags of salt from
+Pittsburgh to Slippery Rock in a single journey.
+
+The effect of these stories on me--?
+
+I dreamed of skeleton hands that reached out from the clothes closet for
+me. Often at night I woke, yelling with nightmare.
+
+With a curious touch of folk lore Granma Gregory advised me to "look for
+the harness under the bed, if it was a nightmare." But she upbraided
+Granma Wandon, her mother, for retailing me such tales.
+
+"Nonsense, it'll do him good, my sweet little Johnnie," she assured her
+daughter, knocking her corncob pipe over the coal scuttle like a man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a story of Granma Wandon's that cut deep into my memory. It
+was the story of the man who died cursing God, and who brought, by his
+cursing, the dancing of the very flames of Hell, red-licking and
+serrate, in a hideous cluster, like an infernal bed of flowers, just
+outside the window, for all around his death-bed to see!
+
+In the fall of the next year Granma Wandon took sick. We knew it was
+all over for her. She faded painlessly into death. She knew she was
+going, said so calmly and happily. She made Millie and Granma Gregory
+promise they'd be good to me. I wept and wept. I kissed her leathery,
+leaf-like hand with utter devotion ... she could hardly lift it. Almost
+of itself it sought my face and flickered there for a moment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She seemed to be listening to something far off.
+
+"Can't you hear it, Maggie?" she asked her daughter.
+
+"Hear what, mother?"
+
+"Music ... that beautiful music!"
+
+"Do you see anything, mother?"
+
+"Yes ... heaven!"
+
+Then the fine old pioneer soul passed on. I'll bet she still clings
+grimly to an astral corncob pipe somewhere in space.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A week before she died, Aunt Millie told us she was sure the end was
+near. For Millie had waked up in the night and had seen the old lady
+come into her room, reach under the bed, take the pot forth, use
+it,--and glide silently upstairs to her room again.
+
+Millie spoke to the figure and received no answer. Then, frightened, she
+knew she had seen a "token" of Granma Wandon's approaching death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the parlour stood the black coffin on trestles; the door open, for we
+had a fear of cats getting at the body,--we could glimpse the ominous
+black object as we sat down to breakfast. And I laid my head on the
+table and wept as much because of that sight as over the loss of my old
+comrade and playmate.
+
+Something vivid had gone out of my life. And for the first time I felt
+and knew the actuality of death. Like a universe-filling, soft,
+impalpable dust it slowly sifted over me, bearing me under. I saw for
+the first time into all the full graves of the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To my great-grandmother's funeral came many distant relatives I had
+never rested eye on before ... especially there came my Great-aunt
+Rachel, Granma Gregory's sister,--a woman just as sweet-natured as she,
+and almost her twin even to the blue rupture of a vein in the middle of
+the lower lip. She, too, had a slightly protrusive stomach over which
+she had the habit of folding her hard-working hands restfully, when she
+talked ... and also there came with her my Great-uncle Joshua, her
+husband ... and my second cousins, Paul and Phoebe, their children. The
+other children, two girls, were off studying in a nurses' college ...
+working their way there.
+
+After the burial Josh and Paul went on back to Halton, where they worked
+in the Steel Mills. They left Aunt Rachel and Phoebe to stay on and pay
+us a visit.
+
+Paul and Josh were "puddlers"--when they worked ... in the open furnaces
+that were in use in those days ... when you saw huge, magnificent men,
+naked to the belt, whose muscles rippled in coils as they toiled away in
+the midst of the living red of flowing metal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Phoebe was wild and beautiful in a frail way. She wore a pea green skirt
+and a waist of filmy, feminine texture. We instantly took to each other.
+She was always up and off, skimming swallow-like in all directions, now
+this way, now that, as if seeking for some new flavour in life, some
+excitement that had not come to her yet.
+
+We made expeditions together over the country. She joined me in my
+imaginary battles with Indians ... my sanguinary hunts for big game....
+It was she who first taught me to beg hand-outs at back doors--one day
+when we went fishing together and found ourselves a long way off from
+home.
+
+Once Phoebe fell into a millpond from a springboard ... with all her
+clothes on ... we were seeing who dared "teeter" nearest the end.... I
+had difficulty in saving her. It was by the hair, with a chance clutch,
+that I drew her ashore.
+
+The picture of her, shivering forlornly before the kitchen stove! She
+was beautiful, even in her long, wet, red-flannel drawers that came down
+to her slim, white ankles. She was weeping over the licking her mother
+had given her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I'm afraid your cousin Phoebe will come to no good end some day, if she
+don't watch out," said my grandmother to me, "and I don't like you to
+play with her much.... I'm going to have Aunt Rachel take her home
+soon" ... after a pause, "as sure as I have ten fingers she'll grow up
+to be a bad woman."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Granma, what is a bad woman?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aunt Rachel and Cousin Phoebe returned home. Uncle Josh, that slack old
+vagabond with his furtive, kindly eye-glances, came for them with a
+livery rig.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I think I read every dime novel published, during those years of my
+childhood ... across the bridge that Elton had helped build, the new
+bridge that spanned the Hickory River, and over the railroad tracks,
+stood a news-stand, that was run by an old, near-sighted woman. As she
+sat tending counter and knitting, I bought her books ... but for each
+dime laid down before her, I stole three extra thrillers from under her
+very eye.
+
+From my grandfather's library I dug up a book on the Hawaiian Islands,
+written by some missionary. In it I found a story of how the natives
+speared fish off the edges of reefs. Straightway I procured a pitchfork.
+
+I searched the shallows and ripples of Hickory River for miles ... I
+followed Babson's brook over the hills nearly to its source.
+
+One day, peering through reeds into a shallow cove, I saw a fish-fin
+thrust up out of the water. I crept cautiously forward.
+
+It was a big fish that lay there. Trembling all over with excitement, I
+made a mad thrust. Then I yelled, and stamped on the fish, getting all
+wet in doing so. I beat its head in with the haft of the fork. It rolled
+over, its white belly glinting in the sun. On picking it up, I was
+disappointed. It had been dead for a long time; had probably swam in
+there to die ... and its gills were a withered brown-black in colour,
+like a desiccated mushroom ... not healthy red.
+
+But I was not to be frustrated of my glory. I tore the tell-tale gills
+out ... then I beat the fish's head to a pulp, and I carried my capture
+home and proudly strutted in at the kitchen door.
+
+"Look, Granma, at what a big fish I've caught."
+
+"Oh, Millie, he's really got one," and Granma straightened up from the
+wash-tub. Millie came out snickering scornfully.
+
+"My Gawd, Ma, can't you see it's been dead a week?"
+
+"You're a liar, it ain't!" I cried. And I began to sob because Aunt
+Millie was trying to push me back into ignominy as I stood at the very
+threshold of glory.
+
+"Honest-to-God, it's--fresh--Granma!" I gulped, "didn't I just kill it
+with the pitchfork?" Then I stopped crying, absorbed entirely in the
+fine story I was inventing of the big fish's capture and death. I stood
+aside, so to speak, amazed at myself, and proud, as my tongue ran on as
+if of its own will.
+
+Even Aunt Millie was charmed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But she soon came out from under the spell with, "Ma, Johnnie means well
+enough, but surely you ain't going to feed that fish to the boarders?"
+
+"Yes, I am. I believe in the little fellow."
+
+"All right, Ma ... but I won't eat a mouthful of it, and you'd better
+drop a note right away for Uncle Beck to drive in, so's he'll be here on
+time for the cases of poison that are sure to develop."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cleaned and baked, the fish looked good, dripping with sauce and basted
+to an appetizing brown.
+
+As I drew my chair up to the table and a smoking portion was heaped on
+my plate, Aunt Millie watched me with bright, malicious eyes.
+
+"Granma, I want another cup o' coffee," I delayed.
+
+But the big, fine, grey-haired mill boss, our star boarder, who liked me
+because I always listened to his stories--he sailed into his helping
+nose-first. That gave me courage and I ate, too ... and we all ate.
+
+"Say, but this fish is good! Where did it come from?"
+
+"The kid here caught it."
+
+"Never tasted better in my life."
+
+None of us were ever any the worse for our rotten fish. And I was
+vindicated, believed in, even by Aunt Millie.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Summer vacation again, after a winter and spring's weary grind in
+school.
+
+Aunt Rachel wrote to Granma that they would be glad to have me come over
+to Halton for a visit.
+
+Granma let me, after I had pleaded for a long while,--but it was with
+great reluctance, warning me of Phoebe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aunt Rachel, Uncle Joshua, Cousin Phoebe and cousin Paul lived in a big,
+square barn-like structure. Its unpainted, barren bulk sat uneasily on
+top of a bare hill where the clay lay so close to the top-soil that in
+wet weather you could hardly labour up the precipitous path that led to
+their house, it was so slippery.
+
+As I floundered upward in the late spring rain, gaining the bare summit
+under the drizzly sky, a rush of dogs met me. They leaped and slavered
+and jumped and flopped and tumbled and whined all about me and over me
+... ten of them ... hound dogs with flop-ears and small, red-rimmed eyes
+... skinny creatures ... there was no danger from them; but they planted
+their mud-sticky paws everywhere in a frenzy of welcome.
+
+"A hound ain't got no sense onless he's a-huntin'," drawled Paul, as his
+great boot caught them dextrously under their bellies and lifted them
+gently, assiduously, severally, in different directions from me....
+
+Aunt Rachel's face, ineffably ignorant and ineffably sweet, lit up with
+a smile of welcome. She met me in the doorway, kissed me.
+
+And she made me a great batch of pancakes to eat, with bacon dripping
+and New Orleans molasses ... but first--
+
+"Josh, where on earth is them carpet slippers o' yourn?"
+
+Josh yawned. He knocked the tobacco out of his pipe leisurely ... then,
+silent, he began scraping the black, foul inside of the bowl ... then at
+last he drawled.
+
+"Don't know, Ma!"
+
+But Phoebe knew, and soon, a mile too wide, the carpet slippers hung on
+my feet, while my shoes were drying in the oven and sending out that
+peculiar, close smell that wet leather emanates when subjected to heat.
+Also, I put on Phoebe's pea-green cotton skirt, while my knee britches
+hung behind the stove, drying. The men chaffed me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the industrial Middle West of those days, when the steel kings'
+fortunes were in bloom of growth, these distantly related kinsfolk of
+mine still lived the precarious life of pioneer days. Through the bare
+boards of the uneven floor whistled the wind. Here and there lay a
+sparse, grey, homemade rag rug. And here and there a window pane,
+broken, had not been replaced. And an old pair of pants, a ragged shirt,
+a worn out skirt stuffed in, kept out the draft,--of which everybody but
+Phoebe seemed mortally afraid. Incidentally these window-stuffings kept
+out much of the daylight.
+
+Aunt Rachel, near-sighted, with her rather pathetic stoop, was
+ceaselessly sewing, knitting, scrubbing, washing, and cooking. She took
+care of her "two men" as she phrased it proudly--her husband and her
+great-bodied son--as if they were helpless children.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We're going a-huntin' to-day, Johnny,--wan' ter come along?"
+
+"Sure!"
+
+"Wall, git ready, then!"
+
+But first Paul fed the hounds out in the yard ... huge slabs of white
+bread spread generously with lard. This was all they ever got, except
+the scraps from the table, which were few. They made a loud, slathering
+noise, gulping and bolting their food.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But we started off without the hounds.
+
+"Ain't you going to take the dogs along?"
+
+"Nope."
+
+"Why not--ain't we going to hunt rabbits?"
+
+"Yep."
+
+"Then why not take them?"
+
+"Put your hand in my right hand pocket an' find out!"
+
+I stuck my hand down, and it was given a vicious bite by a white,
+pink-eyed ferret Paul was carrying there. I yelled with pain and
+surprise. I pulled my hand up in the air, the ferret hanging to a
+finger. The ferret dropped to the ground. Paul stooped and picked it up,
+guffawing. It didn't bite him. It knew and feared him. That was his idea
+of a joke, the trick he played on me!
+
+"Yew might git blood-pisen from that bite!" teased Josh, to scare me.
+But I remained unscared. I sucked the blood from the tiny punctures,
+feeling secure, after I had done it. I remembered how Queen Eleanore had
+saved the life of Richard Coeur de Lion in the Holy Land, when he had
+been bitten by an adder, by sucking out the venom. I enjoyed the thrill
+of a repeated historic act.
+
+"If we got ketched we'd be put in jail fer this!" remarked Josh with
+that sly, slow smile of his; "it ain't the proper season to hunt
+rabbits in, an' it's agin the law, in season or out, to hunt 'em with
+ferrets," and he chuckled with relish over the outlawry of it.
+
+We came to a hole under a hollow tree. Paul let the ferret go down,
+giving him a preliminary smack.
+
+"Mind you, Jim,--God damn you,--don't you stay down that hole too long."
+
+"Think he understands you?"
+
+"In course he does: jest the same es you do."
+
+"And why would Jim stay down?"
+
+"He might corner the rabbit, kill him, an' stay to suck his blood ...
+but Jim knows me ... I've given him many's the ungodly whipping for
+playing me that trick ... but he's always so greedy and hongry that
+sometimes the little beggar fergits."
+
+"And then how do you get him out again?"
+
+"Jest set an' wait till he comes out ... which he must do, sometime ...
+an' then you kin jest bet I _give_ it to him."
+
+We waited a long time.
+
+"Damn Jim, he's up to his old tricks again, I'll bet," swore Josh,
+shifting his face-deforming quid of tobacco from one protuberant cheek
+to the other, meditatively....
+
+The ferret appeared, or, rather, a big grey rabbit ... squealing with
+terror ... coming up backward ... the ferret clinging angrily to his
+nose ... and tugging like a playing pup.
+
+Paul took Jim off and put him back in his pocket ... he had to smack him
+smartly to make him let go--"hongry little devil!" he remarked fondly.
+
+A crack of the hand, brought down edgewise, broke the rabbit's neck, and
+he was thrust into a bag which Josh carried slung over his shoulder.
+
+We caught fifteen rabbits that afternoon.
+
+We had a big rabbit stew for supper. Afterward the two men sat about in
+their socks, chairs tilted back, sucking their teeth and picking them
+with broom straws ... and they told yarns of dogs, and hunting, and
+fishing, till bed-time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The morning sun shone brightly over me through three panes of glass in
+the window, the fourth of which was stopped up with an old petticoat.
+
+I woke with Phoebe's warm kiss on my mouth. We had slept together, for
+the older folks considered us too young for it to make any difference.
+We lay side by side all night ... and like a little man and woman we lay
+together, talking, in the morning.
+
+We could smell the cooking of eggs and bacon below ... an early
+breakfast for Paul, for he had been taken by a whim that he must work in
+the mine over the hill for a few weeks in order to earn some money ...
+for he was a miner, as well as a puddler in the mills ... he worked in
+coal mines privately run, not yet taken into the trust. He often had to
+lie on his side in a shallow place, working the coal loose with his
+pick--where the roof was so close he couldn't sit up straight....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"What shall we do to-day?" asked Phoebe of me, as we lay there, side by
+side, "I say let's go swimming?"
+
+"You and me together?" I demurred.
+
+"In course!"
+
+"And you a girl?"
+
+"Can't I swim jest as well as you can?"
+
+"Phoebe, git up, you lazy-bones," called Aunt Rachel, from the bottom of
+the stairs.
+
+"All right, Ma!"
+
+"Johnnie, you git up, too!"
+
+"Coming down right now, Aunt Rachel!"
+
+"Hurry up, or your breakfast'll git cold ... the idea of you children
+laying in bed like this ... what on earth are you doing up there,
+talking and talking? I kin hear you buzzing away clear down here!"
+
+I had been rapt in telling Phoebe how, when I grew to be a man, I was
+going to become a great adventurer, traveller, explorer.
+
+Phoebe sat up on the edge of the bed, lazily stretching for a moment, as
+a pretty bird stretches its leg along its wing. Then, her slim, nubile
+body outlined sharply in the brilliant day, she stood up, slipped off
+her flannel nightgown with a natural, unaffected movement, and stood
+naked before me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a custom of mine to swing my feet as I ate; "just like a little
+calf wags its tail when it sucks its mother's tit," my grandmother would
+say. I swung my feet vigorously that morning, but did not eat noisily,
+as my uncles, all my male relatives, in fact, did. I never made a noise
+when I ate. I handled my food delicately by instinct. If I found a fly
+in anything it generally made me sick to my stomach.
+
+Feeling warm, I suppose, in her heart toward me, because I was different
+in my ways, and frail-looking, and spoke a sort of book-English and not
+the _lingua franca_ that obtained as speech in the Middle West, my Aunt
+Rachel heaped my plate with griddle cakes, which she made specially for
+me.
+
+"You're goin' to be diff'rent from the rest, the way you read books and
+newspapers," she remarked half-reverentially.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A foamy bend in a racing brook where an elbow of rock made a swirling
+pool about four-foot deep. Phoebe took me there.
+
+We undressed.
+
+How smooth-bodied she was, how different from me! I studied her with
+abashed, veiled glances. The way she wound her hair on the top of her
+head, to put it out of the way, made her look like a woman in miniature.
+
+She dove first, like a water-rat. I followed on her heels.
+
+We both shot to the surface immediately. For all the warmth of the day,
+the water was deceptively icy. We crawled out. We lay on the bank, in
+the good sun, gasping....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we lay there, I spoke to her of her difference ... a thing which was
+for the first time brought home to me in clear eyesight.
+
+Phoebe proceeded to blaze her way into my imagination with quaint,
+direct, explanatory talk ... things she had picked up God knows where
+... grotesque details ... Rabelaisan concentrations on seldom-expressed
+particulars....
+
+I learned many things at once from Phoebe ... twisted and childish, but
+at least more fundamental than the silly stories about storks and
+rabbits that brought babies down chimneys, or hid them in hollow stumps
+... about benevolent doctors, who, when desired by the mothers and
+fathers, brought additions to the family, from nowhere!...
+
+The house-cat ... kittens and the way they came ... surely I knew, but
+had not lifted the analogy up the scale....
+
+A furtive hand touched mine, interwove itself, finger with thrilling
+finger ... close together, we laughed into each other's eyes, over-joyed
+that we knew more than our elders thought we knew....
+
+Girls, just at the gate of adolescence, possess a directness of purpose
+which, afterwards, is looked upon as a distinct, masculine
+prerogative....
+
+Phoebe drew closer to me, pressing against me ... but a fierce, battling
+reluctance rose in my breast....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was astonished, stunned by my negation.
+
+Silently I dressed,--she, with a sullen pout on her fresh, childish
+mouth.
+
+"You fool! I hate you! You're no damn good!" she cried passionately.
+
+With a cruel pleasure in the action, I beat her on the back. She began
+to sob.
+
+Then we walked on a space. And we sat down together on the crest of a
+hill. My mood changed, and I held her close to me, with one arm flung
+about her, till she quietened down from her sobbing. I was full of a
+power I had never known before.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have told of the big, double house my grandmother had for renting, and
+how she might have made a good living renting it out, if she had used a
+little business sense ... but now she let the whole of it to a caravan
+of gypsies for their winter quarters,--who, instead of paying rent,
+actually held her and Millie in _their_ debt by reading their palms,
+sometimes twice a day ... I think it was my Uncle Joe who at last ousted
+them....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I came back from Aunt Rachel's I found a voluble, fat, dirty, old,
+yellow-haired tramp established in the ground floor of the same house.
+He had, in the first place, come to our back door to beg a hand-out.
+And, sitting on the doorstep and eating, and drinking coffee, he had
+persuaded my grandmother that if she would give him a place to locate on
+credit he knew a way to clear a whole lot of money. His project for
+making money was the selling of home-made hominy to the restaurants up
+in town.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found him squatted on the bare floor, with no furniture in the room.
+He had a couple of dingy wash-boilers which he had picked up from the
+big garbage-dump near the race-track.
+
+Day in, day out, I spent my time with this tramp, listening to his
+stories of the pleasures and adventures of tramp-life.
+
+I see him still, wiping his nose on his ragged coat-sleeve as he
+vociferates....
+
+When one day he disappeared, leaving boilers, hominy and all, behind, I
+missed his yarns as much as my grandmother missed her unpaid rent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It appears that at this time my grandfather had a manufacturing plant
+for the terra cotta invention he had stolen from his comrade-in-arms, in
+Virginia somewhere, and that, during all these years, he had had Landon
+working with him,--and now word had come to us that Landon was leaving
+for Mornington again.
+
+My grandmother was mad about him, her youngest ... always spoke of him
+as "her baby" ... informed me again and again that he was the most
+accomplished, the handsomest man the Gregory family had ever produced.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Landon arrived. He walked up to the front porch from the road. He came
+in with a long, free stride ... he gave an eager, boyish laugh ... he
+plumped down his big, bulged-to-bursting grip with a bang.
+
+"Hello, Ma!... hello, Millie!... well, well, so this is Duncan's kid?...
+how big he's grown!"
+
+Landon's fine, even, white teeth gleamed a smile at me.
+
+Granma couldn't say a word ... she just looked at him ... and looked at
+him ... and looked at him ... after a long while she began saying his
+name over and over again....
+
+"Landon, Landon, Landon,"--holding him close.
+
+Landon began living with us regularly as one of the family. He went to
+work in the steel mills, and was energetic and tireless when he worked,
+which he did, enough to pay his way and not be a burden on others. He
+performed the hardest kinds of labour in the mills.
+
+But often he laid off for long stretches at a time and travelled about
+with a wild gang of young men and women, attending dances, drinking,
+gambling.
+
+Nothing seemed to hurt him, he was so strong.
+
+At most of the drinking bouts, where the object was to see who could
+take down the most beer, Landon would win by drinking all he could
+hold, then stepping outside on another pretext ... where he would push
+his finger down his throat and spout out all he had drunk. Then he would
+go back and drink more.
+
+Sunday afternoons were the big gambling and card-playing times in our
+semi-rural neighbourhood.
+
+The "boys" spent the day till dusk in the woods back of Babson's Hill.
+They drank and played cards. Landon taught me every card game there was.
+
+He could play the mouth-organ famously, too ... and the guitar and
+banjo. And he had a good strong voice with a rollick in it. And he was
+also a great mimic ... one of his stunts he called "the barnyard," in
+which he imitated with astonishing likeness the sounds every farm-animal
+or bird makes ... and by drumming on his guitar as he played, and by the
+energetic use of his mouth-organ at the same time, he could also make
+you think a circus band was swinging up the street, with clowns and
+camels and elephants.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+His great fault was that he must have someone to bully and domineer. And
+he began picking on me, trying to force me to model my life on his
+pattern of what he thought it should be.
+
+One day I saw him eating raw steak with vinegar. I told him it made me
+sick to see it.
+
+"Well, you'll have to eat some, too, for saying that." And he chased me
+around and 'round the table and room till he caught me. He held me,
+while I kicked and protested. He compelled me, by forcing his finger and
+thumb painfully against my jaws, to open my mouth and eat. He struck me
+to make me swallow.
+
+Everything I didn't want to do he made me do ... he took to beating me
+on every pretext. When my grandmother protested, he said he was only
+educating me the way I should go ... that I had been let run wild too
+long without a mastering hand, and with only women in the house. He must
+make a man out of me....
+
+My reading meant more to me than anything else. I was never so happy as
+when I was sitting humped up over a book, in some obscure corner of the
+house, where Uncle Landon, now grown the incarnate demon of my life,
+could not find me.
+
+It was a trick of his, when he surprised me stooping over a book, to hit
+me a terrific thwack between the shoulder-blades, a blow that made my
+backbone tingle with pain.
+
+"Set up straight! Do you want to be a hump-back when you grow big?"
+
+His pursuit drove me from corner to corner, till I lost my mischievous
+boldness and began to act timid and fearful.
+
+Whenever I failed to obey Granma, that was his opportunity. (Millie
+would cry triumphantly, "_Now_ you have someone to make you be good!")
+The veins on his handsome, curly forehead would swell with delight, as
+he caught me and whipped me ... till Granma would step in and make him
+stop ... but often he would over-rule her, and keep it up till his right
+arm was actually tired. And he would leave me to crawl off, sobbing dry
+sobs, incapable of more tears.
+
+A black hatred of him began to gnaw at my heart ... I dreamed still of
+what I would do when I had grown to be a man ... but now it was not any
+more to be a great traveller or explorer, but to grow into a strong man
+and kill my uncle, first putting him to some savage form of torture ...
+torture that would last a long, long while.
+
+He would often see it in my eyes.
+
+"Don't you look at me that way!" with a swipe of the hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out in the woods I caught a dozen big yellow spiders, the kind that make
+pretty silver traceries, like handwriting with a flourish--on their
+morning webs.
+
+I brought these spiders home in a tin can and transferred them to some
+empty fruit jars in the cellar, keeping them for some boyish reason or
+other, in pairs, and putting in flies for them.
+
+Aunt Millie came upon them and set up a scream that brought Uncle "Lan,"
+as we called him, down to see what was the matter....
+
+I took my beating in silence. I would no longer beg and plead for mercy.
+After he had finished, I lay across the sloping cellar door, lumpish and
+still, inwardly a shaking jelly of horror.
+
+I was wanting to die ... these successive humiliations seemed too great
+to live through.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The grey light of morning filtering in.
+
+Lan stood over my bed.
+
+"--want to go hunting with me to-day?... shootin' blackbirds?"
+
+"Yes, Uncle Lan," I assented, my mind divided between fear of him and
+eagerness to go.
+
+In the kitchen we ate some fried eggs and drank our coffee in silence.
+Then we trudged on through the dew-wet fields, drenched to the knees as
+if having waded through a brook.
+
+Lan bore his double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulder. He shot into a
+tree-top full of bickering blackbirds and brought three down, torn,
+flopping, bleeding. He thrust them into his sack, which reddened
+through, and we went on ... still in silence. The silence began to make
+me tremble but I was glad, anyhow, that I had gone with him. I
+conjectured that he had brought me a-field to give me a final
+whipping--"to teach me to mind Granma."
+
+"--had to bring you out here ... the women are too chicken-hearted--they
+stop me too soon...."
+
+"--Pity your pa's away ... don't do to leave a kid alone with women
+folks ... they don't make him walk the chalk enough!"
+
+It was about an hour after sunrise. We had come to an open field among
+trees. Lan set down his gun against a tree-trunk.
+
+"--needn't make to run ... I can catch you, no matter how fast you go."
+
+He cut a heavy stick from a hickory.
+
+"Come on and take your medicine ... I'm goin' away to-morrow to Halton,
+and I want to leave you something to remember me by--so that you'll obey
+Ma and Millie while I'm gone. If you don't, when I come back, you'll
+catch it all over again."
+
+My heart was going like a steam engine. At the last moment I started to
+run, my legs sinking beneath me. He was upon me with my first few steps,
+and had me by the scruff of the neck, and brought down the cudgel over
+me.
+
+Then an amazing thing happened inside me. It seemed that the blows were
+descending on someone else, not me. The pain of them was a dull,
+far-away thing. Weak, fragile child that I was (known among the other
+children as "Skinny Gregory" and "Spider-Legs") a man's slow fury was
+kindling in me ... let Lan beat me for a year. It didn't matter. When I
+grew up I would kill him for this.
+
+I began to curse boldly at him, calling him by all the obscene terms I
+had ever learned or heard. This, and the astounding fact that I no
+longer squirmed nor cried out, but physically yielded to him, as limp as
+an empty sack, brought him to a puzzled stop. But he sent me an extra
+blow for good measure as he flung me aside. That blow rattled about my
+head, missing my shoulders at which it had been aimed. I saw a shower
+of hot sparks soaring upward into a black void.
+
+I woke with water trickling down my face and all over me. I heard, far
+off, my uncle's voice calling, cajoling, coaxing, with great fright
+sounding through it....
+
+"Johnnie, Johnnie ... I'm so sorry ... Johnnie, only speak to me!" He
+was behaving exactly like Aunt Millie when she had St. Vitus' dance.
+
+He began tending me gently like a woman. He built a fire and made some
+coffee over it--he had brought coffee and some lunch. I crouched white
+and still, saying not a word.
+
+Landon squatted with his back turned, watching the coffee. His shotgun,
+leaning against the tree-trunk, caught my eye. I crept toward that
+shotgun. I trembled with anticipatory pleasure. God, but now I would pay
+him back!...
+
+But it was too heavy. I had struggled and brought it up, however, half
+to my shoulder, when that uncanny instinct that sometimes comes to
+people in mortal danger, came to Uncle Lan. He looked about.
+
+He went as pale as a sheet of paper.
+
+"--God, Johnnie!" he almost screamed my name.
+
+I dropped the gun in the grass, sullenly, never speaking.
+
+"Johnnie, were you--were you?" he faltered, unnerved.
+
+"Yes, I was going to give you both barrels ... and I'm sorry I didn't."
+
+All his desire to whip me had gone up like smoke.
+
+"Yes, and I'll tell you what, you big, dirty ----, I'll kill you yet,
+when I grow big."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night I fainted at supper. When Granma put me to bed she saw how
+bruised and wealed I was all over ... for the first time she went after
+Uncle Lan--turned into a furious thing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Shortly after, I was taken sick with typhoid fever. They used the
+starvation cure for it, in those days. When they began to give me solid
+food, I chased single grains of rice that fell out of the plate, about
+the quilt, just as a jeweller would pearls, if a necklace of them broke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With my recovery came news, after many days, of my father.
+
+The Hunkies were pushing out the Irish from the mills--cheaper labour.
+My grandmother could not afford to board the Hunkies, they lived so
+cheaply. Renewed poverty was breaking our household up.
+
+My grandmother was about to begin her living about from house to house
+with her married sons and daughters.
+
+My father was sending for me to come East. He had a good job there in
+the Composite Works at Haberford. He was at last able to take care of
+his son--his only child.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My grandmother and my aunt Millie took me to the railroad station. I
+tried to be brave and not cry. I succeeded, till the train began to pull
+out. Then I cried very much.
+
+The face of my grandmother pulled awry with grief and flowing tears.
+Aunt Millie wept, too.
+
+No, I wouldn't leave them. I would stay with them, work till I was rich
+and prosperous, never marry, give all my life to taking care of them, to
+saving them from the bitter grinding poverty we had shared together.
+
+I ran into the vestibule. But the train was gathering speed so rapidly
+that I did not dare jump off.
+
+I took my seat again. Soon my tears dried.
+
+The trees flapped by. The telegraph poles danced off in irregular lines.
+I became acquainted with my fellow passengers. I was happy.
+
+I made romance out of every red and green lamp in the railroad yards we
+passed through, out of the dingy little restaurants in which I ate....
+
+The mysterious swaying to and fro of the curtains in the sleeper
+thrilled me, as I looked out from my narrow berth.
+
+In the smoker I listened till late to the talk of the drummers who
+clenched big black cigars between their teeth, or slender Pittsburgh
+stogies, expertly flicking off the grey ash with their little fingers,
+as they yarned.
+
+I wore a tag on my coat lapel with my name and destination written on
+it. My grandmother had put it there in a painful, scrawling hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The swing out over wide, salt-bitten marshes, the Jersey marshes grey
+and smoky before dawn!... then, far off, on the horizon line, New York,
+serrate, mountainous, going upward great and shining in the still dawn!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Beneath a high, vast, clamorous roof of glass....
+
+As I stepped down to the platform my father met me.
+
+I knew him instantly though it had been years since I had seen him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father whisked me once more across the long Jersey marshes. To
+Haberford. There, on the edge of the town, composed of a multitude of
+stone-built, separate, tin-roofed houses, stood the Composite Works. My
+father was foreman of the drying department, in which the highly
+inflammable sheets of composite were hung to dry....
+
+My father rented a large, front room, with a closet for clothes, of a
+commuting feed merchant named Jenkins ... whose house stood three or
+four blocks distant from the works.
+
+So we, my father and I, lived in that one room. But I had it to myself
+most of the time, excepting at night, when we shared the big double bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Still only a child, I was affectionate toward him. And, till he
+discouraged me, I kissed him good night every night, I liked the smell
+of the cigars he smoked.
+
+I wanted my father to be more affectionate to me, to notice me more. I
+thought that a father should be something intuitively understanding and
+sympathetic. And mine was offish ... of a different species.. wearing
+his trousers always neatly pressed ... and his neckties--he had them
+hanging in a neat, perfect row, never disarranged. The ends of them were
+always pulled even over the smooth stick on which they hung.
+
+I can see my father yet, as he stands before the mirror, painstakingly
+adjusting the tie he had chosen for the day's wear.
+
+I was not at all like him. Where I took my knee britches off, there I
+dropped them. They sprawled, as if half-alive, on the floor ... my
+shirt, clinging with one arm over a chair, as if to keep from falling to
+the floor.. my cap, flung hurriedly into a corner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Christ, Johnnie, won't you ever learn to be neat or civilised? What
+kind of a boy are you, anyhow?"
+
+He thought I was stubborn, was determined not to obey him, for again and
+again I flung things about in the same disorder for which I was rebuked.
+But a grey chaos was settling over me. I trembled often like a person
+under a strange seizure. My mind did not readily respond to questions.
+It went here and there in a welter. Day dreams chased through my mind
+one after another in hurried heaps of confusion. I was lost ... groping
+... in a curious new world of growing emotions leavened with grievous,
+shapeless thoughts.
+
+Strange involuntary rhythms swung through my spirit and body. Fantastic
+imaginations took possession of me.
+
+And I prayed at night, kneeling, great waves of religious emotion going
+over me. And when my father saw me praying by the bedside, I felt
+awkwardly, shamefully happy that he saw me. And I took to posing a
+childishness, an innocence toward him.
+
+Jenkins, the little stringy feed merchant, had two daughters, one
+thirteen, Alva, and another Silvia, who was fifteen or sixteen.. and a
+son, Jimmy, about seven....
+
+It was over Alva and Silvia that my father and Jenkins used to come
+together, teasing me. And, though the girls drew me with an enchanting
+curiosity, I would protest that I didn't like girls ... that when I
+became full-grown I would never marry, but would study books and mind my
+business, single....
+
+After this close, crafty, lascivious joking between them, my father
+would end proudly with--
+
+"Johnnie's a strange boy, he really doesn't care about such things. All
+he cares about is books."
+
+So I succeeded in completely fooling my father as to the changes going
+on within me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though I had not an atom of belief left in orthodox Christianity (or
+thought I had not) I still possessed this all-pervasive need to pray to
+God. A need as strong as physical hunger.
+
+Torn with these curious, new, sweet tumults, I turned to Him. And I
+prayed to be pure ... like Sir Galahad, or any of the old knights who
+wore their lady's favour in chastity, a male maiden,--and yet achieved
+great quests and were manly in their deeds....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The crying and singing of the multitudinous life of insects and animals
+in the spring marshes under the stars almost made me weep, as I roamed
+about, distracted yet exalted, alone, at night.
+
+I was studying the stars, locating the constellations with a little book
+of star-maps I possessed.
+
+I wanted, was in search of, something ... something ... maybe other
+worlds could give this something to me ... what vistas of infinite
+imagination I saw about me in the wide-stretching, star-sprinkled sky!
+
+Dreaming of other worlds swinging around other suns, seething with
+strange millions of inhabitants, through all space, I took to reading
+books on astronomy ... Newcomb ... Proctor's _Other Worlds_ ... Camille
+Flammarion ... Garret Serviss as he wrote in the daily papers ... and
+novels and romances dealing with life on the moon, on Mars, on Venus....
+
+During my night-rovings I lay down in dark hollows, sometimes, and
+prayed to God as fervently as if the next moment I might expect His
+shining face to look down at me out of the velvet, far-reaching
+blackness of night:
+
+"O God, make me pure, and wonderful ... let me do great things for
+humanity ... make me handsome, too, O God, so that girls and women will
+love me, and wonder at me, in awe, while I pass by unperturbed--till one
+day, having kept myself wholly for _her_ as she has kept herself for
+me,--give me then the one wonderful and beautiful white maiden who will
+be mine ... mine ... all and alone and altogether, as I shall be all and
+alone and altogether hers. And let me do things to be wondered at by
+watching multitudes, while bands play and people applaud."
+
+Such was my mad, adolescent prayer, while the stars seemed to answer in
+sympathetic silence. And I would both laugh and weep, thrilled to the
+core with ineffable, enormous joy because of things I could not
+understand ... and I would want to shout and dance extravagantly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Jenkins girls were curious about me, and while they, together with
+the rest of the feed merchant's family, thought me slightly "touched,"
+still they liked the unusual things I said about the stars ... and about
+great men whose biographies I was reading ... and about Steele's Zoology
+I was studying, committing all the Latin nomenclature of classification
+to heart, with a curious hunger for even the husks and impedimenta of
+learning....
+
+Silvia was a rose, half-opened ... an exquisite young creature. Alva was
+gawky and younger. She was callow and moulting, flat-footed and
+long-shanked. Her face was sallow and full of freckles.
+
+In the long Winter evenings we sat together by the warmth of the kitchen
+stove, alone, studying our lessons,--the place given over entirely to us
+for our school work.
+
+A touch of the hand with either of them, but with Silvia especially, was
+a superb intoxication, an ecstasy I have never since known. When all my
+power of feeling fluttered into my fingers ... and when we kissed, each
+night, good-night (the girls kissed me because I pretended to be
+embarrassed, to object to it) our homework somehow done,--the thought of
+their kisses was a memory to lie and roll in, for hours, after going to
+bed.
+
+I would pull away as far as I could from my father, and think
+luxuriously, awake sometimes till dawn.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I hated school so that I ran away. For the first time in my life, but by
+no means my last, I hopped a freight.
+
+I was absent several weeks.
+
+When I returned, weary, and dirty from riding in coal cars, my father
+was so glad to see me he didn't whip me. He was, in fact, a little proud
+of me. For he was always boastful of the many miles he had travelled
+through the various states, as salesman, not many years before. And
+after I had bathed, and had put on the new suit which he bought me, I
+grew talkative about my adventures, too.
+
+I now informed my father that I wanted to go to work. Which I didn't so
+very much. But anything, if only it was not going to school. He was not
+averse to my getting a job. He took out papers for me, and gave me work
+under him, in the drying department of the Composite Works. My wage was
+three dollars a week. My task, to hang the thin sheets of composite, cut
+from three to fifteen hundredths of an inch in thickness, on metal clips
+to dry.
+
+In the Composite Works I discovered a new world--the world of factory
+life.
+
+I liked to be sent to the other departments on errands. There were
+whirling wheels and steadily recurring, ever-lapsing belts ... and men
+and women working and working in thin fine dust, or among a strong smell
+as of rubbed amber--the characteristic smell of composite when subjected
+to friction....
+
+And these men and women were continually joking and jesting and making
+horse-play at one another's expense, as rough people in their social
+unease do.
+
+They seemed part and adjunct to the machines, the workers! Strong,
+sturdy, bared forearms flashed regularly like moving, rhythmic shafts
+... deft hands clasped and reached, making only necessary movements.
+
+Each department housed a different kind of worker. In the grinding,
+squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with
+women.
+
+They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness
+and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade. Always they
+were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone. And, if the trick
+were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed it,
+laughing grimly with the "boys."
+
+Once I was sent to the machine shop for "strap oil." I was thrown over a
+greasy bench and was given it--the laying on of a heavy strap not at all
+gently! I ran away, outraged, to tell my father; as I left, the men
+seemed more attentive to their work than ever. They smiled quietly to
+themselves.
+
+In the comb department the throwing of chunks of composite was the
+workers' chief diversion. And if you were strange there, you were sure
+to be hit as you passed through.
+
+The acid house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards
+around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of
+some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company
+could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of
+America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,--who on
+week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the
+pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each
+man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But
+many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness,
+dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they
+dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was
+not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy
+Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young
+girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked,
+jaundice-coloured death's-heads. They went about, soon, with eyes that
+had grey gaunt hollows about them--pits already cavernous like the
+eye-pits of a skull.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well, they don't _have_ to work in there unless they want to, do they?"
+
+"Ah, they're only a lot of foreigners anyhow."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three dollars a week was a lot of money for me ... a fortune, because I
+had never owned anything higher than nickles and dimes before.
+
+And my father, for the first few weeks, allowed me to have all I earned,
+to do with as I wished. Later on he made me save two dollars a week.
+
+Each Saturday I went down to Newark and bought books ... very cheap,
+second hand ones, at Breasted's book store.
+
+Every decisive influence in life has been a book, every vital change in
+my life, I might say, has been brought about by a book.
+
+My father owned a copy of Lord Byron in one volume. It was the only book
+he cared for, outside of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, together with, of
+course, his own various books on Free Masonry and other secret
+societies.
+
+At first, oddly enough, it was my instinct for pedantry and linguistic
+learning that drew me to Byron. I became enamoured of the Latin and
+Greek quotations with which he headed his lyrics in _Hours of Idleness_,
+and laboriously I copied them, lying on my belly on the floor, under the
+lamp light. And under these quotations I indited boyish rhymes of my
+own.
+
+Then I began to read--_Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus_--the
+Deformed Transformed ... The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The
+Prisoner of Chillon_.
+
+The frontispiece to the book was a portrait of Byron with flowing tie
+and open shirt. Much as a devout Catholic wears a gold cross around his
+neck to signify his belief, with a like devoutness I took to wearing my
+shirt open at the neck, and a loose, flowing black tie. And I ruffled my
+hair in the Byronic style.
+
+"I see you're discovering Byron," my father laughed.
+
+Then he slyly intimated that the best of the poet's works I had
+evidently overlooked, _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_. And he quoted me
+the passage about the lifted skirt above the peeking ankle. And he
+reinforced his observation by grinning salaciously.
+
+From that time on I searched with all the fever of adolescence through
+Byron for every passage which bore on sex, the mystery of which was
+beginning to devour my days.
+
+I read and pondered, shaking with eagerness, the stories of Haidee, of
+Antonia and Julia--the tale of the dream of Dudu. I dwelt in a
+musk-scented room of imagination. Silver fountains played about me.
+Light forms flowed and undulated in white draperies over mosaiced
+pavements ... flashing dark eyes shone mysteriously and amorously,
+starry through curtains and veils.
+
+My every thought was alert with naïve, speculative curiosity concerning
+the mystery of woman.
+
+Through Byron I learned about Moore. I procured the latter's _Lalla
+Rookh_, his odes of Anacreon.
+
+From Byron and Moore I built up an adolescent ideal of
+woman,--exquisitely sensual and sexual, and yet an angel, superior to
+men: an ideal of a fellow creature who was both a living, breathing
+mystery and a walking sweetmeat ... a white creation moved and actuated
+by instinct and intuition--a perpetually inexplicable ecstasy and
+madness to man.
+
+I drew more and more apart to myself. Always looked upon as queer by the
+good, bourgeois families that surrounded us, I was now considered madder
+still.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How wonderful it would be to become a hermit on some far mountain side,
+wearing a grey robe, clear-browed and calmly speculative under the
+stars--or, maybe,--more wonderful: a singer for men, a travelling
+minstrel--in each case, whether minstrel or hermit, whether teaching
+great doctrines or singing great songs for all the world--to have come
+to me, as a pilgrim seeking enlightenment, the most beautiful maiden in
+the world, one who was innocent of what man meant. And together we would
+learn the mystery of life, and live in mutual purity and innocence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The strangeness of my physical person lured me. I marvelled at,
+scrutinised intimately the wonder of myself. I was insatiable in my
+curiosities.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My discovery of my body, and my books, held me in equal bondage. I
+neglected my work in the drying room. My father was vexed. He'd hunt me
+out of the obscure corners back of the hanging sheets of composite where
+I hid, absorbed in myself and the book I held, and would run me back to
+work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day, in the factory, two other boys on an errand from another
+department, came back where I sat, in a hidden nook, reading Thompson's
+_Seasons_. One of them spit over my shoulder, between the leaves. I
+leaped to my feet, infuriated, and a fight began. The desecration of my
+beloved poetry gave me such angry strength that I struck out lustily and
+dropped both of them....
+
+Rushing in on the uproar and blaming me for it, my father seized me by
+the collar. He booted the other boys off, who were by this time on their
+feet again, took me up into the water-tower, and beat me with one of the
+heavy sticks, with metal clips on it, that was used for hanging the
+composite on.
+
+Still trembling with the fight, I shook with a superadded ague of fear.
+My father's chastisement brought back to me with a chill the remembrance
+of the beatings Uncle Landon had given me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"By God, Johnnie, this is the only thing there's left to do with you."
+He flung me aside. I lay there sobbing.
+
+"Tell me, my boy, what _is_ the matter with you?" he asked, softening.
+Unlike Landon, he was usually gentle with me. He seldom treated me
+harshly.
+
+"Father, I don't want to work any more."
+
+"Don't want to work?... but you quit school just to _go_ to work, at
+your own wish!"
+
+"I want to go back to school!"
+
+"Back to school?... you'll be behind the rest by now."
+
+"I've been studying a lot by myself," I replied, forgetting the feel of
+the stick already and absorbed in the new idea.
+
+By this time we were down the stairs again, and I was sitting by my
+father's desk. He took up the unlighted cigar he always carried in his
+mouth (for smoking was not allowed among such inflammable material as
+composite). He sucked at it thoughtfully from habit, as if he were
+smoking.
+
+"Look here, my son, what _is_ the matter with you ... won't you tell
+your daddy?"
+
+"Nothing's the matter with me, Pop!"
+
+"You're getting thin as a shadow ... are you feeling sick?"
+
+"No, Pop!"
+
+"You're a queer little duck."
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+"You're always reading ... good books too ... yet you're no more good in
+school than you are at work ... I can't make you out, by the living God,
+I can't ... what is it you want to be?"
+
+"I don't know, only I want to go back to school again."
+
+"But what did you leave for?"
+
+"I hated arithmetic."
+
+"What do you want to study, then?"
+
+"Languages."
+
+"Would you like a special course in the high school?
+
+"Principal Balling of the Keeley Heights High School might be able to
+work you in. He is a brother Mason of mine."
+
+"I know some Latin and Greek and Ancient History already. I have been
+teaching myself."
+
+"Well, you _are_ a queer fish ... there never was anyone like you in the
+family, except your mother. She used to read and read, and read. And
+once or twice she wrote a short story ... had one accepted, even, by the
+_Youth's Companion_ once, but never printed."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though it was some months off till the Fall term began, on the strength
+of my desire to return to school my father let me throw up my job....
+
+But we soon found out that, brother in the bond, or not, Principal
+Balling could not get me into high school because I was not well enough
+prepared. My studying and reading by myself, though it had been quite
+wide, had also been too desultory. The principal advised a winter in the
+night school where men and boys who had been delayed in their education
+went to learn.
+
+I ran about that summer, with a gang of fellow adolescents; our
+headquarters, strange to say, being the front room and outside steps of
+an undertaker's establishment. This was because our leader was the
+undertaker's boy-of-all-work. Harry Mitchell was his name. Harry, a sort
+of young tramp, fat and pimply-faced, had jaunted into our town one day
+from New York, and had found work with the undertaker. Harry had watery
+blue eyes and a round, moon face. He was a whirlwind fighter but he
+never fought with us. It was only with the leaders of other gangs or
+with strangers that he fought.
+
+Harry continued our education in the secrets and mysteries of life, in
+the stable-boy and gutter way,--by passing about among us books from a
+sort of underground library ... vile things, fluently conceived and made
+even more vivid and animal with obscene and unimaginable illustrations.
+And our minds were trailed black with slime.
+
+And whole afternoons we stood about on the sidewalk jeering and
+fleering, jigging and singing, talking loud, horse-laughing, and
+hungrily eyeing the girls and women that passed by, who tried hard to
+seem, as they went, not self-conscious and stiff-stepping because of our
+observation ... and sometimes we whistled after them or called out to
+them in falsetto voices.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As a child my play had been strenuous and absorbing, like work that one
+is happy at, so that at night I fell asleep with all the pleasant
+fatigue of a labourer.
+
+It is the adolescent who loafs and dawdles on street corners. For the
+cruel and fearful urge of sex stirs so powerfully in him, that he hardly
+knows what to do, and all his days and nights he writhes in the grip of
+terrible instincts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet, in the midst of the turbidness of adolescence, I was still two
+distinct personalities. With my underground library of filth hidden
+away where my father could not find it, at the same time I kept and
+read my other books. The first were for the moments of madness and
+curious ecstasy I had learned how to induce.
+
+But my better self periodically revolted. And I took oath that I would
+never again spew a filthy expression from my mouth or do an ill thing. I
+suffered all the agonies of the damned in hell. I believe hell to be the
+invention of adolescence.
+
+Always, inevitably, I returned to my wallow and the gang.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were not always loafing in front of the undertaker's shop. Sometimes
+we were quite active. Many windows and street lamps were smashed. And we
+derived great joy from being pursued by the "cops"--especially by a
+certain fat one, for whom we made life a continual burden.
+
+Once we went in a body to the outskirts of the town and stoned a
+greenhouse. Its owner chased us across ploughed fields. We flung stones
+back at him. One hit him with a dull thud and made him cry out with
+pain, and he left off pursuing us. It was so dark we could not be
+identified.
+
+One of our favourite diversions was to follow mature lovers as they
+strolled a-field, hoping to catch them in the midst of intimate
+endearments.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father received a raise of a few dollars in salary. As it was they
+paid him too little, because he was easy-going. The additional weekly
+money warranted our leaving the Jenkinses and renting four rooms all our
+own, over the main street. This meant that I was to have a whole room to
+myself, and I was glad ... a whole room where I could stand a small
+writing desk and set up my books in rows. With an extreme effort I
+burned my underground books.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All the women liked my father. He dressed neatly and well. His trousers
+were never without their fresh crease. He was very vain of his neat
+appearance, even to the wearing of a fresh-cut flower in his buttonhole.
+This vanity made him also wear his derby indoors and out, because of his
+entirely bald head.
+
+Every time he could devise an excuse for going to the departments where
+the women worked, he would do so, and flirt with them. He, for this
+reason I am sure, made special friends with Schlegel, foreman of the
+collar department. I never saw a man derive a keener pleasure out of
+just standing and talking with women.
+
+Though, like most men, he enjoyed a smutty story, yet I never heard him
+say a really gross thing about any woman. And his language was always in
+good English, with few curses and oaths in it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our new place was a bit of heaven to me. I procured a copy of Whitman's
+_Leaves of Grass_, of Darwin's _Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_.
+Laboriously I delved through these last two books, my knowledge of
+elementary zoology helping me to the explication of their meaning.
+
+The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I
+knew it all, before,--as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought
+out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life,
+exactly to the Darwinian conclusion.
+
+Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ became my Bible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been
+working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a
+daily paper.
+
+And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly
+discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the
+victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would
+follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and
+degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner
+still. I fell into a hacking cough.
+
+And, at the same time, I became more perverse in my affectation of
+innocence and purity--saying always to my father that I never could care
+for girls, and that what people married for was beyond my comprehension.
+Thus I threw his alarmed inquisitiveness off the track....
+
+I procured books about sexual life. My most cherished volume was an old
+family medical book with charred covers, smelling of smoke and water,
+that I had dug out of the ruins of a neighbouring fire.
+
+In the book was a picture of a nude woman, entitled _The Female Form
+Divine_. I tore this from the body of the book and kept it under my
+pillow.
+
+I would draw it forth, press it against myself, speak soft words of
+affection to it, caress and kiss it, fix my mind on it as if it were a
+living presence. Often the grey light of dawn would put its ashen hand
+across my sunken cheeks before dead-heavy, exhausted sleep proved kind
+to me....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again: my imagination grew to be all graveyards, sepulchral urns,
+skeletons. How beautiful it would be to die young and a poet, to die
+like the young English poet, Henry Kirke White, whose works I was so
+enamoured of. The wan consumptive glamour of his career led me, as he
+had done, to stay up all night, night after night, studying....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the surging and mounting of that in me which I could not resist,
+several hours of strange, abnormal calm would ensue and for that space I
+would swing calm and detached from myself, like a luminous, disembodied
+entity. And then it was that I would write and write. The verses would
+come rushing from my pen. I must hurry with them before my early death
+overtook me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were two visions I saw continually in my sleep:
+
+One was of myself walking with a proud step down a vast hall, the usual
+wreath of fame on my head. I wore a sort of toga. And of course a great
+concourse of people stood apart in silent reverence on either side,
+gazing at me admiringly. With the thunder of their hand-clapping I would
+wake.
+
+The other dream was of being buried alive.
+
+I lay there, smelling the dark earth, and not being able to stir so much
+as the last joint of my little finger. Yet every nerve of me ached with
+sentience.. and I woke gasping, my face bathed with tears and the
+moisture of terror.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From head to foot hot flushes swept over me. And I was stung with the
+pricking of a million needles, going in sharply at every pore!... was
+bathed in cold sweats. And I hoped I was dying.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie, what are you doing to yourself?" And my father fixed his eyes
+on me.
+
+"Nothing, Father!"
+
+"If you weren't such a good boy, I'd--" and he halted, to continue,
+"as it is, you're a clean boy, and I'm proud of you."
+
+I struggled hard to speak with him, to make a confidant of him, but I
+could not.
+
+"I wonder," he added with alarm in his voice, "I wonder if you're
+catching consumption, the disease your mother died of ... you must be
+careful of yourself."
+
+I told him I would be careful....
+
+"I think I'll send you back home to visit the folks this fall."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a restaurant just around the corner from where we lived in our
+second story flat--a restaurant which bore the legend stuck up in the
+window, "Home Cooking." The sign itself was of a dull, dirty,
+fly-specked white which ought to have been a sufficient warning to the
+nice palate.
+
+The place was run by a family of three ... there was Mister Brown, the
+man, a huge-built, blotch-faced, retired stone-mason, his meagre little
+wife, Mrs. Brown, and their grass-widow daughter, Flora.... Flora did
+but little work, except to lean familiarly and with an air of unspoken
+intimacy, over the tables of the men, as she slouched up with their food
+... and she liked to sit outside in the back yard when there was
+sunshine ... in the hammock for more comfort ... shelling peas or
+languidly peeling potatoes.
+
+Flora's vibrant, little, wasplike mother whose nose was so sharp and red
+that it made me think of Paul's ferret--she bustled and buzzed about,
+doing most of the work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Looking out from our back window, I could see Flora lolling, and I would
+read or write a little and then the unrest would become too strong and I
+would go down to her. Soon two potato knives would be working.
+
+"Come and sit by me in the hammock."
+
+I liked that invitation ... she was plump to heaviness and sitting in
+the hammock crushed us pleasantly together.
+
+This almost daily propinquity goaded my adolescent hunger into an
+infatuation for her,--I thought I was in love with her,--though I never
+quite reconciled myself to the cowlikeness with which she chewed gum.
+
+She was as free and frank of herself as I was curious and timid.
+
+"Johnnie, what small feet and little hands you have ... you're a
+regular aristocrat."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A pause.
+
+I give her a poem written to her. She reads it, letting her knife stick
+in a half-peeled potato. She looks up at me out of heavy-lidded eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I believe you're falling in love with me."
+
+I trembled, answered nothing, was silent.
+
+"Kiss me!"
+
+Seeing me so a-tremble, she obeyed her own injunction. With slow
+deliberation she crushed her lips, full and voluptuous, into mine. The
+warmth of them seemed to catch hold of something deep down in me, and,
+with exquisite painfulness, draw it out. Blinded with emotion, I
+clutched close to her. She laughed. I put one hand over her full breast
+as infants do. She pushed me back.
+
+"There, that's enough for one day--a promise of sweets to come!" and she
+laughed again, with a hearty purr like a cat that has a mouse at its
+mercy.
+
+She rose and carried in the pan of potatoes we had just finished
+peeling. And I saw her sturdy, but not unshapely ankles going from me as
+she went up the steps from the yard, her legs gleaming white through her
+half-silk hose (that were always coming down, and that she was always
+twisting up, just under her knees, before my abashed eyes). She wore
+shoes much too little for her plump feet ... and, when not abroad, let
+them yawn open unbuttoned. And her plump body was alive and bursting
+through her careless, half-fastened clothes.
+
+She sang with a deep sultriness of voice as she walked away with the pan
+of potatoes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You ought to see my Florrie read books!" exclaimed the mother.
+
+Flora did read a lot ... but chiefly the erotic near-society novels that
+Belford used to print....
+
+"Yes, she's a smart girl, she is."
+
+And the father....
+
+"I won't work till the unions get better conditions for a man. I won't
+be no slave to no man."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One sultry afternoon I went into the restaurant and found Flora away.
+Poignantly disappointed, I asked where she was.
+
+"--Gone on a trip!" her mother explained, without explaining.
+
+From time to time Flora went on "trips."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And one morning, several mornings, Flora was not there to serve at the
+breakfast table ... and I was hurt when I learned that she had gone back
+to Newark to live, and had left no word for me. Her father told me she
+"had gone back to George," meaning her never-seen husband from whom she
+evidently enjoyed intervals of separation and grass-widowhood.
+
+I was puzzled and hurt indeed, because she had not even said good-bye
+to me. But soon came this brief note from her:
+
+     "Dearest Boy:--
+
+     Do come up to Newark and see me some afternoon. And come more than
+     once. Bring your Tennyson that you was reading aloud to me. I love
+     to hear you read poetry. I think you are a dear and want to see
+     more of you. But I suppose you have already forgotten
+
+                                    Your loving
+
+                                          FLORA."
+
+In the absurd and pitiful folly of youth I lifted the letter to my lips
+and kissed it. I trembled with eagerness till the paper rattled as I
+read it again and again. It seemed like some precious holy script.
+
+I bolted my lunch nervously and it stuck half way down in a hard lump. I
+would go to her that very afternoon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The car on which I rode was subject to too frequent stoppage for me. I
+leaped out and walked along with brisk strides. But the car sailed forth
+ahead of me now on a long stretch of roadway and I ran after it to catch
+it again. The conductor looked back at me in derisive scorn and made a
+significant whirling motion near his temple with his index finger,
+indicating that I had wheels there....
+
+At last I found the street where Flora lived. I trailed from door to
+door till the number she had given me met my eye. It made my heart jump
+and my knees give in, to be so near the quarry. For the first time I was
+to be alone with a woman I desired.
+
+At the bell, it took me a long time to gain courage to pull. But at last
+I reached out my hand. I had to stand my ground. I couldn't run away
+now. The bell made a tinkling sound far within.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The door opened cautiously. A head of touseled black hair crept out.
+
+"Johnnie, dear! _You_!... you _are_ a surprise!"
+
+Did I really detect an echo of disappointment in her deep, contralto
+voice?
+
+Frightened in my heart like a trapped animal, I went in. Down a long,
+dusk, musty-smelling corridor and into a back-apartment on the first
+floor; she led me into a room which was bed-and-sitting room combined.
+In one part of it stood several upholstered chairs with covers on,
+cluttered about a plain table. In the other part stood a bureau heaped
+with promiscuous toilette articles, and a huge, brass-knobbed bed with a
+spread of lace over its great, semi-upright pillows.
+
+"Shall I let in a little more light, dear?"
+
+"Do."
+
+For the blinds were two-thirds down.
+
+"I like to sit and think in the dark," she explained, and her one dimple
+broke in a rich, brown-faced animal smile.
+
+"Yes, but I--I want to see your lovely face," I stuttered, with much
+effort at gallantry....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"He's not at home ... he's off at Wilmington, on a job" (meaning her
+husband, though I had not asked about him). "But what made you come so
+soon? You must of just got my letter!"
+
+"I--I wanted you," I blurted ... in the next moment I was at her feet in
+approved romantic fashion, following up my declaration of desire. Calmly
+she let me kneel there ... I put my arms about her plump legs ... I was
+almost fainting....
+
+After a while she took me by the hair with both hands. She slowly bent
+my head back as I knelt. Leaning over, she kissed deliberately, deeply
+into my mouth ... then, gazing into my eyes with a puzzled expression,
+as I relaxed to her--almost like something inanimate....
+
+"Why, you dear boy, I believe you're innocent like a child. And yet you
+know so much about books ... and you're so wise, too!"
+
+As she spoke she pushed back my mad hands from their clutching and
+reaching. She held both of them in hers, and closed them in against her
+half-uncovered, full breasts, pressing them there.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that you've never gone out with the boys for a
+good time?... how old are you?"
+
+I told her I was just sixteen.
+
+"Do you think I'm ... I'm too young?" I asked.
+
+"I feel as if I was your mother ... and I'm not much over twenty ... but
+do sit up on a chair, dear!"
+
+She stood on her feet, shook out her dress, smiled curiously, and
+started out of the room. I was up and after her, my arms around her
+waist, desperate. She slid around in my arms, laughing quietly to
+herself till the back of her head was against my mouth. I kissed and
+kissed the top of her head. Then she turned slowly to face me, pressing
+all the contours of her body into me ... she crushed her bosom to mine.
+Already I was quite tall; and she was stocky and short ... she lifted
+her face up to me, a curious kindling light in her eyes ... of a
+phosphorescent, greenish lustre, like those chance gleams in a cat's
+eyes you catch at night....
+
+She took my little finger and deliberately bit it ... then she leaned
+away from my seeking mouth, my convulsive arms....
+
+"You want too much, all at once," she said, and, whirling about broke
+away....
+
+With the table between me and her....
+
+"Wouldn't you like a little beer, and some sandwiches? I have some in
+the ice box.... _Do_ let's have some beer and sandwiches."
+
+I assented, though hating the bitter taste of beer, and hungry for her
+instead of sandwiches. And soon we were sitting down calmly at the
+table, or rather, she was sitting down calmly ... baffled, I pretended
+to be calm.
+
+As she rose for something or other, I sprang around the table and caught
+her close to me once more, marvelling, at the same time, at my loss of
+shyness, my new-found audacity. Again she snuggled in close to me, her
+flesh like a warm, palpitating cushion.
+
+"Flora, my darling ... help me!" I cried, half-sobbing.
+
+"What do you mean?" laughing.
+
+"I love you!"
+
+"I know all _you_ want!"
+
+"But I do love you ... see...."
+
+And I prostrated myself, in a frenzy, at her feet.
+
+"Say, you're the queerest kid I've ever known."
+
+And she walked out of the room abruptly, while I rose to my feet and sat
+in a chair, dejected. She came in again, a twinkle in her eye.
+
+"Don't torture me, Flora!" I pleaded, "either send me away, or--"
+
+"Stop pestering me ... let's talk ... read me some of that Tennyson you
+gave me...." and I began reading aloud, for there was nothing else she
+would for the moment, have me do....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You're a poet," whimsically, "I want you to write some letters to me
+because I know you must write beautiful."
+
+"--if you will only let me love you!"
+
+"Well, ain't I lettin' you love me?"
+
+A perverse look came into her face, a thought, an idea that pleased
+her--
+
+"I've lots and lots of letters from men," she began, "men that have been
+in love with me."
+
+"Oh!" I exclaimed weakly ... she had just expressed a desire to add some
+of mine to the pack ... the next thing that she followed up with gave me
+a start--
+
+"Your father--"
+
+"My father?--" I echoed.
+
+"He's written me the best letters of all ... wait a minute ... I'll read
+a little here and there to you." And, gloating and triumphant, and
+either not seeing or, in her vulgarity, not caring what effect the
+reading of my father's love letters would have on me, she began reading
+ardent passages aloud. "See!" She showed me a page to prove that it was
+in his handwriting. The letters told a tale easy to understand. She was
+so eager in her vanity that she read on and on without seeing in my
+face what, seen, would have made her stop.
+
+A frightful trembling seized me, a loathing, a horror. This was my
+father's woman ... and ... I!...
+
+I sat on, dumbfounded, paralysed. I remembered his stories of trips to
+T---- and other places on supposed lodge business ... unluckily, I also
+remembered that several times Flora had been off on trips at the same
+time.
+
+"Just listen to this, will you!" and she began at another passage.
+
+She was so absorbed in her reading that she did not see how I was on my
+feet ... had seized my hat ... was going.
+
+"I'm sorry, Flora, but I've got to go!"
+
+"What?" looking up and surprised, "--got to go?"
+
+"Yes ... Yes ... I must--must go!" my lips trembled.
+
+"Why, we're just getting acquainted ... I didn't mean for you to go
+yet."
+
+She rose, dropping the letters all in a heap.
+
+She was the aggressive one now. She drew me to her quickly, "Stay ...
+and I'll promise to be good to you!"
+
+I pushed back, loathing ... loathing her and myself, but myself more,
+because in spite of all my disgust, my pulses leaped quick again to
+hers.
+
+"Sit down again."
+
+I did not listen, but stood.
+
+"I was thinking that you would stay for supper and then we could go to
+some show and after come back here and I would give you a good time."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I staggered out, shocked beyond belief, the last animal flush had died
+out of me. All my body was ice-cold.
+
+"Promise me you'll come again this day next week," she called after me
+persistently.
+
+She drew the door softly shut and left me reeling down the dark
+corridor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I could hardly speak to my father that night. I avoided him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the creeping edge of dawn I woke from a dream with a jerk as I slid
+down an endless black abyss. The abyss was my bed's edge and I found
+myself on the floor. When I went to rise again, I had to clutch things
+to stand up. I was so weak I sat on the bed breathing heavily. I tumbled
+backward into bed again and lay in a daze during which dream-objects
+mixed with reality and my room walked full of people from all the books
+I had read--all to evaporate as my father's face grew, from a cluster of
+white foreheads and myriads of eyes, into _him_.
+
+"Johnnie, wake up ... are you sick?"
+
+"Please go away from me and let me alone." I turned my face to the wall
+in loathing.
+
+"I'll call a doctor."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The doctor came. He felt my pulse. Put something under my tongue.
+Whispered my father in a room, apart. Left.
+
+My father returned, dejected, yet trying to act light and merry.
+
+"What did the doctor say?" I forced myself to ask of him.
+
+"To be frank, Johnnie ... you're old enough to learn the truth ... he
+thinks you're taken down with consumption."
+
+"That's what my mother died of."
+
+My father shuddered and put his face down in his hands. I felt a little
+sorry for him, then.
+
+"Well you've got to go West now ... and work on a farm ... or
+something."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I began to get ready for my trip West. Surely enough, I had consumption,
+if symptoms counted ... pains under the shoulder blades ... spitting of
+blood ... night-sweats....
+
+But my mind was quickened: I read Morley's _History of English
+Literature_ ... Chaucer all through ... Spenser ... even Gower's
+_Confessio Amantis_ and Lydgate's ballads ... my recent discovery of
+Chatterton having made me Old English-mad.
+
+As I read the life of young Chatterton I envied him, his fame and his
+early death and more than ever, I too desired to die young.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The week before I was to set out my father calmly discovered to me that
+he intended I should work on a farm as a hand for the next four years,
+when I reached Ohio ... was even willing to pay the farmer something to
+employ me. This is what the doctor had prescribed as the only thing that
+would save my life--work in the open air. My father had written Uncle
+Beck to see that this program was inaugurated.
+
+"I won't become a clod-hopper," I exclaimed, seeing the dreary, endless
+monotony of such a life.
+
+"But it will do you good. It will be a fine experience for you."
+
+"If it's such a fine experience why don't you go and do it?"
+
+"I won't stand any nonsense."
+
+"I'd rather die.... I'm going to die anyhow."
+
+"Yes, if you don't do what I tell you."
+
+"I won't."
+
+"We'll see."
+
+"Very well, father, we _will_ see."
+
+"If you weren't such a sick kid I'd trounce you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You could approach Antonville by surrey, buggy or foot ... along a
+winding length of dusty road ... or muddy ... according to rain or
+shine.
+
+My Uncle Beck drove me out in a buggy.
+
+Aunt Alice, so patient-faced and pretty and sweet-eyed in her neat
+poverty--greeted me with a warm kiss.
+
+"Well, you'll soon be well now."
+
+"But I won't work on a farm."
+
+"Never mind, dear ... don't worry about that just yet."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon I sat with Aunt Alice in the kitchen, watching her make
+bread. Everyone else was out: Uncle Beck, on a case ... Cousin Anders,
+over helping with the harvest on a neighbouring farm ... Cousin Anna was
+also with the harvesters, helping cook for the hands ... for the
+Doctor's family needed all the outside money they could earn.
+
+For Uncle Beck was a dreamer. He thought more of his variorum
+Shakespeare than he did of his medical practice. And he was slow-going
+and slow-speaking and so conscientious that he told patients the truth
+... all which did not help him toward success and solid emolument. He
+would take eggs in payment for his visits ... or jars of preserves ...
+or fresh meat, if the farmer happened to be slaughtering.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Where's Granma?" I asked Aunt Alice, as she shoved a batch of bread in
+the oven.
+
+"She's out Halton way ... she'll go crazy with joy when she gets word
+you're back home. She'll start for here right off as soon as she hears
+the news. She's visiting with Lan and his folks."
+
+When I heard Lan mentioned I couldn't help giving a savage look.
+
+Aunt Alice misinterpreted.
+
+"What, Johnnie--won't you be glad to see her!... you ought to ... she's
+said over and over again that she loved you more than she did any of her
+own children."
+
+"It isn't that--I hate Landon. I wish he was dead or someone would kill
+him for me."
+
+"Johnnie, you ought to forgive and forget. It ain't Christian."
+
+"I don't care. I'm not a Christian."
+
+"O Johnnie!" shocked ... then, after a pause of reproach which I
+enjoyed--"your Uncle Lan's toned down a lot since then ... married ...
+has four children ... one every year." And Alice laughed whimsically.
+
+"--and he's stopped gambling and drinking, and he's got a good job as
+master-mechanic in a factory....
+
+"He was young ... he was only a boy in the days when he whipped you."
+
+"Yes, and I suppose I was old?... I tell you, Aunt Alice, it's something
+I can't forget ... the dirty coward," and I swore violently, forgetting
+myself.
+
+At that moment Uncle Beck appeared suddenly at the door, back from a
+case.
+
+"Here, here, that won't do! I don't allow that kind of language in my
+household." And he gave me a severe and admonishing look before going
+off on another and more urgent call that waited him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And how's Granma been getting on?"
+
+"--aging rapidly ... " a pause, " ... hasn't got either of the two
+houses on Mansion Avenue now ... sold them and divided the money among
+her children ... gave us some ... and Millie ... and Lan ... wouldn't
+hear of 'no' ... " parenthetically, "Uncle Joe didn't need any; he's
+always prospered since the early days, you know."
+
+"And what's Granma up to these days?" For she was always doing sweet,
+ignorant, childish, impractical things.
+
+"--spirit-rapping is it? or palmistry? or magnetic healing? or what?"
+
+"You'll laugh!"
+
+"Tell me!"
+
+"She's got a beau."
+
+"What? a beau? and she eighty if a day!"
+
+"Yes, we--all her children--think it's absurd. And we're all trying to
+advise her against it ... but she vows she's going to get married to him
+anyhow."
+
+"And who is her 'fellow'"?
+
+"--a one-legged Civil War veteran ... a Pennsylvania Dutchman named
+Snyder ... owns a house near Beaver Falls ... draws a pension ... he's a
+jolly old apple-cheeked fellow ... there's no doubt they love each other
+... only--only it seems rather horrible for two people as old as they
+are to go and get married like two young things ... and really fall in
+love, too!"
+
+I was silent ... amused ... interested ... then--"well, Granma'll tell
+me all about it when she comes ... and I can judge for myself, and," I
+added whimsically, "I suppose if they love each other it ought to be all
+right."
+
+And we both laughed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Granma heard I was West she couldn't reach Antonville fast enough.
+She was the same dear childlike woman, only incredibly older-looking.
+Age seemed to have fallen on her like an invading army, all at once. Her
+hair was, every shred of it, not only grey, but almost white. There
+shone the same patient, sweet, ignorant, too-trusting eyes ... there was
+the blue burst of vein on her lower lip.
+
+After she had kissed and kissed me, stroked and stroked my head and face
+in speechless love, I looked at her intently and lied to please her:
+
+"Why, Granma, you don't look a day older."
+
+"But I am, Johnnie, I am. I've been working hard since you left." As if
+she had not worked hard _before_ I left ... she informed me that, giving
+away to her children what she had received for the sale of her two
+houses (that never brought her anything because of her simplicity, while
+they were in her possession) she had grown tired of "being a burden to
+them," as she phrased it, and had hired herself out here and there as
+scrubwoman, washerwoman, housekeeper, and what not....
+
+Later I learned that nothing could be done with her, she was so
+obstinate. She had broken away despite the solicitude of all her
+children--who all loved her and wanted her to stay with them.
+
+At last she had answered an advertisement for a housekeeper ... that
+appeared in a farm journal ... and so she had met her old cork-legged
+veteran, whom she now had her mind set on marrying.
+
+"But Granma, to get married at your age?"
+
+"I'd like to ask why not?" she answered sweetly, "I feel as young as
+ever when it comes to men ... and the man ... you wait till you see him
+... you'll like him ... he's such a good provider, Johnnie; he draws a
+steady pension of sixty dollars a month from the Government, and he'll
+give me a good home."
+
+"But any of my aunts and uncles would do the same."
+
+"Yes, Johnnie, but it ain't the same as having a man of your own around
+... there's nothing like that, Johnnie, for a woman."
+
+"But your own children welcome you and treat you well?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Johnnie, my little boy, but in spite of that, I feel in the
+way. And, no matter how much they love me, it's better for me to have a
+home of my own and a man of my own."
+
+"Besides, Billy loves me so much," she continued, wistfully, "and even
+though he's seventy whereas I'm eighty past, he says his being younger
+don't make no difference ... and he's always so jolly ... always
+laughing and joking."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We must begin to allow for Granma," Aunt Alice told me, "she's coming
+into her second childhood."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Granma believed thoroughly in my aspirations to become a poet. With
+great delight she retailed incidents of my childhood, reminding me of a
+thousand youthful escapades of which she constituted me the hero,
+drawing therefrom auguries of my future greatness.
+
+One of the incidents which alone sticks in my memory:
+
+"Do you 'mind,'" she would say, "how you used to follow Millie about
+when she papered the pantry shelves with newspapers with scalloped
+edges? and how you would turn the papers and read them, right after her,
+as she laid them down, and make her frantic?"
+
+"Yes," I would respond, highly gratified with the anecdote, "and you
+would say, Oh, Millie, don't get mad at the little codger, some day he
+might turn out to be a great man!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Uncle Beck had a fine collection of American Letters. I found a complete
+set of Hawthorne and straightway became a moody and sombre Puritan ...
+and I wrote in Hawthornian prose, quaint essays and stories. And I lived
+in a world of old lace and lavender, of crinoline and brocade.
+
+And then I discovered my uncle's books on gynecology and obstetrics ...
+full of guilty fevers I waited until he had gone out on a call and then
+slunk into his office to read....
+
+One afternoon my doctor-uncle came suddenly upon me, taking me unaware.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie, what are you up to?"
+
+"--was just reading your medical books."
+
+"Come over here," already seated at his desk, on his swivel-chair, he
+motioned me to a seat.
+
+"Sit down!"
+
+I obeyed him in humiliated silence.
+
+He rose and closed the door, hanging the sign "Busy" outside.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last I learned about myself and about life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The harvesting over, Anders began to chum with me. We took long walks
+together, talking of many things ... but, chiefly, of course, of those
+things that take up the minds of adolescents ... of the mysteries of
+creation, of life at its source ... of why men and women are so ... and
+I took it for granted, after he confessed that he had fallen into the
+same mistakes as I, suffering similar agonies, that he had been set
+right by his father, the doctor, as I just had. I was surprised to find
+he had not. So I shared with him the recent knowledge I had acquired.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And you mean to tell me that Uncle Beck has said nothing to you?"
+
+"Not a single word ... never."
+
+"But why didn't you ask him then ... him being a doctor?"
+
+"How can a fellow talk with his father about such things?"
+
+"It's funny to me he didn't inform you, anyhow."
+
+"I was his son, you see!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anders had a girl, he told me, confidingly. She was off on a visit to
+Mornington, at present ... a mighty pretty little girl and the best
+there was....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"By the way, Anders, do you know second cousin Phoebe at all?"
+
+"Sure thing I know her ... the last time I heard of her ... which was
+almost a year ago--she was wilder than ever."
+
+"How do you mean, Anders?"
+
+"Her folks couldn't keep her in of nights ... a gang of boys and girls
+would come and whistle for her, and she'd get out, sooner or later, and
+join them."
+
+"I tell you what," I began, in an unpremeditated burst of invention,
+which I straightway believed, it so appealed to my imagination, "I've
+never told anybody before, but all these years I've been desperately in
+love with Phoebe."
+
+Anders scrutinised me quizzically, then the enthusiasm of the actor in
+my face made him believe me....
+
+"Well, no matter how bad she is, she certainly was a beaut, the last
+time I saw her."
+
+"I'm going," I continued "(you mustn't tell anybody), I'm going down to
+Aunt Rachel's, after I leave here, and _get_ Phoebe." And eagerly and
+naïvely we discussed the possibilities as we walked homeward....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After my talk with Uncle Beck all my morbidity began to melt away, and,
+growing better in mind, my body grew stronger ... he wrote to my father
+that it was not consumption ... so now I was turning my coming West into
+a passing visit, instead of a long enforced sojourn there for the good
+of my health.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found different household arrangements on revisiting Aunt Rachel and
+her household.
+
+For one thing, the family had moved into town ... Newcastle ... and they
+had a fine house to live in, neat and comfortable. Gone was that
+atmosphere of picturesque, pioneer poverty. Though, to be sure, there
+sat Josh close up against the kitchen stove, as of old. For the first
+sharp days of fall were come ... he was spitting streams of tobacco, as
+usual.
+
+"I hate cities," was his first greeting to me. He squirted a brown
+parabola of tobacco juice, parenthetically, into the wood-box behind the
+stove, right on top of the cat that had some kittens in there.
+
+Aunt Rachel caught him at it.
+
+"Josh, how often have I told you you mustn't spit on that cat."
+
+"'Scuse me, Ma, I'm kind o' absint-minded."
+
+The incident seemed to me so funny that I laughed hard. Aunt Rachel gave
+me a quiet smile.
+
+"Drat the boy, he's allus findin' somethin' funny about things!"
+
+This made me laugh more. But I had brought Uncle Josh a big plug of
+tobacco, and he was placated, ripping off a huge chew as soon as he held
+it in his hands.
+
+The great change I have just spoken of came over the family because
+Phoebe's two sisters, Jessie and Mona--who had been off studying to be
+nurses, now had come back, and, taking cases in town, they were making a
+good living both for themselves and the two old folks....
+
+I had learned from Uncle Beck, as he drove me in to Mornington, that,
+the last he heard of Phoebe, she was working out as a maid to "some
+swells," in that city.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Damme, ef I don't hate cities an' big towns," ejaculated Uncle Josh,
+breaking out of a long, meditative silence, "you kain't keep no dogs
+there ... onless they're muzzled ... and no ferrets, neither ... and
+what 'ud be the use if you could?... there ain't nothin' to hunt anyhow
+... wisht we lived back on thet old muddy hilltop agin."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Supper almost ready ... the appetizing smell of frying ham--there's
+nothing, being cooked, smells better....
+
+Paul came in from work ... was working steady in the mills now, Aunt
+Rachel had informed me.
+
+Paul came in without a word, his face a mask of such empty hopelessness
+that I was moved by it deeply.
+
+"Paul, you mustn't take on so. It ain't right nor religious," said Uncle
+Josh, knocking the ashes out of his pipe ... he smoked and chewed in
+relays. Paul replied nothing.
+
+"Come on, folks," put in Rachel, "supper's ready ... draw your chairs
+up to the table."
+
+We ate our supper under a quiet, grey mood. An air of tragedy seemed to
+hang over us ... for the life of me I couldn't understand what had
+become of Paul's good-natured, rude jocosity. Why he had grown into a
+silent, sorrowful man....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You kin bunk up with Paul to-night, Johnnie," announced Rachel, when it
+came bedtime.
+
+Paul had already slunk off to bed right after supper. It was dark in the
+room when I got there.
+
+"Paul, where's the light?"
+
+"--put it out ... like to lie in the dark an' think," answered a deep,
+sepulchral voice.
+
+"Whatever _is_ the matter with you, Paul?"
+
+"Ain't you heered? Ain't Ma told you?"
+
+"No!"
+
+Paul struck a match and lit the lamp. I sat on the side of the bed and
+talked with him.
+
+"Ain't you heered how I been married?" he began.
+
+"So that's it, is it?" I anticipated prematurely, "and you weren't happy
+... and she went off and left you!"
+
+"Yes, she's left me all right, Johnnie, but not that way ... she's
+dead!"
+
+And Paul stopped with a sob in his throat. I didn't know what to say to
+his sudden declaration, so I just repeated foolishly, "why, I never knew
+you got married!" twice.
+
+"Christ, Johnnie, she was the best little woman in the world--such a
+little creature, Johnnie ... her head didn't more'n come up to under my
+armpits."
+
+There followed a long silence, to me an awkward one; I didn't know what
+to do or say. Then I perceived the best thing was to let him ease his
+hurt by just talking on ... and he talked ... on and on ... in his slow,
+drawling monotone ... and ever so often came the refrain, "Christ, but
+she was a good woman, Johnnie ... I wish you'd 'a' knowed her."
+
+At last I ventured, "and how--how did she come to die?"
+
+"--baby killed her, she was that small ... she was like a little girl
+... she oughtn't to of had no baby at all, doctor said...."
+
+"I killed her, Johnnie," he cried in agony, "and that's the God's truth
+of it."
+
+Another long silence.
+
+The lamp guttered but didn't go out. A moth had flown down its chimney,
+was sizzling, charring, inside ... Paul lifted off the globe. Burnt his
+hands, but said nothing ... flicked the wingless, blackened body to the
+floor....
+
+"But the baby?--it lived?"
+
+"Yes, it lived ... a girl ... if it hadn't of lived ... if it had gone,
+too, I wouldn't of wanted to live, either!..."
+
+"That's why I'm workin' so hard, these days, with no lay-offs fer
+huntin' or fishin' or anything."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day I learned more from Rachel of how Paul had agonized over
+the death of his tiny wife ... "'she was that small you had a'most to
+shake out the sheets to find her,' as Josh useter say," said Rachel
+gravely and unhumorously ... and she told how the bereaved husband
+savagely fought off all his womenfolk and insisted on mothering, for a
+year, the baby whose birth had killed its mother.
+
+"At last he's gittin' a little cheer in his face. But every so often the
+gloomy fit comes over him like it did last night at supper. I keep
+tellin' him it ain't Christian, with her dead two years a'ready--but he
+won't listen ... he's got to have his fit out each time."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As if this had not been enough of the tragic, the next day when I asked
+about Phoebe, Aunt Rachel started crying.
+
+"Phoebe's gone, too," she sobbed.
+
+"O, Aunt Rachel, I'm so sorry ... but I didn't know ... nobody told me."
+
+"That's all right, Johnnie. Somehow it relieves me to talk about
+Phoebe." She rose from her rocker, laid down her darning, and went to a
+dresser in the next room. She came out again, holding forth to me a
+picture ... Phoebe's picture....
+
+A shy, small, oval, half-wild face like that of a dryad's. Her chin
+lifted as if she were some wood-creature listening to the approaching
+tread of the hunter and ready on the instant to spring forth and run
+along the wind....
+
+An outdoor picture, a mere snapshot, but an accidental work of art.
+
+Voluminous leafage blew behind and above her head, splashed with the
+white of sunlight and the gloom of swaying shadow.
+
+"Why, she's--she's beautiful!"
+
+"Yes--got prettier and prettier every time you looked at her...."
+
+"But," and Aunt Rachel sighed, "I couldn't do nothin' with her at all.
+An' scoldin' an' whippin' done no good, neither. Josh useter whip her
+till he was blue in the face, an' she wouldn't budge. Only made her more
+sot and stubborner....
+
+"--guess she was born the way she was ... she never could stay still a
+minute ... always fidgettin' ... when she was a little girl, even--I
+used to say, 'Now, look here, Phoebe,' I'd say, 'your ma 'ull give you a
+whole dime all at once if you'll set still jest for five minutes in that
+chair.' An' she'd try ... and, before sixty seconds was ticked off she'd
+be on her feet, sayin', 'Ma, I guess you kin keep that dime.'
+
+"When she took to runnin' out at nights," my great-aunt continued, in a
+low voice, "yes, an' swearin' back at her pa when he gave her a bit of
+his mind, it nigh broke my heart ... and sometimes she'd see me cryin',
+and that would make her feel bad an' she'd quiet down fer a few days ...
+an' she'd say, 'Ma, I'm goin' to be a good girl now,' an' fer maybe two
+or three nights she'd help clean up the supper-things--an' then--" with
+a breaking voice, "an' then all at once she'd scare me by clappin' both
+hands to that pretty brown head o' hers, in sech a crazy way, an'
+sayin', 'Honest, Ma, I can't stand it any longer ... this life's too
+slow.... I've gotta go out where there's some life n' fun!'
+
+"It was only toward the last that she took to sneakin' out after she
+pretended to go to bed.. gangs of boys an' girls, mixed, would come an'
+whistle soft fer her, under the window ... an' strange men would
+sometimes hang aroun' the house ... till Josh went out an' licked a
+couple.
+
+"It drove Josh nigh crazy.
+
+"One evenin', after this had gone on a long time, Josh ups an' says,
+'Ma, Phoebe's run complete out o' hand ... she'll hafta be broke o' this
+right now ... when she comes back to-night I'm going to give her the
+lickin' of her life.'
+
+"'Josh, you mustn't whip her. Let's both have a long talk with her. (I
+knowed Josh 'ud hurt her bad if he whipped her. He has a bad temper when
+he is het up.) Maybe goin' down on our knees with her an' prayin' might
+do some good.'"
+
+"'No, Ma, talkin' nor prayin' won't do no good ... the only thing left's
+a good whippin' to straighten her out.'"
+
+"O Aunt Rachel," I cried, all my desire of Phoebe breaking but into
+tenderness. I looked at the lovely face, crossed with sunlight, full of
+such quick intelligence, such mischievousness....
+
+You can catch a wild animal in a trap, but to whip it would be sacrilege
+... that might do for domesticated animals.
+
+"Josh never laid a hand on her, though, that night ... she never came
+home ... men are so awful in their pride, Johnnie ... don't you be like
+that when you grow to be a man...."
+
+Then Aunt Rachel said no more, as Paul came in at that moment. Nor did
+she resume the subject.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next morning I packed away to visit Uncle Lan. I might as well go, even
+if I hated him. It would be too noticeable, not to go.
+
+He was at the train, waiting for me. He proffered me his hand. To my
+surprise, I took it. He seized my grip from me, put his other hand
+affectionately on my shoulder.
+
+"I've often wondered whether you'd ever forgive me for the way I beat
+you.... I've learned better since."
+
+Before I knew it my voice played me the trick of saying yes, I forgave
+him.
+
+"That's a good boy!" and Lan gave my hand such a squeeze that it almost
+made me cry out with the pain of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Lan," as we walked along, "can you tell me more about Phoebe.... Aunt
+Rachel told me some, but--"
+
+"Oh, she ended up by running away with a drummer ... she hadn't been
+gone long when her ma got word from her asking her to forgive her ...
+that she'd run off with a man she loved, and was to be married to him
+pretty soon.... Phoebe gave no address, but the letter had a Pittsburgh
+postmark....
+
+"A month ... six months went by. Then a letter came in a strange hand.
+The girl that wrote it said that she was Phoebe's 'Roommate.'" Lan
+paused here, and gave me a significant look, then resumed:
+
+"Paul went down to bring the body home, and found she'd been buried
+already. They were too poor to have it dug up and brought home."
+
+"It seems that the man that took Phoebe off was nothing but a pimp!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Suicide: early one Sunday morning; early, for girls of their profession,
+the two girls, Phoebe and her roommate were sitting in their bedrooms in
+kimonos.
+
+"What a nice Sunday," Phoebe had said, looking out at the window.
+"Jenny," she continued to her roommate, "I have a feeling I'd like to go
+to church this morning...."
+
+Jenny had thought _that_ was rather a queer thing for Phoebe to say....
+
+Jenny went out to go to the delicatessen around the corner, to buy a
+snack for them to eat, private, away from the rest of the girls, it
+being Sunday morning. She'd bring in a Sunday paper, too.
+
+When she returned, Phoebe didn't seem to be in the room. Jenny felt that
+something was wrong, had felt it all along, anyhow....
+
+She heard a sort of gasping and gurgling....
+
+She found Phoebe on the floor, two-thirds under the bed. Her eyes were
+rolled back to the whites from agony. A creamy froth was on her mouth.
+And all her mouth and chin and pretty white neck were burned brown with
+the carbolic acid she had drunk.. a whole damn bottle of it.
+
+Jenny dropped on her knees by Phoebe and called out her name--loud....
+"Phoebe, why don't you speak to me!" Took her head in her lap and it
+only lolled. Then she began screaming, did Jenny, and brought the whole
+house up. And the madame had shouted:
+
+"Shut up, you bitch, do you want people to think someone's gettin'
+killed? Ain't we in bad enough already?"
+
+"So Phoebe came to a bad end," commented Lan, "as we always thought she
+would."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The nearest I came to having my long-cherished revenge on Landon:
+
+Once, in the night, during my week's stay with him, I stepped from bed,
+sleep-walking, moving toward the room where he and Aunt Emily lay.
+Imagining I held a knife in my left hand (I am left-handed) to stick him
+through the heart with.
+
+But I bumped terrifically into a door half ajar, and received such a
+crash between the eyes that it not only brought me broad awake, but gave
+me a bump as big as a hen's egg, into the bargain.
+
+The dream of my revenge had been so strong in my brain that still I
+could feel the butcher-knife in my hand ... and I looked into the empty
+palm to verify the sensation, still there, of clasping the handle.
+
+"--that you, Johnnie?" called my uncle.
+
+"Yep!"
+
+"What's the matter? can't you sleep?"
+
+"No!--got up to take a drink of water."
+
+"You'll find a bucketful on the kitchen table, and the dipper floating
+in it ... and there's matches on the stand by your bed." A pause. He
+continued: "You must of run into something. I heard a bang."
+
+"I did. I bumped my head into the door."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I visited Aunt Millie last.
+
+I found her a giantess of a woman, not fat, but raw-boned and tall. Her
+cheeks were still as pitted with hollows, her breath as catarrhal as
+ever. But she had become a different woman since she had married.
+
+Her husband was a widower with three children already before he took her
+in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the
+yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile
+... with a deep, hoarse voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man
+had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost
+have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see
+this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted
+virility and strength, and wore his shirt open at the neck, and several
+buttons lower, in order to reveal his full hirsuteness.
+
+Millie had already given birth to two children of her own, by him. And
+she toiled about the house at endless duties, day and night, happy with
+him, and loving his children and hers with an equal love. And being
+adored in turn by them.
+
+It was "Ma!" here and "Ma!" there ... the voices of the children ever
+calling for her.... And she, running about, waiting on the youngsters,
+baking ovensful of bread, sewing, scrubbing, dusting ... and talking,
+talking, talking all the time she flew about at her ceaseless work....
+
+Uncle Dick loved his joke, and the broader the better. As I sat across
+the table from him, at mealtimes, and looked into his amused, small
+twinkling eyes, I thought continually of the Miller in Chaucer's
+_Canterbury Tales_....
+
+Millie, too, was not slow at having her joke. She was roughly
+affectionate of me, in memory of old days. And she continually asked me,
+with loud, enjoying laughter, if I remembered this, that, and the other
+bad (Rabelaisan) trick I had played on her back in Mornington....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But I was glad to see Haberford and the East again. I was all over my
+desire to die a poet, and young.... Principal Balling had me come to see
+him. He examined me in Latin and in English and History. He found that,
+from study by myself, I had prepared so that I was more than able to
+pass in these subjects. But when it came to mathematics I was no less
+than an idiot. He informed my father that he had been mistaken in me,
+before ... that he had given me a too cursory look-over, judging me
+after the usual run ... he announced that he would admit me as special
+student at the Keeley Heights High School.
+
+The one thing High School gave me--my Winter there--was Shelley. In
+English we touched on him briefly, mainly emphasising his _Skylark_. It
+was his _Ode to the West Wind_ that made me want more of him ... with
+his complete works I made myself a nuisance in class, never paying
+attention to what anyone said or did, but sitting there like a man in a
+trance, and, with Shelley, dreaming beautiful dreams of revolutionising
+the world.
+
+I awoke only for English Composition. But there, inevitably, I
+quarrelled with the teacher over her ideas of the way English prose was
+to be written. She tried to make us write after the Addisonian model. I
+pointed out that the better style was the nervous, short-sentenced,
+modern one--as Kipling wrote, at his best, in his prose. We had
+altercation after altercation, and the little dumpy woman's eyes raged
+behind her glasses at me--to the laughter of the rest of the class. Who
+really did not care for anything but a lark, while I was all the while
+convinced with the belief that they sat up nights, dreaming over great
+books as I did.
+
+Even yet, though now I know better, I cannot accept the fact that the
+vast majority find their only poetry in a good bellyful of food, as I do
+in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ and in the _Epipsychidion_....
+
+Dissatisfied and disillusioned, it was again a book that lifted me out
+of the stupidity in which I found myself enmeshed. Josiah Flynt's
+_Tramping With Tramps_,--and one other--_Two Years Before the Mast_, by
+Dana. And I lay back, mixing my dreams of humanity's liberation, with
+visions of big American cities, fields of wheat and corn, forests,
+little towns on river-bends.
+
+A tramp or sailor--which?
+
+First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and
+back again?
+
+Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my
+favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett
+and Fielding?
+
+It took me days of talk with the gang--boasting--and nights of dreaming,
+to screw myself up to the right pitch.
+
+Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the
+English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New
+York waterfront that same afternoon....
+
+I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to
+go to sea, and that he needn't try to find me in order to fetch me home
+again. I wished him good luck and good-bye.
+
+Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books: my Cæsar and
+Vergil in the Latin, Young's _Night Thoughts_, and Shelley.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+South Street ... here were ships ... great tall fellows, their masts
+dizzy things to look up at.
+
+I came to a pier where two three-masted barks lay, one on either side.
+First I turned to the one on the right because I saw two men up aloft.
+And there was a boy passing down the deck, carrying a pot of coffee aft.
+I could smell the good aroma of that coffee. Ever since, the smell of
+coffee makes me wish to set out on a trip somewhere.
+
+"Hey, Jimmy," I shouted to the boy.
+
+"Hey, yourself!" he replied, coming belligerently to the side. Then,
+"what do ye want?"
+
+"To go to sea. Do you need anybody aboard for the voyage?"
+
+He looked scornfully at me, as I stood there, skinny, shadow-thin.
+
+"You go to hell!" he cried. Then he resumed his way to the cabin,
+whistling.
+
+The ship opposite, I inspected her next. It was grand with the
+figurehead of a long, wooden lady leaning out obliquely with
+ever-staring eyes, her hands crossed over her breasts.
+
+Aboard I went, down the solitude of the deck. I stopped at the cook's
+galley. I had gone there because I had seen smoke coming out of the
+little crooked pipe that stood akimbo.
+
+I looked in at the door. A dim figure developed within, moving about
+among pots and pans. It was the cook, I could tell by the white cap he
+wore ... an old, very old man. He wore a sleeveless shirt. His long
+skinny, hairy arms were bare. His long silvery-grey beard gave him an
+appearance like an ancient prophet. But where the beard left off there
+was the anomaly of an almost smooth, ruddy face, and very young,
+straight-seeing, blue eyes.
+
+When I told the old cook what I wanted, he invited me in to the galley
+and reached me a stool to sit on.
+
+"The captain isn't up yet. He was ashore on a jamboree last night.
+You'll see him walking up and down the poop when he's hopped out of his
+bunk and eaten his breakfast."
+
+The cook talked about himself, while I waited there. I helped him peel a
+pail of potatoes....
+
+Though I heard much of strange lands and far-away ports, he talked
+mostly of the women who had been in love with him ... slews of them ...
+"and even yet, sixty-five years old, I can make a good impression when I
+want to ... I had a girl not yet twenty down in Buenos Ayres. She was
+crazy about me ... that was only two years ago."
+
+He showed me pictures of the various women, in all parts of the world,
+that had "gone mad about him" ... obviously, they were all prostitutes.
+He brought out a batch of obscene photographs, chuckling over them.
+
+It was a German ship--the _Valkyrie_. But the cook spoke excellent
+English, as did, I later found out, the captain, both the mates, and all
+but one or two of the crew.
+
+Before the captain came up from below the cook changed the subject from
+women to history. In senile fashion, to show off, he recited the names
+of the Roman emperors, in chronological sequence. And, drawing a curtain
+aside from a shelf he himself had built over his bunk, he showed me
+Momsen's complete history of Rome, in a row of formidable volumes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"There's the captain now!"
+
+A great hulk of a man was lounging over the rail of the poop-deck,
+looking down over the dock.
+
+I started aft.
+
+"Hist!" the cook motioned me back mysteriously. "Be sure you say 'Sir'
+to him frequently."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Beg pardon, sir. But are you Captain Schantze, sir?" (the cook had told
+me the captain's name).
+
+"Yes. What do you want?"
+
+"I've heard you needed a cabin boy."
+
+"Are you of German descent?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"What nationality are you, then?"
+
+"American, sir."
+
+"That means nothing, what were your people?"
+
+"Straight English on my mother's side ... Pennsylvania Dutch on my
+father's."
+
+"What a mixture!"
+
+He began walking up and down in seaman fashion. After spending several
+minutes in silence I ventured to speak to him again.
+
+"Do you think you could use me, sir?"
+
+He swung on me abruptly.
+
+"In what capacity?"
+
+"As anything ... I'm willing to go as able seaman before the mast, if
+necessary."
+
+He stopped and looked me over and laughed explosively.
+
+"Able seaman! you're so thin you have to stand twice in one place to
+make a shadow ... you've got the romantic boy's idea of the sea ...
+but, are you willing to do hard work from four o'clock in the morning
+till nine or ten at night?"
+
+"Anything, to get to sea, sir!"
+
+"--sure you haven't run away from home?"
+
+"No-no, sir!"
+
+"Then why in the devil do you want to go to sea? isn't the land good
+enough?"
+
+I took a chance and told the captain all about my romantic notions of
+sea-life, travel, and adventure.
+
+"You talk just like one of our German poets."
+
+"I _am_ a poet," I ventured further.
+
+The captain gave an amused whistle. But I could see that he liked me.
+
+"To-morrow morning at four o'clock ... come back, then, and Karl, the
+cabin boy, will start you in at his job. I'll promote him to boy before
+the mast."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I spent the night at Uncle Jim's house ... he was the uncle that had
+come east, years before. He was married ... a head-bookkeeper ... lived
+in a flat in the Bronx.
+
+He thought it was queer that I was over in New York, alone ... when he
+came home from work, that evening....
+
+I could keep my adventure to myself no longer. I told him all about my
+going to sea. But did Duncan (my father) approve of it? Yes, I replied.
+But when I refused to locate the ship I was sailing on, at first Jim
+tried to bully me into telling. I didn't want my father to learn where I
+was, in case he came over to find me ... and went up to Uncle Jim's....
+
+Then he began laughing at me.
+
+"You've always been known for your big imagination and the things you
+make up ... I suppose this is one of them."
+
+"Let the boy alone," my aunt put in, a little dark woman of French and
+English ancestry, "you ought to thank God that he has enough imagination
+to make up stories ... he might be a great writer some day."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Imagination's all right. I'm not quarrelling with Johnnie for that. But
+you can't be all balloon and no ballast."
+
+They made me up a bed on a sofa in the parlour ... among all the
+bizarre chairs and tables that Uncle Jim had made from spools ... Aunt
+Lottie still made dresses now and again ... before she married Jim she
+had run a dressmaking establishment.
+
+Uncle Jim set a Big Ben alarm clock down on one of the spool tables for
+me.
+
+"I've set the clock for half-past three. That will give you half an hour
+to make your hypothetical ship in ... you'll have to jump up and stop
+the clock, anyhow. It'll keep on ringing till you do."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My first morning on shipboard was spent scrubbing cabin floors, washing
+down the walls, washing dishes, waiting on the captain and mates' mess
+... the afternoon, polishing brass on the poop and officers' bridge,
+under the supervision of Karl, the former cabin boy.
+
+"Well, how do you like it?" asked the cook, as he stirred something in a
+pot, with a big wooden ladle.
+
+"Fine! but when are we sailing?"
+
+"In about three days we drop down to Bayonne for a cargo of White Rose
+oil and then we make a clean jump for Sydney, Australia."
+
+"Around Cape Horn?" I asked, stirred romantically at the thought.
+
+"No. Around the Cape of Good Hope."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early in the afternoon of the day before we left the dock, as I was
+polishing brass on deck, my father appeared before me, as abruptly as a
+spirit.
+
+"Well, here he is, as big as life!"
+
+"Hello, Pop!"
+
+I straightened up to ease a kink in my back.
+
+"You had no need to hide this from me, son; I envy you, that's all, I
+wish I wasn't too old to do it, myself ... this beats travelling about
+the country, selling goods as a salesman. It knocks my dream of having a
+chicken farm all hollow, too...."
+
+He drew in a deep breath of the good, sunny harbour air. Sailors were up
+aloft, they were singing. The cook was in his galley, singing too. There
+were gulls glinting about in the sun.
+
+"Of course you know I almost made West Point once ... had the
+appointment ... if it hadn't been for a slight touch of rheumatism in
+the joints ..." he trailed off wistfully.
+
+"We've never really got to know each other, Johnnie."
+
+I looked at him. "No, we haven't."
+
+"I'm going to start you out right. Will the captain let you off for a
+while?"
+
+"The cook's my boss ... as far as my time is concerned. I'm cabin boy."
+
+My father gave the cook a couple of big, black cigars. I was allowed
+shore leave till four o'clock that afternoon....
+
+"--you need a little outfitting," explained my father, as we walked
+along the dock to the street....
+
+"I've saved up a couple of hundred dollars, which I drew out before I
+came over."
+
+"But, Father...."
+
+"You need a lot of things. I'm going to start you off right. While you
+were up in the cabin getting ready to go ashore I had a talk with the
+cook.... I sort o' left you in his charge--"
+
+"But I don't want to be left in anyone's charge."
+
+"--found out from him just what you'd need and now we're going to do a
+little shopping."
+
+I accompanied my father to a seamen's outfitting place, and he spent a
+good part of his two hundred buying needful things for me ... shirts of
+strong material ... heavy underwear ... oilskins ... boots ... strong
+thread and needles ... and a dunnage bag to pack it all away in....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We stood together on the after-deck again, my father and I.
+
+"Now I must be going," he remarked, trying to be casual. He put a ten
+dollar bill in my hand.
+
+"--to give the boys a treat with," he explained ... "there's nothing
+like standing in good with an outfit you're to travel with ... and
+here," he was rummaging in his inside pocket ... "put these in your
+pocket and keep them there ... a bunch of Masonic cards of the lodge
+your daddy belongs to ... if you ever get into straits, you'll stand a
+better chance of being helped, as son of a Mason."
+
+"No, Father," I replied, seriously and unhumorously, "I can't keep
+them."
+
+"I'd like to know why not?"
+
+"I want to belong to the brotherhood of man, not the brotherhood of the
+Masons."
+
+He looked puzzled for a moment, then his countenance cleared.
+
+"That's all right, Son ... you just keep those cards. They might come in
+handy if you find yourself stranded anywhere."
+
+When my father turned his back, with a thought almost prayerful to the
+spirit of Shelley, I flung the Masonic cards overboard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After dusk, the crew poured _en masse_ to the nearest waterfront saloon
+with me. The ten dollars didn't last long.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"His old man has lots of money."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our last night at the pier was a night of a million stars.
+
+The sailmaker, with whom I had become well acquainted, waddled up to me.
+He was bow-legged. He waddled instead of walked. We sat talking on the
+foreward hatch....
+
+"I'm glad we're getting off to-morrow," I remarked.
+
+"--we might not. We lack a man for the crew yet."
+
+"--thought we had the full number?"
+
+"We did. But one of the boys in your party strayed away ... went to
+another saloon and had a few more drinks ... and someone stuck him with
+a knife in the short ribs ... he's in the hospital."
+
+"But can't Captain Schantze pick up another man right away?"
+
+"The consulate's closed till ten to-morrow morning. We're to sail at
+five ... so he can't sign on a new sailor before ... of course he might
+shanghai someone ... but the law's too severe these days ... and the
+Sailors' Aid Society is always on the job ... it isn't like it used to
+be."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But in spite of what the sailmaker had told me, the captain decided to
+take his chance, rather than delay the time of putting forth to sea.
+Around ten o'clock, in the full of the moon, a night-hawk cab drew up
+alongside the ship where she lay docked, and out of it jumped the first
+mate and the captain with a lad who was so drunk or drugged, or both,
+that his legs went down under him when they tried to set him on his
+feet.
+
+They tumbled him aboard, where he lay in an insensate heap, drooling
+spit and making incoherent, bubbling noises.
+
+Without lifting an eyebrow in surprise, the sailmaker stepped forward
+and joined the mate in jerking the man to his feet. The captain went aft
+as if it was all in the day's work.
+
+The mate and the sailmaker jerked the shanghaied man forward and bundled
+him into a locker where bits of rope and nautical odds and-ends were
+piled, just forward of the galley.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the sharp but misty dawn we cast our moorings loose. A
+busy little tug nuzzled up to take us in tow for open sea.
+
+We were all intent on putting forth, when a cry came from the port side.
+The shanghaied man had broken out, and came running aft ... he stopped a
+moment, like a trapped animal, to survey the distance between the dock
+and the side ... measuring the possibilities of a successful leap.
+
+By this time the first and second mates were after him, with some of the
+men ... he ran forward again, doubled in his tracks like a schoolboy
+playing tag ... we laughed at that, it was so funny the way he went
+under the mate's arm ... the look of surprise on the mate's face was
+funny ... Then the man who was pursued, in a flash, did a hazardous
+thing ... he flung himself in the air, over the starboard side, and took
+a long headlong tumble into the tugboat....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was tied like a hog, and hauled up by a couple of ropes, the
+sailmaker singing a humorous chantey that made the boys laugh, as they
+pulled away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This delayed the sailing anyhow. The mist had lifted like magic,
+and we were not far toward Staten Island before we knew a fine,
+blowing, clear day, presided over, in the still, upper spaces, by
+great, leaning cumulus clouds. They toppled huge over the great-clustered
+buildings as we trod outward toward the harbour mouth....
+
+The pilot swung aboard. The voyage was begun.
+
+The coast of America now looked more like a low-lying fringe of
+insubstantial cloud than solid land.
+
+My heart sank. I had committed myself definitely to a three-months'
+sea-trip ... there was no backing out, it was too far to swim ashore.
+
+"What's wrong, Johann," asked the captain, "are you sea-sick already?"
+He had noticed my expression as he walked by.
+
+"No, sir!"
+
+"If you are, it isn't anything to be ashamed of. I've known old
+sea-captains who got sea-sick every time they put out of port."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a running forward. The shanghaied man hove in sight, on the
+rampage again. He came racing aft. "I must speak with the captain."
+
+There was a scuffle. He broke away. Again the two mates were close upon
+him. Suddenly he flung himself down and both the mates tripped over him
+and went headlong.
+
+The captain couldn't help laughing. Then he began to swear ... "that
+fellow's going to give us a lot of trouble," he prophesied.
+
+Several sailors, grinning, had joined in the chase. They had caught the
+fellow and were dragging him forward by the back and scruff of the neck,
+while he deliberately hung limp and let his feet drag as if paralysed
+from the waist down.
+
+The captain stood over the group, that had come to a halt below. The
+captain was in good humour.
+
+"Bring him up here."
+
+The shanghaied man stood facing Schantze, with all the deference of a
+sailor, yet subtly defiant.
+
+The captain began to talk in German.
+
+"I don't speak German," responded the sailor stubbornly.
+
+Yet it was in German that he had called out he must see the captain.
+
+This did not make the captain angry. Instead, like a vain boy, he began
+in French....
+
+"I don't speak French ..." again objected the sailor, still in English.
+
+"Very well, we'll speak in English, then ... bring him down into the
+cabin ..." to the men and mates ... To the sailor again, "Come on,
+Englishman! (in derision), and we'll sign you on in the ship's
+articles."
+
+They haled him below. The captain dismissed the sailors. The captain,
+the two mates and I, were alone with the mutineer.... I stepped into the
+pantry, pretending to be busy with the dishes. I didn't want to miss
+anything.
+
+"Now," explained the captain, "what's happened has happened ... it's up
+to you to make the best of it ... we had to shanghai you," and he
+explained the case in full ... and if he would behave and do his share
+of the work with the rest of the crew, he would be treated decently and
+be paid ... and let go, if he wished, when the _Valkyrie_ reached
+Sydney....
+
+"Now sign," commanded the mate, "I never heard of a man in your fix ever
+being treated so good before."
+
+"But I won't sign."
+
+"Damme, but you will," returned Miller, the first mate, who, though
+German, spoke English in real English fashion--a result, he later told
+me, of fifteen years' service on English boats....
+
+"Take hold of him, Stanger," this to the second mate, a lithe,
+sun-browned, handsome lad who knew English but hated to speak it.
+
+They wrestled about the cabin at a great rate ... finally they succeeded
+in forcing a pen into the mutineer's hand....
+
+Then the man calmed down, apparently whipped.
+
+"Very well, where shall I sign?"
+
+"Da," pointed the captain triumphantly, pointing the line out, with his
+great, hairy forefinger ... and, with victory near, relapsing into
+German.
+
+But, just as it reached the designated spot, the fellow gave a violent
+swish with the pen. The mates made a grab for his hand, but too late. He
+tore a great, ink-smeared rent through the paper....
+
+_Whang!_ Captain Schantze caught him with the full force of his big,
+open right hand on the left side of his face.... _Whish!_ Captain
+Schantze caught him with the full force of his open left, on the other
+cheek!
+
+The shanghaied man stiffened. He trembled violently.
+
+"Do it a thousand times, my dear captain. I won't sign till you kill
+me."
+
+"Take him forward. He'll work, and work hard, without signing on.... No,
+wait ... tie him up to the rail on the poop ... twenty-four hours of
+that, my man, since you must speak English--will make you change your
+mind."
+
+He was tied, with his hands behind him.
+
+The captain paced up and down beside him.
+
+Then Franz (as I afterward learned his name) boldly began chaffing the
+"old man" ... first in English.
+
+"I don't understand," replied Schantze; he was playful now, as a cat is
+with a mouse ... or rather, like a big boy with a smaller boy whom he
+can bully.
+
+After all, Schantze was only a big, good-natured "kid" of thirty.
+
+Then Franz ran through one language after another ... Spanish, Italian,
+French....
+
+The captain noticed me out of the tail of his eye. His big, broad face
+kindled into a grin.
+
+"What are you doing here on deck, you rascal!" He gave me an
+affectionate, rough pull of the ear.
+
+"Polishing the brass, sir!"
+
+"And taking everything in at the same time, eh? so you can write a poem
+about it?"
+
+His vanity flattered, Schantze began answering Franz back, and, to and
+fro they shuttled their tongues, each showing off to the other--and to
+me, a mere cabin boy. And Franz, for the moment, seemed to have
+forgotten how he had been dragged aboard ... and the captain--that Franz
+was a mutineer, tied to the taffrail for insubordination!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sea-sickness never came near me. Only it was queer to feel the footing
+beneath my feet rhythmically rising and falling ... for that's the way
+it seemed to my land-legs. But then I never was very sturdy on my legs
+... which were then like brittle pipestems.... I sprawled about,
+spreading and sliding, as I went to and from the galley, bringing, in
+the huge basket, the breakfast, dinner and supper for the cabin....
+
+The sailors called me "Albatross" (from the way an albatross acts when
+sprawling on shipdeck). They laughed and poked fun at me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Look here, you Yankee rascal," said the captain, when I told him I
+never drank ... "I think it would do you good if you got a little smear
+of beer-froth on your mouth once in a while ... you'd stop looking
+leathery like a mummy ... you've already got some wrinkles on your face
+... a few good drinks would plump you out, make a man of you.
+
+"In Germany mothers give their babies a sip from their steins before
+they are weaned ... that's what makes us such a great nation."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If I didn't drink, at least the two mates and the sailmaker made up for
+me ... we had on board many cases of beer stowed away down in the
+afterhold, where the sails were stored. And next to the dining room
+there was the space where provisions were kept--together with kegs of
+kümmel, and French and Rhine wines and claret....
+
+And before we had been to sea three days I detected a conspiracy on the
+part of the first and second mates, the cook, and the sailmaker--the
+object of the conspiracy being, apparently, to drink half the liquor out
+of each receptacle, then fill the depleted cask with hot water, shaking
+it up thoroughly, and so mixing it.
+
+As far as I could judge, the old, bow-legged sailmaker had taken out a
+monopoly on the cases of beer aft. Never were sails kept in better
+condition. He was always down there, singing and sewing.
+
+Several times I saw him coming up whistling softly with a lush air of
+subdued and happy reminiscence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Several mornings out ... and I couldn't believe my ears ... I heard a
+sound of music. It sounded like a grind-organ on a city street....
+
+_The Sunshine of Paradise Alley_.
+
+And the captain's voice was booming along with the melody.
+
+I peeked into Schantze's cabin to announce breakfast.
+
+He had a huge music box there. And he was singing to its playing, and
+dancing clumsily about like a happy young mammoth.
+
+"Spying on the 'old man,' eh?"
+
+He came over and caught me by an ear roughly but playfully.
+
+"No, Captain, I was only saying breakfast is ready."
+
+"You're a sly one ... do you like that tune? _The Sunshine of Paradise
+Alley?_ It's my favorite Yankee hymn."
+
+And it must have been; every morning for eighty-nine days the gaudy
+music box faithfully played the tune over and over again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ship drifted slowly through the Sargasso Sea--that dead, sweltering
+area of smooth waters and endless leagues of drifting seaweed.... Or we
+lifted and sank on great, smooth swells ... the last disturbance of a
+storm far off where there were honest winds that blew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The prickly heat assailed us ... hundreds of little red, biting pimples
+on our bodies ... the cook's fresh-baked bread grew fuzz in twenty-four
+hours after baking ... the forecastle and cabin jangled and snarled
+irritably, like tortured animals....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was with a shout, one day, that we welcomed a good wind, and shot
+clear of this dead sea of vegetable matter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we crossed the equator Father Neptune came on board ... a curious
+sea-ceremony that must hark back to the Greeks and Romans....
+
+The bow-legged sailmaker played Neptune.
+
+He combed out a beard of rope, wrapped a sheet around his shoulders,
+procured a trident of wood....
+
+"Come," shouted one of the sailors to me, running up like a happy boy,
+"come, see Neptune climbing on board."
+
+The sail-maker pretended to mount up out of the sea, climbing over the
+forecastle head--just as if he had left his car of enormous,
+pearl-tinted sea-shell, with the spouting dolphins still hitched to it,
+waiting for him, while he paid his respects to our captain.
+
+Captain Schantze, First Mate Miller, Second Mate Stange, stood waiting
+the ceremonial on the officers' bridge, an amused smile playing over
+their faces.
+
+A big, boy-faced sailor named Klaus, and the ship's blacksmith, a
+grey-eyed, sandy-haired fellow named Klumpf, followed the sailmaker
+close behind, as he swept along in his regalia, solemnly and
+majestically. And Klaus beat a triangle. And Klumpf played an accordion.
+
+"Sailmaker" (the only name he was called by on the ship) made a
+grandiose speech to the Captain.
+
+Schantze replied in the same vein, beginning,
+
+"Euer Majestät--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sailors marched forward again, to their music, like pleased
+children. For custom was that they should have plum duff this day, and
+plenty of hot grog....
+
+Before I was aware, I was caught up by several arms.
+
+For I had never before crossed the line. So I must be initiated.
+
+They set me on a board, over a great barrel of sea-water.
+
+Klumpf gave me a mock-shave with a vile mixture of tar and soap. He used
+a great wooden razor about three feet long. The officers shouted and
+laughed, looking on from the bridge.
+
+"What's your name, my boy?" asked Father Neptune.
+
+"John Greg--" Before I could articulate fully the blacksmith thrust a
+gob of the vile lather into my mouth. As I spluttered and spit everyone
+gave shouts of laughter. One or two sailors rolled on the deck,
+laughing, as savages are said to do when overtaken with humour.
+
+The board on which I sat was jerked from under me. Once, two times,
+three times, I was pushed, almost bent double, far down into the barrel
+of sea-water. It was warm, at least.
+
+Then a hue and cry went up for Franz. He was caught. He swore that he
+had crossed the line before, as doubtless he had. But there was now a
+sort of quiet feud between him and the rest aboard. So in a tumbling
+heap, they at last bore him over. He fought and shrieked. And because he
+did not submit and take the ceremony good-naturedly, he was treated
+rather roughly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My certificate of initiation was handed me formally and solemnly. It was
+a semi-legal florid document, sealed with a bit of rope and tar. It
+certified that I had crossed the line. The witnesses were "The
+Mainmast," "The Mizzen Mast," and other inanimate ship's parts and
+objects....
+
+"Keep this," said Sailmaker, as he handed it to me, "as evidence that
+you have already crossed the line, and you will never be shaved with tar
+and a wooden razor again. You are now a full-fledged son of Neptune."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On a ship at sea where the work to do never ends, it is a serious matter
+if one of the crew does not know his work, or fails to hold up his end.
+That means that there is so much more work to be done by the others.
+
+Franz deliberately shirked. And, as far as I could see, he purposely
+got in bad with the mates, under whom he had approximately sixty days
+more of pulling and hauling, going up aloft, scrubbing, and chipping to
+do. I was puzzled at the steadfast, deliberate malingering of the man.
+The crew all hated him, too. I have seen the man at the wheel
+deliberately deflect the ship from its course, in order to bring the
+wind against the mutineer's belly, hoping to have him blown overboard
+while he was running aloft....
+
+And one night, in the forecastle, someone hurled a shoe at him. A blow
+so savagely well-aimed, that when he came running aft, howling with pain
+(for, for all his obstinacy, he seemed to lack courage)--to complain of
+the outrage, to Schantze--his eye popped out so far that it seemed as if
+leaping out of its socket! It was ghastly and bloody like a butchered
+heart.
+
+Later, I asked the sailors why this had been done to Franz. And Klumpf
+said--
+
+"We had a scuffle over something. We were all taking it friendly ... and
+Franz bit Klaus through the hand, almost ... then someone threw a shoe
+and hit him in the eye"....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In about a week, after his eye had healed just a little, I drew Franz
+apart. We sat down together on the main hatch. I was worried about him.
+I did not understand him. I was sorry for him.
+
+"Look here, Franz ... don't you know you might get put clean out of
+business if you keep this mutiny of one up much longer? You can't whip a
+whole ship's crew."
+
+"I don't want to whip a whole ship's crew."
+
+"The captain had to have another man in a hurry, you know ... but he's
+really willing to give you decent treatment."
+
+"Did the captain send you to tell me this?"
+
+"Of course not ... only I'm sorry for you."
+
+Franz gave me a broad, inexplicable wink. He smiled grotesquely--from
+swollen lips made more grotesque because of a recent punch in the mouth
+"Sailmaker" had fetched him....
+
+"Don't trouble yourself about me. I know what I'm doing, my boy."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean that, as soon as I came out of my drunk, and found myself
+shanghaied, I _wanted_ them to ill-treat me ... there's a Sailors' Aid
+Society at Sydney, you know!"
+
+"What good will the Sailors' Aid Society do you?"
+
+"You just wait and see what good it will do me!"
+
+"Nonsense, Franz! The captain's willing to pay you off at Sydney."
+
+"Pay me off, eh? Yes, and the old boy will pay me handsome damages,
+too!... the sentimental old ladies that have nothing else to do but
+befriend the poor abused sailor, will see to it that I find justice in
+the courts there."
+
+"You have a good case against the captain as it is, then. Why don't you
+turn to and behave and be treated decently?"
+
+"No," he replied, with a curious note of strength in his voice, "the
+worse I'm treated the more damages I can collect. I'm going to make it a
+real case of brutal treatment before I leave this old tub."
+
+"But they--they'll--they might kill you!"
+
+"Not much ... those days are about gone ... for a man who knows how to
+handle himself, as I do....
+
+"Well, let us thank God," he finished, "for the Sailors' Aid Society and
+the dear old maids at Sydney!"
+
+I walked off, thinking. Franz had sworn me not to tell. Yet I was
+tempted to. It would get me in right with Captain Schantze.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We shaped to the Cape of Good Hope with great, southern jumps. We were
+striking far south for the strong, steady winds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"There was a damned English ship, the _Lord Summerville_, that left New
+York about the same time we did ... she's a sky-sailer ... we mustn't
+let her beat us into Sydney."
+
+"Why not, Captain?"
+
+"An Englishman beat a German!" the captain spat, "fui! We're going to
+beat England yet at everything ... already we're taking their
+world-trade away from them ... and some day we'll beat them at sea and
+on land, both."
+
+"In a war, sir?"
+
+"Yes, in a war ... in a great, big war! It will have to come to that,
+Johann, my boy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The cook's opinion on the same subject was illuminating.
+
+He told me many anecdotes which tended to prove that even England's
+colonies were growing tired of her arrogance: he related droll stories
+told him by Colonials about the Queen ... obscene and nasty they were,
+too.
+
+"Catch a German talking that way about the Kaiserin!"
+
+The old cook couldn't realize a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon
+temperament--that those they rail against and jibe at they love the
+most!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Off the Tristan da Cunha Islands we ran head-on into a terrific storm
+... one that lasted forty-eight hours or more, with rushing, screaming
+winds, and steady, stinging blasts of sleet that came thick in
+successions of driving, grey cloud.
+
+It was then that we lost overboard a fine, handsome young Saxon, one
+Gottlieb Kampke:
+
+Five men aloft ... only four came down ... Kampke was blown overboard
+off the footrope that ran under the yard, as he stood there hauling in
+on the sail. For he was like a young bull in strength; and, scorning, in
+his strength, the tearing wind, he used to heave in with both hands ...
+not holding fast at all, no matter how hard the wind tore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was all that the ship herself could do, to live. Already two
+lifeboats had been bashed in. And the compass stanchioned on the bridge
+had gone along with a wave, stanchions and all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no use trying to rescue Gottlieb Kampke. Besides, he would be
+dead as soon as he reached the water, in such a boiling sea, the captain
+said to me.
+
+The melancholy cry, "Man overboard!" ...
+
+I took oath that if I ever reached home alive, I would never go to sea
+again. If I just got home, alive, I would be willing even to tie up
+brown parcels in grocery cord, for the rest of my life, to sweep out a
+store day after day, regularly and monotonously, in safety!...
+
+The captain saw me trembling with a nausea of fear. And, with the winds
+booming from all sides, the deck as slippery as the body of a live eel,
+he gave me a shove far out on the slant of the poop. I sped in the grey
+drive of sleet clear to the rail. The ship dipped under as a huge wave
+smashed over, all fury and foam, overwhelming the helmsman and bearing
+down on me....
+
+It was miraculous that I was not swept overboard.
+
+After that, strangely, I no longer feared, but enjoyed a quickening of
+pulse. And I gladly took in the turns in the rope as the men sang and
+heaved away ... waves would heap up over us. We would hold tight till we
+emerged again. Then again we would shout and haul away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It's all according to what you grow used to," commented the captain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By the time I was beginning to look into the face of danger as into a
+mother's face, the weather wore down. The ocean was still heavy with
+running seas, but we rode high and dry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unlucky Kampke!
+
+His shipmates bore his dunnage aft, for the captain to take in charge.
+And, just as in melodramas and popular novels, a picture of a
+fair-haired girl was found at the bottom of his sea-chest, together with
+one of his mother ... his sweetheart and his mother....
+
+Depositions were taken down from his forecastle mates, as to his going
+overboard, and duly entered into the log ... and the captain wrote a
+letter to his mother, to be mailed to her from Sydney.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For a day we were sad. An imminent sense of mortality hung over us.
+
+But there broke, the next morning, a clear sky of sunshine and an open
+though still yesty sea--and we sang, and became thoughtless and gay
+again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Yes," sighed the cook, "I wish it had been Franz instead of Gottlieb.
+Gottlieb was such a fine fellow, and Franz is such a son of a----."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... I have left something out.
+
+At the beginning of the voyage Captain Schantze housed a flock of two
+dozen chickens in a coop under the forecastle ... in order to insure
+himself of fresh eggs during the voyage....
+
+And for fresh meat, he had a huge sow hauled aboard--to be killed later
+on....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One morning, when I went forward to fetch the captain's and mates'
+breakfast, I found the cook all white and ghastly....
+
+"What's the matter, Cook?"
+
+"To-day's the day I've got to butcher the sow," he complained, "and I'd
+give anything to have someone else do it ... I've made such a pet of her
+during the voyage ... and she's so intelligent and affectionate ...
+she's decenter than lots of human beings I've met."
+
+I kept to the cabin while the butchering was going on.
+
+The cook, the next day, with tears streaming down his face, told me how
+trusting the sow had been to the last moment....
+
+"I'll never forget the look in her eyes when she realised what I had
+done to her when I cut her throat."
+
+"And I'll never be able to eat any of her. I'd throw it up as fast as it
+went down ... much as I do like good, fresh pork."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ship-boys, Karl and Albert, always stole the eggs, the captain was
+sure, as soon as they were laid, though he was never able to catch them
+at it.
+
+"Run," he would shout hurriedly to me, "there! I hear the hens cackling.
+They've laid an egg."
+
+I'd run. But there'd be no egg. Someone would have reached the nest,
+from the forecastle, before I did.
+
+Because the eggs were always stolen as soon as laid, the captain decreed
+the slaughter of the hens, too ... not a rooster among them ... the hens
+were frankly unhappy, because of this....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The last hen was to be slain. Pursued, she flew far out over the still
+ocean. Further and further she flew, keeping up her heavy body as if by
+an effort of will.
+
+"Come back! Don't be such a damn fool!" I shouted in my excitement.
+
+Everybody was watching when the chicken would light ... how long it
+could keep up....
+
+As soon as I shouted "come back!" the bird, as if giving heed to my
+exhortation, slowly veered, and turned toward the ship again. Everybody
+had laughed till they nearly sank on deck, at my naïve words.
+
+Now a spontaneous cheer went up, as the hen slowly tacked and started
+back....
+
+It was still weather, but the ship was moving ahead....
+
+"She won't make it!"
+
+"She will!"
+
+Another great shout. She lit astern, right by the wheel. Straightway she
+began running forward, wings spread in genuine triumph.
+
+"Catch her!" shouted the mate.
+
+Nobody obeyed him; they stood by laughing and cheering, till the hen
+made safety beneath the forecastle head.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was spared for three days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"If you ever tell the captain on us," First Mate Miller threatened, as
+he and the second mate stood over a barrel of Kümmel, mixing hot water
+with it, to fill up for what they had stolen, "if you ever tell, I'll
+see that you go overboard--by accident ... when we clear for Iqueque,
+after we unload at Sydney."
+
+"Why should I tell? It's none of my business!"
+
+I had come upon them, as they were at work. The cook had sent me into
+the store-room for some potatoes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miller, the first mate, was quite fat and bleary-eyed. He used to go
+about sweating clear through his clothes on warm days. At such times I
+could detect the faint reek of alcohol coming through his pores. It's a
+wonder Schantze didn't notice it, as I did.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sometimes, at meals, the captain would swear and say, sniffing at the
+edge of his glass, "What's the matter with this damned brandy ... it
+tastes more like water than a good drink of liquor."
+
+As he set his glass down in disgust, the mates would solemnly and
+hypocritically go through the same operation, and express their wonder
+with the captain's.
+
+Finally one of the latter would remark sagely, "they always try to palm
+off bad stuff on ships."
+
+In spite of my fear of the mates, I once had to stuff a dirty dish-rag
+down my mouth to keep from laughing outright. The greasy rag made me gag
+and almost vomit.
+
+"And what's the matter with you?" inquired Schantze, glaring into the
+pantry at me, while the two mates also glowered, for a different reason.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You skinny Yankee," said the captain, taking me by the ear, rather
+painfully, several days after that incident, "I'm sure someone's
+drinking my booze. Could it be you, in spite of all your talk about not
+drinking? You Anglo-Saxons are such dirty hypocrites."
+
+"Indeed, no, sir,--it isn't me."
+
+"Well, this cabin's in your care, and so is the storeroom. You keep a
+watch-out and find out for me who it is.... I don't think its Miller or
+the second mate ... it must be either the cook or that old rogue of a
+sailmaker....
+
+"Or it might be some of the crew," he further speculated, "but anyhow,
+it's your job to take care of the cabin, as I said before....
+
+"Remember this--all sailors are thieves, aboard ship, if the chance to
+take anything good to eat or drink comes their way."
+
+I promised to keep a good look-out.
+
+On the other hand....
+
+"Mind you keep your mouth shut ... and don't find things so damned
+funny, neither," this from the first mate, early one morning, as I
+scrubbed the floors. He stirred my posteriors heavily with a booted
+foot, in emphasis.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sea kicked backward in long, speedy trails of foam, lacing the
+surface of a grey-green waste of waves....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I had any spare time, I used to lie in the net under the bowsprit,
+and read. From there I could look back on the entire ship as it sailed
+ahead, every sail spread, a magnificent sight.
+
+One day, as I lay there, reading Shelley, or was it my Vergil that I was
+puzzling out line by line, with occasional glances at the great ship
+seeming to sail into me--myself poised outward in space--
+
+There came a great surge of water. I leaped up in the net, bouncing
+like a circus acrobat. My book fell out of my hand into the sea.
+
+I looked up, and saw fully half the crew grinning down at me. The mate
+stood over me. A bucket that still dripped water in his hand showed me
+where the water had come from.
+
+"Come up out of there! The captain's been bawling for you for half an
+hour ... we thought you'd gone overboard."
+
+I came along the net, drenched and forlorn.
+
+"What in hell were you doing down there?"
+
+"I--I was thinking," I stammered.
+
+"He was thinking," echoed the mate scornfully. "Well, thinking will
+never make a sailor of you."
+
+Boisterous laughter.
+
+"After this do your thinking where we can find you when you're wanted."
+
+As I walked aft, the mate went with me pace for pace, poking more fun at
+me. To which I dared not answer, as I was impelled, because he was
+strong and I was very frail ... and always, when on the verge of danger,
+or a physical encounter, the memory of my Uncle Lan's beatings would now
+crash into my memory like an earthquake, and render my resolution and
+sinews all a-tremble and unstrung.
+
+I was of a mind to tell the captain _who_ was drinking his liquor--but
+here again I feared, and cursed myself for fearing.
+
+When the mate told him of where he had found me, at last--what he had
+done--what I had said--Schantze laughed....
+
+But, later on, he sympathised with me and unexpectedly remarked:
+
+"Johann, how can you expect a heavy-minded numbskull like Miller to
+understand!"
+
+Then, laughing, he seized me by the ear--his usual gesture of fondness
+for me--
+
+"Remember me if you ever write a book about this voyage, and don't give
+me too black a name! I'm not so bad, am I, eh?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Australian coast had lain blue across the horizon for several days.
+
+"Watch me to-morrow!" whispered Franz cryptically to me as he strolled
+lazily by....
+
+Next day, around noon, I heard a big rumpus on the main deck, I hurried
+up from the cabin.
+
+There lay Franz, sprawled on his back like a huge, lazy dog, and the
+mate was shaking his belly with his foot on top of it, just as one plays
+with a dog ... but to show he was not playing, he delivered the
+prostrate form of the sailor a swift succession of kicks in the ribs....
+
+"You won't work any longer, you say?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I'll kick your guts out."
+
+"Very well."
+
+"Stand on your feet like a man."
+
+"What for? You'll only knock me down again!" and Franz grinned comically
+and grotesquely upward, through the gap in his mouth where two of his
+teeth had been punched out earlier in the voyage.
+
+It was easy to see that Franz's curious attitude of non-resistance had
+the mate puzzled what to do next. All the sailors indulged in furtive
+laughter. None of them had a very deep-rooted love for Miller, and, for
+the first time, they rather sympathised with the man who had been
+shanghaied ... some of them even snickered audibly ... and straightway
+grew intent on their work....
+
+Miller turned irritably on them. "And what's the matter with _you_!"...
+
+"Bring him up here!" shouted Captain Schantze.
+
+Four sailors picked Franz up and carried him, unresisting, bumping his
+back on the steps as he sagged like a sack half full of flour....
+
+"Here! I've had about enough of this!" cried the captain, furious, "tie
+him to the rail again!..."
+
+"Now, we'll leave you there, on bread and water, till you say you'll
+work."
+
+"What does it matter what you do," sauced Franz; "we'll be in port in
+four days ... and then you'll see what I'll do!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"What's that?" cried the captain. Then catching an inkling of Franz's
+scheme, he hit the man a quick, hard blow in the mouth with his clenched
+fist.
+
+"Give him another!" urged the mate.
+
+But the captain's rage was over, though Franz sent him a bold, mocking
+laugh, even as the blood trickled down in a tiny red stream from where
+his mouth had, been struck.
+
+I never saw such courage of its kind.
+
+They left him there for ten hours. But he stood without a sign of
+exhaustion or giving in. And they untied him. And let him loose.
+
+And, till we hove to at Dalghety's Wharf, in Sydney Harbour, unnoticed,
+Franz, the Alsace-Lorrainer, roamed the boat at will, like a passenger.
+
+"Wait till I get on shore ... this little shanghaiing party of the
+captain's will cost him a lot of hard money," he said, in a low voice,
+to me,--standing idly by, his hands in his pockets, while I was bending
+over the brass on the bridge railing, polishing away.
+
+"But they've nearly killed you, Franz ... will it be worth it?"
+
+"All I can say is I wish they'd use me rougher."
+
+"You know, Franz, I'm not a bit sorry for you now ... I was at first."
+
+"That so?... I don't need anybody to be sorry for me. In a week or so,
+when I have won my suit against the captain through the Sailors' Aid
+Society, I'll be rolling in money ... then you can be sorry for the
+captain."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sydney Harbour ... the air alive with sunlight and white flutterings of
+sea gulls a-wing ... alive with pleasure boats that leaned here and yon
+on white sails.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now that we were safe in harbour, I hesitated whether to run away or
+continue with the ship. For I had signed on to complete the voyage, via
+Iqueque, on the West Coast of South America, to Hamburg ... I hesitated,
+I say, because, on shipboard, you're at least sure of food and a place
+to sleep....
+
+Karl and I had been set to work at giving the cabin a thorough
+overhauling. We fooled away much of our time looking into the captain's
+collections of erotic pictures and photographs ... and his obscene books
+in every language.
+
+And we discovered under the sofa-seat that was built against the side, a
+great quantity of French syrups and soda waters. So we spent quite a
+little of our time in mixing temperance drinks for ourselves.
+
+Cautiously I spoke to the cook about what Karl and I were doing. For he
+knew, of course, that I knew of his marauding ... and of the mates' and
+sailmaker's ... so it was safe to tell him.
+
+"You'd better be careful," the cook admonished me.
+
+"But what could Captain Schantze want with so many bottles of syrup and
+soda water aboard?"
+
+"The English custom's officer who comes aboard here is an old friend of
+Schantze's, and a teetotaler ... so the captain always treats him to
+soda water."
+
+"But Karl and I have drunk it all up already," I confessed slowly.
+
+"You'll both catch a good hiding then when he calls for it and finds
+there is none."
+
+The next day the customs man came aboard.
+
+"Have a drink, Mr. Wollaston?" Schantze asked him.
+
+"Yes, but nothing strong," for probably the tenth occasion came the
+answer.
+
+Then offhandedly, the captain--as if he had not, perhaps, said the same
+thing for ten previous voyages: "I have some fine French soda water and
+syrup in my private locker, perhaps you'd like some of that, Mr.
+Wollaston?"
+
+Mr. Wollaston, whose face and nose was so ruddy and pimply anyone would
+take him for a toper, answers: "Yes, a little of that Won't do any harm,
+Captain!"
+
+"Karl!--Johann!" We had been listening, frightened, to the colloquy. We
+came out, trembling.
+
+"Look under the cushions in my cabin ... bring out some of the syrup and
+soda water you find there."
+
+"Very well, sir!"
+
+We both hurried in ... stood facing each other, too scared to laugh at
+the situation. The captain had a heavy hand--and carried a heavy cane
+when he went ashore. He had the cane with him now.
+
+After a long time: "You tell him there is none," whispered Karl.
+
+"Well, what's wrong in there?" cried Schantze impatiently.
+
+"We can't find a single bottle, sir!" I repeated, louder.
+
+"What? Come out here! Speak louder! What did you say?"
+
+"We can't find a single bottle, sir!" I murmured, almost inaudibly.
+
+Then Karl, stammering, reinforced me with, "There are a lot of empty
+bottles here, sir!"
+
+"What does this mean? Every voyage for years I have had soda and French
+syrup in my locker for Mr. Wollaston."
+
+"Oh, don't mind me," deprecated the little customs man, at the same time
+as furious as his host.
+
+Karl had already began to blubber in anticipation of the whipping due.
+The captain laid his heavy cane on everywhere. The boy fell at his feet,
+bawling louder, less from fear than from the knowledge that his
+abjectness would please the captain's vanity and induce him to let up
+sooner.
+
+"Now _you_ come here!" Schantze beckoned me.
+
+He raised the cane at me. But, to my own surprise, something brave and
+strange entered into me. I would not be humiliated before a countryman
+of my mother's, that was what it was!
+
+I looked the captain straight in the eye.
+
+"Sir, I did not do it, and I won't be whipped!"
+
+"Wha-at!" ejaculated Schantze, astonished at my novel behaviour.
+
+"I didn't touch the syrup." Karl looked at me, astonished and
+incredulous at my audacity, through his tear-stained face.
+
+The captain stepped back from me.
+
+I must be telling the truth to be behaving so differently.
+
+"Get to your bunk then!" he commanded.
+
+I obeyed.
+
+"Who is he?" ... I heard the little customs man ask the skipper; "he
+doesn't talk like an Englishman."
+
+"He isn't. He just a damn-fool Yankee boy I picked up in New York."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had rounded Franz up and locked him away. The captain was
+determined to frustrate his little scheme for reimbursement, which he
+had by this time guessed.
+
+I lie. I must tell the truth in these memoirs.
+
+I had told on him.
+
+But my motive was only an itch to see what would then take place. But
+when I saw that the issue would be an obvious one: that he would merely
+be spirited forth to sea again, and this time, _forced_ to work, I felt
+a little sorry for the man. At the same time, I admit I wanted to
+observe the denouement myself, of his case ... and as I now intended to
+desert the ship, it would have to take place in Sydney.
+
+So, on the second night of Franz's incarceration, when nearly everybody
+was away on shore-leave, I took the captain's bunch of keys, and I let
+the shanghaied man, the mutineer, the man from Alsace-Lorraine--out!
+
+It was not a very dark night. Franz stole along like a rat till he
+reached the centre of the dock. There he gave a great shout of defiance
+... why, I learned later....
+
+The _Lord Summerville_, which had, after all, beat us in by two days,
+despite Captain Schantze's boast, was lying on the other side of our
+dock. And her mate and several sailors thus became witnesses of what
+happened.
+
+The shout brought, of course, our few men who remained on watch, on
+deck, and over on the dock after Franz ... who allowed himself to be
+caught ... the dock was English ground ... the ship was German ... a
+good point legally, as the canny Franz had foreseen.
+
+His clothes were almost torn from his body.
+
+Miller accidentally showed up, coming back from shore. And he joined in.
+
+"Come back with us, you verfluchte _Alsatz_-Lothringer."
+
+The Englishmen from the _Lord Summerville_ now began calling out, "Let
+him alone!" and "I say, give the lad fair play!"
+
+Some of them leaped down on the dock in a trice.
+
+"Who the hell let him out?" roared the mate.
+
+I stood on deck, holding my breath, and ready to bolt in case Franz
+betrayed me. But nevertheless my blood was running high and happy over
+the excitement I had caused by unlocking the door.
+
+"No one let me out. I picked the lock. Will that suit you?" lied Franz,
+protecting me.
+
+"What's the lad been and done?" asked the mate of the _Lord
+Summerville_.
+
+"I was shanghaied in New York," put in Franz swiftly, "and I demand
+English justice."
+
+"And you shall get it, my man!" answered the mate proudly, "for you have
+been assaulted on English ground, as I'll stand witness."
+
+A whistle was blown. Men came running. Soon Franz was outside the
+jurisdiction of Germany.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day Captain Schantze stalked about, hardly speaking to Miller.
+He was angry and laid the blame at the latter's door.
+
+"Miller, why in the name of God didn't you guard that fellow better? An
+English court ... you know what _they'll_ do to us!"
+
+Miller spread his hands outward, shrugged his shoulders expressively,
+remained in silence. The two mates and the captain ate the rest of their
+supper in a silence that bristled.
+
+The ship was detained for ten days more after its cargo had been
+unloaded.
+
+At the trial, during which the "old maids" and The Sailors' Aid Society
+came to the fore, Captain Schantze roared his indignant best--so much so
+that the judge warned him that he was not on his ship but on English
+ground....
+
+Franz got a handsome verdict in his favour, of course.
+
+And for several days he was seen, rolling drunk about the streets, by
+our boys, who now looked on him as a pretty clever person.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was my time to run away--if I ever intended to. Within the next day
+or so we were to take on coal for the West Coast. We were to load down
+so heavily, the mate, who had conceived a hatred of me, informed me,
+that even in fair weather the scuppers would be a-wash. Significantly he
+added there would be much danger for a man who was not liked aboard a
+certain ship ... by the mates ... much danger of such a person's being
+washed overboard. For the waves, you know, washed over the deck of so
+heavily loaded a ship at will.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the _Lord Summerville_ was a mad Pennsylvania boy who had, like
+myself, gone to sea for the first time ... but he had had no uncle to
+beat timidity into him ... and he had dared ship as able seaman on the
+big sky-sailed lime-juicer, and had gloriously acquitted himself.
+
+He was a tall, rangy young bullock of a lad. He could split any door
+with his fist. He liked to drink and fight. And he liked women in the
+grog-house sense.
+
+One of his chief exploits had been the punching of the second mate in
+the jaw when both were high a-loft. Then he had caught him about the
+waist, and held him till he came to, to keep him from falling. The mate
+had used bad language at him.
+
+Hoppner had worked from the first as if he had been born to the sea.
+
+He and I met in a saloon. The plump little barmaid had made him what she
+called, "A man's drink," while me she had served contemptuously with a
+ginger ale.
+
+Hoppner boasted of his exploits. I, of mine.
+
+"I tell you what, Gregory, since we're both jumping ship here, let's be
+pals for awhile and travel together."
+
+"I'm with you, Hoppner."
+
+"And why jump off empty-handed, since we are jumping off?"
+
+"What is it you're driving at?"
+
+"There ought to be a lot of loot on two boats!"
+
+"Suppose we get caught?" I asked cautiously.
+
+"Anybody that's worth a damn will take a chance in this world. Aren't
+you game to take a chance?"
+
+"Of course I'm game."
+
+"Well, then, you watch your chance and I'll watch mine. I'll hook into
+everything valuable that's liftable on my ship and you tend to yours in
+the same fashion."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We struck hands in partnership, parted, and agreed to meet at the
+wharf-gate the next night, just after dark, he with his loot, I with
+mine.
+
+I spent the morning of the following day prospecting. I had seen the
+captain put the ship's money for the paying of the crew in a drawer, and
+turn the key.
+
+But first, with a curious primitive instinct, I fixed on a small ham and
+a loaf of rye bread as part of the projected booty, in spite of the fact
+that, if I but laid hands on the ship's money, I would have quite a
+large sum.
+
+It was the piquaresque romance of what I was about to do that moved me.
+The romance of the deed, not the possession of the objects stolen, that
+appealed to my imagination. I pictured my comrade and myself going
+overland, our swag on our backs, eluding pursuit ... and joining with
+the natives in some far hinterland. I would be a sort of Jonathan Wilde
+plus a François Villon.
+
+Before the captain returned I had surveyed everything to my satisfaction
+... after supper the captain and the two mates left for shore again.
+
+Now was the time. I searched the captain's old trousers and found the
+ship's keys there. They were too bulky to carry around with him.
+
+The keys seemed to jangle like thunder as I tried them one after the
+other on the drawer where I had seen him put away the gold.
+
+I heard someone coming. I started to whistle noisily, and to polish the
+captain's _carpet slippers!_ ... it was only someone walking on deck ...
+The last key was, dramatically, the right one. The drawer opened ... but
+it was empty! I had seen the captain--the captain had also seen me. Now
+I started to take anything I could lay my hands on.
+
+I snatched off the wall two silver-mounted cavalry pistols, a present
+from his brother to Schantze. I added a bottle of kümmel to the ham and
+the rye bread. The kümmel a present for Hoppner.
+
+Then, before leaving the _Valkyrie_ forever, I sat down to think if
+there were not something I might do to show my contempt for Miller.
+There were many things I could do, I found.
+
+In the first place, I took a large sail-needle and some heavy-thread and
+I sewed two pairs of his trousers and two of his coats up the middle of
+the legs and arms, so he couldn't put them on, at least right away. I
+picked up hammer and nails and nailed his shoes and sea-boots securely
+to the middle of his cabin floor. Under his pillow I found a full flask
+of brandy. I emptied half ... when I replaced it, it was full again. But
+I had not resorted to the brandy cask to fill it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The apprehension that I might be come upon _flagrante delictu_ gave me a
+shiver of apprehension. But it was a pleasurable shiver. I enjoyed the
+malicious wantonness of my acts, and my prospective jump into the
+unknown ... all the South Seas waited for me ... all the world!
+
+But, though every moment's delay brought detection and danger nearer, I
+found time for yet one more stroke. With a laughable vision of Schantze
+smashing Miller all over the cabin, I wrote and left this note pinned on
+the former's pillow:
+
+     Dear Captain:--
+
+     By the time you read this letter I will be beyond your reach (then
+     out of the instant's imagination ... I had not considered such a
+     thing hitherto). I am going far into the interior and discover a
+     gold mine. When I am rich I shall repay you for the cavalry pistols
+     which I am compelled to confiscate in lieu of my wages, which I now
+     forfeit by running away, though entitled to them.
+
+     You have been a good captain and I like you.
+
+     As for Miller, he is beneath my contempt. It was he who drank all
+     your wines, brandies, and whiskies ... the sailmaker is to answer
+     for your beer. The second mate has been in on this theft of your
+     liquors, too (I left the cook out because he had been nice to me).
+
+     Good-bye, and good luck.
+
+     Your former cabin boy, and, though you may not believe me, always
+     your well-wisher and friend,
+
+                                                        JOHN GREGORY.
+
+I left what I had stolen bundled up in my blanket. I walked forward
+nonchalantly to see if anyone was out to observe me. I discovered the
+sandy-haired Blacksmith, Klumpf, sitting on the main hatch. I saw that I
+could not pass him with my bundle without strategy. The strategy I
+employed was simple.
+
+I drew him a bottle of brandy. I gave it to him. After he had drawn a
+long drink I told him I was running away from the ship. He laughed and
+took another drink. I passed him with my bundle. He shouted good-bye to
+me.
+
+Before I had gone by the nose of the old ship, who should I run into but
+Klaus, coming back from a spree. He was pushing along on all fours like
+an animal, he was so drunk ... good, simple Klaus, whom I liked. I laid
+down my bundle, risking capture, while I helped him to the deck. He
+stopped a moment to pat the ship's side affectionately as if it were a
+living friend, or nearer, a mother.
+
+"Gute alte _Valkyrie!_.. gute alte _Valkyrie!_" he murmured.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Safe so far. At the outside of the dock-gate Hoppner waited my arrival.
+He was interested in the kümmel, and in the pistols, which were
+pawnable.
+
+He had been more daring than I. He had tried to pick his captain's
+pocket of a gold watch while the latter slept. But every time he reached
+for it the captain stirred uneasily. He would have snatched it anyhow,
+but just then his first mate stepped into the cabin ... "and I hid till
+the mate went out again."
+
+"And what then?"
+
+"I picked up a lot of silverware the captain had for show occasions ...
+that I found, rummaging about."
+
+"And him there sleeping?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I found four revolvers that belonged to the mates and captain. I put
+them all in one bundle and chucked them into a rowboat over the ship's
+side. And now we must go back to your boat--"
+
+"To my boat?" I asked, amazed.
+
+"Yes" (I had told him how nearly I had missed our ship-money).
+
+"To your boat, and ransack the cabin till we locate that coin."
+
+"That's too risky."
+
+"Hell, take a chance, can't you?"
+
+That's what Hoppner was always saying as long as we travelled together:
+"Hell, take a chance."
+
+But when I began telling him with convulsive laughter, of the revenge I
+had taken on the mate ... and also how I had thrown all the keys
+overboard, Hoppner, instead of joining in with my laughter, struck at
+me, not at all playfully, "What kind of damn jackass have I joined up
+with, anyhow," he exclaimed. "Now it won't be any use going back, you've
+thrown the keys away and we'd make too great a racket, breaking open
+things...."
+
+He insisted, however, on going back to his own boat, sliding down to the
+rowboat, and rowing away with the loot he had cast into it. We had no
+sooner reached the prow of the _Lord Summerville_ than we observed
+people bestirring themselves on board her more than was natural.
+
+"Come on, _now_ we'll beat it. They're after me."
+
+Hoppner had also brought a blanket. We went "humping bluey" as swagmen,
+as the tramp is called in Australia.
+
+The existence of the swagman is the happiest vagrant's life in the
+world. He is usually regarded as a bona fide seeker for work, and food
+is readily given him for the asking. Unlike the American hobo, he is
+given his food raw, and is expected to cook it himself. So he carries
+what he calls a "tucker bag" to hold his provisions; also, almost more
+important--his "billy can" or tea-pot....
+
+Hoppner and I acquired the tea-habit as badly as the rest of the
+Australian swagmen. Every mile or so the swagman seems to stop, build a
+fire, and brew his draught of tea, which he makes strong enough to take
+the place of the firiest swig of whiskey. I've seen an old swagman boil
+his tea for an actual half-hour, till the resultant concoction was as
+thick and black as New Orleans molasses. With such continual draughts of
+tea, only the crystalline air, and the healthy dryness of the climate
+keeps them from drugging themselves to death.
+
+"Tea ain't any good to drink unless you can put a stick straight up in
+it, and it can stand alone there," joked an old swagman, who had invited
+us to partake of a hospitable "billy-can" with him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We had long, marvellous talks with different swagmen, as we slowly
+sauntered north to Newcastle....
+
+We heard of the snakes of Australia, which workmen dug up in torpid
+writhing knots, in the cold weather ... of native corrobories which one
+old informant told us he had often attended, where he procured native
+women or "gins" as they called them, for a mere drink of whiskey or gin
+... "that's why they calls 'em 'gins'" he explained ... (wrong, for
+"gin" or a word of corresponding sound is the name for "woman" in many
+native languages in the antipodes)....
+
+The azure beauty of those days!... tramping northward with nothing in
+the world to do but swap stories and rest whenever we chose, about
+campfires of resinous, sweetly smelling wood ... drinking and drinking
+that villainous tea.
+
+In Australia the law against stealing rides on freights is strictly
+enforced. The tramp has always to walk--to the American tramp this is at
+first a hardship, but you soon grow to like it ... you learn to enjoy
+the wine in the air, the fragrance of the strange trees that shed bark
+instead of leaves, the noise of scores of unseen Waterfalls in the hills
+of New South Wales.
+
+The morning that the little sea-port of Newcastle lay before us, I felt
+as if I had been on tour through a strange world. For the first time the
+story-books of my youth had come true.
+
+But Hoppner rose from the camp fire that we'd been sleeping by,
+stretched, and remarked, "now, thank Christ, I'll be able to find a good
+seat in a pub again, just like in Sydney, and all the booze I can drink.
+We can go to some sailors' boarding house here, tell them we want to
+ship out, and they'll furnish us with the proper amount of drinks and
+take care of us, all hunky dory, till they find us a berth on ship ...
+of course they'll be well paid for their trouble ... two months' advance
+pay handed over to them by the skipper ... but that won't bother me a
+bit."
+
+From the hill on which we lay encamped we saw all the ships in the
+harbour. I no longer feared the sea. Your true adventurer forgets danger
+and perils experienced as a woman forgets the pangs of childbirth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We met a sailor on the street, who, though at first a stranger, soon
+became our friend and, with the quick hospitality of the sea, steered us
+to a pub known as the Green Emerald, bought us drinks, and introduced us
+to Mother Conarty, the proprietress.
+
+"I'll ship ye out all right, but where's your dunnage?"
+
+We confessed that we had run away from our ships down at Sydney.
+
+The old sailor had spoken of Mother Conarty as rough-mannered, but a
+woman with "a good, warm heart."
+
+She proved it by taking us in to board, with no dunnage for her to hold
+as security.
+
+"Oh, they're good lads, I'm sure," vouched our sailor-friend, speaking
+of us as if we had been forecastle mates of his for twenty voyages on
+end ... the way of the sea!
+
+Now Mother Conarty was not stupid. She was a great-bodied, jolly
+Irishwoman, but she possessed razor-keen, hazel eyes that narrowed on us
+a bit when she first saw us. But the woman in her soon hushed her
+passing suspicions. For Hoppner was a frank-faced, handsome lad, with
+wide shoulders and a small waist like a girl's. It was Hoppner's good
+looks took her in. She gave us a room together.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a blowsy cheeked bar-maid, Mother Conarty's daughter. She
+knew well how to handle with a few sharp, ironic remarks anyone who
+tried to "get fresh" with her ... and if she couldn't, there were plenty
+of husky sailormen about, hearty in their admiration for the resolute,
+clean girl, and ready with mauling fists.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Mother Conarty's proud o' that kid o' hers, she is."
+
+"And well she may be!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I've been thinkin' over you b'yes, an' as ye hain't no dunnage wit' ye,
+I'm thinkin' ye'll be workin' fer yer board an' room."
+
+"We're willing enough, mother," I responded, with a sinking of the
+heart, while Hoppner grimaced to me, behind her back.
+
+We scrubbed out rooms, and the stairs, the bar, behind the bar, the
+rooms back and front, where the sailors drank. We earned our board and
+room ... for a few days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Green Emerald I met my first case of delirium tremens. And it was
+a townsman who had 'em, not a sailor. The townsman was well-dressed and
+well-behaved--at first ... but there lurked a wild stare in his eye that
+was almost a glaze ... and he hung on the bar and drank and drank and
+drank. It apparently had no effect on him, the liquor that he took.
+
+"Say, but you're a tough one," complimented Molly.
+
+But _it_ began in the afternoon. He picked up a stray dog from the floor
+and began kissing it. And the dog slavered back, returning his
+affection. Then he dropped the dog and began picking blue monkeys off
+the wall ... wee things, he explained to us ... that he could hold
+between thumb and forefinger ... only there were so many of them ...
+multitudes of them ... that they rather distressed him ... they carried
+the man away in an ambulance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hoppner and I tired of the ceaseless scrubbing. One day we simply walked
+out of the Green Emerald and never showed up again. Hoppner stayed on in
+town.
+
+I found that the _Valkyrie_ had run up from Sydney to coal at Newcastle,
+for the West Coast. I thought that in this case a little knowledge was
+not a dangerous thing, but a good thing, as long as I confined that
+knowledge to myself. I knew that the _Valkyrie_ was there. It was not
+necessary that the officers of the boat should know I was there ...
+which I wasn't, for I turned south, my swag on my back, and made Sydney
+again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Sydney and "on the rocks," that is with nothing to eat and no place
+to sleep but outdoors.
+
+Of course I couldn't keep away from the ships. I arrived at the Circular
+Quay. I ran into the Sailors' Mission. They were serving tea and having
+a prayer-meeting. I wandered in.
+
+A thin, wisplike man, timid, in black, but very gentlemanly, made me
+heartily welcome. Not with that obnoxious, forced heartiness sky-pilots
+think the proper manner to affect in dealing with sailors, but in a
+human way genuinely felt.
+
+After a service of hearty singing, he asked me if he could help me in
+any way.
+
+"I suppose you can. I'm on the rocks bad."
+
+He gave me all the cakes to eat which were left over from the tea. And a
+couple of shillings beside.
+
+"I wonder if there's anything else I can do?"
+
+"Yes, I'm a poet," I ventured, "and I'd like to get Chaucer's
+_Canterbury Tales_ to read again." I said this as much to startle the
+man as really meaning it. I can go so long without reading certain
+poets, and after that I starve for them as the hungry starve for food. I
+was hungry for Chaucer.
+
+Such a request, coming from a youth almost in rags, impressed the
+sky-pilot so deeply that he insisted on giving me a job pumping the
+organ during services and a little room to sleep in at the mission. What
+is more, he lent me Skeats' edition of Chaucer, complete. And all the
+time I was with him he proved a "good sport." He didn't take advantage
+of my dependence on him to bother me so very much about God.
+
+He took it for granted that I was a Christian, since I never discussed
+religion with him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It began to grow wearisome, pumping an organ for a living. And I had fed
+myself full on Chaucer.
+
+I began to yawn, behind the organ, over the growing staleness of life in
+a sailors' mission. And also I was being pestered by a tall, frigid old
+maid in purples and blacks, who had fixed her eye on me as a heathen she
+must convert.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"How'd you like a voyage to China?" the sky-pilot asked, one day.
+
+Cathay ... Marco Polo ... Milton's description of the Chinese moving
+their wheelbarrows along the land by means of sails ... many poetic
+visions marched across my mind at the question.
+
+"I'd like to, right enough."
+
+"Then here's a chance for you," and he handed me a copy of the Bulletin,
+pointing out an advertisement for cattlemen on the steamboat, _South Sea
+King_, about to take a cargo of steers from Queensland to Taku, province
+of Pechi-li, Northern China.
+
+"What are they sending cattle away up there for?"
+
+"Supplies for troops ... The Boxer outbreak, you know ... go down to the
+number given in the advertisement, and I'm sure they'll sign you on as
+cattleman, if you want the job."
+
+"All right. I'll go now."
+
+"No," looking me over dubiously, "you'd better not go there or anywhere
+else, in your present rig ... you're too ragged to apply even for such
+work ... hang around till morning, and I'll go home to-night and bring
+you a decent coat, at least. Your coat is worse than your trousers ...
+though _they_ are ravelled at the bottoms and coming through in the left
+knee ... every time you take a step I can see a glint of white through
+the cloth, and," walking round me in a tour of inspection, "the seat
+might break through at any moment." All this was said without a glint of
+humour in his eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next morning the sky-pilot came down very late. It was twelve. But he
+had not forgotten me. "Here's the coat," and he solemnly unwrapped and
+trailed before my astonished gaze a coat with a long, ministerial tail.
+I put it on. The tail came below the bend of my knees. I laughed. The
+sky-pilot did not.
+
+Finally he stepped back, cracked a solemn smile, and remarked, "You _do_
+look rather odd!"
+
+The intonation of his voice, his solemn almost deprecatory smile, set me
+off and I laughed till the tears ran down my face.
+
+"I say, what's so funny?"
+
+"Me! I am!... in your long-tailed coat."
+
+"If I was on the rocks like you I wouldn't see anything to laugh
+about."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the shipping office, the place mentioned in the advertisement, in the
+dimly lit, grey-paned room, there sat one lone, pasty-faced,
+old-youngish clerk on the traditional clerk's high stool. But he proved
+lively beyond his appearance.
+
+"My God! do look who's here!" he exclaimed facetiously, and then,
+rapidly, without giving me room for a biting word in return, "no,
+there's no use now, my boy ... we took on all the cattlemen we needed by
+ten o'clock this morning."
+
+I walked away, disconsolate. I bore on my back my swagman's blanket. In
+the blanket I carried a change of shirts the sky-pilot had given me, a
+razor, a toothbrush, a Tennyson, and a Westcott and Hort's Greek New
+Testament with glossary, that I had stolen from a bookstall in Sydney.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found out where the dock was, nevertheless, where the men were loafing
+about in groups, waiting to be taken out to the _South Sea King_ ...
+which lay in the harbour.
+
+At the entrance to the pier I met a powerful, chunky lad who was called
+"Nippers," he said. He, too, was going with the _South Sea King_ ... not
+as a cattleman, but as stowaway. He urged me to stow away along with
+him. And he gave me, unimaginatively, my name of "Skinny," which the
+rest called me during the voyage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We strolled up to the men and joined them.
+
+"Hello, kids!"
+
+"Hello, fellows! Are you the cattlemen for the _South Sea King_?"
+
+"Right you are, my lad ... we are that!"
+
+The men went on with their arguing. They were fighting the Boer War all
+over again with their mouths. Some of them had been in it. Many of them
+had tramped in South Africa. They shouted violently, profanely, at each
+other at the tops of their voices, contending with loud assertions and
+counter-assertions, as if about to engage in an all-round fight.
+
+Several personal altercations sprang up, the points of the debate
+forgotten ... I couldn't discover what it was about, myself ... only
+that one man was a fool ... another, a silly ass ... another, a bloody
+liar!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The launch which was to carry them to the _South Sea King_ at this
+moment started nosing into the dock, on a turbulent zig-zag across the
+harbour; and the men forgot their quarrelling. It brought up at the foot
+of a pile and made fast.
+
+"Come on, Skinny," Nippers urged me aggressively, "it's front seats or
+nothing. Act as if you owned the boat." We thrust ahead of the others
+and swarmed down the ladder ... heaping, swearing, horse-playing, the
+cattlemen filled the launch from stern to bow.
+
+Nippers had been a professional stowaway since his tenth year. He had
+gone all over the world in that fashion, he had informed me. He was now
+sixteen. I was almost eighteen.
+
+His six years of rough life with rough men had brought him to premature
+manhood, taught him to exhibit a saucy aplomb to everybody, to have at
+his finger-ends all the knockabout resourcefulness and impudence that
+the successful vagrant must acquire in order to live at all as an
+individual....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were the first on deck.
+
+"Where are the cattlemen's bunks?" Nippers asked of an oiler who stood,
+nonchalant, somewhat contemptuous, looking over the side at the
+seething, vociferous cattlemen.
+
+Not wasting a word on us, the oiler pointed aft over his shoulder, with
+a grimy thumb.
+
+We found a dark entrance like the mouth to a cave, that led down below.
+In our hurry we lost our footing on the greasy ladder and tumbled all
+the way to the bottom.
+
+We had not time to rub our bruises. We plumped down and under the lower
+tier of bunks ... just in time ... the men came pouring down
+helter-skelter ... the talking, arguing, voluble swearing, and obscenity
+was renewed ... all we could see, from where we lay, was a confusion of
+legs to the knee, moving about....
+
+They settled down on the benches about the table. They slackened their
+talk and began smacking their lips over ship-biscuit, marmalade, and
+tea.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Still we lay in silence. The screw of the propeller had not started
+yet. We dared not come out or we would be put ashore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were hungry. We could hear their tin plates clattering and clinking
+as the cattlemen ate supper, and smell the smell of cornbeef and boiled
+potatoes. Our mouths ran from hunger.
+
+--"wish I had something to scoff, I'm starvin'," groaned Nippers, "but
+we'll hafta lay low till the bloody tub pulls out or we'll get caught
+an' dumped ashore."
+
+Supper done with, the men were sitting about and smoking. They were
+soon, however, summoned up on deck, by a voice that roared down to them,
+from above, filling their quarters with a gust of sound.
+
+We were alone now, perhaps,--it was so still.
+
+With an almost imperceptible slowness, Nippers thrust his head out, as
+cautiously as a turtle ... he emerged further.
+
+He made a quick thrust of the arm for a platter of beef and potatoes,
+that stood, untouched, on the table ... someone coughed. We had thought
+we were alone. Nippers jerked back. The tin came down with a clatter,
+first to the bench, then to the floor. A big friendly potato rolled
+under to where we were. We seized on it, divided it, ate it.
+
+Contrary to our conjecture, some of the men must have stayed below.
+Someone jumped out of a bunk.
+
+"There's rats down here!"
+
+"--mighty big rats, if you arsks me."
+
+"It's not rats," and I could hear a fear in the voice that quavered the
+words forth, "I tell you, buddy, this ship is haunted."
+
+"--haunted!" boomed the voice of a man coming down the ladder, "you stop
+this silly nonsense right now ... don't spread such talk as that ...
+it's stowaways!"
+
+We saw a pair of legs to the knees again. We lay still, breathless. A
+watch chain dangled down in a parabolic loop. Then followed a round
+face, beef-red with stooping. It looked under apoplectically at us.
+
+"Ah, me b'yes, c'm on out o' there!"
+
+And out we came, dragged by the foot, one after the other, as I myself
+in my childhood have pulled frogs out from a hole in a brook-bank.
+
+"I've been hearing them for hours, Mister," spoke up the little,
+shrivelled, leathery-skinned West Indian negro, who spoke English
+without a trace of dialect, "and I was sure the place was haunted."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We stood before the captain, cap deferentially in hand.
+
+But he looked like anything but a man in charge of a ship. He was short.
+In outward appearance, moreover, he was like a wax doll. He had
+waxen-white cheeks with daubs of pink as if they had been put there from
+a rouge pot. His hair was nicely scented, oiled, and patted down. His
+small hands were white and perfectly manicured.
+
+Nippers began to snicker openly at him. But the sharp variety and
+incisiveness of the oaths he vented at us, soon disabused us of any
+opinion we might have held that he was sissified....
+
+"What's wrong with _you_, you young ---- ---- ---- ---- you?" began the
+captain. The snicker died slowly from Nipper's lips, and in his face
+dawned an infinite, surprised respect....
+
+Then, after he had subdued us:
+
+"So you're stowaways, eh?... and you think you're going to be given a
+free ride to Brisbane and let go ashore, scot free?... not much! You'll
+either go to jail there or sign up here, as cattlemen for the trip to
+China--even though I can see that your mouths are still wet from your
+mothers' tits!" And he ended with a blasphemous flourish.
+
+Nippers and I looked at each other in astonishment. Of course we wanted
+to sign on as cattlemen. No doubt some of the men hired at Sydney had
+failed to show up at the wharf.
+
+The ship's book was pushed before us.
+
+"Sign here!" I signed "John Gregory" with satisfaction. Nippers signed
+after, laboriously.
+
+"And now get aft with you, you ----!" cursed the captain, dismissing us
+with a parting volley that beat about our ears.
+
+"Gawd, but the skipper's a _right_ man enough!" worshipped Nippers.
+
+We hurried down the ladder to gobble up what was left of the cornbeef
+and potatoes.... Nippers looked up at me, with a hunk of beef sticking
+from his mouth, which he poked in with the butt-end of his knife....
+"Say, didn't the old man cuss wonderful, and him lookin' like such a
+lady!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was plenty of work to do in the few days it took to reach
+Brisbane, where the cattle were to be taken aboard. The boat was an
+ordinary tramp steamer, and we had to make an improvised cattleboat out
+of her. Already carpenters had done much to that effect by erecting
+enclosures on the top deck, the main deck, by putting up stalls in the
+hold. Every available foot was to be packed with the living flesh of
+cattle.
+
+We gave the finishing touches to the work, trying to make the boarding
+and scantling more solid--solid enough to withstand the plunging,
+lurching, and kicking of fear-stricken, wild Queensland steers unused to
+being cooped up on shipboard....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We had made fast to a dock down the Brisbane River, several miles out
+from Brisbane ... nearby stood the stockyards, with no cattle in them
+yet.
+
+In a day's time of lusty heaving and running and hauling we had taken on
+the bales of compressed fodder that were to feed the cattle for the
+twenty-day trip to Taku, China.
+
+Then the little, fiery, doll-like skipper made the tactical error of
+paying each man a couple of bob advance on his forthcoming wages.
+
+In a shouting, singing mob we made for Brisbane, like schoolboys on a
+holiday.
+
+Two shilling apiece wasn't much. But a vagabond can make a little silver
+go far. And there are more friends to be found by men in such a
+condition, more good times to be had--of a sort--than a world held by
+more proper standards can imagine.
+
+In both brothel and pub the men found friends. There were other sailors
+ashore, there were many swagmen just in from the bush--some with
+"stakes" they had earned on the ranches out in the country ... and in
+their good, simple hearts they were not averse to "standing treats."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As if by previous appointment, one by one we drifted together, we
+cattlemen of the _South Sea King_--we drifted together and found each
+other in the fine park near the Queensland House of Parliament.
+
+We had, all of us, already over-stayed our shore-leave by many hours.
+We grouped together in informal consultation as to what should be
+done--should we go back to the ship or not?
+
+"We might run into a typhoon ... with all them crazy cattle on board!"
+voiced one....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nevertheless, perhaps because it was, after all, the line of least
+resistance, because there regular meals awaited us, and a secure place
+of sleep, by twos and threes we drifted back, down the long, hot, dusty
+road, to where the _South Sea King_ lay waiting for us ... the mate, the
+captain, and the cattle-boss furious at us for our over-stayed
+shore-leave....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The cattle had been there these many hours, bellowing and moving
+restlessly in their land-pens, the hot sun blazing down upon them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our cattle-boss, it seems, knew all about the handling of his animals on
+land. But not on sea. When, the following morning, we started early,
+trying to drive the cattle on board ship, they refused to walk up the
+runway. In vain the boss strewed earth and sod along its course, to make
+it seem a natural passage for them ... they rushed around and around
+their pens, kicking up a vast, white, choking dust,--snorting,
+bellowing, and throwing their rumps out gaily in sidelong gallopades ...
+all young Queensland steers; wild, but not vicious. Still full of the
+life and strength of the open range....
+
+Then we scattered bits of the broken bales of their prepared food, along
+the runway, to lure them ... a few were led aboard thus. But the captain
+cried with oaths that they didn't have time to make a coaxing-party of
+the job....
+
+At last the donkey-engine was started, forward. A small cable was run
+through a block, and, fastened by their halters around their horns, one
+after the other the steers, now bellowing in great terror, their eyes
+popping for fear--were hoisted up in the air, poised on high, kicking,
+then swung down, and on deck.
+
+You had to keep well from under each one as he descended, or suffer the
+befouling consequences of his fear ... we had great laughter over
+several men who came within the explosive radius ... till the mate hit
+on the device of tying each beast's tail close before he was jerked up
+into the air.
+
+What a pandemonium ... shouting ... swearing ... whistles blowing
+signals ... the chugging respiration of the labouring donkey-engine ...
+and then the attempted stampede of each trembling, fear-crazy animal as
+soon as he rose four-footed, on deck, after his ride through the sky....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ship was crammed as full as Noah's ark. In the holds and on the main
+deck stood the steers, in long rows....
+
+On the upper deck, exposed to all the weather, were housed the more
+tractable sheep, who had, without objection, bleated their way aboard
+docilely up the runway--behind their black ram ... that the cattle-boss
+had to help on a bit, by pulling him the few first yards by his curly
+horns.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we swam by in the fading day, a pale ghost of a moon was already up.
+Ghostly rows of knee-ing trees stood out like live things in the
+river....
+
+Under the night, off at sea, what with the mooing and baaing through all
+the ship, it seemed like an absurd farmyard that had somehow got on the
+ocean.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were two quarters for the men ... a place under the forecastle
+head, forward--as well as the after-quarters. Nippers and I had been
+separated--he staying aft, while I took up my bunk forward.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the men on the boat, the few that stick in my memory as distinct
+personages:
+
+There was the bloated, fat Scotch boy, whom we called just Fatty, a
+sheepherder by calling. He had signed on for the trip, to take care of
+the sheep on the upper deck;
+
+There was a weak, pathetic cockney, who died of sun-stroke;
+
+The ex-jockey, a bit of a man with a withered left arm--made that way
+from an injury received in his last race, when his mount fell on him;
+
+There was the West Indian Negro, a woolly, ebony wisp of a creature, a
+great believer in ghosts (he who thought we stowaways were ghosts when
+we hid under the bunk). The Irish cattle-boss gave him the job of
+night-watchman, "to break him of his superstitious silliness";
+
+There was the big, black Jamaica cook ... as black as if he was polished
+ebony ... a fine, big, polite chap, whom everyone liked. He had a white
+wife in Southampton (the sailors who had seen her said she was pretty
+... that the cook was true to her ... that she came down to the boat the
+minute the _South Sea King_ reached an English port, they loved each
+other so deeply!) ...
+
+Then there was the giant of an Irishman ... who, working side by side
+with me in the hold, shovelling out cattle-ordure there with me,
+informed me that I looked as if I had consumption ... that I would not
+be able to stand the terrific heat for many days without keeling over
+... but, his prediction came true of himself, not of me.
+
+One morning, not many days out, the little West Indian watchman,
+bringing down the before-daylight coffee and ships-biscuits and rousing
+the men, as was his duty,--found the big fellow, with whom he used to
+crack cheery jokes, apparently sound asleep. The watchman shook him by
+the foot to rouse him ... found his big friend stiff and cold.
+
+The watchman let out a scream of horror that woke us right and proper,
+for _that_ day....
+
+The next day was Sunday. It was a still, religious afternoon.
+
+We men ranged in two rows aft. The body had been sewn up in coarse
+canvas, the Union Jack draped over it.
+
+The captain, dapper in his gold-braided uniform, stood over the body as
+it lay on the plank from which it was to descend into the sea. In a
+high, clear voice he read that beautiful burial-service for the dead ...
+an upward tilt of the board in the hands of two brown-armed seamen, the
+body flashed over the side, to swing feet-down, laden with shot, for
+interminable days and nights, in the vast tides of the Pacific.
+
+No one reached quickly enough. The Union Jack went off with the body,
+like a floral decoration flung after....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We drank the coffee brought to us before dawn, in grouchy, sleepy,
+monosyllabic silence. Immediately after, the cattle were to water and
+feed ... and a hungry lot they were ... but despite their appetites,
+with each day, because of the excessive heat of the tropics, and the
+confined existence that was theirs--such an abrupt transition from the
+open range--they waxed thinner and thinner, acquired more of large-eyed
+mournfulness and an aspect of almost human suffering in their piteous,
+pleading faces....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If the big chap who succumbed to heart failure that night had lived a
+few days longer, he would have wondered still more at me or anyone else
+surviving a day's work in the hold.
+
+For the thermometer ran up incredibly ... hotter and hotter it grew ...
+and down there in the hold we had to shovel out the excrement every
+morning after breakfast. It was too infernal for even the prudish
+Anglo-Saxon souls of us to wear clothes beyond a breechclout, and shoes,
+to protect our feet from the harder hoof.
+
+Our eyes stung and watered from the reek of the ammonia in the
+cattle-urine. What with the crowding, the bad air (despite the canvas
+ventilators let down) and the sudden change from green pasturage to
+dry, baled food, most of the beasts contracted "the skitters." This
+mess was what we had to shovel out through the portholes ... an
+offensive-smelling, greenish, fluidic material, that spilled, the half
+of it, always, from the carefully-held scoop of the shovel.
+
+Cursing, with the bitter sweat streaming off our bodies and into our
+eyes, and with an oblique eye to guard from heat-maddened, frantic
+steer-kicks,--each day, for several hours, we suffered through this hell
+... to emerge panting, like runners after a long race; befouled ... to
+throw ourselves down on the upper deck, under the blue, wind-free sky
+and feel as if we had come into paradise....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I wish I had never come back to this hell-ship, at Brisbane!"
+
+"I wish I had never come aboard at all at Sydney!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At such times, and at other odd ends of leisure, I brought my Westcott
+and Hort's Greek New Testament from my bunk, and with the nasty smell of
+sheep close-by, but unheeded through custom--I studied with greater
+pleasure than I ever did before or since.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I said before, it was not long before these poor steers were
+broken-spirited things.
+
+But there was one among them whose spirit kept its flag in the air,
+"The Black Devil," as the cook had named him fondly ... a steer, all
+glossy-black, excepting for a white spot in the center of his forehead.
+He behaved, from the first, more like a turbulent little bull than a
+gelding. The cook fed him with tid-bits from the galley.
+
+He had evidently been someone's pet before he had been sold for live
+meat, to be shipped to China.
+
+When we took him on board by the horns he showed no fear as he rode in
+the air. And, once on his feet again, and loose on deck, he showed us
+hell's own fight--out of sheer indignation--back there in Brisbane. He
+flashed after us, with the rapid motions of a bullfight in the movies.
+Most of us climbed every available thing to get out of his reach. He
+smashed here and there through wooden supports as if they were of
+cardboard.
+
+The agile little ex-jockey kept running in front of him, hitting him on
+the nose and nimbly escaping--in spite of his wing-like, wasted arm,
+quicker than his pursuer ... that smashed through, while he ducked and
+turned....
+
+"I'll be God-damned," yelled the captain from the safe vantage of the
+bridge, "fetch me my pistol," to the cabin boy, "I'll have to shoot the
+beast!"
+
+All this while the big black Jamaica cook had been calmly looking on,
+leaning fearlessly out over the half-door of the galley ... while the
+infuriated animal rushed back and forth.
+
+The cook said nothing. He disappeared, and reappeared with a bunch of
+carrots which he held out toward "The Black Devil."...
+
+In immediate transformation, the little beast stopped, forgot his anger,
+stretched forth his moist, black nuzzle, sniffing ... and walked up to
+the cook, accepting the carrots. The cook began to stroke the animal's
+nose....
+
+"_You_ little black devil," he said, in a soft voice, "you're all right
+... they don't understand you ... but we're going to be pals--us
+two--aren't we?"
+
+Then he came out at the door to where the steer stood, took "The Black
+Devil," as we henceforth called him, gently by the under-jaw,--and led
+him into a standing-place right across from the galley.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we struck further north under vast nights of stars, and days of
+furnace-hot sunshine, the heat, confinement, and dry, baled food told
+hideously on the animals ... the sheep seemed to endure better, partly
+because they were not halted stationary in one spot and could move about
+a little on the top deck.... But they suffered hardships that came of
+changing weather.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Especially the cattle in the lower hold suffered, grew weak and
+emaciated.... We were ever on the watch to keep them from going down ...
+there was danger of their sprawling over each other and breaking legs in
+the scramble. So when one tried to lie down, his tail was twisted till
+the suffering made him rise to his feet ... sometimes a steer would be
+too weak to regain his feet ... in such a case, in a vain effort to make
+the beast rise, I have seen the Irish foreman twist the tail nearly off,
+while the animal at first bellowed, then moaned weakly, with anguish ...
+a final boot at the victim in angry frustration....
+
+Last, a milky glaze would settle over the beast's eyes ... and we would
+drag him out and up by donkey-engine, swing him over and out, and drop
+him, to float, a bobbing tan object, down our receding ocean-path.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The coast of Borneo hovered, far and blue, in the offing, when we struck
+our first, and last, typhoon. The mate avowed it was merely the tail-end
+of a typhoon; if that was the tail-end, it is good that the body of it
+did not strike down on us.
+
+The surface of the ocean was kicked up into high, ridge-running masses.
+The tops of the waves were caught in the wind and whipped into a wide,
+level froth as if a giant egg-beater were at work ... then water, water,
+water came sweeping and mounting and climbing aboard, hill after
+bursting hill.
+
+The deck was swept as by a mountain-torrent ... boards whirled about
+with an uncanny motion in them. They came forward toward you with a
+bound, menacing shin and midriff,--then on the motion of the ship, they
+paused, and washed in the opposite direction.
+
+Here and there a steer broke loose, which had to be caught and tethered
+again. But in general the animals were too much frightened to do
+anything but stand trembling and moaning ... when they were not
+floundering about....
+
+Down below was a suffocating inferno. For the hatches that were
+ordinarily kept open for more air, had to be battened down till the
+waves subsided.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the very height of the storm, we heard a screaming of the most abject
+fear.
+
+The jockey had passed, in forgetful excitement, too close to his enemy,
+The Black Devil--who had not forgotten, and gave him a horn in the side,
+under the withered arm.
+
+Several sailors carried the bleeding man aft to the captain ... who
+dressed his wound with fair skill. The jockey was not so badly injured,
+all things considered. The thrust had slanted and made only a flesh
+wound ... which enabled the fellow to loaf on a sort of sick-leave,
+during the rest of the trip.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The storm over, frantically we tore off the hatches again ... to find
+only ten steers dead below. The rest were gasping piteously for air. It
+was a day's work, heaving the dead stock overboard ... including the two
+more which died of the after-effects....
+
+When we went to look the sheep over, we found that over a third of them
+had been washed overboard. The rest were huddled, in frightened,
+bleating heaps, wondering perhaps what kind of an insane world it was
+that they had been harried into.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The story of this cattleboat unfolds freshly before me again, out of the
+records of memory ... the pitiful suffering of the cattle ... the lives
+and daily doings of the rowdy, likeable men, who were really still
+undeveloped children, and would so go down to the grave ... with their
+boasting and continual vanity of small and trivial things of life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All the time I was keeping a diary of my adventures ... in a large,
+brown copybook, with flexible covers. I carried it, tightened away,
+usually, in the lining of my coat, but occasionally I left it under the
+mattress of my bunk.
+
+Nippers observed me writing in it one day.
+
+That night it was gone. I surmised who had taken it.
+
+Seeking Nippers, I came upon him haltingly reading my diary aloud to an
+amused circle of cattlemen, in his quarters aft.
+
+"Give me that book back!" I demanded.
+
+He ignored me.
+
+"Give him a rap in the kisser, Skinny!"
+
+I drew back, aiming a blow at Nippers. He flung the book down and was on
+me like the tornado we had just run through ... he was a natural-born
+fighter ... in a twinkling I was on the floor, with a black eye, a
+bleeding mouth.
+
+I flung myself to my feet, full of fury ... then something went in my
+brain like the click of a camera-shutter ... I had an hallucination of
+Uncle Landon, coming at me with a club....
+
+I plumped into a corner, crouching. "Don't hit me any more ... please
+don't, Uncle Lan!"
+
+"He's gone crazy!"
+
+"Naw, he's only a bloody, bleedin' coward," returned another voice, in
+surprise and disgust.
+
+Someone spat on me. I was let up at last.... I staggered forward to my
+bunk. My book had been handed back to me. It's a wonder I didn't throw
+myself into the sea, in disgust over the queer fit that had come over
+me. I lay half the night, puzzling ... was I a coward?
+
+Not unless an unparalleled change had occurred in me. I had fought with
+other children, when a boy ... had whipped two lads at once, when
+working in the Composite factory, that time they spit into my book.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day a fishing-junk hove into sight, just as if it had sailed out of
+a Maxfield Parrish illustration,--swinging there in the mouth of a
+blood-red sunset ... then, like magic, appeared another and another and
+another....
+
+"Fishing-junks," ejaculated the mate, "--pretty far out, too, but a
+Chink'll risk his life for a few bleedin' cash ... and yet he won't
+fight at all ... an' if you do him an injury he's like as not likely to
+up an' commit suicide at your door, to get even!"
+
+"That's a bally orful way to get even with a henemy!" exclaimed a
+stoker, who sat on the edge of the forward hatch.
+
+"I should say so, too!"
+
+Then, far and faint, were heard a crew of Chinese sailors, on the
+nearest junk, singing a curious, falsetto chantey as they hauled on a
+bamboo-braced sail....
+
+"A feller wot never travelled wouldn't bloody well believe they was
+such queer people in the world," further observed the philosophic
+coal-heaver.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next morning the coast of China lay right against us, on the starboard
+side ... we ran into the thick of a fleet of sampans, boats fashioned
+flat like overgrown rowboats, propelled each by a huge sculling oar,
+from the stern ... they were fishers who manned them ... two or three to
+a boat ... huge, bronze-bodied, fine-muscled, breech-clouted men ... as
+they sculled swiftly to give us sea-room each one looked fit to be a
+sculptor's model.
+
+Their bodies shone in the sun like bronze. Several, fearing we might run
+them down, as we clove straight through their midst, raised their arms
+with a shout full of pleading and fright.
+
+"What's the matter? are they trying to murder some of these poor chaps?"
+I asked.
+
+"No ... we're just having a little fun ... what's the life of a Chink
+matter?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I say, if the Chinks up where the Boxers are fighting are big and
+strong as them duffers, here's one that don't want no shore-leave!"
+commented someone, as we stood ranged by the side.
+
+"I always thought Chinamen was runts."
+
+"Oh, it's only city Chinks--mostly from Canton, that come to civilized
+countries to run laundries ... but these are the real Chinamen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the cattle had been unladen, the crew were to be taken down to
+Shanghai and dumped ashore ... as it was an English Treaty port, that
+would be, technically, living up to the ship's articles, which
+guaranteed that the cattlemen aboard would be given passage back to
+English ground....
+
+But I was all excitement over the prospect of making my way ashore to
+where the Allied troops were fighting....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dawn ... we were anchored in Taku Bay among the warships of the Allied
+nations ... grey warships gleaming in the sun like silver ... the sound
+of bugles ... flags of all nations ... of as many colours as the coat of
+Joseph.
+
+"Well, here we are at last!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next day the work of unloading the cattle began ... hoisted again by the
+horns from our boat of heavy draught to the hold of a coasting steamer,
+that had English captain and mates, and a Chinese crew.
+
+Some of the steers were so weak that they died on deck ... as they were
+dying, butchers cut their throats so their beef could be called fresh.
+
+The only one who desired to go ashore there, I made my way, when it was
+dark and the last load of steers was being transferred to shore, down
+below to the hold of the coaster. I stood in a corner, behind an iron
+ladder, so that the cattle couldn't crush me during the night ... for
+the Chinese had turned them loose, there, in a mass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I stumbled ashore at Tongku, a station up a way on the banks of the Pei
+Ho river.
+
+My first night ashore in China was a far cry from the China of my dreams
+... the Cathay of Marco Polo, with its towers of porcelain.... I crept,
+to escape a cold drizzle, under the huge tarpaulin which covered a great
+stack of tinned goods--army supplies. A soldier on guard over the stack,
+an American soldier, spotted me.
+
+"Come, my lad," lifting up the tarpaulin, "what are you doing there?"
+
+"--Trying to keep from the wet!"
+
+"--run off from one of the transports?"
+
+"Yes," was as good an answer as any.
+
+"You're pretty cold ... your teeth are chattering. Here, take a swig o'
+this."
+
+And the sentinel reached me a flask of whiskey from which I drew a nip.
+Unaccustomed as I was to drink, it nearly strangled me. It went all the
+way down like fire. Then it spread with a pleasant warmth all through my
+body....
+
+"Stay here to-night ... rather uncomfortable bed, but at least it's dry.
+No one 'ull bother you ... in the morning Captain ----, who is in charge
+of the commissariat here, might give you a job."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That next morning Captain ---- gave me a job as mate, eighty dollars
+Mex. and a place to sleep, along with others, in a Compound, and find my
+food at my own expense....
+
+Mate, on a supply-launch that went in and out to and from the
+transports, that were continually anchoring in the bay. Our job was to
+keep the officers' mess in supplies....
+
+"And, if you stick to your job six months," I was informed, "you'll be
+entitled to free transportation back to San Francisco."
+
+My captain was a neat, young Englishman, with the merest hint of a
+moustache of fair gold.
+
+Our crew--two Chinamen who jested about us between themselves in a
+continuous splutter of Chinese. We could tell, by their grimaces and
+gestures ... we rather liked their harmless, human impudence ... as long
+as they did the work, while we lazed about, talking ... while up and
+down the yellow sweep of the Pei-ho the little boat tramped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It's too bad you didn't arrive on the present scene a few weeks,
+sooner," said my young captain ... "it was quite exciting here, at that
+time. I used to have to take the boathook and push off the Chinese
+corpses that caught on the prow of the boat as they floated down, thick
+... they seemed to catch hold of the prow as if still alive. It was
+uncanny!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We slept, rolled up in our blankets, on the floor of a Chinese compound
+... adventurers bound up and down the river, to and from Tien-Tsin and
+Woo-shi-Woo and Pekin ... a sort of caravanserai....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though it was the fall of the year and the nights were cold enough to
+make two blankets feel good, yet some days the sun blazed down
+intolerably on our boat, on the river....
+
+When we grew thirsty the captain and myself resorted to our jug of
+distilled water. I had been warned against drinking the yellow,
+pea-soup-like water of the Pei-ho....
+
+But one afternoon I found our water had run out.
+
+So I took the gourd used by the Chinese crew, and dipped up, as they
+did, the river water.
+
+The captain clutched me by the wrist.
+
+"Don't drink that water! If you'd seen what I have, floating in it,
+you'd be afraid!"
+
+"What won't hurt a Chinaman, won't hurt me," I boasted....
+
+The result of my folly was a mild case of dysentery....
+
+In a few days I was so weak that I went around as if I had no bones left
+in my body. And I wanted to leave the country. And I repaired to Captain
+---- who had given me the job, and asked him for my pay and my
+discharge. He lit into me, disgusted, upbraiding me for a worthless
+tramp....
+
+"I might have known that you were of that ilk, from the first, just by
+looking at you!"
+
+He handed me the eighty dollars in Mexican silver, that was coming to
+me.... I repaid the captain the forty I had borrowed, for food.
+
+"Sick! yes, sick of laziness!"
+
+Captain ---- was partly right. I had an uncontrollable distaste for the
+monotony of daily work, repeated in the same environment, surrounded by
+the same scenery ... but I was also quite weak and sick, and I am
+persuaded, that, if I had stayed on there, I might have died.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I sat on one of the wharves and played host to a crowd of romantic
+thoughts that moved in their pageant through my brain ... now I would go
+on to Pekin and see the great Forbidden City. Now I would dress in
+Chinese clothes and beg my way through the very heart of the Chinese
+Empire ... and write a book, subsequently, about my experiences and
+adventures ... and perhaps win a medal of some famous society for it ...
+and I had a dream of marrying some quaintly beautiful mandarin's
+daughter, of becoming a famous, revered Chinese scholar, bringing
+together with my influence the East and the West....
+
+I reached so far, in the dream, as to buy several novels of the Chinese,
+printed in their characters, of an itinerant vendor....
+
+The everyday world swung into my ken again.
+
+Three junks, laden with American marines, dropping down the river from
+Pekin, cut across my abstracted gaze ... the boys were singing.
+
+They marched off on the dock on which I sat. They were stationed right
+where they deployed from the junks. Men were put in guard over them.
+
+At Tien Tsin they had behaved rather badly, I was told by one of
+them,--had gone on a Samshu jag ... a Chinese drink, worse than the
+worst American "rot-gut." ...
+
+"Wisht I c'd git off the dock an' rustle up another drink somewheres."
+
+"They wouldn't let us off this dock fer love nor money," spoke up a
+lithe, blue-shaven marine to me--the company's barber, I afterward
+learned him to be....
+
+"Yah, we got ter stay here all afternoon, an' me t'roat's es dry es
+san'paper."
+
+"Where are they taking you to, from here?"
+
+"Manila!... the _Indiana's_ waitin' out in th' bay fer us."
+
+"--Wish I could get off with you!" I remarked.
+
+"Wot's the matter? On th' bum here?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Immediately the barber and two others, his pals, became intensely,
+suspiciously so, interested in my desire to sail with them....
+
+"--Tell you wot," and the company barber reached into his pocket with a
+surreptitious glance about, "if you'll take these bills an' sneak past
+to that coaster lyin' along the next dock, the Chinese steward 'ull sell
+you three bottles o' whiskey fer these," and he handed me a bunch of
+bills ... "an' w'en you come back with th' booze, we'll see to it that
+you get took out to the transport with us, all right ... won't we,
+boys?"
+
+"--betcher boots we will."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"God, but this is like heaven to me," exclaimed the barber, as he tilted
+up his bottle, while the two others stood about him, to keep him from
+being seen. The three of them drank their bottles of whiskey as if it
+was water.
+
+"That saved me life...."
+
+"An' mine, too. You go to Manila wit' us, all right,--kid!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Toward dusk came the sharp command for the men to march aboard the
+coaster that had drawn up for them. The boys kept their word. They
+loaded me down with their accoutrements to carry. I marched up the
+gangway with them, and we were off to the _Indiana_.
+
+I was the first, almost, to scamper aboard the waiting transport in the
+gathering dusk ... and, to make sure of staying aboard, I hurried down
+one ladder after the other, till I reached the heavy darkness of the
+lowermost hold. Having nothing to do but sleep, I stumbled over some
+oblong boxes, climbed onto one, and composed myself for the night, using
+a coil of rope for a pillow.
+
+I woke to find a grey patch of day streaming down the ladder-way. My
+eyes soon adjusted themselves to the obscurity.
+
+And then it was that I gave a great, scared leap. And with difficulty I
+held myself back from crying out.
+
+Those curious oblong boxes among which I had passed the night--they were
+hermetically sealed coffins, and there were dead soldiers in them.
+Ridges of terror crept along my flesh. Stifling a panic in me, I forced
+myself to go slow as I climbed the iron rungs to the hold above ...
+where living soldiers lay sleeping in long rows....
+
+Still undetected, I scrambled along an aisle between them and put myself
+away in a sort of life-preserver closet. Not till I had heard the
+familiar throb of the propeller in motion for a long time, did I come
+forth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the voyage of, I believe, eight days, I loafed about, lining up
+for rations with the boys ... no one questioned me. My engineer's
+clothes that I had taken, in lieu of part of my wages, from the
+slop-chest of _The South Sea King_, caused the officers of the marines
+to think I belonged to the ship's crew ... and the ship-officers must
+have thought I was in some way connected with the marines ... anyhow, I
+was not molested, and I led a life much to my liking ... an easy-going
+and loafing and tale-telling one ... mixing about and talking and
+listening ... and reading back-number magazines.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day my friend the barber called me aside:
+
+"Say, kid, I've been delegated to tell you that you've got lice." I
+flamed indignant.
+
+"That's a God-damned lie! and whoever told you so is a God-damned liar,
+too! I never had a louse in my life."
+
+"Easy! Easy!... no use gittin' huffy ... if it ain't lice you got, wot
+you scratchin' all the time fer? Look in the crotch of yer pants and the
+seams of your shirt, an' see!"
+
+I _had_ been scratching a lot ... and wondering what was wrong ... my
+breast was all red ... but I had explained it to myself that I was
+wearing a coarse woolen undershirt next my skin ... that I had picked up
+from the slop-chest, also.
+
+The barber walked jauntily away, leaving me standing sullenly alone.
+
+I sneaked into the toilet, looking to see if anyone was about. I turned
+my shirt back. To my horror, my loathing,--the soldier's accusation was
+true!... they were so thick, thanks to my ignorant neglect, that I could
+see them moving in battalions ... if I had been the victim of some
+filthy disease, I could scarcely have felt more beyond the pale, more a
+pariah. I had not detected them before, because I was ignorant of the
+thought of having them, and because their grey colour was exactly that
+of the inside of my woolen shirt.
+
+I threw the shirt away, content to shiver for a few days till we had
+steamed to warmer weather ... I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed
+myself.... I had, up to now, had experience with head-lice only ... as a
+child, in school....
+
+I look back with a shudder even yet to that experience. During my
+subsequent tramp-career I never could grow callous to vermin, as a few
+others that I met, did. Once I met a tramp who advised me not to bother
+about 'em ... and you would soon get used to 'em ... and not feel them
+biting at all ... but most tramps "boil up"--that is, take off their
+clothes, a piece at a time, and boil them--whenever they find
+opportunity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Manila. A brief adventure there ... a bum for a few weeks, hanging
+around soldiers' barracks, blacking shoes for free meals ... till
+Provost Marshal General Bell, in an effort to clear the islands of boys
+who were vags and mascots of regiments, gave me and several other rovers
+and stowaways free transportation back to America....
+
+A brief stop at Nagasaki to have a broken propeller shaft mended: a long
+Pacific voyage ... then hilly San Francisco one golden morning....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All these ocean days I peeled potatoes and helped to dish out rations
+to the lined-up soldiers at meal-times ... one slice of meat, one or two
+potatoes, to a tin plate ...
+
+For long hours I listened to their lying tales and boasting ... then
+lied and boasted, myself....
+
+My most unique adventure aboard the _Thomas_; making friends with a
+four-times-enlisted soldier named Lang, who liked army life because, he
+said, outside of drills and dress parade, it was lazy and easy ... and
+it gave him leisure to read and re-read his Shakespeare. He was a
+Shakespearean scholar....
+
+"It's the best life in the world ... no worries or responsibilities
+about food and lodging--it spoils a fellow for any other kind of life
+... the officers are always decent to a fellow who respects himself as a
+soldier and citizen."
+
+Lang and I became good pals. Day after day I sat listening to him, as,
+to the accompaniment of the rumble and pulse of the great boat a-move,
+he quoted and explained Shakespeare to me, nearly always without the
+book.
+
+His talk was fascinating--except when he insisted on repeating to me his
+own wretched rhymes ... in which he showed he had learned nothing about
+how to write poetry from his revered Shakespeare ... it was very bad
+Kiplingesque stuff ... much like my own bad verse of that period....
+
+Once Lang recited by heart the whole of _King Lear_ to me, having me
+hold a copy of the play, to prove that he did not fumble a single line
+or miss a single word ... which he did not....
+
+Lang was a prodigious drunkard. At Nagasaki I rescued him from the
+water-butt. Coming back drunk on rice wine, he had stuck his head down
+for a cool drink, as a horse does. And in he had tumbled, head-first. If
+I had not seen his legs wiggling futilely in the air, and drawn him
+forth, dripping, he would have drowned, as the butt was too solid for
+his struggles to dump, and he couldn't make a sound for help.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we neared San Francisco several of the boys spoke to me of taking up
+a purse for my benefit. Soldiers are always generous and
+warm-hearted--the best men, individually, in the world.
+
+I said no to them, that they must not take up a collection for me ... I
+did not really feel that way, at heart, but I liked better seeming proud
+and independent, American and self-reliant....
+
+Later on, at the very dock, I acceded ... but now I was punished for my
+hypocrisy. The boys were so eager to be home again, they only threw
+together about five dollars for me ... when, if I hadn't been foolish, I
+might have had enough to loaf with, say a month, at San Francisco, and
+do a lot of reading in the Library, and in books of poetry that I might
+have picked up at second-hand book stores....
+
+However, I gathered together, before I went ashore, two suits of khaki
+and two army blankets, and a pair of good army shoes that afterwards
+seemed never to wear out.
+
+And a young chap named Simmons, who had been sergeant, had joined the
+army by running away from home, took me to an obscure hotel as his valet
+... he wanted to "put on dog," as the Indians say.
+
+He had parents of wealth, back in Des Moines.
+
+I served him as his valet for the two weeks he stayed at the hotel. He
+had been shot through the left foot so that a tendon was severed, and he
+had to walk with a cane, with a foot that flopped at every step.
+
+He gave me fifteen dollars for wages. After he had departed I rented a
+cheap room for a week.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Standing in front of a store on Kearney Street, one afternoon, dressed
+in my suit of soldier's khaki, looking at the display in the window, I
+got the cue that shaped my subsequent adventures in California....
+
+"Poor lad," I heard one girl say to another, standing close by, "he
+looks so sick and thin, I'm sorry for him."
+
+They did not notice that my soldier's uniform had cloth buttons. Simmons
+had made me put cloth buttons on, at the hotel,--had furnished them to
+me--
+
+"I don't want you going about the other way ... you're such a nut, you
+might get into trouble."
+
+Mule-drivers and others in subsidiary service were allowed khaki with
+cloth buttons only ... at that time ... I don't know how it goes now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The girls' taking me for a sick, discharged soldier made me think. I
+would travel in that guise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With a second-hand Shakespeare, in one volume, of wretched print, with a
+much-abused school-copy of Cæsar, in the Latin (of whose idiomatic Latin
+I have never tired), an extra suit of khaki, a razor, tooth-brush, and
+tooth-powder--and a cake of soap--all wrapped up in my army blankets, I
+set forth on my peregrinations as blanket-stiff or "bindle-bum."
+
+Where I saw I could escape without awkward questioning, I played the
+convalescent ex-soldier ... I thrived. My shadow-thinness almost turned
+to fatness. It would have, had there been any disposition toward obesity
+in me....
+
+At times I was ashamed of doing nothing ... queer spurts of American
+economic conscience....
+
+Once I worked, plowing ... to drive the horses as far as a tall tree for
+shade, at the end of the third day, sneak back to the house ... and out
+to the highway with my bundle and my belongings, kicking up my heels
+ecstatically, glad to be freed from work.
+
+I plumped down in a fence corner and did not stir till I had read a
+whole play of Shakespeare, and a snatch of my Cæsar.
+
+Once or twice, sheriffs who were bent on arresting me because I had no
+visible means of support, let me go, because it awed them to find a
+tramp reading Shakespeare....
+
+"It's a shame, a clever lad like you bein' a bum!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tramps, though anti-social in the larger aspects of society (as, for
+that matter, all special classes are, from millionaires down--or up),
+are more than usually companionable among themselves. I never lived and
+moved with a better-hearted group of people.
+
+By "jungle" camp-fires--("the jungles," any tramp rendezvous located
+just outside the city limits, to be beyond police jurisdiction), in
+jails, on freights ... I found a feeling of sincere companionship ... a
+companionship that without ostentation and as a matter of course, shared
+the last cent the last meal ... when every cent _was_ the last cent,
+every meal the _last_ meal ... the rest depending on luck and
+Providence....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tramps often travel in pairs. I picked up a "buddy" ... a short,
+thick-set man of young middle age, of Scandinavian descent ... so blond
+that his eyebrows were white in contrast with his face, which was ruddy
+with work in the sun. He, like me, was a "gaycat" or tramp who is not
+above occasional work (as the word meant then--now it means a cheap,
+no-account grafter). He had recently been working picking oranges ...
+previous to that, he had been employed in a Washington lumber camp.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Together we drifted along the seacoast south to San Diego ... then back
+again to Santa Barbara ... for no reason but just to drift. Then we
+sauntered over to San Bernardino--"San Berdu," as the tramps call it....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It struck chilly, one night. So chilly that we went into the freightyard
+to put up in an empty box-car till the sun of next day rose to warm the
+world.
+
+We found a car. There were many other men already there, which was good;
+the animal heat of their bodies made the interior warmer.
+
+The interior of the car sounded like a Scotch bagpipe a-drone ... what
+with snoring, breaking of wind in various ways, groaning, and muttering
+thickly in dreams ... the air was sickeningly thick and fetid. But to
+open a side door meant to let in the cold.
+
+Softly my buddy and I drew off our shoes, putting them under our heads
+to serve as pillows, and also to keep them from being stolen. (Often a
+tramp comes along with a deft enough touch to untie a man's shoes from
+his feet without waking him. I've heard of its being done.) We wrapped
+our feet in newspapers, then. Our coats we removed, to wrap them about
+us ... one keeps warmer that way than by just wearing the coat....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The door on each side crashed back!
+
+"Here's another nest full of 'em!"
+
+"Come on out, boys!"
+
+"What's the matter?" I queried.
+
+"'stoo cold out here. We have a nice, warm calaboose waitin' fer ye!"
+
+Grunting and grumbling, we dropped to the cinders, one after the other.
+A posse of deputies and citizens, had, for some dark reason, rounded us
+up.
+
+One or two made a break for it, and escaped, followed by a random shot.
+After that, no one else cared to be chased after by a bullet.
+
+They conducted us to what they had termed "the calaboose," a big,
+ramshackle, one-roomed barn-like structure. Piled in so thick that we
+almost had to stand up, there were so many of us--we were held there
+till next morning.
+
+But we were served, then, a good breakfast, at the town's expense. The
+owner of the restaurant was a queer little, grey-faced, stringy fellow.
+He fed us all the buckwheat cakes and sausages we could hold, and won
+every hobo's heart, by giving all the coffee we could drink ... we held
+our cups with our hands about them, grateful for the warmth.
+
+"Say, you're all right, mister!" ventured a tramp to the proprietor, as
+he walked by.
+
+"Bet your God-damned life I'm all right!... because I ain't nothin' but
+a bum myself ... yes, an' I'm not ashamed of it, neither ... before I
+struck this burg an' started this "ham-and" and made it pay, I was on
+the road same es all o' you!"
+
+"Kin I have more pancakes, boss, an' another cup of coffee?"
+
+"You sure can, bo!... es I was sayin', I'm a bum myself, an' proud of it
+... and I think these here damn bulls (policemen ... who were sitting
+nearby, waiting for us to finish) have mighty little to 'tend to,
+roundin' up you boys, now the orange-pickin' season's over with, an'
+puttin' you away like this ... why, if any one of them was half as
+decent as one o' you bums--"
+
+"Sh! fer Christ's sake!" I admonished, "they're hearing you."
+
+"That's jest what I want 'em to do ... I don't owe nothin' to no man,
+an' it's time someone told 'em somethin'."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Breakfast over, we were marched off to the courthouse. We were turned
+loose together in a large room. We felt so good with the sausage, cakes
+and coffee in our bellies, that we pushed each other about, sang,
+jigged, whistled.
+
+As we had walked in, I had asked, of the cop who walked by my side--who
+seemed affable....
+
+"Say, mister, after all what's the idea?"
+
+"We had to make an example," he returned, frankly.
+
+"I don't quite get you!"
+
+"Last week a bunch of bums dropped off here at our town, and they
+almost ran the diggings for about twenty-four hours ... insulted women
+on the streets ... robbed ice-boxes ... even stole the clothes off the
+lines."
+
+"In other words, you mean that a bunch of drunken yeggs dropped in on
+the town, gutted it, and then jumped out ... and we poor harmless bums
+are the ones that have to pay."
+
+"--guess that's about how it is."
+
+I passed the word along the line. My companion tramps cursed the yegg
+and his ways....
+
+"They're always raisin' hell ... an' we git the blame ... when all we
+want is not loot, but hand-outs and a cup o' coffee ... and a piece of
+change now and then."
+
+The yegg, the tiger among tramps--the criminal tramp--despises the
+ordinary bum and the "gaycat." And they in turn fear him for his
+ruthlessness and recklessness.
+
+He joins with them at their camp-fires ... rides with them on the road
+... robs his store or house, or cracks his safe, then flies on, taking
+the blinds or decking on top of a "flyer." The law, missing the right
+quarry, descends on the slower-moving, harmless bum. And often some poor
+"fall-guy" gets a good "frame-up" for a job he never thought of ... and
+the majesty of the law stands vindicated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The charge against us was vagrancy. We were tried by twos.
+
+"Come on, buddy!... you an' your pal."
+
+My companion and I were led in before, I think, a justice of the peace.
+The latter was kindly-disposed toward me because I was young and looked
+delicate.
+
+When I began my plea for clemency I appropriated the name, career, and
+antecedents of Simmons, the young soldier whose body-servant I had been,
+back in San Francisco. The man on the bench was impressed by my story of
+coming of a wealthy family ... my father was a banker, no less.
+
+The justice waved me aside. He asked my buddy to show his hands. As the
+callouses on the palms gave evidence of recent hard work, he was set
+free along with me. We were the only two who were let off. The rest were
+sent up for three months each, I am told....
+
+And, after all that, what did my buddy do but up and steal my blanket
+roll, with all in it--including my Cæsar and Shakespeare--and my extra
+soldier uniform--the first chance he got!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An American who had married a Mexican girl gave me work sawing and
+chopping wood. I stayed with him long enough to earn a second-hand suit
+of clothes he owned, which was too small for him, but almost fitted me
+... civilian clothes ... my soldier clothes were worn to tatters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I picked up another pal. A chunky, beefy nondescript. I was meditating a
+jump across "the desert." The older hoboes had warned me against it,
+saying it was a cruel trip ... the train crews knew no compunction
+against ditching a fellow anywhere out in the desert, where there would
+be nothing but a tank of brackish water....
+
+My new chum, on the other hand, swore, that, to one who knew the ropes,
+it was not so hard to make the jump on the Southern Pacific ... through
+Arizona and New Mexico, to El Paso. He said he would show me how to
+wiggle into the refrigerator box of an orange car ... on either end of
+the orange car is a refrigerator box, if I remember correctly ... access
+to which is gained through the criss-cross bars that hold up a sort of
+trap-door at the top. It was in the cold season, so there was now no ice
+inside. These trap-doors are always officially sealed, when the car is
+loaded. To break a seal is a penitentiary offense.
+
+I stood off and inspected the place I was supposed to go in at. The
+triangular opening seemed too small for a baby to slide through. I
+looked my chunky pal up and down and laughed.
+
+"--think I can't make it, eh?... well, you watch ... there's an art in
+this kind of thing just like there is in anything."
+
+Inch by inch he squeezed himself in. Then he stood up inside and called
+to me to try ... and he would pull me the rest of the way, if I stuck.
+He was plump and I was skinny. It ought to be easy for me. Nevertheless,
+it was the hardest task I ever set myself ... I stuck half-way. My pal
+pulled my shirt into rags, helping me through,--I had handed my coat in,
+previously, or he would have ripped that to pieces, too. It seemed that
+all the skin went off my hips, as I shot inside with a bang. And none
+too soon. A "shack" (brakeman) passed over the tops of the cars at
+almost that very moment. We lay still. He would have handed me a
+merciless drubbing if he had caught me, with my nether end hanging
+helplessly on the outside.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We squatted on the floor of the refrigerator box. When we reached Yuma
+my pal rose to his feet.
+
+"Ain't yer goin' ta throw yer feet fer a hand-out?" he asked me.
+
+"No, I'm going to stick in here till I reach El Paso, if I can."
+
+"What's the fun bein' a bum, if you're goin' ter punish yerself like
+that!"
+
+"I want to find a country where there's growing green things, as soon as
+I can."
+
+"So long, then."
+
+"So long.. don't you think you'd better stick till we reach Tuscon? Some
+of the boys told me the 'bulls' (officers) here have been 'horstile'
+(had it in for the tramp fraternity) ... ever since a yegg bumped off a
+deputy, a while back."
+
+"Naw, I'll take my chances."
+
+As I rode on, alone, I stood up and took in the scenery like a tourist
+... there danced away, and gathered in, the shimmering, sun-flooded
+desert ... an endless flat expanse of silver sage and sentinel cactus. I
+saw bleached bones and a side-cast skull with whitened horns, poking up
+into the sky ... I saw a sick steer straggling alone, exactly like some
+melodramatic painting of Western life ... the kind we see hanging for
+sale in second-rate art stores.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I stuck till Tuscon was reached. There I was all in for lack of food and
+water....
+
+A woman gave me a good "set-down" at her kitchen table. I was as hungry
+for something to read as I was for something to eat. When she walked out
+of the kitchen, leaving me alone for a moment, I caught sight of a
+compact little Bible that lay on the leaf of her sewing machine. Two
+steps, and I had it stowed in my hip pocket, and was back innocently
+eating ... the taking of the Bible was providential. I believe that it
+served as the main instrument, later on, in saving me from ten years in
+the penitentiary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was glad enough to hop to the cinders at El Paso. But El Paso at that
+time was "unhealthy" for hoboes. They were holding twenty or thirty of
+us in the city jail, and mysterious word had gone down the line in all
+directions, that quick telegraph by word-of-mouth that tramps use among
+themselves, to avoid the town--that it was "horstile."...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again rolling miles of arid country. But this time, like a soldier on a
+long march, I was prepared: I had begged, from door to door, enough
+"hand-outs" to last a week ... throwing away most of the bread ...
+keeping the cold meats and the pie and cake. I sat in my open box-car,
+on a box that I had flung in with me, reading my Bible and eating my
+"hand-outs" and a millionaire had nothing on me for enjoyment.
+
+I was half-way to San Antonio when I fell in with as jolly a bunch of
+bums as I ever hope to see in this world ... just outside a little town,
+in the "jungles."
+
+These tramps were gathered together on a definite plan, and I was
+invited to join them in it: the plan was, to go, _en masse_, from town
+to town, and systematically exploit it; one day one man would go to the
+butcher shops, the next, another man would take them, and the first
+would, let's say, beg at the baker's ... and each day a different man
+would take a different section among the houses. Then all the food so
+procured would be put together and shared in common.
+
+As usual, there was among them an individual who held them together--the
+originator of the idea. He was a fat, ruddy-faced alcoholic ex-cook, who
+had never held a job for long because he loved whiskey so much.
+
+Besides being the presiding genius of the gang, he also did all the
+cooking. He loved to cook. Each day he jumbled all the mixable portions
+of the food together, and, in a big tin wash-boiler which he had rescued
+from "the dump" outside of town, he stewed up quite a palatable mess
+which we called "slum" or "slumgullion," or, more profanely,
+"son-of-a-b----."
+
+For plates we used old tomato cans hammered out flat ... for knives and
+forks, our fingers, pocket-knives, and chips of wood.
+
+It was a happy life.
+
+One afternoon mysteriously our leader and cook disappeared--with a broad
+grin on his face. Soon he returned, rolling a whole barrel of beer which
+he had stolen during the night from the back of a saloon ... and had
+hidden it nearby in the bushes till it was time to bring it forth....
+
+We held a roaring party, and had several fights. ("Slopping up" is what
+the tramps call a drinking jamboree.) This was the first time I got
+drunk in my life. It took very little to set me off ... I burned a big
+hole in my coat. I woke lying in the mud near the willows ... and with a
+black eye ... a fellow tramp affectionately showed me his finger that I
+had bitten severely ... for a day we had bad nerves, and lay about
+grumbling....
+
+We kept quite clean. The tramp is as clean as his life permits him to be
+... usually ... the myth about his dirtiness is another of the myths of
+the newspaper and magazine world ... though I have seen ones who were
+extraordinarily filthy....
+
+We "boiled up" regularly ... and hung our shirts and other articles of
+apparel on the near-by willows to dry....
+
+After about ten days of scientific exploitation of them, the "natives"
+of the town on the verge of which we were encamping, began to evidence
+signs of restlessness.
+
+So we moved on to another town by means of a local freight.
+
+Settled there in "the jungles," we hilariously voted to crown the cook
+our king. We held the ceremony, presenting him with a crown made out of
+an old tin pan, which one of the more expert among us hammered into a
+circlet and scoured bright with sand....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But soon I grew tired of the gang and started on alone.
+
+"You'd better beat it on out of the South as quick as you can," an old
+tramp had warned me, "they're hell on a bum down here, and harder yet on
+a Yankee ... no, they haven't forgot _that_ yet--not by a damn sight!"
+
+I was soon to wish that I had listened to the old tramp's wisdom.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the chill grey dip of an early spring dawn I dropped off a freight in
+the yards of the town of Granton.
+
+I drew my threadbare coat closer as I made my way up the track, on the
+look-out for some place to go into and warm myself. Usually, in chilly
+weather, each railroad station throughout the country has a stove a-glow
+in the waiting room ... I found the railroad station, and the stove,
+red-hot, was there ... it was good to be near a fire. In the South it
+can be at times heavily cold. There is a moisture and a rawness in the
+weather, there, that hurts.
+
+I was not alone. Two negro tramps followed me; like myself, seeking
+warmth and shelter. Then came a white tramp.
+
+We stood around the stove, which shone red in the early half-light of
+dawn. We shivered and rubbed our hands. Then we fell into tramps' gossip
+about the country we were in.
+
+The two negroes soon left to catch a freight for Austin. My fellow tramp
+and I stretched ourselves along the benches. He yawned with a loud noise
+like an animal. "I'm worn-out," he said, "I've been riding the bumpers
+all night." I noticed immediately that he did not speak tramp argot.
+
+"And _I_ tried to sleep on the bare boards of a box car."
+
+We had disposed ourselves comfortably to sleep for the few hours till
+wide day, in the station, when the station master came. He poked the
+fire brighter, shook it down, then turned to us. "Boys," not unkindly,
+"sorry, but you can't sleep here ... it's the rules."
+
+We shuffled to our feet.
+
+"Do you mind if we stand about the stove till the sun's high enough to
+take the chill off things?"
+
+"No."
+
+But, standing, we fell to talking ... comparing notes....
+
+"I've been through here once before," remarked my companion, whom I
+never knew otherwise than as "Bud."
+
+"There's a cotton seed mill up the tracks a way toward town, and we can
+sleep there, if you want ... to-day's Sunday, and no one will be around,
+working, to disturb us. In the South it's all right for a tramp to sleep
+among cotton seed, provided he doesn't smoke there."
+
+"Come on, then, let's find a place. I can hardly hold my head up."
+
+We slumped along the track. A cinder cut into my foot through the broken
+sole of one shoe. It made me wince and limp.
+
+Soon we came to the cotton seed house and looked it over from the
+outside. It was a four-square building, each side having a door. All the
+doors but one were locked. That one, when pushed against, tottered over.
+We climbed in over the heavy sacks, seemingly full of cement, with which
+the unlocked door had been propped to. It also was unhinged.
+
+It was dark inside. There were no windows.
+
+We struck matches and explored. We found articles of heavier hardware
+scattered and piled about, some sacks of guano, and about a dozen wired
+bales of hay.
+
+"I thought this was a cotton seed mill," commented Bud, "because I saw
+so many niggers working around it, when I passed by, the other time."
+
+"Well, and what is it, then?"
+
+"Evidently a warehouse--where they store heavier articles of hardware."
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"Twist the wires off a couple of these bales of hay, use it for bedding,
+and have a good sleep anyhow."
+
+"But--suppose we're caught in here?"
+
+"No chance. It's Sunday morning, no one will be here to work to-day, and
+we'll be let alone."
+
+With a little effort we twisted the bales apart and made comfortable
+beds from the hay.
+
+It seemed I had slept but a moment when I was seized by a nightmare. I
+dreamed some monstrous form was bending over me, cursing, breathing
+flames out of its mouth, and boring a hot, sharpened implement into the
+centre of my forehead. I woke, to find, that, in part, my dream was
+true.
+
+There straddled over me an excited man, swearing profusely to keep his
+courage up. He was pressing the cold muzzle-end of a "forty-four-seventy"
+into my forehead.
+
+"Come on! Get up, you ---- ---- ----! Come on out of here, or I'll blow
+your ---- ---- ---- brains out, do you hear?"
+
+Then I caught myself saying, as if from far away, perfectly calm and
+composed, and in English that was almost academic--"my dear man, put up
+your gun and I will go with you quietly. I am only a tramp and not a
+desperado."
+
+This both puzzled and at the same time reassured my captor ... and made
+him swear all the louder,--this time, with a note of brave certainty in
+his tone.
+
+His gun poked me in the back to expedite my exit. I stepped out at the
+open door into streaming daylight that at first dazzled my eyes. I saw
+waiting on the track outside a posse of about fifteen citizens.
+
+"Good work, McAndrews," commended one of them, deep-voiced. The others
+murmured gruff approval.
+
+McAndrews, from conversation that I gathered, was night-watchman in the
+yards. He had one red-rimmed eye. The other was sightless but had a
+half-closed leer that seemed to express discreet visual powers.
+
+"Now go on in an' fetch out the other bum," commanded the deep-voiced
+member of the posse, speaking with authority.
+
+"There wasn't but only this 'un," McAndrews replied, with renewed
+timidity in his voice, scarcely concealed, and jerking his thumb toward
+me.
+
+"But the little nigger said they was--ain't that so, nigger?"
+
+"Yassir, boss--I done seen two o' dem go in dar!" replied a wisp of a
+negro boy, rolling wide eye-whites in fright, and wedged in among the
+hulking posse.
+
+"Well, this 'un's all I seen!" protested the night watchman, "an' you
+betcher I looked about mighty keerful ... wot time did you see 'um break
+in?" turning to the negro child.
+
+"Jes' at daylight, boss!"
+
+"An' wot was you-all a-doin' down hee-ar?"
+
+"He was a-stealin' coal f'um the coalkiars," put in one of the posse,
+"in cohse!"
+
+All laughed.
+
+"Anyhow, I done seed two o' dem," protested the boy, comically, "wot
+evah else I done!"
+
+Everybody was now hilarious.
+
+"Whar's yoah buddy?" I was asked.
+
+"Did unt you-all hev no buddy wit' you?"
+
+"Yes, I did have a buddy with me, but--" trying to give Bud a chance of
+escape,--"but he caught a freight West, just a little bit ago."
+
+"You're a liar," said the one in authority, who I afterward heard was
+the head-clerk of the company that ran the warehouse. The negro boy had
+run to his house and roused him. He had drawn the posse together....
+
+"You're a liar! Your buddy's still in there!"
+
+"No, I'll sweah they haint nobuddy else," protested McAndrews.
+
+But prodded by their urging, he climbed in again over the sacks of
+guano, and soon brought out Bud, who had waked, heard the rumpus, and
+had been hiding, burrowed down under the hay as deep as he could go.
+
+There was a burst of laughter as he stood framed in the doorway, in
+which I couldn't help but join. He had such a silly, absurd, surprised
+look in his face ... a look of stupefied incredulity, when he saw all
+the men drawn up to receive him. From a straggled lock of hair that fell
+over one eye hung several long hay-wisps. His face looked stupid and
+moon-fat. He rolled his big, brown eyes in a despairful manner that was
+unconsciously comic. For he was, instinctively, as I was not, instantly
+and fully aware of the seriousness of what might come upon us for our
+innocent few hours' sleep.
+
+"Come on, boys. Up with your hands till we go through your pockets."
+
+On Bud's hip they found a whiskey flask, quarter-full. In my inside
+pocket, a sheaf of poor verse--I had barely as yet come to grips with my
+art--and, in an outside pocket, the Bible I had filched from the woman's
+sewing machine in Tuscon.
+
+The finding of the Bible on my person created a speechless pause.
+
+Then--
+
+"Good Gawd! A bum with a Bible!"
+
+Awe and respect held the crowd for a moment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The march began.
+
+"Where are you taking us to?"
+
+"To the calaboose."
+
+Down a long stretch of peaceful, Sunday street we went--small boys
+following in a curious horde, and Sunday worshippers with their women's
+gloved hands tucked in timidly under their arms as we passed by. They
+gave us prim, askance glances, as if we belonged to a different species
+of the animal kingdom.
+
+Buck negroes with their women stepped out into the street, while, as is
+customary there,--the white men passed, taking us two tramps to jail. We
+came to a high, newly white-washed board fence. Within it stood a
+two-story building of red brick. On the fence was painted, in big black
+letters the facetious warning, "Keep out if you can." A passage in
+through the gate, and McAndrews first knocked at, then kicked against
+the door.
+
+The sleepy-faced, small-eyed jailer finally opened to us. The wrinkled
+skin of the old man hung loosely from his neck. It wabbled as he talked.
+
+"What the hell's the mattah with you folks?" protested McAndrews, the
+night watchman, "slep' late," yawned the jailer, "it bein' Sunday
+mawhnin'."
+
+By this time the sheriff, summoned from his house, had joined us. A big
+swashbuckler of a man with a hard face, hard blue eyes with quizzical
+wrinkles around them. They seemed wrinkles of good humour till you
+looked closer.
+
+"--s a damn lie ... you 'en Jimmy hev bin a-gamblin' all night,"
+interjected the sheriff, in angry disgust.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They marched us upstairs. The whole top floor, was given over to a huge
+iron cage which had been built in before the putting on of the roof. A
+narrow free space--a sort of corridor, ran all around it, on the
+outside.
+
+Eager and interested, the prisoners already in the cage pushed their
+faces against the bars to look at us. But at the sheriff's word of
+command they went into their cells, the latter built in a row within the
+cage itself, and obediently slammed their doors shut while a long iron
+bar was shot across the whole length, from without ... then the big door
+of the cage was opened, and we were thrust in. The bar was drawn back,
+liberating the others, then, from their cells.
+
+The posse left. Our fellow prisoners crowded about us, asking us
+questions ... what had we done?... and how had we been caught?... and
+what part of the country were we from?... etc. etc....
+
+From the North ... yes, Yankee ... well, when a fellow was both a Yank
+and a tramp he was given a short shrift in the South.
+
+They talked much about themselves ... one thing, however, we all held in
+common ... our innocence ... we were all innocent ... every one of us
+was innocent of the crime charged against us ... we were just being
+persecuted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon a negro preacher, short and squat, who, innocent, was yet
+being held for Grand Jury, delivered us a fearful half-chanted sermon on
+the Judgment Day. I never heard so moving, compelling a sermon. I saw
+the sky glowing like a furnace, the star-touching conflagration of the
+End of Things rippling up the east in increasing waves of fire, in place
+of the usual dawn ... I heard the crying of mankind ... of sinners ...
+for mountains to topple over on them and cover them from the wrath of
+the Lord....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"In co'hse I nevah done it," explained the preacher, "I had some hawgs
+of mah own. Mah hawgs had an under-bit an' an ovah-bit in dere eahs, an'
+de ones I's 'cused o' stealin', dey had only an ovah-bit. But heah dey's
+got me, holdin' me foh de pen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little grey-faced pickpocket--caught at his trade at the Dallas
+Fair, told me how easy it was to add an under-bit to an over-bit to the
+ears of the two hogs stolen, "Sure that sneakin' niggah pahson did it,"
+he averred--but all the while he likewise averred that _he_ hadn't
+picked the pocket of the man from whom he was accused of stealing a
+wallet....
+
+"Yes, I'll admit Ah've done sech things. But this taime they was sure
+wrong. Ef I git framed up," he added, "I mean tuh study law ... pull foh
+a job in th' prison libery an' read up ... an' take up practice when I
+serve my term."
+
+Beside the hog-stealing parson and the little grey-faced pickpocket
+there were also:
+
+A big negro youth, black as shiny coal, who was being held over on
+appeal. He'd been sentenced to ninety-nine years for rape of a negro
+girl ... if it had been a white girl he would have been burned long ago,
+he said ... as it was, the sheriff's son, who was handling his case,
+would finally procure his release--and exact, in return, about ten
+years' of serfdom as payment. And there was a young, hard-drinking
+quarrelsome tenant-farmer, who was charged with having sold two bales of
+cotton not belonging to him, to get money for drinking....
+
+There was another negro, hanging-handed, simous-faced, who had, in a fit
+of jealousy, blown two heads off by letting loose both barrels at once
+of his heavily charged shotgun ... the heads were his wife's ... and her
+lover's. He caught them when their faces were close together ... and
+they were kissing. But he seemed a gentle creature, tractable and
+harmless.
+
+On the outside of the cage in which we were cooped like menagerie
+animals, a negro girl had her cot. She slept and lived out there by the
+big stove which heated the place. She was a girl of palish yellow
+colour. She was a trusty. She had been caught watching outside of a
+house while two grown-up negro women went within to rob.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Monday morning "kangaroo court" was called ... that court which
+prisoners hold, mimicking the legal procedure to which they grow so
+accustomed during their lives. We were arraigned for trial--the charge
+against us, that of "Breaking Into Jail."
+
+The cotton thief served as prosecuting attorney. The negro youth in for
+rape of one of his own colour,--the sergeant-at-arms; while the negro
+preacher in for hog-stealing defended us ... and he did it so well that
+we were let off with ten blows of the strap a-piece. We had no money to
+be mulcted of, nor were we able to procure from friends, as the custom
+is, funds for the buying of whiskey and tobacco.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a few days Bud and I had settled down into the routine of jail-life.
+Every morning we swept our cells, and all the prisoners took turns
+sweeping the corridor. The fine for spitting on the floor was ten lashes
+laid on hard. And each day before breakfast we soaked the seams of our
+clothes in vile-smelling creosote to kill off the lice and nits. We had
+no chance to bathe, and were given but little water to wash our face and
+hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I wonder what they are going to do with us?"
+
+"Anything they please," answered Bud gloomily.
+
+"From thirty to ninety days on the county farm, I suppose?"
+
+"We'll be lucky if we don't get from four to ten years in the pen."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Burglary--didn't we break into that warehouse?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our meals were passed in to us through an open space near the level of
+the floor, at the upper end of the cage, where a bar had been removed
+for that purpose. We'd line up and the tin plates would be handed in,
+one after the other ... two meals a day. For breakfast a corn pone of
+coarse, white corn meal, and a bit of fried sow-belly. For dinner, all
+the water we could drink. For supper, breakfast all over again, with
+the addition of a dab of greens. On rare occasions the sheriff's son or
+the jailer went hunting ... and then we'd have rabbit. The sheriff had
+the contract, at so much per head, for feeding the prisoners.
+
+Each morning I used to ask the jailer for the occasional newspaper with
+which he covered the basket in which he brought our food to us. One
+morning my eyes fell upon an interesting item:
+
+The story of how two young desperadoes had been caught in the warehouse
+beside the railroad track, in the act of committing burglary ... the
+tale of our capture was briefly told ... the bravery of the night
+watchman and the posse extolled ... and the further information was
+conveyed, that, having waved preliminary examination (and we had, for
+they told us the justice was continually too drunk to examine us) we
+were being held over for Grand Jury ... on a charge of burglary.
+
+Though he had predicted this, the actuality of it struck Bud all of a
+heap. He paced up and down the cage for the full space of an hour,
+hanging his ungainly head between his shoulders in abandonment to
+despair.
+
+My reaction was a strange one. I wanted to sing ... whistle ... dance
+... I was in the midst of adventure and romance. I was a Count of Monte
+Cristo, a Baron von Trenck. I dreamed of linguistic and philosophic
+studies in the solitude of my cell at the penitentiary till I was master
+of all languages, of all wisdom, or I dreamed of escape and of rising to
+wealth and power, afterwards, so that I would be pardoned and could come
+back and magnanimously shame with my forgiveness the community that had
+sent me up.
+
+Bud stopped his pacing to and fro to stand in our cell-doorway. I was
+sitting on a stool, thinking hard.
+
+"We can't do a thing," said Bud, "we're in for it, good and proper."
+
+"--tell you what _I'll_ do," I responded, "I'll write a letter to the
+owner of the warehouse and appeal to his humanity."
+
+"You romantic jack-ass," yelled Bud, his nerves on edge. He walked away
+angry. He came back calmer.
+
+"Look here, Gregory, I want you to excuse that outburst--but you _are_ a
+fool. This is _real life_ we're up against now. You're not reading about
+this in a book."
+
+"We'll see what can be done," I returned.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the extreme end of the big cage, the end furthest from the entrance
+door, stood two cells not occupied. The last of these I had chosen for
+my study, a la Monte Cristo. The sheriff's son had lent me a dozen of
+Opie Reid's novels, a history of the Civil War from the Southern
+viewpoint, an arithmetic, and an algebra. Here all day long I studied
+and wrote assiduously. And it was here I went to sit on my stool and
+write the letter to the owner of the warehouse ... a certain Mr.
+Womber....
+
+In it I pointed out the enormity of sending to the penitentiary two
+young men, on a merely technical charge of burglary. For if we had gone
+into the place to rob, why had we so foolishly, then, gone to sleep? And
+what, at the final analysis, could we have stolen but bales of hay,
+sacks of guano, and plowshares? All of them too unwieldy to carry away
+unless we had other conveyance than our backs. It was absurd, on the
+face of it.
+
+Furthermore, I appealed to him, as a Christian, to let us go free ... in
+the name of God, not to wreck our lives by throwing us, for a term of
+years, into contact with criminals of the hardened type--to give us one
+more chance to become useful citizens of our great and glorious country.
+
+Bud laughed sneeringly when I read the letter aloud to him ... said it
+was a fine effort as a composition in rhetoric, but I might expect
+nothing of it--if the perpetually drunk jailer really brought it to its
+destination--except that it would be tossed unread into the
+wastebasket....
+
+I pleaded with the jailer to deliver it for me ... told him how
+important it would be to our lives ... adjured him to consider our
+helpless and penniless state. He promised to deliver it for me.
+
+"I have nothing to give you, now," I ended, "but, if I ever get free,
+I'll send you twenty-five dollars or so from up home, when I reach the
+North."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A prisoner's first dream is "escape." Voices outside on the street, the
+sight of the tops of green trees through bars, dogs barking far away,
+the travels of the sun as shown by moving bands of light on the walls
+and in the cells--all remind him of the day when he was, as he now sees
+it, happy and free ... he forgets entirely, in the midst of the jail's
+black restraints, the lesser evils of outside, daily life. Even the
+termagant wife is turned into a domestic angel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Under the smoky prison lamp made of a whiskey bottle filled with oil,
+and a shred of shirt drawn through a cork, we planned to cut out.
+
+"The way to do it is easy," said the little pickpocket, "in the sole of
+every good shoe is a steel spring. I'll take the steel from my shoe.
+There's already one bar removed from the chuck-hole (No use trying to
+reproduce the dialect). If we saw out another bar, that will give us
+enough room for going through. Then it will be easy to dig out the
+mortar between the bricks, in the jail wall. Once out, we can make for
+the river bottoms, and, by wading in the water, even their bloodhounds
+can't track us."
+
+"And once I get over into Indian Territory or Arkansas, you'll never see
+me in Texas again," I muttered.
+
+"How'll we conceal where we've been sawing?" Bud asked.
+
+"By plugging up the grooves with corn bread blackened with soot that we
+can make by holding the wick of this smoky lamp against the
+cage-ceiling."
+
+"And how'll we keep folks from hearing the sawing?"
+
+"By dancing and singing while Baykins here" (alluding to a "pore white"
+fiddler who had almost killed a man at a dance) "while Baykins here
+plays 'whip the devil.'"
+
+The very next day we began dancing and singing and taking turns at the
+chuckhole bar.
+
+"Whip the Devil" is an interminable tune like the one about the "old
+woman chasing her son round the room with a broom."...
+
+The mistake was, that in our eagerness we "whipped the devil" too long
+at a time. Naturally, the jailer grew suspicious of such sudden and
+prolonged hilarity. But even at that it took almost a week for them to
+catch on. We knew it was all up when, one morning at breakfast, the
+sheriff came in with the jailer.
+
+"Boys, all back into your cells!" he growled.
+
+The long bar was thrown over our closed doors.
+
+The sheriff stooped down and inspected the chuck-hole.
+
+"Why, Jesus Christ, they'd of been through in two more nights. It's good
+we caught them in time or they'd of been a hell of a big jail-delivery
+... do you mean to tell me," turning to the jailer, "you never noticed
+this before?" and with one finger he raked out the blackened corn bread.
+
+"You see, I'm a little near-sighted, Mistah Jenkins."
+
+"Too damned near-sighted, an' too damned stupid, too."
+
+The big iron door of the cage was locked again, the long bar thrown off
+our cell doors.
+
+"Now, you sons of b---- can come out into the cage again; but, mind you,
+if any of you try such a thing again, I'll take you out one by one and
+give you all a rawhiding."
+
+We received the abuse in sullen silence. For three days our rations
+lacked cornpone, for punishment.
+
+We decided among ourselves that the negro preacher, to stand in well
+with the authorities, had given us away....
+
+And if he had not, panic-stricken, pleaded with the sheriff to be taken
+out and put in a separate cell, I believe we would have killed him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was one more way. It was so simple a way that we had not thought
+of it before. The mulatto girl, who slept by the big stove, on a cot,
+just outside the cage ... a trusty and the jailer's unwilling concubine
+... this slim, yellow creature was much in love with the lusty young
+farmer who had stolen the bales of cotton and sold them for a drunk. And
+it was he who suggested that, through her, we get possession of the
+keys. For, every day, she informed us, she passed them by where they
+hung on a nail, downstairs, as she swept and cleaned house for the
+jailer.
+
+It was not a difficult matter to procure them. She would bring them up
+to us and hand them in through the chuck-hole, which the village
+blacksmith had repaired and once more reinforced with extra bars, "so
+them bastards won't even think of sawing out again," as the jailer had
+expressed it.
+
+The evening she handed the keys in to us we were so excited we wanted to
+have "Whip the Devil" played again for our singing and dancing. But this
+might have once more awakened suspicion. Before, we had raised such a
+row as to have caused pedestrians to stop and listen in groups,
+wondering what made the men inside so happy....
+
+There were three separate locks on the great cage door. One, two of them
+went back with an easy click. For the third we could find no key. There
+was nothing else to do now but to have recourse to singing and dancing
+again. Baykins started sawing his fiddle furiously while the big negro
+in for rape hammered and hammered on the lock to break it, with one
+prison stool after another, till all were tossed aside, broken as
+kindling wood is broken. It was good that the jailer was either deaf,
+or, like the heathen gods in the Old Testament, away on a journey.
+Finally, we gave up in despair. The big negro collapsed with a wail. The
+first sign of weakness I ever detected in him.
+
+"Now it's shore either ninety-nine yeahs in de pen foh me, or ten yeahs
+for th' sheriff's son foh lawyah fees ... an' the footprints in de
+flowah bed ... of the man what done de rape was two sizes biggah dan
+mine."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day the jailer, of course, missed the keys. Panic-stricken, the
+mulatto girl was afraid to slip them back to their accustomed nail, for
+fear she'd be seen at it; or was it out of vindictiveness against the
+jailer that she had now actually hidden them somewhere (for, finding
+them of no use, we had handed them back to her)!
+
+That same afternoon the sheriff, with his son and the little,
+shrivelled, stuttering, half-deaf jailer, came in at the door of the big
+room. It was easy to see what they wanted. They wanted the keys and they
+were going to make the girl confess where they were ... as she was the
+only other person, beside the prison authorities, that was in the way to
+come at them.
+
+"Martha, we want them keys! Show us where they is, like a good girl!"
+
+"'Deed, Ah don' know where dey is a-tall, Marse Sheriff!"
+
+"Come on, gal, you was the only one downstairs exceptin' Jacklin heah!"
+pointing to the jailer.
+
+The jailer nodded his head asseveratingly.
+
+"Yes, Martha, tell us whar the keys air," urged the latter, with
+caressing softness and fright in his voice. He didn't want his mistress
+whipped.
+
+
+"If you don't, by God, I'll whup the nigger hide clean off yore back,"
+and the sheriff reached for the braided whip which his son Jimmy handed
+him.
+
+"I sweah Ah don' know where dey is!"
+
+"You dirty liah," taking out a watch; "I'll give you jest five minutes
+t' tell, an' then--" he menaced with the up-lifted whip.
+
+In stubborn silence the girl waited the five minutes out.
+
+"Jimmy!... Jacklin!... throw her down an' hold her, rump up, over that
+cot." They obeyed. With a jerk the sheriff had her dress up and her bare
+buttocks in view.
+
+"I'm a-goin' to whup an' whup till you confess, Martha."
+
+Crack! Crack! Crack! the whip descended, leaving red whelts each time.
+The mulatto girl writhed, but did not cry quits. Beads of perspiration
+glistened on the jailer's face. The girl shook off his lax grip on her
+arms ... the sheriff's son was holding her legs. We were crowded against
+the bars, angry and silent. We admired the girl's hopeless pluck. We saw
+she was holding out just to, somehow, have vengeance on the jailer for
+her being held in unwilling concubinage by him, hoping he would catch it
+hard for having let the keys hang carelessly in open view, and so,
+stolen.
+
+"Damn you, Jacklin," shouted the sheriff, "I believe you're a little
+soft on the gal ... come here ... you swing the whip an' I'll hold her
+arms."
+
+In mute agony Jacklin obeyed ... whipping the woman of whom he was fond.
+
+"Harder, Jacklin, harder," and the sheriff drew his gun on him to
+emphasise the command.
+
+Under such impulsion, a shower of heavy blows fell. The girl screamed.
+
+"I'll give up ... Oh, good Lordy, I'll give up."
+
+And she dug the keys out from under the mattress across which they had
+whipped her.
+
+After they had gone she lay crying on her face for a long while. When
+night came she still lay crying. Nothing any of us could say would
+console her. Not even the little white cotton thief had power to allay
+her hurt....
+
+At last we began cursing and railing at her. That made her stop, after a
+fashion. But still she occasionally gave vent to a heart-deep, dry,
+racking sob.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Locked in there behind bars and forced to be impotent onlookers, the
+whipping we had witnessed made us as restless as wild animals. That
+night, under the dim flare of our jail-made lamps, the boys gambled as
+usual, for their strips of paper,--and as eagerly as if it were real
+currency. I, for my part, drew away to the vacant cell at the far end of
+the cage to study and read and dream my dreams....
+
+As I sat there I was soon possessed with a disagreeable feeling that a
+malignant, ill-wishing presence hovered near. I shifted in my seat
+uneasily. I looked up. There stood, in the doorway, the lusty young
+farmer who was in for stealing the bales of cotton. He wore an evil,
+combative leer on his face. He was "spoiling" for a quarrel--just for
+the mere sake of quarrelling--that I could see. But I dissembled.
+
+"Well, Jack?" I asked gently.
+
+"You're a nice one," he muttered, "you pale-faced Yankee son of a b----
+... think you're better 'n the rest of us, don't ye?... readin' in yore
+books?"
+
+"Nonsense, what are you picking at me for? I'm not harming anybody, am
+I?"
+
+"No, but you're a God damned fool!"
+
+"Look here, what have I ever done to you?"
+
+"Nothin', only you're a white-livered stinker, an' I'm jest a-spoilin'
+foh a fight with you-all."
+
+"But I don't want to fight with you."
+
+"I'll make you," he replied, striding in; and fetching me a cuff on the
+ear ... then, in a far-away voice that did not seem myself, I heard
+myself pleading to be let alone ... by this time all the other boys had
+crowded down about the cell to see the fun.
+
+I was humiliated, ashamed ... but, try as I would, the thought and
+vision of my uncle came on me like a palsy.
+
+Bud stepped up. He had always been so meek and placid before that what
+he did then was a surprise to me.
+
+"_I'll_ fight!"
+
+"What! you?" glowered the young farmer, surprised.
+
+"Yes, I'll give you all the fighting you want, you dirty cotton thief!"
+
+Instantly the farmer made at him. Bud ran in, fetched him two blows in
+the face, and clinched.
+
+It was not going very well for the desperado. From somewhere on his
+person he whipped forth a knife, and, with a series of flashes through
+the air, began stabbing Bud again and again in the back.
+
+I thank God for what came over me then. Too glad of soul to believe it,
+I experienced a warm surge of angry courage rushing through me like an
+electric storm. All the others were panic-stricken for the moment. But I
+burst through the group, rushed back to the toilet, and, with frenzied
+strength, tore loose a length of pipe from the exposed plumbing. I came
+rushing back. I brought down the soft lead-pipe across "Jack's" ear,
+accompanying the blow with a volley of oaths in a roaring voice.
+
+The farmer whipped about to face his new antagonist, letting Bud drop
+back. Bud sank to the iron floor. The farmer was astonished almost to
+powerlessness to find facing him, with a length of swinging pipe in his
+hand, the boy who had a few minutes before been afraid.
+
+But he rapidly recovered and came on at me, gibbering like an incensed
+baboon.
+
+By this time all the humiliations I had suffered in the past, since
+succumbing to the fear-complex that my uncle had beaten into me--all the
+outrage of them was boiling in me for vengeance. I saw the blood bathing
+the torn ear of my antagonist. It looked beautiful. I was no longer
+afraid of anything. Yelling my uncle's name I came on ... I beat the
+knife out of the other's hand and bloodied his knuckles with the next
+blow. I beat him down with rapid blows, threshing at him, shouting and
+yelling exultantly.
+
+The other men thought me gone crazy. I had, for the time, gone crazy.
+The fellow lay at my feet, inert. I stopped for the moment.
+
+In that moment the gang began to close in on me, half frightened
+themselves. I threatened them back.
+
+"By hell, I've had enough of bullying," I shouted wildly; "I'm not
+afraid of anything or anybody any more ... if there's anyone else here
+that wants a taste of this pipe, let them step up."
+
+"We ain't a-tryin' to fight you-all," called out the big negro who was
+in for rape, "we jest don' want you to kill him an' git hung foh
+murduh."
+
+At the word "murder" I stepped quickly back.
+
+"Well, don't let him come bothering me or my pal for a fight any more
+when we've done nothing to him."
+
+"Don' worry, he won't no moh!" assured the fiddler....
+
+I threw down the lead pipe. It had seemed to me that all the while it
+was my Uncle Landon who had received the blows.
+
+The rough-neck farmer was in bad shape; he was bloodied all over like a
+stuck pig. The mulatto girl on the outside had for the last five minutes
+been occupied in calling out of the window for help. She managed to
+attract the attention of a passerby-by.
+
+"What's the matter?" was called up to her....
+
+"The jailer ain't downstairs ... an' de boys is killin' each other up
+heah!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By the time the angry-faced sheriff came with his son, the jailer, and a
+couple of doctors, we had quieted down.
+
+Bud and the farmer were taken out; by the side of each a pail of water
+was placed ... they were seated on stools, stripped to the waist. The
+surgeons dressed their wounds as if on a battlefield. "Jack" needed ten
+stitches in his scalp.... Bud had four knife wounds that demanded sewing
+up. Both the boys went pale like ghosts and spewed their bellies empty
+from weakness and loss of blood....
+
+"Mind you, you chaps in there have raised 'bout enough hell ... ef I
+hear o' any more trouble, I'll take you all out one by one an' treat
+each one o' you-all to a good cowhidin', law or no law!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was let alone after that. My cowardice had gone forever. I was now a
+man among men. I was happy. I saw what an easy thing it is to fight, to
+defend yourself. I saw what an exhilaration, a pleasure, the exchanging
+of righteous blows can be.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Always my dream was of being a big man when I got out--some day. Always
+I acted as if living a famous prison romance like that of Baron Von
+Trenck's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I collected from the living voices of my fellow prisoners innumerable
+jail and cocaine songs, and rhymes of the criminal world. I wrote them
+down on pieces of wrapping paper that the jailer occasionally covered
+the food-basket with in lieu of newspaper.
+
+  "Oh, coco-Marie, and coco-Marai,
+  I'se gon' ta whiff cocaine 'twill I die.
+  Ho! (sniff) Ho! (sniff) baby, take a whiff of me!"
+
+(The sniffing sound indicating the snuffing up into the nostril of the
+"snow," or "happy dust," as it is called in the underworld.)
+
+Then there was the song about lice:
+
+  "There's a lice in jail
+  As big as a rail;
+  When you lie down
+  They'll tickle your tail--
+  Hard times in jail, poor boy!..."
+
+And another, more general:
+
+  "Along come the jailer
+  About 'leven o'clock,
+  Bunch o' keys in his right hand,
+  The jailhouse do'h was locked....
+  'Cheer up, you pris'ners,'
+  I heard that jailer say,
+  'You got to go to the cane-brakes
+  Foh ninety yeahs to stay!'"
+
+As you can guess, most of these jail songs and ballads of the underworld
+could only be printed in asterisks. I was hoping, in the interests of
+folklore, to preserve them for some learned society's private printing
+press.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A fresher green came to the stray branches of the trees that crossed our
+barred windows. The world outside seemed to waken with bird-song. It was
+spring, and time for the sitting of the grand jury that was to decide
+whether we were, each of us, to be held over for trial by petty jury ...
+days of fretful eagerness and discontent ... from the windows the yellow
+trusty-girl said she could see lines of buggies driving in to town. It
+was the custom of farmers for miles around to drive in to their county
+seat during the court assizes ... a week or so of holidays like a
+continuous circus for them.
+
+When the sheriff would have occasion to come into the room in which
+stood our big cage, the boys would crowd up to the bars, each one hoping
+for news favourable to his case ... the prevailing atmosphere was one of
+hope.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The negro who had murdered his wife and her sweetheart with a shotgun
+had already had his trial. He was--and had been--but waiting the arrival
+of the prison contractor, as the latter went from county jail to county
+jail, gathering in his flock, and taking them away, chained together, to
+the penitentiary and the cane brakes ... "where only a big buck nigger
+can live," the little pickpocket had told me, with fear in his voice....
+
+He came ... the contractor ... to our jail at midnight. All of us leaped
+from our mattresses to witness the dreary procession of neck-chained and
+be-manacled convicted men. In the light of the swinging lanterns, a
+lurid spectacle. Our man was taken out and chained in with the gang.
+They clanked away down the stairs, leaving us who remained with heavy
+chains on our hope instead of on our necks and hands and legs ...
+because of the sight we had just seen. For the passing day or so we were
+so depressed that we wandered about saying nothing to each other, like
+dumb men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One after the other the men had true bills found against them, and
+little slips of folded paper were thrust in to them through the bars of
+their cells. And shyster lawyers who fatten on the misfortunes of the
+prison-held being, began to hold whispered conversations (and
+conferences) from without, mainly to find out just how much each
+prisoner could raise for fees for defence....
+
+Bud and I were the only ones left. All the others had had true bills
+found against them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But there came an afternoon when the big, hulky sheriff, with the cruel,
+quizzical eyes, came to the back bars of our cell and summoned us up
+with a mysterious air....
+
+"Well, boys," he began, pausing to squirt a long, brown stream of
+tobacco juice, "well, boys--" and he paused again.
+
+My nerves were so on edge that I controlled with difficulty a mad
+impulse to curse at the sheriff for holding us in such needless
+suspense....
+
+Taking another deliberate chew off his plug, he told us that after
+mature deliberation the grand jury had decided that there was not enough
+grounds for finding a true bill against us, and, as a consequence, we
+were to be let go free.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following morning I had the satisfaction of hearing from old
+Jacklin, the jailer, that Womber, the owner of the warehouse, had
+himself gone before the grand jury and informed them that he did not
+wish to press the charge of burglary against us....
+
+Womber, Jacklin said, had received my letter and at first had tossed it
+aside ... even thrown it contemptuously into the wastebasket. But his
+wife and daughter had raked it out and read it and had, day and night,
+given him no peace till he had promised to "go easy on the poor boys."
+
+This was my triumph over Bud--the triumph of romance over realism.
+
+"I'm glad we're getting out, but there's more damn fools in the world
+than I thought," he remarked, with a sour smile of gratification.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now, with new, trembling eagerness, we two began waiting for the
+hour of our release. That very afternoon it would be surely, we thought
+... that night ... then the next morning ... then ... the next day....
+
+But until a week more had flown, the sheriff did not let us go. In order
+to make a little more profit on his feeding contract, averred our
+prisoners.
+
+But on Saturday morning he came to turn us loose. By this time we seemed
+blood brothers to the others in the cage ... negro ... mulatto ... white
+... criminal and vicious ... weak, and victims of circumstance ...
+everything sloughed away. Genuine tears stood in our eyes as with strong
+hand-grips we wished the poor lads good luck!
+
+We stumbled down the jail stairway up which, three months before, we had
+been conducted to our long incarceration in the cage. The light of free
+day stormed in on our prison-inured eyes in a blinding deluge of white
+and gold ... we stepped out into what seemed not an ordinary world, but
+a madness and tumult of birds, a delirious green of trees too beautiful
+for any place outside the garden of Paradise.
+
+"Come on," said Bud, "let's go on down the main street and thank Womber
+for not pressing the case--"
+
+"To hell with Womber!"
+
+"Well, then, I'm going to thank him."
+
+"I'm grateful enough.... I might write him a letter thanking him ...
+but I'm not anxious to linger in this neighbourhood."
+
+So Bud and I parted company, shaking hands good-bye; he headed west ...
+to China and the East, finally, he said ... I never knew his real name
+... neither of us gave his right name to the town's officials....
+
+As I sought the railroad tracks again, the good air and my unwonted
+freedom made me stagger, so that several negroes laughed at me heartily,
+thinking I was drunk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I sat down on a railroad tie and tenderly and solicitously took a brown
+package out of my inside pocket--the brown paper on which I had
+inscribed with enthusiasm the curious songs of jail, cocaine, criminal,
+and prostitute life I had heard during my three months' sojourn behind
+bars.
+
+I looked them over again. With all their smut and filth, they were yet
+full of naïve folk-touches and approximations to real balladry. I was as
+tender of the manuscript as a woman would be with her baby.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sky grew overcast. A rain storm blew up. A heavy wind mixed with
+driving wet ... chilly ... I found shelter under a leaky shed ... was
+soggy and miserable ... even wished, in a weak moment, for the
+comparative comfort of my cell again....
+
+The fast freight I was waiting for came rocking along. I made a run for
+it in the rapidly gathering dusk. I grabbed the bar on one side and made
+a leap for the step, but missed, like a frantic fool, with one
+foot--luckily caught it with the other, or I might have fallen
+underneath--and was aboard, my arms almost wrenched from their sockets.
+
+Not till I had climbed in between the cars on the bumpers did I realise
+that my coat had been torn open and my much-valued songs jostled out.
+
+Without hesitation I hurled myself bodily off the train. My one idea to
+regain the MSS. I landed on my shoulders, saw stars, rolled over and
+over. I groped up and down. And tears rained from my eyes when I
+understood those rhymes were lost forever....
+
+It was midnight before I caught another freight. I climbed wearily into
+an empty box car while the freight was standing still. I was seen. A
+brakeman came to the door and lifted up his lantern, glancing within, I
+was crouching, wet and forlorn, in a corner of the car, waiting for the
+freight to be under way.
+
+"Come on out with you! Hit the grit!" commanded the "shack" grimly.
+
+I rose. I came to the door. I hated him in my heart, but quite simply
+and movingly I recited the story of my imprisonment, ending by asking
+him to let me ride, in the name of God.
+
+He crunched away down the path, his lantern bobbing as he went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All night long I rode ... bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump! All
+night long my head was a-ferment with dreams of the great things I would
+achieve, now that I was free of the shadow of imprisonment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I walked down the streets of Haberford once more, though I was
+leathery and stronger-looking, my adventures had added no meat to my
+bones. I was amused at myself as I walked along more than usually erect,
+for no other reason than to keep my coat-tail well down in back in order
+not to show the hole in the seat of my trousers. As I came down the
+street on which my father and I had lived, an anticipatory pleasure of
+being recognised as a sort of returned Odysseus beat through my veins
+like a drum. But no one saw me who knew me. It hurt me to come home,
+unheralded.
+
+I came to the house where I had dwelt. I pulled the bell. There was no
+answer. I walked around the corner to the telegraph office. I was
+overjoyed to see lean, lanky Phil, the telegraph operator, half
+sleeping, as usual, over the key of his instrument.
+
+"Hel-lo, John Gregory!" he shouted, with glad surprise in his voice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He telephoned my father ... who came over from the works, running with
+gladness. I was immediately taken home. I took three baths that
+afternoon before I felt civilised again....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father had returned to the Composite Works. I was alone in my little
+room, with all my cherished books once more. They had been, I could
+plainly observe, kept orderly and free of dust, against cay home-coming.
+I took down my favourite books, kissing each one of them like a
+sweetheart. Then I read here and there in all of them, observing all the
+old passages I had marked. I lay in all attitudes. Sprawling on the
+floor on my back, on my belly ... on my side ... now with my knees
+crossed....
+
+Whitman, Shakespeare, Scott, Shelley, Byron ... Speke, Burton, Stanley
+... my real comrades!... my real world! Rather a world of books than a
+world of actuality!...
+
+I was so glad to be among my books again that for a month I gave no
+thought to the future. I did nothing but read and study ... except at
+those times when I was talking to people prodigiously of my trip and
+what I had seen and been through. And naturally and deftly I wove huge
+strips of imagination and sheer invention into the woof of every tale or
+anecdote....
+
+I captained ships, saw Chinese slaughtered by the thousands, fought
+bandits on the outskirts of Manila, helped loot the palace of the
+empress in the Sacred City at Pekin ... tales of peril and adventure
+that I had heard others relate at camp-fires, in jail, in the
+forecastle, on the transport, I unhesitatingly appropriated as my own
+experiences.
+
+All the papers printed stories about me. And I was proud about it. And I
+became prouder still when I sold a story in two parts to a New York
+Sunday paper ... I liked the notoriety....
+
+But as usual, the yarns I retailed struck in upon my own imagination,
+too ... just as had my earlier stories of killing Indians. Particularly
+the tale I had related of having seen dead Chinamen in heaps with their
+heads lopped off. A nightmare of this imaginary episode began to come to
+me. And another dream I had--of a huge Boxer, with a cutlass, standing
+over me. And he was about to carve me piecemeal while I lay bound and
+helpless before him. The dream persisted so strongly that, after I
+awoke, I still seemed to see him standing in a corner of my room. And I
+cried aloud. And felt foolish when it brought my father in. So I stopped
+making up adventures, especially the disagreeable ones, because they
+eventually had more effect on me than they did on my auditors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father had changed boarding places ... but, as usual, it was not
+better food, but a little, dark widow that attracted him to that
+boarding house.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Barton was a strange, strong-minded, ignorant man. Hardly able to
+compose a sentence in correct English, he employed educated, but
+unresourceful assistants who furnished the good grammar, while he
+supplied the initiative and original ideas, and increased the influence
+and circulation of his magazine. Also he lived strenuously up to the
+doctrines he taught; fasting, for instance.
+
+Soon after I reached "Perfection City" he launched on his two weeks'
+annual fast. Up in the big house where he lived, in the next town of
+Andersonville (he himself would have been gladder of a mere shack or
+tent like the rest of us--but his wife negated any such idea) Mrs.
+Barton used to taunt and insult him by putting out the best food under
+his nose, during this time.
+
+Mrs. Barton was a terror. She was ever inviting to her house that kind
+of people who know somebody "worth while" or are related to somebody
+who, in their turn, are, perhaps, related to--somebody else!...
+
+In their presence she would patronise Barton by calling him "Stevie!" in
+her drawling, patronising manner....
+
+When the woman came in among the tents and shacks of our "city" she
+would, in speaking with any of us, imply all sorts of mean, insinuating
+things about her reformer-husband....
+
+Barton, they said, met her while on one of his lecture tours....
+
+Their baby ... a little, red object like a boiled lobster ... the
+anonymous, undistinguished creatures all babies are at that time--the
+mother used to bring it in among us and coo and coo over it so
+ridiculously that we made her behaviour a joke among us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Barton's secretary was a beautiful, gentle, large-eyed girl ... wholly
+feminine ... soft-voiced ... as a reaction from the nagging of his wife,
+from her blatancy and utter lack of sympathy with any of his projects,
+he insensibly drifted into a relationship closer and closer, with this
+girl ... they used to take long walks into the pines together ... and be
+observed coming back slowly out of the sunset ... hand in hand ... to
+drop each other's hands, when they considered that the observing line of
+vision had been reached.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lying under my huge army tent, by the shore of pretty little Lake Emily,
+I dreamed long and often, in the hush of starry midnight, of
+reconstructing the life of the whole world--especially the love-life
+between men and women.
+
+Shelley was my God, not Christ. Shelley's notes to _Queen Mab_ were my
+creed, as his poetry and Whitman's furnished me my Bible. Through them I
+would reform the world!
+
+I had not realised then (as Shelley did not till his death), the
+terrific inertia of people, their content, even, with the cramping and
+conventional ideas and beliefs that hold them in unconscious slavery....
+
+I think that summer I learned Shelley and Whitman by heart.
+
+And Keats was more than my creed. He comprised my life!
+
+Day by day I took care of my body, gaining in weight, filling out the
+hollows in my face, till I had grown into a presentable young man. For
+the first time in my life I knew the meaning of perfect health. Every
+atom of my blood tingled with natural happiness as I have felt it in
+later days, under the stimulation of good wine.
+
+No coffee, no tea, no beefsteak, no alcohol....
+
+On that summer's ideal living I built the foundation of the health and
+strength, that, long after, I finally acquired as a permanent
+possession.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Stephen Barton and I had many interesting talks together. With the
+cultural background of Europe he might have been a Rousseau or a
+Phalanisterian. As it was, he ran a "natural life" magazine which,
+though crude, benefited hundreds of people. What though it showed
+pictures of stupid men and women revealing, in poses rivalling the
+contortionist, their physical development acquired through his methods.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We would collect many people about us, to serve as a nucleus from which
+the future society of men and women would expand ... we would all live
+together as nearly naked as possible, because that was, after all, the
+only pure thing ... as Art showed, in its painting and sculpture. We
+would make our livings by the manufacture of all sorts of exercising
+apparatus and health-foods....
+
+And so the world would be leavened with the new idea ... and men and
+women and little children would wander forth from the great, unclean,
+insanitary cities and live in clusters of pretty cottages ... naked, in
+good weather,--in bad, clothed for warmth and comfort, but not for
+shame. And the human body would become holy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile the petty, local fight had started which was to disrupt this
+hope of Barton's, and thwart its fulfillment forever.
+
+The town of Andersonville became jealous of the town of Cottswold
+because the latter handled most of the mail of our city and thereby had
+achieved the position of third or fourth class postoffice--I don't know
+exactly which.
+
+The struggle commenced when the two lone policemen of Andersonville
+began to arrest us--men and women--when we walked into their town for
+provisions, clad in our bathing suits ... later on, we were forbidden to
+run for exercise, in our bathing suits, on the fine, macadamised road
+that passed not far from our dwellings ... it shocked the motorists.
+
+Yet people came from far and near, just to be shocked. That seems to be
+the chief, most delightful, and only lawfully indulged emotion of the
+Puritan.
+
+Barton summoned us to a meeting, one night, and we held a long palaver
+over the situation. We decided to become more cautious, in spite of a
+few hotheads who advised defiance to the hilt....
+
+And the beautiful girl that possessed such fine breasts could no longer
+row about on our little lake, naked to the waist. And we were requested
+to go far in among the trees for our nude sun-baths.
+
+The more radical of us moved entirely into the woods, despite the sand
+flies....
+
+Then the affair simmered down to quietness--till the New York _World_
+and the New York _Journal_ sent out their reporters.... After that, what
+with the lurid and insinuating stories printed, the state authorities
+began to look into the matter--and found no harm in us.
+
+But the Andersonville officials were out for blood. Cottswold was
+growing too fast for their injured civic pride and vanity.
+
+"Can't you divide your mail between the two towns, and make them both
+third or fourth class or whatever-it-is postoffice towns?" I asked
+Barton, after he had given me the simple explanation of the whole
+affair.
+
+"No--for if I took anything away from Cottswold and added it to
+Andersonville, then the Cottswold authorities would become my
+adversaries, too ... the only thing I can do," he added, "is what I
+meant to do all along,--as soon as our 'city' has grown important
+enough--have 'Perfection City' made a postoffice."
+
+"And then make enemies of both towns at once?"
+
+He threw up his hands in despair and walked away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having quit work with the gang that was laying out the streets of the
+future city through the pines, I was entirely out of the few dollars my
+several weeks' work had enabled me to save ... though but little was
+needed to exist by, in that community of simple livers ... my procuring
+my tent free had rendered me quite independent....
+
+One afternoon Barton met me on the dam-head.
+
+"Come on in swimming with me ... I have something to talk with you
+about," he said.
+
+We swam around and talked, as nonchalantly as two other men would have
+done, sitting in their club.
+
+"How would you like to work for me again?"
+
+"What is it you want me to work at?"
+
+"I need a cook for my nature restaurant ... can you cook?"
+
+I thought. I knew his present cook, MacGregor, the Scot, and I didn't
+want to do him out of a job. Besides, I didn't know how to cook.
+
+The first objection Barton read in my face.
+
+"MacGregor is quitting ... I'm not firing him."
+
+"All right ... I'll take the job."
+
+Our conference over, we had climbed out to the top of the dam, slid
+over, and were now standing beneath. The water galloped down in a snowy
+cataract of foam, as we topped off our swim with the heavy "shower-bath"
+that was like a massage in its pummelling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MacGregor good-naturedly stayed an extra week, saying he'd show me the
+run of things. Secretly he tried to teach me how to cook....
+
+As the cooking was not all of the "nature" order, but involved preparing
+food for a horde of people we called "outsiders" who were employed in
+Barton's publishing plant, I would have to prepare meat and bake bread
+and make tea and coffee....
+
+Barton confessed to me that a food-compromise was distasteful to him.
+But he could not coerce. While lecturing about the country it was often,
+even with him, "eat beefsteaks or starve!"
+
+MacGregor was a professional Scotchman, just as there are professional
+Irishmen, Englishmen and professional Southern Gentlemen ... every
+Scotchman is a professional Scotchman ... but there is always something
+pleasant and poetic about his being so ... it is not as it is with the
+others--whose "professionalism" generally bears an unpleasant reek.
+
+MacGregor had sandy, scanty hair, a tiny white shadow of a moustache,
+kindly, weak eyes, a forehead prematurely wrinkled with minute,
+horizontal lines. Burns ... of course ... he knew and quoted every line
+to me. And _Sentimental Tommy_ and _Tommy and Grizel_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a week I was left in full possession of the nature restaurant.
+
+Barton had been rendered slightly paring and mean, in matters of
+money,--by smooth individuals who came to him, glowing with words of
+what they could effect for him, in this or that project--individuals who
+soon decamped, leaving Barton the poorer, except in experience.
+
+In return he had to retrench. But the retrenchments fell in the place
+where the penny, not the dollar, lay.
+
+He practised economy on me. He gave me only ten dollars a week, board
+and room free, as cook; and also I was to wait on the diners, as well as
+prepare the meals.
+
+Nevertheless the fault for having two jobs at once thrust on me, rested
+partly with me: when he asked me if I was able to do both, I fell into a
+foolish, boasting mood and said "yes."
+
+MacGregor figured out my menu for me a week ahead, the day he left:
+"Anyhow, you'll only last a week," he joked.
+
+The night before the first breakfast I lay awake all night, worrying ...
+hadn't I better just sneak away with daylight?... no, I must return to
+Mt. Hebron in the fall. Though all I wanted to return for was to show
+the school, that, in spite of my spindly legs, I could win my "H" in
+track athletics.
+
+I must make good at this job, and save ... my grandmother, who had sent
+me money the previous year, I must not call on her again. And I did not
+count on my father ... for he was strenuously in the saddle to a grass
+widow, the one who had lured him to change boarding houses, and she was
+devouring his meagre substance like the Scriptural locust.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That first breakfast was a nightmare. I "practised breakfast" from three
+o'clock till six ... by six I had started another breakfast, and by
+seven, after having spoiled and burned much food, I was tolerably ready
+for customers ... who seemed, at that hour, to storm the place.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is not necessary to go into detail. In three days I was through. And
+I had my first fight with Barton.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was back in my army tent once more, free, with my Shelley, my Keats,
+my manuscript....
+
+In despair of ever returning to Hebron, once more I lay under starry
+nights, dreaming poetry and comparing myself to all the Great Dead....
+
+With the top of the tent pulled back to let the stars in, I lay beneath
+the gigantic, marching constellations overhead--under my mosquito
+netting--and wrote poems under stress of great inspiration ... at times
+it seemed that Shelley was with me in my tent--a slight, grey form ...
+and little, valiant, stocky Keats, too.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After my quarrel with Barton, he tried to oust me from that desirable
+site the Bishop's wife had turned over to me ... indeed, he tried to
+persuade me to leave the colony. But I would not stir.
+
+There was a young fellow in the "City" named Vinton.... Vinton was the
+strong man of the place. He spent three hours every morning exercising,
+in minute detail, every muscle of his body ... and he had developed
+beautiful muscles, each one of which stood out, like a turn in a rope,
+of itself.
+
+Vinton was sent to oust me, by force if need be.
+
+I really was afraid of him when he strode up to me, as I lay there
+reading the _Revolt of Islam_ again.
+
+With a big voice he began to hint, mysteriously, that it would be wise
+for me to clear out. I showed him that I held a clear title and right to
+sojourn there till Christmas, if I chose to, as the bishop's wife had
+paid for the site till that time, and had then transferred the use of
+the location to me. I showed him her letter ... with the Tallahassee
+postmark.
+
+His only answer was, that he knew nothing about that ... that Barton
+wanted the place, and, that if I wouldn't vacate peaceably--and he
+looked me in the eyes like some great, calm animal.
+
+Though my heart was pounding painfully, against, it seemed, the very
+roof of my mouth, I compelled my eyes not to waver, but to look fiercely
+into his....
+
+"Are you going to start packing?"
+
+"No, I am not going to start packing."
+
+"I can break your neck with one twist," and he illustrated that feat
+with a turn of one large hand in the air.
+
+He came slowly in, head down, as if to pick me up and throw me down.
+
+I waited till he was close, then gave him an upward rip with all my
+might, a blow on the forehead that made the blood flow, and staggered
+him with consternation. To keep myself still at white heat, I showered
+blows on him. To my surprise, he fell back.
+
+"Wait--wait," he protested in a small voice, "I--I was just fooling."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Vinton left, my blood still pouring through my veins in a
+triumphant glow, I sat on the ground by the side of my tent-floor and
+composed a poem....
+
+That afternoon Barton's office boy was sent to me, as an emissary of
+peace.
+
+"The boss wants to see you in his office."
+
+"Tell your boss that my office is down here. If he wants to see me he
+can come here."
+
+The boy scurried away. I was now looked upon as a desperate man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And I was happy. I sang at the top of my voice, an old ballad about
+Captain John Smith, so that Barton could hear it through the open window
+of his office....
+
+  "And the little papooses dig holes in the sand ...
+  _Vive le Capitaine John!_..."
+
+I leaped into the lake, without even my gee-string on, and swam far out,
+singing....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Late that evening, Barton came to my tent ... very gently and sweetly
+... he no longer called me John or Johnnie ... I was now Mr. Gregory. He
+asked me, if he rented the plot back from me, would I go in peace? I
+replied, no, I meant to stay there till the middle of September, when
+the fall term opened at Mt. Hebron.
+
+Then he asked me, would I just join forces with him,--since we must put
+the movement above personalities....
+
+We had a long talk about life and "Nature" ideals. The man showed all
+his soul, all his struggles, to me. And I saw his real greatness and was
+moved greatly. And I informed him I would antagonise him no longer,
+that, though I would not give up the desirable site, otherwise, I would
+help him all I could.
+
+Then he said he would be glad to have me stay, and we shook hands
+warmly, the moisture of feeling shining in our eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As the time for my return to school drew near, I was in fine physical
+condition, better than ever before in my life. I was still somewhat
+thin, but now it could be called slenderness, not thinness. And I was
+surprised at the laughing, healthy, sun-browned look of my face.
+
+I felt a confidence in myself I had never known before....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had a flirtation with a pretty, freckle-faced girl. She worked in
+Barton's "factory," and she used to come down to my tent where I sat
+reading, with only my trunks on,--during the noon hour,--and ask me to
+read poetry aloud to her. And I read Shelley. She would draw shyly
+closer to me, sending me into a visible tremour that made me ashamed of
+myself.
+
+At times, as we read, her fair, fine hair would brush my cheek and send
+a shiver of fire through me. But I still knew nothing about women. I
+never even offered to kiss her.
+
+But when she was away from me, at night specially, I would go into long,
+luxurious, amorous imaginations over her and the possession of her, and
+I would dream of loving her, and of having a little cottage and
+children....
+
+But words and elegant, burning phrases are never enough for a woman.
+
+In a week I noticed her going by on the arm of a mill-hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And, broke again, I wrote to my grandmother that I must have fifty
+dollars to get back to school on. And, somehow, she scraped it together
+and sent it to me. My first impulse was to be ashamed of myself and
+start to return it. Then I kept it. For, after all, it was for poetry's
+sake.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the train to Hebron, as I walked up the car to my seat, health
+shining in my smooth, clear face and skin, the women and girls gave me
+approving, friendly glances, and I was happy.
+
+A summer of control from unhealthy habits had done this for me, a summer
+of life, naked, in the open air, plus exercise. I had learned a great
+lesson. To Barton I owe it that I am still alive, vigorously alive, not
+crawlingly ... but I suffered several slumps before I attained and held
+my present physique. For the world and life afford complications not
+found in "Perfection City."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The school hill lay before my eyes again. From it spread on all sides
+the wonderful Connecticut valley. Up and down the paths to the dining
+hall, the buildings in which classes were held, the Chapel crowning the
+topmost crest, wandered groups of boys in their absurd, postage-stamp
+caps, their peg-top trousers, their wide, floppy raglan coats.
+
+I was a senior now. At first my change in bodily build and bettered
+health rendered me hardly recognisable to my friends.
+
+The very first day I reached Hebron again I was out on the wide, oval
+field, lacing around the track. In a month would come the big track-meet
+and I was determined this time, to win enough points to earn me my "H."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Principal Stanton sent for me, the second day after my arrival.
+
+"I wanted to have a long talk with you before you got settled, Gregory."
+
+His steely, blue eyes gleamed through his gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
+
+"Sit down."
+
+And we had a talk lasting over an hour ... about religion mainly. He was
+surprised to learn that I knew a lot about the early Church fathers, had
+read Newman, and understood the Oxford controversy ... had read many of
+the early English divines....
+
+"Gregory," he cried, putting his hand on my knee, "what a power for God
+you would be, if you would only give over your eccentricities and
+become a Christian ... a chap with your magnetism--in spite of your
+folly!--"
+
+He impressed on me the fact, that, now I was a senior, more would be
+expected of me ... that the younger boys would look up to me, as they
+did to all seniors, and I must be more careful of my deportment before
+them ... my general conduct....
+
+He asked me what I intended making of myself.
+
+"A poet!" I exclaimed.
+
+He spread his hands outward with a gesture of despair.
+
+"Of course, one can write poetry if necessary ... but what career are
+you choosing?"
+
+"The writing of poetry."
+
+"But, my dear Gregory, one can't make a living by that ... and one must
+live."
+
+"Why must one live?" I replied fervently, "did Christ ever say 'One must
+live'?"
+
+"Gregory, you are impossible," laughed Stanton heartily, "but we're all
+rather fond of you ... and we want you to behave, and try to graduate.
+Though we can't tell just what you might do in after-life ... whether
+you'll turn out a credit to the School or not."
+
+"Professor Stanton, I have a favour to ask of you before I go," I asked,
+standing.
+
+"Yes?" and he raised his eyebrows.
+
+"I want to know if I can have that room alone, over the platform, in
+Recitation Hall."
+
+"You'll have to ask Professor Dunn about that ... he has charge of
+room-transfers ... but why can't you room as the other students do?... I
+don't know whether it is good for you, to let you live by yourself ...
+you're already different enough from the other boys ... what you need is
+more human companionship, Gregory, not less."
+
+"I want to do a lot of writing. I want to be alone to think. I plan to
+read Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament all through, again, this
+winter." ... This was a sop to his religious sentiment. I related how I
+had first read the New Testament in the Greek, while on a cattle-boat,
+in the China Seas....
+
+"Gregory, you're quite mad ... but you're a smooth one, too!" his eyes
+gleamed, amused, behind his glasses....
+
+"And I want to write a lot of poems drawn from the parables of the New
+Testament"--though, not till that minute had such an idea entered my
+head....
+
+When I was admitted to the study of Professor Dunn and sat down waiting
+for him among his antique busts and rows of Latin books, I had
+formulated further plans to procure what I desired....
+
+He came in, heavily dignified, like a dark, stocky Roman, grotesque in
+modern dress, lacking the toga.
+
+I told him of my New Testament idea ... and added to it, as an
+afterthought, that I also wanted to prosecute a special study of the
+lyrics of Horace. Though he explained to me that Horace belonged to the
+college curriculum, his heart expanded. Horace was his favourite
+poet--which, of course, I knew....
+
+I got my room.
+
+I borrowed a wheelbarrow from the barn, and wheeled my trunk down to
+Recitation Hall, singing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What a hypocrite I had been! But I had obtained what I sought--a room
+alone. But now I must, in truth, study the Greek Testament and
+Horace....
+
+I figured out that if I enrolled for several extra Bible courses the
+Faculty would be easier on me with my other studies, and let me cut some
+of them out entirely.
+
+To make myself even more "solid," I gave out that I had been persuaded
+to Christianity so strongly, of a sudden, that I contemplated studying
+for the ministry. I even wrote my grandmother that this was what I
+intended to do. And her simple, pious letter in return, prayerful with
+thanks to God for my conversion so signal--in secret cut me to the
+heart....
+
+But it gave me a temporary pleasure, now, to be looked upon as "safe."
+To be openly welcomed at prayer-meetings ... I acted, how I acted, the
+ardent convert ... and how frightened I was, at myself, to find that, at
+times, I believed that I believed!...
+
+My former back-sliding was forgiven me.
+
+And the passage of Tennyson about "one honest doubt" being more than
+half the creeds, was quoted in my favour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Field-day!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I entered for the two-mile, to be run off in the morning ... for the
+half-mile, the first thing in the afternoon ... the mile, which was to
+be the last event, excepting the hammer-throw. My class, in a body, had
+urged me to enter for all the "events" I could ... when the delegation
+came, I welcomed them, with gratified self-importance, to my solitary
+room. I invited them in, and they sat about ... on my single chair ...
+my bed ... the floor....
+
+"You see, Gregory, if you win two of these races, we'll get the banner
+that goes to the class that makes the greatest number of points ... you
+must do it for us ... we have never yet won the banner, and this is our
+last chance."
+
+They left, solemnly shaking my hand, as over a matter of vast
+importance....
+
+Hurrying into my track suit, I went out to the Oval. It was three days
+before the meet.
+
+Dunn was there, with several others, measuring out distances and
+chalking lanes.
+
+With all the delicate joy of an aesthete I took my slim, spiked running
+shoes. I patted them with affection as I pushed my feet into them. I
+removed the corks from the shining spikes....
+
+I struck out with long, low-running, greyhound strides ... around and
+around ... the wind streamed by me....
+
+I knew I was being watched admiringly. I could see it out of the tail of
+my eyes. So I threw forward in a final sprint, that brought me up, my
+eyes stinging with the salt of sweat, my legs aching ... my chest
+heaving....
+
+"Good boy," complimented Dunn, coming up to me, and patting me on the
+back ... Gregory, I'm _for_ you. I'm so glad you've come out a clean,
+fine, clear-cut Christian."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For the two-mile, the half, and the mile, each--a single athlete was
+training, his heart set on the record. It seemed impossible that I
+should win all three races. Yet I did.
+
+I was all nerves and sinews for the two-mile. The night before I had
+lain awake. I could not sleep so I read a poor translation of the odes
+of Pindar. But behind the bad verbiage of the translator, I fed on the
+shining spirit of the poetry. With Pindar's music in me, I was ready for
+the two-mile.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tensely we leaned forward, at the scratch. I had my plan of campaign
+evolved. I would leap to the fore, at the crack of the pistol, set a
+terrific pace, sprint the first quarter, and then settle into my long,
+steady stride, and trust to my good lung power ... for I had paid
+special attention to my lung-development, at "Perfection City."
+
+I felt a melting fire of nervousness running through my body, a
+weakness.
+
+I bowed my face in my hands and prayed ... both to Christ and to Apollo
+... in deadly seriousness ... perhaps all the gods really were....
+
+The gun cracked. Off I leapt, in the lead ... in the first lap the field
+fell behind.
+
+"Steady, Gregory, steady!" advised Dunn, in a low voice, as I flashed
+into the second....
+
+I thought I had distanced everybody ... but it chilled me to hear the
+soft swish, swish of another runner ... glancing rapidly behind, I saw a
+swarthy lad, a fellow with a mop of wiry, black hair, whom we called
+"The Hick" (for he had never been anywhere but on a farm)--going stride
+for stride, right in my steps, just avoiding my heels....
+
+Run as I might, I couldn't shake him off....
+
+Every time I swept by, the crowd would set up a shout ... but now they
+were encouraging "The hick" more than me. This made me furious, hurt my
+egotism. My lungs were burning with effort ... I threw out into a longer
+stride. I glanced back again. Still the chap was lumbering along ... but
+easily, so easily ... almost without an effort....
+
+"Good God, am I going to be beaten?" I sensed a terrific sprinting-power
+in the following, chunky body of my antagonist.
+
+There were only two more laps ... the rest of the field were a lap and a
+half behind, fighting for third place amongst themselves ... jeered at
+by the instinctive cruelty of the onlookers....
+
+My ears perceived a cessation of the following swish, the tread.
+Simultaneously I heard a great shout go up. I dared not look back,
+however, to see what was happening--I threw myself forward at that
+shout, fearing the worst, and ran myself blind....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Take it easy, you have it!"
+
+"Shut up! he's after the record."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The shrill screaming of the girls who had come over, in a white,
+linen-starched wagon load, from Fairfield, gave me my last spurt.
+Expecting every moment to hear my antagonist grind past me, on the
+cinders, I sped up the home-stretch.
+
+The air was swimming in a gold mist. I felt arms under mine, and I was
+carried off to the senior tent, by my class-mates....
+
+Yet I am convinced that I would have been beaten, if my rival had not
+had the string that held his trunks up, break. He had sunk down on the
+track, when they had fallen, not to show his nakedness ... and, pulling
+them up, and holding them, amid great laughter, he had still won second
+ribbon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I won the second race--the half-mile, without the humour of such a
+fateful intervention. It was my winning of the first that won me the
+second. I had just equalled the two-mile record, in the first....
+
+I ran that half, blindly, like a mad man. I was drunk with joy over my
+popularity ... for when I had gone into the big dining room for lunch,
+all the boys had shouted and cheered and roared, and pounded the dishes
+with their knives.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Now, Gregory, you've just got to take the mile away from Learoyd ...
+he's a junior ... you've just _got_ to!... besides, if you don't ...
+there's Flammer has lost the broad jump ... and we won't win the class
+banner after all."
+
+Learoyd was a smallish, golden-faced, downy-headed boy ... almost an
+albino.... I had seen him run ... he ran low to the ground, in flashes,
+like some sort of shore-bird.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the class-tent, alone. Dunn had driven my class out, where they had
+been massaging and kneading my legs ... which trembled and tottered
+under me, from the excessive use they had already undergone.
+
+I sat down and put my head between my knees, and groaned. Then I
+straightened out my right leg and rubbed it, because a cramp was
+knotting it.
+
+"Hello, Gregory!"
+
+The tent-flap opened. The athletic director poked his head in.
+
+"Come on, Gregory, we're waiting for you."
+
+"Wait a minute, Smythe ... I want to pray," I replied simply. Reverently
+he withdrew ... impressed ... awed....
+
+I flung myself on my face.
+
+"Look here, God, I'll really believe in you, if you give me this last
+race ... it will be a miracle, God, if you do this for me, and I will
+believe in your Bible, despite my common sense ... despite history ...
+despite Huxley and Voltaire," then, going as far as I could--"yes, and
+despite Shelley ... dear God, dear Christ, please do what I have asked."
+
+My hand struck on a bottle of witch hazel as I rose. Impulsively, I
+drank off half the contents. It sent a warmth through me. I straightened
+up, invigorated.
+
+"Come on, Gregory ... what's the matter?" it was Dunn, protesting,
+"we'll have to run off the mile without you, if you don't come."
+
+"I'm ready ... I'm coming."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All that I had in my head, when the pistol cracked, was to _run!_ ...
+all I felt about me was only a pair of mad legs.
+
+I licked out, neither seeing nor caring ... almost feeling my way along
+the rim of the track with my toes, as I ran--as if I had racing eyes in
+them. There was a continuous roar that rose and fell like the sea. But I
+neither saw nor heeded. I just ran and ran.
+
+On the home-stretch a fellow came breast to breast with me. It was
+Learoyd ... running low like a swallow skimming the ground. But it
+didn't worry me. I was calm, just floating along, it seemed to me.
+
+I saw Dunn throwing his camera into the air, in the forefront of the
+seething crowd. He was crying for me to come on. The camera fell in a
+smashed heap, unregarded.
+
+Barely, with my chest flung out, I took the tape ... trailing off ... I
+ran half a lap more, with my class leaping grotesquely and shouting,
+streaming across field after me--before I had my senses back again, and
+realised that the race was over.
+
+"Did I win? Did I win? Did I win?" I asked again and again.
+
+"Yes, you won!"
+
+I was being carried about on their shoulders.
+
+"A little more, and we'd have to take you over to the hospital,"
+commented Smythe, as he looked at me, while I lay prone on my back,
+resting, under shelter of the tent.
+
+"Who--who used up all this witch-hazel?" he asked of the rubbers....
+
+I hid my face in the grass, pretending to groan from the strain I had
+just undergone. Instead, I was smothering a laugh at myself ... at the
+school ... at all things....
+
+"God and witch-hazel," I wanted to shout hysterically, "hurrah for God
+and witch-hazel."
+
+Then I rose shakily to my feet, and, flinging myself loose from those
+who offered to help me, I ran at a good clip, in my sneakers, dangling
+my running shoes affectionately--to my solitary room ... with a bearing
+that boasted, "why, I could run all those three races over again, one
+right after the other, right now ... no, I'm not tired ... not the least
+bit tired!"
+
+That night, in the crowded dining hall, the ovation for me was
+tremendous.
+
+"I'll smash life just like those races," I boasted, in my heart.
+
+But my triumph and eminence were not to last long.
+
+To be looked up to at Mt. Hebron you had to lead a distasteful,
+colourless life of hypocrisy and piety such as I have seldom seen
+anywhere before. Under cover of their primitive Christianity I never
+found more pettiness. First, you prayed and hymn-sung yourself into
+favour, and then indulged in sanctimonious intrigue to keep yourself
+where you had arrived.
+
+I could not stand my half self-hypnotised hypocrisy any longer. A spirit
+of mischief and horseplay awoke in me. I perpetrated a hundred
+misdemeanours, most of them unpunishable elsewhere, but of serious
+import in schools and barracks, where discipline is to be maintained. I
+stayed out of bounds late at night ... I cut classes continually. I
+visited Fairfield ... and a factory town further south, where I lounged
+about the streets all day, talking with people.
+
+Professor Stanton, not to my surprise, sent for me again.
+
+Yet I was amazed at what he knew about me, amazed, too, to discover the
+extent of the school's complicated system of pious espionage that
+checked up the least move of every student.
+
+Stanton brought out a sheet of paper with dates and facts of my
+misbehaviour that could not be controverted....
+
+"So we will have to ask you to withdraw from the school, unless you
+right-about-face ... otherwise, we have had enough of you ... in fact,
+if it had not been for your great promise--your talents!--"
+
+I waved the compliment aside rather wearily.
+
+"I think that if this school has had enough of me, I have had about
+enough of the school."
+
+I expressed, in plain terms, my opinion of their espionage system.
+
+"Your omnipotent God must be hard put to it when He has to rely on the
+help of such sneakiness to keep His Book (and I couldn't help laughing
+at the literary turn I gave to my denunciation) before the public!"
+
+Stanton's eyes flamed behind their glasses.
+
+"Gregory, I shall have to ask you to leave the Hill as soon as you can
+get your things together," he shouted.
+
+"--which can hardly be soon enough for me," I replied.
+
+"Come, my boy," continued Stanton, as if ashamed at himself for his
+outburst, and putting his hand on my shoulder, "you're a good sort of
+boy, after all ... you have so much in you, so much energy and power ...
+why don't you put it to right uses?... after your father has made such
+sacrifices for you, I hate to see you run off to a ravelled edge like
+this.
+
+"Even yet, if you'll only promise to behave and preserve a proper
+dignity in the presence of the other students--even yet we would be glad
+to have you stay and graduate ... and we might be able to procure you a
+scholarship at Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Brown. Lang says you put
+yourself into the spirit of Homer like an old Greek, always doing more
+work than the requirements,--and Dunn says, that you show him things in
+Vergil that he never saw before."
+
+Moved, I shook my head sadly. I hated myself for liking these people.
+
+"If you mean that I should be like other people ... I just can't ...
+it's neither pose nor affectation." (He had intimated that some of the
+professors alleged that as the core of the trouble.) "I guess I don't
+belong here ... yes, it would be better for me to go away!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night, unobserved, I stole into the chapel that stood on the Crest
+of the hill, against the infinite stars.
+
+I spent nearly all the night in the chapel, alone. The place was full of
+things. I felt there all the gods that ever were worshipped ... and all
+the great spirits of mankind. And I perceived fully how silly, weak,
+grotesque, and vain I was; and yet, how big and wonderful, it would be
+to swim counter, as I meant, to the huge, swollen, successful currents
+of the commercial, bourgeois practicality of present-day America.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I pinned up a sign on the bulletin board in the hall, in rhyme,
+announcing, that, that afternoon, at four o'clock, John Gregory would
+hold an auction of his books of poetry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My room was crowded with amused students. I mounted the table, like an
+auctioneer, while they sat on my cot and on the floor, and crowded the
+door.
+
+At first the boys jeered and pushed. But when I started selling my copy
+of Byron and telling about his life, they fell into a quiet, and
+listened. After I had made that talk, they clapped me. Byron went for a
+dollar, fetching the largest price. I sold my Shelley, my Blake, my
+Herrick, my Marvell, my Milton ... all....
+
+My Keats I could not bring myself to sell. I kept that like a treasure.
+What I could not sell I gave away.
+
+My entire capital was ten dollars ... one suit of clothes ... a change
+of underwear ... two shirts. I discarded my trunk and crammed what
+little I owned into my battered suitcase.
+
+That night, the story of my dismissal from school having travelled about
+from mouth to mouth, and the tale of my poets' auction--the boys
+cheered me, as I came into the dining hall--cheered me partly
+affectionately, partly derisively.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning mail I received a letter from the New York _Independent_,
+a weekly literary magazine. Dr. Ward, the editor, informed me that I
+possessed genuine poetic promise, and he was taking two of the poems I
+had recently submitted to him, for publication in his magazine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Like the vagrant I was, I considered myself indefinitely fixed, with
+that ten dollars. I went to Boston ... hung about the library and the
+waterfront ... stayed in cheap lodging houses for a few days--and found
+myself on the tramp again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I freighted it to New York, where I landed, grimy and full of coal-dust.
+And I sought out my uncle who lived in the Bronx.
+
+I appeared, opportunely, around supper time. I asked him if he was not
+glad to see me. He grimaced a yes, but wished that I would stop tramping
+about and fit in, in life, somewhere.... He observed that my shirt was
+filthy and that I must take a bath immediately and put on a clean one of
+his.
+
+In Boston I had ditched everything but the clothes I wore ... and my
+suit was wrecked with hard usage.
+
+"Get work at anything," advised my Uncle Jim, "and save up till you can
+rig yourself out new. You'll never accomplish anything looking the way
+you do. Your editor at the _Independent_ will not be impressed and think
+it romantic, if you go to see him the way you are ... ragged poets are
+out of date."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At "Perfection City" I had made the acquaintance of a boy, whom,
+curiously enough, I have left out of that part of the narrative that has
+to deal with the Nature Colony. He was a millionaire's son: his father,
+a friend of Barton's, had sent him out to "Perfection City" with a
+tutor. His name was Milton Saunders. He was a fine, generous lad, but
+open as the weather to every influence ... especially to any which was
+not for his good.
+
+One morning I saw him actually remove his own shoes and give them to a
+passing tramp who needed them worse than he.
+
+"That's nothing, dad's money will be sufficient to buy me a new pair,"
+he explained, going back to his tent, in his bare feet, his socks in his
+hand--to put on his sneakers while he hastened to the shoe store in
+Andersonville.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Milton had urged me to be sure to come and see him if I chanced to be in
+New York.
+
+I now called him on the telephone and was cordially invited to visit
+him, and that, immediately.
+
+The servants eyed me suspiciously and sent me up by the tradesmen's
+elevator. Milton flew into a fury over it. His friend was his friend, no
+matter how he was dressed--he wanted them to remember that, in the
+future!
+
+He brought out a bottle of wine, had a fine luncheon set before me. I
+went for the food, but pushed the wine aside. He drank the bottle
+himself. I was still, for my part, clinging to shreds of what I had
+learned at "Perfection City." ...
+
+He rushed me to his tailor. I had told him of my first poems' being
+accepted.
+
+"Of course, you must be better dressed when you go to see the editor."
+
+The tailor looked me over, in whimsical astonishment. He vowed that he
+could not have a suit ready for me by ten the next morning, as Milton
+was ordering.
+
+"Then you have a suit here for me about ready."
+
+"It is ready now."
+
+"Alter it immediately to fit Mr. Gregory ... we're about the same
+height."
+
+The tailor said _that_ could be done.
+
+For the rest of the day Milton and I peregrinated from one saloon
+back-room to another ... in each of which the boy seemed to be well
+known. He drank liquor while I imbibed soft drinks ... the result was
+better for him than for me. I soon had the stomach-ache, while he only
+seemed a little over-exhilarated.
+
+At his door-step he shoved a ten dollar bill into my hand. I demurred,
+but accepted it.
+
+"I'd hand you more," he apologised, "but the Old Man never lets me have
+any more than just so much at a time ... says I waste it anyhow ... but
+I manage to do a lot of charging," he chuckled.
+
+"Have you a place to stay to-night?"
+
+"Yes ... I have an uncle who lives uptown."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I showed up at my uncle's, that night, I showed him my new rig-out,
+and explained to him how I came into possession of it. But he did not
+accept my explanation. Instead, he shook his head in mournful
+dubiousness ... indicating that he doubted my story, and insinuating
+that I had not come by my suit honestly; as well as by the new dress
+suitcase Saunders had presented me with, and the shirts and
+underclothing.
+
+"God knows where you'll end up, Johnny."
+
+After supper Uncle Jim grew restive again, and he came out frankly with
+the declaration that he did not want me to stay overnight in the house,
+but to pack on out to Haberford to my father ... or, since I must stay
+in town to see my editor (again that faint, dubious smile), I might stay
+the night at a Mills Hotel ... since my rich friend had given me money,
+too ... besides my aunt was not so very strong and I put a strain on
+her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Mills Hotel I was perched in a cell-like corner room, high up.
+The room smelt antiseptic. Nearby, Broadway roared and spread in
+wavering blazons of theatric gold. I looked down upon it, dreaming of my
+future fame, my great poetic and literary career ... my plays that would
+some day be announced down there, in great shining sign-letters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sound of an employée's beating with a heavy stick, from door to iron
+door, to wake up all the Mills Hotel patrons, bestirred me at an early
+hour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I meditated my next move, and now resolved on another try at community
+life.... The Eos Artwork Studios, founded in the little New York State
+town of Eos, by the celebrated eccentric author and lecturer, Roderick
+Spalton.
+
+I was in such impatience to reach Eos that I did not cross over to
+Haberford, to drop in on my father. I feared also that my leaving school
+the second time, "under a cloud," would not win me an enthusiastic
+welcome from him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By nightfall I was well on my way to Eos, sitting in an empty box-car. I
+had with me my new clothes--which I wore--and my suitcase, a foolish way
+to tramp. But I thought I might as well appear before Roderick Spalton
+with a little more "presence" than usual. For I intended spending some
+time in his community.
+
+Characteristically, I had gone to the office of the _Independent_, had
+not found the editor in, that morning, and had chafed at the idea of
+waiting till the afternoon, when I might have had a fruitful talk with a
+man who was interested in the one real thing in my life--my poetry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I reached Rochester safely. It was on the stretch to Buffalo that I paid
+dearly for being well-dressed and carrying a suitcase ... as I lay
+asleep on the floor of the box-car I was set upon by three tramps, who
+pinioned my arms and legs before I was even fully awake. I was forced to
+strip off my clothes, after wrestling and fighting as hard as I could. I
+floated off into the stars from a blow on the head....
+
+When I came to, I was trembling violently both with cold and from the
+nervous shock. My assailants had made off with my suitcase ... I was in
+nothing but my B.V.D.'s and shirt. Even my Keats had been stolen. But
+beside me I found the ragged, cast-off suit of one of the tramps ... and
+my razor, which had dropped out of my coat pocket, while the tramp had
+changed clothes, and not been noticed. Gingerly, I put on the ragged
+suit....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I stood in front of the Eos Artwork Studios.
+
+I saw a boy coming down the path from one of the buildings.
+
+"Would you tell me please where I can find the Master?" I asked,
+reverently.
+
+The boy gave me a long stare.
+
+"Oh, you mean Mr. Spalton?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's him ... there ... choppin' wood."
+
+There was a young man and an older one, both chopping wood, in the back
+of a building, but in fairly open view.
+
+I walked to where they worked with both inward and outward trepidation,
+for, to me, Spalton was one of the world's great men.
+
+Just as I reached the spot, the younger of the two threw down his axe.
+
+"So long, Dad! now I'll go into the shop and tend to those letters."
+
+I stood in the presence of the great Roderick Spalton himself, the man
+who, in his _Brief Visits to the Homes of Famous Folk_, had written more
+meatily and wisely than any American author since Emerson ... the man
+whose magazine called _The Dawn_, had rendered him an object of almost
+religious veneration and worship to thousands of Americans whose spirits
+reached for something more than the mere piling of dollars one on the
+other....
+
+I stood before him, visibly overwhelmed. It was evident that my silent
+hero-worship was sweet to him. He bespoke me gently and courteously.
+
+"So you want to become an Eoite?"
+
+"Yes," I whispered, bending my gaze humbly before his.
+
+"And what is your name, my dear boy."
+
+"John Gregory, Master!"
+
+"What have you brought with you? where is your baggage?"
+
+"I--I lost my baggage ... all I have with me is a-a r-razor."
+
+He leaned his head back and laughed joyously. His lambent brown eyes
+glowed with humour. I liked the man.
+
+"Yes, we'll give you a job--Razorre!" he assured me, calling me by the
+nickname which clung to me during my stay....
+
+"Take that axe and show me what you can do."
+
+I caught up the axe and fell to with enthusiasm. The gospel of the
+dignity and worth of labour that he preached thrilled in me. It was the
+first time I ever enjoyed working....
+
+As we worked the Master talked ... talked with me as if he had known me
+for years--as if I, too, were Somebody.
+
+There was nothing he did not discuss, in memorable phrase and trenchant,
+clever epigram. For he saw that I believed in him, worshipped
+whole-heartedly at his shrine of genius, and he gave me, in return, of
+his best. For the first time I saw what human language is for. I thought
+of Goethe at Weimar ... Wilde's clever conversation in London....
+
+Never since did I see the real man, Spalton, as I saw him then, the man
+he might always have been, if he had had an old-world environment,
+instead of the environment of modern, commercial America--the spirit of
+which finally claimed him, as he grew more successful....
+
+Modern, commercial America--where we proudly make a boast of lack of
+culture, and where artistic and aesthetic feeling, if freely expressed,
+makes one's hearers more likely than not, at once uneasy and restive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night, at supper, I caught my first glimpse of the Eoites in a
+body. The contrast between them and my school-folk was agreeably
+different. I found among them an atmosphere of good-natured greeting and
+raillery, that sped from table to table. And when Spalton strode in,
+with his bold, swinging gait (it seemed that he had just returned from a
+lecture in a distant city early that afternoon), there was cheering and
+clapping.
+
+Guests and workers joined together in the same dining hall, with no
+distinctive division.... I sat next to Spalton's table, and a warm glow
+of pleasure swept through me when he sent me a pleasant nod.
+
+"Hello, Razorre," he had greeted me; then he had turned to the group at
+his table and told them about me, I could see by their glances--but in a
+pleasant way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning I was at work in the bindery, smearing glue on the
+backs of unbound books. My wage was three dollars a week and "found," as
+they say in the West. Not much, but what did it matter? There was a fine
+library of the world's classics, including all the liberal and
+revolutionary books that I had heard about, but which I could never
+obtain at the libraries ... and there were, as associates and
+companions, many people, who, if extremely eccentric, were,
+nevertheless, alive and alert and interested in all the beautiful things
+Genius has created in Art and Song....
+
+Derelicts, freaks, "nuts" ... with poses that outnumbered the silver
+eyes in the peacock's tail in multitude ... and yet there was to be
+found in them a sincerity, a fineness, and a genuine feeling for
+humanity that "regular" folks never achieve--perhaps because of their
+very "regularness."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here, at last, I had found another environment where I could "let loose"
+to the limit ... which I began to do....
+
+In the first place, there was the matter of clothes. I believed that men
+and women should go as nearly naked as possible ... clothing for warmth
+only ... and, as one grew in strength and health through nude contact
+with living sun and air and water, the body would gradually attain the
+power to keep itself warm from the health and strength that was in it.
+
+So, in the middle of severe winter that now had fallen on us, I went
+about in sandals, without socks. I wore no undershirt, and no coat ...
+and went with my shirt open at the neck. I wore no hat....
+
+Spalton himself often went coatless--in warm weather. His main sartorial
+eccentricity was the wearing of a broad-brimmed hat. And whenever he
+bought a new Stetson, he cut holes in the top and jumped on it, to make
+it look more interesting and less shop-new ... of course everybody in
+the community wore soft shirts and flowing ties.
+
+We addressed each other by first names and nicknames. Spalton went under
+the appellation of "John." One day a wealthy visitor had driven up.
+Spalton was out chopping wood.
+
+"Come here, John, and hold my horses."
+
+Spalton dropped the axe and obeyed.
+
+Afterward he had been dismissed with a fifty cent tip.
+
+He told the story on himself, and the name "John" stuck.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Working in the bindery, I began to find out things about the community
+of Eos that were not as ideal as might be ... most of the illumination
+of the books was done by girls, even by children after school hours. The
+outlines of the letters and objects to be hand-illumined were printed in
+with the text, the girls and children merely coloured them between the
+lines.
+
+In each department, hidden behind gorgeous, flowing curtains, were
+time-clocks, on which employees rang up when they came to work, and when
+they left. Also, each worker was supposed to receive dividends--which
+dividends consisted in pairs of mittens and thick woolen socks
+distributed by the foremen at Christmas time ... or maybe an extra
+dollar in pay, that week.
+
+"Two dollars a week less than a fellow would draw at any other place
+that ran the same sort of business," grumbled a young bookbinder who was
+by way of being a poet, "and a pair of woolen mittens or socks, or an
+extra dollar, once a year, as dividends!"
+
+However, I think that the artworkers had finer lodgings and board than
+most workers could have supplied for themselves ... and the married
+couples lived in nicer houses ... and they heard the best music, had the
+best books to read, lived truly in the presence of the greatest art and
+thought of the world ... and heard speak in the chapel, from time to
+time, all the distinguished men of the country ... who came, sooner or
+later, to visit Spalton and am? community....
+
+What though the wages were not so big, what though you rang up the time
+of arrival at work and the time of departure from it, on hidden
+time-clocks, what though every piece of statuary, every picture, every
+stick of furniture, had, on the bottom of it, its price label, or,
+depending from it, its tag that told the price at which it might be
+bought!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Spalton had begun his active career as a business man, had swung out
+from that, his fertile mind glimpsing what worlds of thought and
+imagination lay beyond it!
+
+But now Big Business was calling him back again, using him for its
+purposes.
+
+Oftener and oftener magnificently written articles by him began to
+appear in his remarkable little magazine, _The Dawn_. And the Ingersoll
+of Dollar Watch fame crowded out the Ingersoll of brave agnosticism ...
+and when he wrote now of artists and writers, it was their thrifty
+habits, their business traits, that he lauded.
+
+"A great man can be practical and businesslike, in fact the greatest of
+them always are," he defended. "There was Voltaire, the successful
+watchmaker at Ferney ... and there was Shakespeare, who, after his
+success in London, returned to Avon and practically bought up the whole
+town ... he even ran a butcher shop there, you know."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"The people expect startling things ... and, as the winds of genius blow
+where they list--when they refuse to blow in the direction required,
+divine is the art of buncombe," he jested.
+
+I suppose this applied to his musician-prodigy, a girl of eight, who
+worked, in the afternoons, in the bindery. And when a visiting party
+swept through that department, it was part of her job to rise as if
+under the impulse of inspiration, leave her work, and go to a nearby
+piano and play ... the implication being that the piano was placed there
+for the use of the workers when melody surged within them....
+
+But she was the only one who played. And she never played except when
+she was tipped the wink. And it was only one thing--a something of
+Rubenstein's ... which she had practised and practised and practised to
+perfection; and _that_ rendered, with haughty head like a little sibyl,
+she would go back to her work-bench. And if urged to play more, she
+would answer, lifting her great, velvet eyes in a dreamy gaze, "no, no
+more to-day. The inspiration has gone." And, awed, the visitors would
+depart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Back of the bindery stood the blacksmith shop, where MacKittrick, the
+historian-blacksmith, plied the bellows and smote the anvil.
+
+MacKittrick took a liking to me. For one day we began talking about
+ancient history, and he perceived that I had a little knowledge of it,
+and a feeling for the colour and motion of its long-ago life.
+
+"I want you to come and work for me," he urged, "my work is mostly
+pretty," he apologised, with blacksmith sturdiness, "--not making
+horseshoes, but cutting out delicate things, ornamental iron work for
+aesthetic purposes, and all that ... all you'll have to do will be to
+swing the hammer gently, while I direct the blows and cut put the dainty
+filigree the "Master" sells to folk, afterward, as art."
+
+"Well, isn't it art?" I asked.
+
+"I suppose it is. But I like the strong work of blacksmithing best. You
+see, I was born to be a great historian. But destiny has made me a
+blacksmith," he continued irrelevantly ... "do come out and work for me.
+I'm hungry for an intelligent helper who can talk history with me while
+we work."
+
+My transfer was effected. And I was immediately glad of it. "Mac," as we
+called him, was a fine, solid man ... and he did know history. He knew
+it as a lover knows his mistress. He was right. He should have been a
+great historical writer--great historian he _was_!
+
+For two glorious months I was with him. And during those two months, I
+learned more about the touch and texture of the historic life of man
+than three times as many years in college could have taught me.
+
+"Mac" talked of Cæsar as if only yesterday he had shaken hands with him
+in the Forum ... and he was shocked over his murder as if it had
+happened right after....
+
+"Ah, that was a bad day for Rome and the future of the world, when those
+mad fellows struck him down there like a pig!" he cried.
+
+And Mary, Queen of Scots, was "a sweet, soft body of a white thing that
+should have been content with being in love, and never tried to rule!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Can you cook?" asked Spalton of me one day, just as Barton had done at
+"Perfection City."
+
+"No," I replied honestly, thinking back to that experience.
+
+"Fine!" was the unexpected rejoinder, "I'm going to send you put to the
+camp to cook for my lumber-jacks for a few weeks."
+
+"But I said I couldn't cook."
+
+"You know how to turn an egg in the pan? you know enough not to let ham
+and bacon burn?... you know water won't scorch, no matter how long it
+stands over the fire?...
+
+"You'll make an excellent cook for lumber-jacks ... so long as it's
+something to eat that's stuck under their noses, they don't give a
+damn!... they're always hungry enough to eat anything ... and can digest
+anything....
+
+"Get ready! I'm sending you out on one of the waggons by noon."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perched on the high seat of the waggon by the side of the driver! The
+latter was bundled up to the chin ... wore a fur cap that came down over
+the ears ... was felt-booted against the cold ... wore heavy gloves.
+
+It was so cold that the breath of the horses went straight up into the
+air like thick, white wool. As we rode by, the passing farmers that were
+driving into town almost fell off their seats, startled, and staring at
+me. For there I perched ... coatless and hatless ... sockless feet in
+sandals ... my shirt flung open, a la Byron, at the neck.
+
+It is true that the mind can do anything. I _thought_ myself into being
+composed and comfortable. I did not mind, truly I did not mind it.
+
+The driver had protested, but only once, laconically:
+
+"Whar's y'r coat an' hat?"
+
+"I never wear any," I explained, beginning a propagandistic harangue on
+the non-essentiality of clothes....
+
+He cut in with the final pronouncement:
+
+"Damn fool, you'll git pneumony."
+
+Then he fell into obdurate, contemptuous silence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The snow was deep about our living shanty and cook-shack in one, but
+hard-frozen enough to bear a man's weight without snow-shoes. Over the
+crust had fallen a powdery, white, new snow, about four inches deep.
+
+Every morning, after the "boys" had eaten their breakfast and left for
+the woods, I went through my exercises, stripped, out in the open ... a
+half hour of it, finished by a roll in the snow, that set me tingling
+all over.
+
+One morning I made up my mind to startle the "boys" by running,
+mother-naked, in a circle, whooping, about them, where they were sawing
+up fallen trees and felling others.
+
+It was a half mile to where they worked.
+
+For more bizarre effect, I clapped on a straw hat which I found in the
+rafters--a relic of the preceding summer....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Gosh a'mighty, what's this a-comin!"...
+
+Everybody stopped working. Two neighbour farmers, who had come over for
+a bit of gossip, stooped, their hands on their knees, bowed with
+astonishment, as if they had beheld an apparition.
+
+One of the "boys" told me the two held silence for a long time--till I
+was entirely out of sight again, and after.
+
+Then one exclaimed, "air they any more luny fellers like thet, back at
+them Artwork shops?"
+
+The incident gave birth to the legend of a crazy man under Spalton's
+care, whose chief insanity was running naked through snowdrifts.
+
+Spalton had three sons. Roderick was the eldest: named after his father.
+Level-headed and businesslike, he followed his father's vagaries because
+he saw the commercial possibilities in them ... though he did so more as
+a practical man with a sense of humour than as a man who was on the
+make. Spalton, who knew men thoroughly and quickly appraised their
+individual natures, had installed Roderick in the managing end of
+things,--there with the aid of an older head--one Alfoxden, of whom
+Spalton made too much of a boast, telling everyone he had rescued him
+from a life of crime; Alfoxden, when younger, forged a check and had
+served his term for it. Coming out into the world again, no one would
+trust him because of that one mistake, Spalton, at this juncture, took
+him in and gave him a new chance--but--as I said unkindly, in my mind,
+and publicly, he made capital of his generous action.
+
+But Alfoxden was a soul of rare quality. He never seemed to resent
+"John's" action. He was too much of a gentleman and too grateful for the
+real help Spalton had extended to him.
+
+Alfoxden was a slight, Mephistophelian man ... with bushy, red eyebrows.
+And he was totally bald, except for the upper part of his neck, which
+was fiery with red hair. He had a large knowledge of the Rabelaisan in
+literature ... had in his possession several rather wild effusions of
+Mark Twain in the original copy, and a whole MSS. volume of Field's
+smutty casual verse....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But I was in the lumber camp, cooking for the "boys."...
+
+"Hank," Spalton's youngest son (there was a second son, whose name I
+forget ... lived with his mother, Spalton's divorced wife, in Syracuse,
+and was the conventional, well-brought-up, correct youth)--Hank worked
+in the camp, along with the other lumber-jacks.
+
+The boy was barely sixteen, yet he was six feet two in his stocking feet
+... huge-shouldered, stupendous-muscled, a vegetarian, his picture had
+appeared in the magazines as the prodigy who had grown strong on "Best
+o' Wheat," a prepared breakfast food then popular.
+
+I asked him if the story that he had built his growth and strength on it
+was a fake.
+
+"Yes. I never ate 'Best o' Wheat' in my life, except once or twice," he
+answered, "I like only natural food ... vegetables ... and lots of milk
+... but I draw the line at prepared, pre-digested stuff and baled
+breakfast foods."
+
+"Then why did you lend them the use of your name?"
+
+"Oh, everybody that has any prominence does that ... for a price ... but
+I really didn't want to do it. 'John' made me ... or I wouldn't have."
+
+"And now you have your hair cropped close, why is that?"
+
+"I suppose it's all right to wear your hair long ... but, last summer,
+it got so damned hot with the huge mop I had, that I always had a
+headache ... so one day I went down town to the barber and slipped into
+his chair. 'Hello, Hank,' says he, 'what do you want, a shave?' (joking
+you know--I didn't have but one or two cat-hairs on my face)....
+
+"'No, Jim, I want a hair-cut.' At first he refused ... said 'The
+Master' would bite his head off ... but then he did it--
+
+"John wouldn't speak to me that night, at table ... but the other
+fellows shouted and clapped....
+
+"I don't exactly get dad's idea all the time ... he's a mighty clever
+man, though....
+
+"Books? Oh, yes ... the only ones I care about are those on Indians and
+Indian lore ... I have all the Smithsonian Institution books on the
+subject ... and I have a wigwam back of the bindery--haven't you noticed
+it?--where I like to go and sit cross-legged and meditate ... no, I
+don't want to study regular things. Dad always makes me give in, in
+fact, whenever I act stubborn, by threatening to send me off to a
+regular school....
+
+"No, I want nothing else but to work with my hands all my life."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But, with all his thinking for himself, "Hank" was also childishly
+vulgar. He gulped loudly as he ate, thinking it an evidence of hearty
+good-fellowship. And he deliberately broke wind at the table ... then
+would rap on wood and laugh....
+
+I, on my dignity as cook, and because the others, rough as they were,
+complained to me in private about this behaviour, but did not openly
+speak against it because "Hank" was their employer's son. I took
+exception to the good-natured "lummox's" behaviour.
+
+One morning he was the last to climb out from over the bench at the
+rough, board table....
+
+"Hank ... wait. I want to speak to you a minute."
+
+"Yes, Razorre, what is it?" he asked, waiting....
+
+"Hank, the boys have delegated me to tell you that you must use better
+manners than you do, at meals."
+
+"The hell you say! and what are you going to do if I don't?"
+
+"I--why, Hank, I hadn't thought of that ... but, since you bring up the
+question, I'm going to try to stop you, if you won't stop yourself."
+
+"--think you can?--think you're strong enough?"
+
+"I said '_try_'!"
+
+"Listen, Razorre," and he came over to me with lazy, good-natured
+strength, "I'll pick you up, take you out, and roll you in the snow, if
+you don't keep still."
+
+"And I'll try my best to give you a good whipping," replied I, setting
+my teeth hard, and glaring at him.
+
+He started at me, grinning. I put the table between us, and began taking
+deep breaths to thoroughly oxygenate my blood, so it would help me in my
+forthcoming grapple with the big, over-grown giant.
+
+He toppled the table over. We were together. I kept on breathing like a
+hard-working bellows, as I wrestled about with him.
+
+He seized me by the right leg and tried to lift me up, carry me out. I
+pushed his head back by hooking my fingers under his nose, like a prong.
+
+Then I grabbed him by the seat of the britches and heaved. And they
+burst clean up the back like a bean pod....
+
+Unexpectedly Hank flopped on the bench and began to shout with
+laughter....
+
+My heavy, artificial breathing, like a bellows, for the sake of
+oxygenating more strength into my muscles, had struck him as being so
+ludicrous, that he was in high good humour. I joined in the laughter,
+struck in the same way.
+
+"I surrender, Razorre, and I'll promise to be decent at the table--you
+skinny, crazy, old poet!"
+
+And he rumbled and thundered again with Brobdingnagian mirth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Back from the lumber camp. Comparatively milder weather, but still the
+farmers we passed on the road were startled by my summery attire. But by
+this time the lumber-jacks and I were on terms of proven friendship ...
+I had told them yarns, and had listened to their yarns, in turn ... the
+stories of their lives ... and their joys and troubles....
+
+I was reported to Spalton as having been a first-rate cook.
+
+I went to work in the bindery again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Every day seemed to bring a new "eccentric" to join our colony. I have
+hardly begun to enumerate the prime ones, yet....
+
+But when I returned to the little settlement a curious man had already
+established himself ... one who was called by Spalton, in tender
+ridicule, Gabby Jack ... that was Spalton's nickname for him ... and it
+stuck, because it was so appropriate. Jack was a pilgrim in search of
+Utopia. And he was straightway convinced, wholly and completely, that
+he had found it in Eos. To him Spalton was the one and undoubted prophet
+of God, the high priest of Truth.
+
+Gabby Jack was a "j'iner." From his huge, ornate, gold watch-chain hung
+three or four bejewelled insignia of secret societies that he was a
+member of. He wore a flowered waistcoat ... an enormous seal-ring,
+together with other rings.
+
+He had laid aside a competence, by working his way from journeyman
+carpenter to an independent builder of frame houses, in some thriving
+town in the Middle West ... where, in his fifty-fifth year, he had
+received the call to go forth in quest of the Ideal, the One Truth.
+
+His English was a marvel of ignorant ornateness, like his vest and his
+watch-chain and rings. He had, apparently, no family ties. Spalton
+became his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, almost his God.
+There was nothing the Master said or did that was not perfect ... he
+would stand with worship and adoration written large on his swarthy,
+great face, listening to Spalton's most trivial words....
+
+Otherwise, he was Gabby Jack ... talking ... talking ... talking ...
+with everybody he met ... enquiring ... questioning ... taking notes in
+a large, crude, misspelling hand ... trying himself to write....
+
+We ran away from him ... Spalton ran away from him ... "this fellow will
+be the death of me," he remarked to me, one afternoon, with a light of
+pleasure and pride in his eyes, however, at being so worshipped. "Ah,
+Razorre, beware of the ignorant disciple!"
+
+There was nothing Jack would not do for Spalton. He sought out
+opportunities and occasions for serving him.
+
+And he would guide visitors over the establishment. And, coming to the
+office where Spalton usually sat and worked, he was heard to say once,
+with a wide-spread, reverential sweep of the hand--"and this, ladies and
+gents, is the (his voice dropping to a reverential whisper) 'Sancta
+Sanctoria.'"
+
+Jack could not see so well with one eye as he could with the other. A
+cataract was there which gave that eye the appearance of a
+milky-coloured, poached egg....
+
+Coming home from Buffalo one evening, he stepped down on the wrong side
+of the train, in the dusk ... perhaps from his eagerness to sit by his
+prophet at supper again that night--there being too long a line leaving
+at the station, ahead of him.
+
+A freight was drawing out on the track opposite. And Gabby was so huge
+that he was rolled like a log in a jam, between the two moving trains
+... when the freight had passed, he rose and walked. He took a cab to
+the Artwork Studios.
+
+All in tatters, he hurried to his room and put on another suit. He
+appeared at supper by the side of the Master. He narrated what had
+happened, amid laughter and joking. When Spalton wanted to send for his
+old, frail, white-headed father, the elder Spalton, who was the
+community doctor, Jack waved the idea aside.
+
+"Oh, no, Master!" (Master he called Spalton, and never the familiar,
+more democratic John) "Oh, no, I'm all right."...
+
+The next morning Jack did not show up for breakfast.
+
+At ten o'clock Spalton, solicitous, went up to his room....
+
+He shouted for help. He had found his disciple there, huge and dead,
+like a stranded sea-thing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Gabby Jack's will ... for they found one, together with a last word
+and testament for humanity,--it was asked of Spalton that he should
+conduct the funeral from the Chapel ... and read the funeral oration,
+written by the deceased himself ... and add, if the Master felt moved, a
+few words thereto of his own ... if he considered that so mean a
+disciple deserved it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All work was suspended the day of Jack's funeral.
+
+Spalton eloquently read the curious, crude composition of his disciple
+... which had fine flashes, as of lightning in a dark sky, here and
+there, in it.
+
+Then Spalton began adding words of his own, in praise of the deceased--
+
+"You all know this dear comrade of ours," he began, "this dear friend
+whose really fine soul, while in the body--went under the appellation of
+Gabby Jack--"
+
+Here Spalton broke down. He unashamedly dropped into the chair behind
+the reading-desk and wept aloud. He could say no more....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In _The Dawn_ for the ensuing month he put a wonderful and beautiful
+tribute to his disciple ... who had thoroughly loved, and believed in
+him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On a cold day of blowing snow, "Pete" came tramping in to town ... his
+high boots laced to the knees, a heavy alpaca coat about him ... he had
+come all the way from Philadelphia on foot, to add his portrait to our
+gallery of eccentrics ... but he was not so unusual after all ... there
+was too much of the hungry hardness of youth in him, the cocksureness of
+conceit which he considered genius.
+
+Immediately he put Spalton to question ... and everything and everybody
+to question....
+
+He irritated Spalton most by attacking doctors ... (though Spalton
+himself did so in his magazine) ... Spalton's father was an old family
+practitioner....
+
+But the Master's revenge came.
+
+"Pete" fell sick. Spalton sent for his father to doctor him. And made
+the old man use a strong horse-medicine on him ... which he himself
+brought up from the stables....
+
+"The boy is such an ass ..." Spalton told me laughingly, "that it's a
+veterinarian he needs, not a doctor."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was Speedwell, the young naturalist ... a queer, stooping, gentle,
+shy thing, who talked almost as an idiot would talk till he got on his
+favourite topic of bird and beast and flower. In personal appearance he
+was a sort of Emerson gone to weed ... he walked about with a quick,
+perky, deprecative step....
+
+"--queer fish," John remarked of him, "but, Razorre, you ought to come
+on him in the woods ... there he is a different person ... he sits under
+a tree till he seems to become part of the vegetation, the landscape ...
+when I had him out to camp with me last summer he would go off alone and
+stay away till we thought he had got lost, or had walked into a pond, in
+his simpleness, and drowned...."
+
+We followed him, and watched him....
+
+There he sat ... in his brown corduroys ... his lock of hair over his
+eyes ... that simple, sweet, idiotic expression, like sick sunshine, on
+his mouth....
+
+And after a while the birds came down to him ... pecked all around him
+... and a squirrel climbed up on his shoulder ... he seemed to have an
+attraction for the wild things ... it wasn't as if they just accepted
+him as a part of the surroundings ... the man sat there like a stump
+till we grew tired watching, and returned to camp....
+
+Each day he spent most of the day, immobile, like that....
+
+"Say Razorre," the Master continued, after a thoughtful pause, "you know
+you nuts are teaching me a lot of things....
+
+"The trouble with the educated, regular folks is that they lose so much
+by drawing the line ... often everything that is spontaneous and
+fine.... This thing called God, you know, draws the line nowhere....
+
+"If 'Crazy' Speedwell fell heir to a large sum of money, his relatives
+could find a commission of physicians anywhere, who would honestly have
+him into custody for lunacy ... yet, in some respects, he is the wisest
+and kindest man I have ever known ... though, in others, he is often
+such a fool as to try my patience very hard, at times."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most of us who had arrived at "The Studios" from "foreign" parts, slept
+in the common dormitory.
+
+We held frequent "roughhouses" there, the younger of us ... to the
+annoyance of Speedwell. Spalton finally gave him permission to sleep and
+live, alone, in the shed where the fire-truck and hose was stored....
+
+One night, for malicious fun, a beak-nosed young prize-fighter, and
+several others (including myself) sneaked into his abode while he slept
+... thoughtlessly we turned the gas on and tiptoed out again....
+
+Not long after he came staggering forth, half-suffocated....
+
+Everybody laughed at the tale of this ... at first Spalton himself
+laughed, our American spirit of rough joking and horse-play gaining the
+uppermost in him ... but then he recalled to mind the seriousness of our
+practical joke, and burned with anger at us over what we had done. And
+he threatened to "fire" on the spot anyone who ever again molested
+"Crazy" Speedwell....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Old Pfeiler" we called him....
+
+Pfeiler had attended one of Spalton's lectures at Chicago.
+
+Afterward, he had come up front and asked the lecturer if he could make
+a place for him at Eos ... that he was out of a job ... starving ... a
+poor German scholar ... formerly, in better days, a man of much wealth
+and travel....
+
+He had spent his last nickel for admission to Spalton's lecture. Spalton
+brought him back to the Eos Artwork Studios.
+
+There he found that the queer, gentle, old man was as helpless as a
+child ... all he could be trusted to do was to write addresses on
+letters ... which he was set at, not too exactingly....
+
+I never saw so happy a man as Pfeiler was that winter.
+
+He was a Buddhist, not by pose, but by sincere conviction. He thought,
+also, that the Koran was a greater book than the Bible ... and more
+miraculous ... "one man, Mohammed, who left a work of greater beauty
+than the combined efforts of the several hundred who gave us that
+hodge-podge, the Bible."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pfeiler had been left a fortune by his father, a wealthy German merchant
+... so, like Sir Richard Burton, he had made off to the Near East ...
+where he had lived among the Turks for ten years ... till, what with his
+buying rare manuscripts and Oriental and Turkish art, he had suddenly
+run upon the rocks of bankruptcy ... and had returned from the Levantine
+a ruined, helpless scholar, who had never been taught to be anything
+else but a man of culture and leisure....
+
+By steerage he made his way to America ... to Chicago ... all his works
+of art, his priceless manuscripts sold ... the money gone like water
+through the assiduities of false friends and sycophants....
+
+On the bum in Chicago ... a hotel clerk, discharged as incompetent--he
+had forgotten to insist that a man and woman register always as man and
+wife ... "because it was such hypocrisy" ... finally a dishwasher, who
+lived in a hall bed-room ... no friends because of his abstractedness,
+his immersion in oriental scholarship ... his only place of refuge, his
+dwelling place, when not washing dishes for a mere existence, the Public
+Library....
+
+"Old Pfeiler" drank coffee by the quart, as drunkards drink whiskey. He
+had a nervous affliction which caused him to shake his head continually,
+as if in impatience ... or as a dog shakes his head to dislodge
+something that has crept into his ear....
+
+He was as timid as a girl....
+
+The common dormitory was no place for him ... I am sorry to confess
+that, for a while, I helped to make his life miserable for him ... each
+night the beak-nosed pugilist-lad and I raised a merry roughhouse in the
+place.... Pfeiler was our chief butt. We put things in his bed ... threw
+objects about so they would wake him up. One night I found him crying
+silently ... but somehow not ignobly ... this made me shift about in my
+actions toward him, and see how miserable my conduct had been....
+
+So the next time "Beak-horn," as I called my plug-ugly friend, started
+to tease the old man, I asked him to stop ... that we had tormented
+Pfeiler long enough. "Beak-horn" replied with a surprised, savage stare
+... and the next moment he was on me, half in jest, half in earnest. I
+boxed with him as hard and swift as I was able ... but a flock of fists
+drove in over me ... and I was thrown prone across the form of the old
+man ... who stuttered with fright and impotent rage, swearing it was all
+a put-up game between us to torment him further, when I protested that I
+had not tried to do it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning Spalton sent for me.
+
+"Look here, Razorre, if _you_ were not the biggest freak of them all, I
+could understand," he remarked severely....
+
+I tried to explain how sorry I was for the way I had joined in Pfeiler's
+persecution ... but the master would have none of it ... he told me to
+look better to my conduct or he would have to expel me from the
+community....
+
+"Gregory," he ended, calling me by my name, "somehow I never quite _get
+you_ ... most of the time you are refined and almost over-gentle ... you
+know and love poetry and art and the worthwhile things ... but then
+there's also the hoodlum in you ... the dirty Hooligan--" his eyes
+blazed with just rebuke.... I trod out silently, sick of myself, at
+heart ... as I have often, often been.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After that, Pfeiler avoided me. I went up to him in apology. Most
+contritely I said I was sorry.
+
+"You are a fraud," he cried at me, spluttering, almost gnashing his
+teeth in fury, "you go around here, pretending you are a poet, and have
+the soul of a thug, a brute, a coward and bully ... please don't speak
+to me any more as long as I'm here ... you only pretend interest in
+spiritual and intellectual things, always for some brutal reason ...
+even now you are planning something base, some diabolical betrayal of
+the Master, perhaps, or of all of us.... I myself have advised Mr.
+Spalton, for the good of his community to send you back to the tramps
+and jail-birds from whom you come ... you scum! you filthy pestilence!"
+
+His head was shaking like an oscillating toy ... his eyes were starting
+from his head through force of his invective ... he was jerking about,
+in his anger, like a dancing mouse....
+
+I hurried out of his word-range, overwhelmed with greater shame than I
+can ever say.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The editor of the _Independent_, Dr. William Hayes Ward, had, so far,
+not found room in his magazine for the two poems of mine he had bought.
+I was chagrined, and wrote him, rather impetuously, that, if he didn't
+care for the poems he might return them. Which he did, with a rather
+frigid and offended reply. I was rendered unhappy by this.
+
+I spoke to Spalton about it.
+
+"Why Razorre, so you _have_ come that near to being in print?" I showed
+him the poems. "Yes, you have the making of a real poet in you!"
+
+A day or so after he approached me with--"I'm writing a brief visit to
+the home of Thoreau ... how would you like to compose a poem for me, on
+him--for the first page of the work?"
+
+"I would like it very much," I said. In a few days I handed him the
+poem. A "sonnet," the form of which I myself had invented, in fifteen
+lines.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For days I lived in an intoxication of anticipation ... just to have one
+poem printed, I was certain, would mean my immediate fame ... so
+thoroughly did I believe in my genius. I was sure that instantly all of
+the publishers in the world would contend with each other for the
+privilege of bringing out my books.
+
+Spring had begun to give hints of waking green, when _The Brief Visit_
+was issued from the press. I rushed to procure a copy before it was
+bound. I was surprised and dumbfounded to find that the Master had used
+the poem without my name attached ... just as if it, with the rest of
+the book, was from his own pen.
+
+My first impulse was to rush into the dining hall, at breakfast, Waving
+the sheets, and calling "John" to account for his theft, before
+everybody ... then I bethought myself that, perhaps, some mistake had
+been made ... that the proofreader might have left my name out.
+
+Spalton looked up quickly as I passed by his table. He read in my face
+that I had already discovered what he had done. He blushed. I nodded him
+a stiff greeting. I ate in silence--at the furthest table.
+
+In a few minutes he did me an honour he had never shown me before. He
+came over to where I sat. "Razorre," he invited, "how would you like to
+take a hike with me into the country, this morning?"
+
+I gave him a swift glance. "I would like it very much."
+
+"Then as soon as you are through, meet me in the library."
+
+I drank a second cup of coffee with studied deliberation--in spite of
+myself, I was thrilled with the notice that had been shown me before all
+the others. Already my anger had somewhat lessened.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Never had the master been so eloquent, so much his better self, since
+that first day, at the wood-pile. He strove to throw the magic of his
+spirit over me with all his power. For hours we walked, the light, pale
+green of the renewing year about us. But through it all I saw what he
+was trying to effect ... to impress me so deeply that I would not only
+forgive him for having stolen my poem, but actually thank him, for
+having used it--even consider it a mark of honour ... which his
+eloquence almost persuaded me to do.
+
+Indeed I saw the true greatness in "John" ... but I also saw and
+resented the petty, cruel pilferer--stealing helpless, unknown, youthful
+genius for his own--resented it even more because the resources of the
+man's nature did not require it of him to descend to such pitiful
+expedients. He was rich enough in himself for his own fame and glory.
+
+And why should he rob a young poet of his first fame, of the exquisite
+pleasure of seeing his name for the first time in print? ... than which
+there is no pleasure more exquisite ... not even the first possession of
+a loved woman!...
+
+We had almost returned to the "Artworks" before I tried to let loose on
+him ... but even then I could not. Gently I asked him why he had not
+affixed my name to my poem.
+
+He looked at me with well-simulated amazement.
+
+"Why, Razorre, I never even thought of it ... we are all a part of one
+community of endeavour here ... and we all give our efforts as a
+contribution to the Eos Idea ... I have paid you a higher compliment
+than merely giving you credit ... instead, I have incorporated your
+verse into the very body of our thought and life."
+
+His effrontery struck me silent. I told him sadly that I must now go
+away.
+
+"Nonsense," he replied, "this is as good a place in which to develop
+your poetic genius as any place in the world. I may say, better. Here
+you will find congenial environment, ready appreciation .. come, let us
+walk a little further," and we turned aside from the steps of the dining
+room and struck down the main street of the town.
+
+"I mean bigger things for you, Razorre, than you can guess.... I will
+make you the Eos Poet--look at Gresham, he is the Eos Artist, and, as
+such, his fame is continent-wide ... just as yours will become ... and I
+will bring out a book of your poetry ... and advertise it in _The
+Dawn_."
+
+His eloquence on art and life, genius and literature, had enthralled and
+placated me ... his personal wheedling irritated and angered.
+
+"A book of my poems ... without my name on the title page, perhaps," I
+cried, impassioned, looking him deep in the eyes. He shifted his glance
+from me--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I threw my few belongings together.
+
+Everybody, in saying good-bye, gave me a warm hand-clasp of friendship
+(excepting Pfeiler), including Spalton, who assured me--
+
+"Razorre, you'll be back again ... despite its faults, they all come
+back to Eos."
+
+"Yes," I responded, sweeping him off his feet by the unexpectedness of
+my reply, "yes, in spite of all, Eos is a wonderful place ... it has
+given me something ... in my heart ... in my soul ... which no other
+place in the world could have given ... and at the time I needed it most
+... a feeling for beauty, a fellowship--"
+
+"Razorre," he cut in, moved, "we all have our faults,--God knows _you_
+have--mutual forgiveness--" he murmured, pressing my hand warmly again;
+his great, brown eyes humid with emotion ... whether he was acting, or
+genuine ... or both ... I could not tell. I didn't care. I departed
+with the warmth of his benediction over my going.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This time I did not freight it. I paid my fare to New York.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father ... I must pay him a visit, before lifting my nose in the air
+like a migrating bird. Where I would go or what I would do that spring
+and summer, I hadn't the vaguest idea....
+
+It seemed but the day before that I had left Haberford. The fat
+policeman who leaned against the iron railing of the small park near the
+station was there in the same place. The same young rowdies pushed each
+other about, and spat, and swore, near the undertaker shop and the
+telegraph office.
+
+But as I walked past the Hartman express office--the private concern
+which Hartman, the thin, wiry shock-haired Swede, had built up through
+arduous struggle, beginning with one wagon--
+
+Hartman saw me through the window, and beckoned vigorously for me to
+step in....
+
+"--just got home from another hobo-trip, Johnny?"
+
+"You're almost right, Mr. Hartman."
+
+"A pause....
+
+"--been to see your father yet?"
+
+"No, sir, I'm on the way there now ... just arrived this minute, on the
+train from New York."
+
+"I'm glad I caught sight of you, then, to prepare you." A longer pause
+... mysteriously embarrassing, on his part.
+
+"I have something to tell you about him ...--guess you're old enough to
+stand plain talk ... sit down!"
+
+I took a chair.
+
+"You see, it's this way," and he leaned forward and put his hand on my
+knee.. "it's women--a woman" ... he paused, I nodded to him to go on,
+feeling very dramatic and important....
+
+"It's Mrs. Jenkins, the widow, that has her hooks in him ... around
+where he boards ... and, to be frank with you, he's going it so strong
+with her that he's sick and rundown ... and not so right, at times, _up
+here_!" and Hartman tapped his forehead with his forefinger
+significantly....
+
+"Now, you're the nearest one to him around here," he went on, "and I'll
+tell you what we were going to do ... his lodge, of which I'm a member,
+was going to give him a trip, to separate him from her, and cure him ...
+you come back just pat....
+
+"Has your daddy any relatives that can afford to entertain him, out in
+the West, where you came from?"
+
+"Yes, one of my uncles, his brother, is very well off, and would be glad
+to take him in ... in fact any of the folks back home would," my voice
+sounded hollow and far off as I answered.
+
+"You're a pretty smart lad ... do you want to go back with him when he
+goes?"
+
+"No, Mr. Hartman."
+
+"Well, we can tip the porter to take care of him ... but why don't you
+want to go with him, we will foot your expenses?"
+
+"I have other things to do," I answered vaguely.
+
+He gave a gesture of impatience....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a hush in the house, as I stepped softly up the stairs. The
+catch of the front door was back....
+
+First I went to my room and found all my books intact ... in better
+condition even, than when I was home with them ... there was not a speck
+of dust anywhere. Evidently my father was not too sick to keep the place
+clean ... but then, I meditated he would attend to that, with his last
+effort.
+
+My books were my parents, my relatives. I had been born of them, not of
+my own father and mother. My being born in the flesh was a mere accident
+of nature. My father and mother happened to be the vehicle.
+
+But the place was so quiet it perturbed me.
+
+"Pop!" I called, going toward his bed-room.
+
+The door leading into it slowly opened. The little, dark widow was in
+there with him.
+
+"Hush! your father is asleep."
+
+A hatred of both him and her shot up quick in my heart. I sensed their
+abandonment to the sheerly physical, till it took in their whole
+horizon. It was utterly ignoble. I had a vision of all humanity, living,
+for the most part, merely for food and sex, letting art and poetry and
+beauty and adventure pass by, content if they only achieved the bare
+opportunity of daily wallowing in their mire.
+
+I was bad and mean enough, but the conception of a single poem in my
+brain, till it found birth on paper, was, I swore, bigger and finer
+than all this world-mess at its best. Also there was in me somewhat the
+thwarted, sinister hatred of the celibate....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You mustn't bother your father now," little Mrs. Jenkins interposed, as
+I started in, "you must let him rest for awhile, and not wake him."
+
+Through the door, half open, I caught a glimpse of a hollow, wax-white
+face ... he looked as if all the blood had been let out of his body,
+little by little. The little, pretty, dark woman looked like a crafty
+animal ... there was a beady shine of triumph, which she could not
+conceal, in her eyes, as she opposed my entering. I smelt the pungent
+smell of her physical womanhood. There was a plumpness about her body, a
+ruddiness to her lips, that gave me the phantasy that, perhaps, the
+moment before, she had drunk of my father's blood, and that she was
+preventing me from going in to where he lay till a certain tiny, red
+puncture over his jugular vein had closed.
+
+"You forget, Mrs. Jenkins, that he is my father."
+
+"You shan't go in ... please, Johnnie ... let him sleep just a little
+longer ... as soon as he wakes he asks for another drink!"
+
+"And who put him in this state?" I charged directly, vividly remembering
+what Hartman had said....
+
+"What, you don't mean to insinuate?"--she gasped.
+
+"I mean nothing, only that I have come home to take care of my father,
+till his lodge takes charge of him, and that, for the present, I want
+you to please leave me alone with him."
+
+Her small, black pupils dilated angrily. But she did not press the point
+of her staying. She had put her hand on my arm cajolingly, but I had
+shook it off with such evident disgust--founded partly and secretly on a
+horror of physical attraction for her--that drew my morbid, starved
+nature--
+
+"Very well!... but I'll be back this afternoon, early. When he wakes up
+and asks for a drink of whiskey ... starts out to get one ... draw him a
+glass of water from the faucet, and take your oath that it's whiskey ...
+he'll believe you and drink it!"
+
+And she departed, an odor of strong perfume in her wake.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Had this planet of earth been populated from without?... there were
+evidently two races on it--the race of men--the race of women--men had
+voyaged in from some other world in space women had done the like from
+their world ... to this world, alien to both of them. And here a
+monstrous thing had brought them together like an interlocking
+fungus--their sex-union ... a function that monstrously held together
+two different species of animals that should not even be on meeting
+terms.
+
+Thus my morbid fancy ran, as I entered slowly my father's room.
+
+He slept.
+
+On a chair by his bed lay a copy of _Hamlet_, his favourite
+Shakespearean play. I picked it up, read in it, waiting for him to wake,
+while he breathed laboriously.
+
+I became absorbed in the play ... I must write a poem, some time, called
+"Hamlet's Last Soliliquy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father was awake.
+
+I did not know how long he had been so, for his breathing had not
+changed and the only difference from his sleeping state was that his
+eyes stared, wide and glassy, at the ceiling, as if they comprehended
+nothing.
+
+A feeling of horror crept over my body. This was more than I had counted
+on.. my father, helpless on his back and his wits off gathering wool....
+
+"Father!" I put my hand on a talon of his.
+
+He turned his head slightly. Smiled vacuously.
+
+"Father!"
+
+A perturbation clouded his eyes ... that painful struggle toward
+comprehension observed in an infant's face.
+
+"Who are you? What do you want?"
+
+"I'm your son--Johnnie!... and I've come back to take care of you."
+
+"Johnnie is away ... far off ... on the sea ... in a ship."
+
+And he sighed and turned his face to the wall as if the thought troubled
+him, and he wished to dismiss it. Then, in a moment, he whirled about,
+changed and furious. He rose to a sitting posture ... swung his legs
+out, bringing the bed-clothes a-wry with him....
+
+"You are an impostor ... you are not my son ... I tell you again, he is
+away ... has been away for years ... as long as I can remember ...
+perhaps he is dead ... you are an impostor."
+
+He leaped up, full of madness, and seized hold of me.
+
+"Stop, Father, what are you trying to do?"
+
+As I grappled with him, trying to keep him from hurting me--and he was
+quite strong, for all his emaciation--the horror of my situation made me
+sick at the stomach, quite sick ... and my mind went ridiculously back
+to the times when my father and I had eaten oyster-fries together ...
+"that is the only thing you and this man have in common ...
+oyster-fries," remarked my mind to me. All the while I was pinning his
+wrists in my grasp ... re-pinning them as he frantically wrested them
+loose ... swearing and heaping obscenities on my head ... all the while,
+I thought of those oyster-fries ... we had saved up a lard-tin full of
+bacon grease to fry them in ... and fry after fry had been sizzled to a
+rich, cracker-powdered brown in that grease ... a peculiar smell waxed
+in the kitchen, however ... which we could never trace to its source ...
+"a dead rat somewhere, maybe," suggested my father.
+
+When we had used a third of the bacon grease, the dead rat's foot stood
+up ... out of that can.
+
+We discharged the contents of our stomachs in the sink.
+
+This was the ridiculous incident that possessed my imagination while I
+struggled with my father.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had my father over on the bed. He fought to a sitting posture again
+... got his finger in my eye and made me see a whorl of dancing sparks.
+With irritation and a curse ... then both laughing hysterically and
+sobbing ... I bore him back to his pillow....
+
+The strength had gone entirely out of him ... now it came into his mind
+that I was there trying to rob or kill him.
+
+"Spare me, spare me!" he pleaded, "you can have everything in the house
+... only don't kill me! My God!"
+
+"Good Christ!" I groaned, as he beat upward, fighting again.
+
+I let him rise, almost palsied with horror.
+
+He perched on the edge of the bed, exhausted,--began groping with one
+hand, in the air, idly.
+
+"What is it? What do you want?"
+
+"Give me my pants! I don't trust you. I want to go to the corner and get
+a drink ... give me my pants!"
+
+"Pop, look at me ... stop this nonsense ... you're safe ... I'm your
+son, Johnnie!"
+
+"That's all very well," he assented with an air of reserved cunning.
+
+"Please believe me," I pleaded.
+
+"All right ... you are my son ... only don't kill me," he responded
+craftily.
+
+"Father!... good God!"
+
+He perceived by the emotion of my last exclamation, that at least I was
+not ill-disposed toward him.
+
+He clutched at the advantage.
+
+"Promise to take care of me till Johnnie comes--he's just around the
+corner," slyly.
+
+"Pop, what is it you want? What can I do for you?"
+
+"A curious greed flickered in his eyes.
+
+"Get me a drink!"
+
+"All right! I'll get it for you!"
+
+"Let me think! There's none in the house ... none left, Emily said."
+
+"But I brought some with me ... wait a minute." I went into the kitchen,
+turned on the tap softly, filled a glass half full of water, brought it
+back to him.
+
+"Here it is."
+
+"I don't like the colour of it."
+
+"Why, it has a nice, rich colour."
+
+"What is it?--Scotch?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He sipped of it. Made a rueful face. "I don't like the taste of it ...
+it tastes too much like water," he commented, with a quiet, grave,
+matter-of-fact grimace that set me laughing, in spite of myself....
+
+"Drink it down! I swear it's all right."
+
+He tossed off the water.
+
+"Give me my pants. I want to get out of here."
+
+"Why, wasn't that whiskey that I just gave you?"
+
+"Yes, yes ... but not very good stuff. I know where I can get better."
+
+Humouring him, I helped him into his trousers ... painfully he put on
+his shirt, neatly tied his tie, while I steadied him. This manual
+function seemed to better his condition straightway. He startled me by
+turning to me with a look of amused recognition in his eyes. He was no
+longer off his head, just a very sick man.
+
+"Well, Johnnie, so you're back again?"
+
+"Yes, Pop--back again!"
+
+"What are you going to do next?" he queried wearily, seating himself
+laboriously in an armchair.
+
+"Stay, and take care of you!"
+
+"That will be unnecessary. I have had a rather severe attack of malaria
+... that is all ... left me rather weak ... but now I'm getting over it
+... had to take a lot of whiskey and quinine, though, to break it up!
+
+"Malaria comes on me, every spring, you know ... harder than usual, this
+spring, though ... it's made me dotty ... made me say things, at times,
+I'm afraid!"
+
+We sat silent.
+
+"--need any money?" he was reaching into his pocket.
+
+"No, I don't want a cent!"
+
+"Then take this five dollar bill and go around to the corner saloon and
+buy me a pint ... what I had is all used up, and the chills are not
+quite out of me yet."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the way to the saloon I stopped at Hartman's express office ...
+related the foregoing story....
+
+"H'm! yes!... I see!" ... Hartman braced his thumbs together
+meditatively, "--from what you say it's pretty serious ... something
+will have to be done this very day....
+
+"Yes, go and get the pint ... let him have a drink of it. And--and keep
+close to him all the time ... don't," he added significantly, "leave the
+lady in question in the room alone with him for a single moment."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Have you got the pint, Son?"
+
+"Yes, Father. Here it is ... but just a little!"
+
+"I know what I'm doing!"
+
+He took most of it down at a gulp.
+
+Noticing the anxious look in my eyes.
+
+"Don't worry about me, Johnnie. I can take it or leave it alone ...
+--always could!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before Mrs. Jenkins could come back, Hartman anticipated her with a
+nurse and a doctor. As Mrs. Jenkins came in, chagrin and indignation
+showed on her face. But she bowed perforce to the situation. She was too
+wise not to.
+
+"His lodge-brothers are taking care of Mr. Gregory now, Mrs. Jenkins,"
+explained Mr. Hartman suavely, warning her off, at the same time, with a
+severe, understanding look in his eyes.
+
+She dropped her eyelashes--though with a bit of instinctive coquetry in
+them--under his straight-thrusting glance.
+
+"Well, I suppose professional care _would_ be better than anything I
+could do for him ... but," sweetly, "I'll drop in from time to time to
+see if there's any little thing I can do."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Deprived of the loving care of Emily Jenkins, though he called for her
+many times, my father mended his condition rapidly. And, after a long,
+mysterious conference with Hartman and other members of his fraternal
+order, he consented to allow himself to be sent West on a visit. But not
+till they had promised to keep his job as foreman in the Composite
+Works, open for him, till he was well enough to come back.
+
+After I had seen my father off, I stayed in the silent rooms only long
+enough to pack up my books, which I left in care of Hartman.
+
+I had at last arrived at a definite plan of action.
+
+My grandfather was transacting some sort of business in Washington, as
+my uncle, Jim, had informed me. There he was living in affluence,
+married again, in his old age ... just like his former wife.
+
+I had evolved a scheme which seemed to me both clever and feasible, by
+which to extract from him a few hundred or a thousand dollars with which
+to prosecute my studies further, and enter, eventually, say, Princeton
+or Harvard ... perhaps Oxford.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found my grandfather holding forth in a swell suite of offices in the
+business district of Washington.
+
+Near his great desk, with a little table and typewriter, sat a girl,
+very pretty--he would see to that!... evidently his stenographer and
+private secretary.
+
+As I stood by the railing, she observed me coldly once or twice, looking
+me over, before she thrust her pencil in her abundant hair and sauntered
+haughtily over to see what I was after.
+
+Despite the fact that I informed her who I was, with eyes impersonal as
+the dawn she replied that she would see if Mr. Gregory could see me ...
+that at present he was busy with a conference in the adjoining room.
+
+I sat and waited ... dusty and derelict, in the spick-and-span office,
+where hung the old-fashioned steel engravings on the wall, of Civil War
+battles, of generals and officers seated about tables on camp
+stools,--bushy-bearded and baggy-trousered.
+
+Finally my grandfather Gregory walked briskly forth. He looked about,
+first, as if to find me. His eyes, after hovering hawklike, settled, in
+a grey, level, impersonal glance, on me.
+
+"Come in here," he bade, not even calling me by name.
+
+I stepped inside, trying hard to be bold. But his precision and
+appearance of keen prosperity and sufficiency made me act, in spite of
+myself, deprecative. So I sat there by him, in his private room, keying
+my voice shrill and voluble and high, as I always do, when I am not sure
+of my case. And, worse, he let me do the talking ... watching me keenly,
+the while.
+
+I put to him my proposition of having my life insured in his name, that
+I might borrow a thousand or so of him, on the policy, to go to college
+with....
+
+"Ah, if he only lets me have what I ask," I was dreaming, as I pleaded,
+"I'll go to England ... to some college with cool, grey mediaeval
+buildings ... and there spend a long time in the quiet study of poetry
+... thinking of nothing, caring for nothing else."
+
+"No! how absurd!" he was snapping decisively. I came to from my vision.
+
+"My dear Johnnie, your proposition is both absurd and--" as if that were
+the last enormity--"very unbusinesslike!"
+
+"But I will then become a great poet! On my word of honour, I will! and
+I will be a great honour to the Gregory family!"
+
+He shook his head. He rose, standing erect and slender, like a small
+flagpole. As I rose I towered high over the little-bodied, trim man.
+
+"Come, you haven't eaten yet?"
+
+"No!"
+
+Well, he had a sort of a heart, after all ... some family feeling.
+
+Walking slightly ahead, so as not to seem to be in my company, old
+Grandfather Gregory took me to a--lunch counter ... bowing to numerous
+friends and acquaintances on the way ... once he stepped aside to a
+hurried conference, leaving me standing forlorn and solitary, like a
+scarecrow in a field.
+
+I grew so angry at him I could hardly bridle my anger in.
+
+"--like oyster sandwiches?" he asked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He didn't even wait to let me choose my own food.
+
+"Two oyster sandwiches and--a cup of coffee," he barked.
+
+While I ate he stepped outside and talked with another friend.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Good-bye," he was bidding me, extending a tiny hand, the back of it
+covered with steel-coloured hairs, "you'd better go back up to
+Jersey--just heard your daddy is very sick there ... he might need your
+help."
+
+I thought cautiously. Evidently he knew nothing of my father's having
+been sent home by his lodge. I affected to be perturbed....
+
+"In that case--could you--advance me my fare to Haberford?"
+
+I'd wangle a _few_ dollars out of him.
+
+My grandfather's answer was a silent, granite smile.
+
+"--just want to see what you can cajole out of the old man, eh? No,
+Johnnie--I'll leave you to make your way back in the same way you've
+made your way to Washington ... from all accounts railroad fare is the
+least of your troubles."
+
+My whole hatred of him, so carefully concealed while I thought there was
+some hopes of putting through my educational scheme, now broke out--
+
+"_You"_--I began, cursing....
+
+"I knew that's the way you felt all along ... better run along now, or
+I'll say I don't know you, and have you taken up for soliciting alms."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before nightfall I was well on my way to Philadelphia. For a while I
+resigned myself to the life of a tramp. I hooked up with another gang of
+hoboes, in the outskirts of that city, and taught them the plan of the
+ex-cook that we'd crowned king down in Texas....
+
+I kept myself in reading matter by filching the complete works of
+Sterne (in one volume) and the poetry of Milton--from an outside stand
+of a second hand book store....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+--left that gang, and started forth alone again. I became a walking bum,
+if a few miles a day constitutes taking that appellation. I walked ahead
+a few miles, then sat down and studied my Milton, or dug deep into
+_Tristram Shandy_. Hungry, I went up to farmhouse or backdoor of city
+dwelling, and asked for food....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found myself in the outskirts of Newark again.
+
+I took my Sterne and Milton to Breasted's, hoping to trade them for
+other books. I stood before the outside books, on the stand, hesitating.
+I was, for the moment, ashamed to show myself to "the perfesser,"
+because of the raggedness that I had fallen into.
+
+While I was hesitating, a voice at my elbow--
+
+"Any books I can show you?--any special book you're looking for?"
+
+The voice was the voice of the tradesman, warning off the man unlikely
+to buy--but it was the familiar voice of my friend, "the perfesser,"
+just the same. I turned and smiled into his face, happy in greeting him,
+losing the trepidation my rags gave me.
+
+"Why, Johnnie Gregory!" he shook my hand warmly as if I were a prince. I
+was enchanted.
+
+"I want to exchange two books if I can--for others!"
+
+"Come right into the back. Breasted, the boss, is out for the day....
+I'm having my lunch sent in, won't you have some with me?"
+
+He acted just as if he hadn't noticed my dilapidation.
+
+I said I'd gladly share his lunch.
+
+He drew my story out of me,--the story of my life, in fact, before the
+afternoon wore to dusk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Do you think I'm crazy?" I asked him.
+
+"No ... far from it ... " adding gently, with a smile, "sometimes an
+awful fool, though, Johnnie--if I may say it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Won't you stay overnight?"
+
+"No, thanks just the same, 'Perfesser.'"
+
+"I have room enough ... better hang around a few days and look for a job
+here."
+
+"It's too near Haberford."
+
+"But I know you'd take a couple of fresh books, if I gave them to you,
+now wouldn't you?"
+
+My eyes lit up as with hunger.
+
+"This Milton and Sterne are too used-up to be worth a nickel a-piece.
+Maybe, if I'd keep them, they might be worth something, some day, when
+you're famous," he joked.
+
+"If you want to give me a couple of books ... how about this Keats and
+this Ossian? I want the Keats for myself. It will renew my courage.
+And--the Ossian--will you mail that book on for me, to Eos, to old
+Pfeiler?"
+
+I had told him, in the course of my talking, about them both.
+
+Pfeiler used often to talk of the greatness of Ossian's poetry ... and
+how he'd like to possess a volume of it again ... that is, before he
+grew to hate me.
+
+Maybe if I sent him the book, with a letter, he would think less harshly
+of me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I tramped through New England. My whole life had settled back into
+tramping ... only my Keats remained. I read and re-read his poems, not
+caring to write a line myself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I worked as a dish-washer or pearl-diver for several weeks in Boston,
+and bought a very cheap second-hand suit.
+
+I shifted my mind like a weather vane and decided against shipping to
+England, with the forlorn hope of, somehow attending Oxford or
+Cambridge, and studying English literature there. My old ideal of being
+a great adventurer and traveller had vanished, and, in its stead, came
+the desire to live a quiet life, devoted entirely to writing poetry, as
+the poet Gray lived his.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I drifted inland to Concord, a-foot, as a pilgrim to the town where
+Emerson and Thoreau had lived. I was happy in loitering about the haunts
+of Thoreau; in sitting, full of thought, by the unhewn granite tombstone
+of Emerson, near the quiet of his grave.
+
+Toward evening I realised that I had gone without food all day....
+
+On a hill mounting up toward the West, outside of Concord, I stopped at
+the house of a market-gardener and asked for something to eat. A
+tottering old man leaned forward through the half-open door. He asked me
+in, and set before me a plate of lukewarm beans and a piece of jelly
+roll. But he delighted the tramp in me by setting before me, also, a cup
+of excellent, hot, strong coffee.
+
+Afterward when he asked me if I wanted a job, I said yes.
+
+The old man lit my way upstairs to a bed in the attic.
+
+It was hardly dawn when he woke me....
+
+A breakfast of soggy pancakes and more beans, which his equally aged
+wife had prepared. And we were out in the fields, at work. And soon his
+wife was with us, working, too.
+
+When Sowerby, this market gardener, told me that he was almost ninety I
+could believe him. He might have added a few more years, with credence.
+
+He went actively about his toil, but yet shaky like a bicycle till it
+fully starts, when it runs the steadier the more it is speeded. It was
+work that kept him on his feet, work that sustained life in him. His
+whole life and pleasure was senseless work.
+
+And yet he was not a bookless man. He possessed many books, mostly the
+old religious classics. Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, Baxter's _Saint's
+Rest_, Blair, _On the Grave_ ... Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living_ and _Holy
+Dying_, that gave me a shock almost of painful remembrance--Keats had
+read the latter when he was dying in Rome ... and there were the New
+England Divines, the somber Jonathan Edwards whose sermon on the day of
+doom and the tortures of hell made his auditors faint ... I thought back
+to the terrifying sermon of the illiterate negro preacher in the Texas
+jail.
+
+But now old Sowerby read nothing. "I have no time left for a book."
+
+I never met the old man's equal for parsimony. "The last man--the man
+who worked for me before you came--he was a Pole, who could hardly speak
+English. He left because he didn't like the food ... yes, that was what
+he had the impudence to announce ... and you can see that I am not so
+bad ... don't I give you a slice of jelly roll with your beans, every
+other night?"
+
+I assented to what the old man said. He had been the milkman to the
+Emerson and Thoreau families, and, in that capacity, had known both the
+great men. And I was more eager to hear what he had to say about them,
+than to draw wages for my work.
+
+But he had little to say about them, except that they were as great
+fools as the outside world esteemed them great men.
+
+"They talked a lot about work and a man's being independent, earning his
+living with his own hands, from the soil, but,--did they follow their
+teachings?... that's the test....
+
+"And I saw them, often, strolling out a-field together, talking and
+talking a lot of nonsense about philosophy, and going on, regardless,
+across their neighbours' crops."
+
+And that was the only information I could get of these famous men from
+their milkman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sowerby kept pigs under the barn.... For economy's sake the cows' dung
+was shovelled down to them. And over them the outhouse was also built,
+so that our human efforts might not be wasted....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One night, despite a hard day's work, I could not sleep. So I went out
+on the hillside to enjoy the moonlight.
+
+On my way back to the attic I observed a light in the barn. I stopped in
+to see who was there. It was Sowerby, cleaning out the stable, to the
+plain disgust of the horses and cows.
+
+I asked him if anything was the matter. I learned that he had risen in
+the middle of the night and gone to work ... because that was his
+happiness, his only happiness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Driven by an impulse of distaste for him and his house and market
+garden, I started to leave in secret. What money was coming to me for my
+two weeks' work I did not care about--in the face of the curious
+satisfaction it would give me just to quit, and to have the old man call
+up to me and find me missing....
+
+I heard him pottering back to his bedroom again.... I waited till he was
+quiet and back to sleep--then I stole forth in the quiet moonlight near
+dawn.
+
+It gave me a pleasure to vanish like smoke. I thought of the time when I
+had that job plowing in Southern California; that time I had driven the
+horses to the further end of the field, and left them standing there
+under the shade of a tree and then made off, wishing to shout and sing
+for the sheer happiness of freedom from responsibility and regular work.
+
+Each time I have made off that way, from a multitude of varying
+employments, it has not been, surely, to the detriment of my successive
+employers. I have always decamped with wages still owing me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I swung a scythe for a week for another Yankee farmer, on a marsh where
+the machine couldn't be driven in--which I was informed was King
+Phillip's battle ground.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I visited the inn where Longfellow was supposed to have gotten his
+inspiration for _Tales of a Wayside Inn_.
+
+I must see all the literary landmarks, even those where I considered the
+authors that had caused the places to be celebrated, as dull and third
+rate....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With gathering power in me grew my desire to attend college. I would
+tramp, as I was doing, through the country, and end up at some western
+university for the fall term.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The art workers' community lay in my way at Eos.
+
+I dropped off a freight, one morning, in the Eos yards....
+
+The gladdest to see me again was the Buddhist, Pfeiler. He rushed up to
+me, in the dining hall, that night, and took both my hands in his ...
+thanking me for my kind thought of him in sending him my Ossian ...
+avowing that he had made a mistake in his opinion of me and asking my
+indulgence ... for he was old and a failure ... and I was young and
+could still look forward to success.
+
+My unexpected dropping-in at Eos created quite a stir.
+
+Spalton welcomed me back, and stood, that evening, before the fire in
+the sitting room, with his arm about my shoulder ... even as he did so I
+remembered the picture taken of him and the celebrated poet L'Estrange,
+together ... their arms about each other's shoulders ... and the current
+Eos proverb, that Spalton always quarrelled not long after with anyone
+about whose shoulder he first cast his arm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Already a change was manifest in the little community. Tabled off by
+themselves sat the workers and the folk of the studios, that night.
+While the guests who stayed at the inn occupied separate tables.
+
+And there were many secret complaints about a woman they referred to as
+"Dorothy" ... Dorothy had done this ... Dorothy had done that ...
+Dorothy would be the ruination of "the shop" ... it would have been
+better if she had never shown up at the Eos Studios....
+
+I asked who was Dorothy....
+
+"Don't you know ... we thought you did ... Spalton's new wife ... the
+one his first wife got a divorce from him for?"
+
+And I heard the story, part of which I knew, but not the final details.
+
+Spalton's first wife had been an easy-going, amiable creature ... fair
+and pretty in a soft, female way ... a teacher in the local Sunday
+school ... one who accepted all the conventions as they were ... who
+could not understand anyone not conforming to them ... life was easier
+and more comfortable that way....
+
+Spalton's originality and genius would in the end have of itself
+produced a rupture between them ... few women are at home with genius,
+much as they clasp their hands in ecstasy over it, as viewed on the
+lecture and concert platform....
+
+But the wedge that drove them apart was entered when his first wife,
+Anne, brought into their married life, Dorothy, a fellow teacher, a
+visiting friend.
+
+Dorothy was so thin as to be stringy of body. She had a sharp
+hatchet-face, eyes with the colour of ice in them ... a cold, blue-grey.
+
+She was a woman of culture, yet at the same time she was possessed of a
+great instinct for organisation and business enterprise--just what was
+needed for the kind of thing Spalton was trying to inaugurate at Eos.
+She fell in readily with the Master's schemes ... even with his
+price-tags on objects of art, his egregious overvaluation of hand
+illumined books ... which his wife, with old-fashioned honesty, rebuked
+him for.
+
+An affinity of like-mindedness grew up between Spalton and this intense,
+homely woman, Dorothy ... whose face, like that of all clever, homely
+women, grew to a beauty in his eyes, that mere beauty which plastic form
+can never attain.
+
+There was a local busybody of a minister, and it was he who first
+intimated to the then Mrs. Spalton that her dear and intimate friend,
+was betraying her....
+
+There followed the usual spying and publicity ... Mrs. Spalton won her
+divorce....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But this was after several years. Long before the divorce was granted
+John and Dorothy were aware of a tangible fruit of their love.... I had
+often wondered why the Master so ardently, so often, wrote eloquently in
+defense of the superior qualities of illegitimate children....
+
+Dorothy bore their child ... a girl ... and went away to teach in a
+smart school somewhere in the East, under an assumed name....
+
+Now, after many years, Spalton and she married.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I saw in the sitting room a wonderful girl. She had shining, abundant
+hair, and a face rendered superlatively beautiful by the glowing of
+vivacity, understanding, feminine vitality behind it and through it,
+like a lamp held up within. She was absorbed in the new exhibit of
+Gresham's that hung on the walls of the guest room ... she wore a short,
+bouncing, riding skirt, and carried a quirt in her hand.
+
+I walked up to her, fascinated. Without letting her know who I was I
+quoted Poe's _To Helen_ to her. She stood, smiling sweetly, as if it
+were the most usual thing in the world, to have a lean, wild-faced
+stranger address her with a poem.
+
+"That's the way I feel about you!" I ended.
+
+She gave a lovely laugh ... held out both her hands, dropping the quirt
+on the floor ... took my hands and leaned back gaily, like a child.
+
+"Oh, I know who you are ... you're Razorre ... father wrote me a lot
+about you ... when I lived East ... you were one of his pet 'nuts'!"
+
+We sat there and conversed a long time. She talked of Socrates and Plato
+as if she had broken bread with them ... she discussed science, history,
+art as if wisdom and understanding were nearer her desire than anything
+else....
+
+She was the child of "John" and Dorothy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again Spalton asked me to stay, "we need a poet for Eos!"
+
+But I insisted that I must go on and acquire a college education ...
+which he maintained would be a hindrance, not a help--"they will iron
+you out, and make you a decent member of society--and then, Razorre, God
+help the poet in you ... poets and artists should never be decent ...
+only the true son of Ishmael can ever write or paint," he waved.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There came to the artworkers one day a young Southern woman, a six
+months' widow ... she was gentle and lily-coloured and lovely. She had
+great, swimming, blue eyes, a sensitive red bow of a mouth ... and the
+lashes of her eyes lay far down on her cheeks. She was the first woman I
+had met who approximated my poet's ideal of what a woman should be.
+
+I was working for Spalton during my stay, which I meant to make a brief
+one. I was shovelling coal for him, and firing a furnace.
+
+Wash as I might, I could not remove a faint blackness that clung to the
+edges of my eyes. This made my eyes glow and seem larger than they were.
+On such an extraneous and whimsical exterior circumstance hinged the
+young widow's interest in me.
+
+And I decided that I'd stay a little longer at the Eos Studios ... all
+winter, if she stayed all winter. And I no longer asked for an easier
+job. For I wanted my eyes to remain large-seeming, since, half in jest,
+she admired their present appearance.
+
+She manifested a close and affectionate friendship for me, and all day
+long all I thought of, as I kept the furnace going, was the evening
+after dinner, when I could sit close by her reading poetry in a low
+voice to her.
+
+I leaned over her on every pretext to smell her hair,--her body, through
+her low-necked dress--to breathe in giddily that delicate fragrance that
+emanates from the bodies of beautiful women, as perfume from flowers.
+
+Once, in spite of my timidity, I dared place my arm about her shoulders,
+there in the dark. There was a lecture on over in the "chapel" and
+mostly everybody had gone to it. Spalton, in passing through where we
+sat together, asked her if she was coming. "No, she was too tired." She
+remained sitting by me. Spalton shot me a glance of scarcely concealed
+resentment and went on. We were left alone.
+
+She began telling me of her deceased husband ... of their devotion to
+each other ... she applied a dainty thing of lace to her eyes, pausing a
+moment....
+
+"John? may I call you by your name, not by the odious name they have for
+you here?..."
+
+She leaned her head against my shoulder.
+
+"Johnnie, you are a fine, sensitive soul, and I know you'll be a great
+poet some day ... but why don't these people take you more seriously?
+
+"I think it must be your childlikeness ... and your spirit of
+horse-play, that breaks through at the most inopportune moments, that
+encourages these fools to treat you with levity."...
+
+"Dear woman," I began, "dearest woman," and my throat bunched queerly so
+that I could not speak further.
+
+She stroked my hair....
+
+"How old are you?"
+
+"Twenty-three."
+
+"I am just a year younger."
+
+"May I kiss you?" I asked, stumblingly.
+
+"Yes, Johnnie, you may kiss me"....
+
+"Why, you dear child, you ... you kiss just like a small boy ..." in a
+lower voice, "can it be possible that you, with all your tramping, your
+knowledge of life in books, of people?--"
+
+I bent my head, ashamed, silently acknowledging my inexperience of
+women.
+
+"No, it's nothing to be ashamed of, dearest boy ... I think you are a
+fine man--to have gone through what you have--and still--"
+
+Her voice trailed off. She put her arm around my neck, drew me to her,
+and kissed me!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we sat close together, a brooding silence. Then, with a transition of
+thought to the practical, she remarked....
+
+"I'm angry with these people ... they over-charge for everything."
+
+"Just think of it--I--I feel I may speak of it to you ... we seem to
+have come so near to each other to-night--"
+
+"They brought my laundry back yesterday, and for one piece of silk
+lingerie I was charged--guess?"
+
+I couldn't imagine how much.
+
+"Seventy-five cents--think of that!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As the Eoites came tramping back from the lecture, they found us still
+seated there. At the first footstep we had swiftly moved apart.
+
+I had been half-reclining, my head in her lap, strangely soothed and
+happy as she ran her fingers through my hair. For a long time neither of
+us had said a word.
+
+Now I sat apart from her, awkward and wooden.
+
+Spalton did not speak, inclined his head icily, as he strode by.
+
+"He's mad because I didn't come to his talk," she whispered.
+
+"I see my finish," I replied.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, Spalton was as much in love with Dorothy, his second wife, as I
+have ever known a man to be in love with a woman. But that could not
+entirely exclude his jealousy over my sympathetic relation with the
+"Southern Lady," as the artworkers termed her. And he feared for her on
+another score. She was, to use a constantly recurring phrase of the
+Master's, whenever he wished to describe anyone as being wealthy, "lousy
+with money," and he suspected, not without good cause, that I would warn
+her against paying exorbitant prices for books and objects of art....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One night I was the cause of an accident which gave him a handle to
+seize on.
+
+We were having a musicale. A new musician had come to Eos. The former
+Eos musician, Von Hammer, the father of the prodigy who played the
+piano, had quarrelled with the Master and had retired to Buffalo. Where,
+after a brief struggle as teacher of music, he had turned to playing for
+the movies. It must have nearly slain the man, for he was a sincere
+artist, a lover of classical music ... and now compelled to play ragtime
+and popular melodies for a living.
+
+All that I held of him, despite myself, was an unkind remembrance--his
+breath had been charnel-foul, and always, when discussing anything, he
+insisted on taking the lapel of his listener's coat and talking directly
+into his nose....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But his successor was playing at an introductory musicale....
+
+A tall, alert, dark young man ... Italian-dark ... his eyes shone behind
+his gold-rimmed glasses, swimming large and distorted under the
+magnification of the lenses ... his lips were full and red, his
+moustache of a heavy, bristly black that made them look redder and
+fuller still, almost negroid.
+
+He played the piano with violent, expert energy ... his favourite work
+was the "Turkish Patrol," which, Spalton exclaimed, as he applauded
+vigorously, he would now adopt as the Eos anthem.
+
+The drawing-room was crowded ... a few visiting celebrities ... Eoites,
+too, but only the quasi-celebrities among them. The mass of the workers
+was as rigidly excluded now, under the new régime, as ordinary retainers
+ever are.
+
+I stood by my "Southern Lady." She was in evening dress ... wore a
+lorgnette ... I trembled as I leaned over her, for I could see the firm,
+white-orbed upper parts of her breasts ... I was trying to be lightly
+playful, and was clumsy at it. I took up her lorgnette and toyed with
+it. I sat on the edge of a table ... and where I sat stood a supposed
+Greek vase of great antiquity and value.
+
+It is a law that prevails in three-dimensional space that two objects
+cannot occupy the same place at one time. I dislodged the vase. It came
+to the floor in a crash ... which stopped the music ... which stopped
+everything. There fell a dead silence. I looked down at the fragments,
+hardly knowing what to do....
+
+Spalton came over to me ... intensely ... his eyes blazing.
+
+"Razorre, come out into the lobby ... I want to speak to you." I
+willingly followed him ... he wheeled on me when he had me alone.
+
+"Do you know why we have these paintings of Gresham's hung high up there
+on the wall?" he asked rhetorically, with an eloquent, upward sweep of
+his arm, "it's so bums like you ... dirty tramps ... can't wipe their
+feet on them."
+
+"I am so sorry, so very sorry," I murmured, contrite.
+
+Thinking my contrition meekness, and possibly fear of him, he went to
+take me by the shoulders. I knocked his hands away promptly and quickly
+stepped back, on the defensive ... all my reverence for him swallowed up
+in indignation, rising at last, against his vulgar chiding.
+
+At that moment, my widow, Mrs. Tighe, arrived ... she was weeping....
+
+"Don't be hard on the poor boy," she pleaded ... "anyhow, it was all my
+fault ... and I want to pay you for your vase ... whatever it cost."...
+
+A momentary flicker of greed lighted the Master's eyes. But he
+perceived as instantly how unmagnanimous he would appear if he accepted
+a cash settlement.
+
+"I am not thinking of my financial loss ... beauty cannot be valued that
+way!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Then you must not blame the boy."
+
+"He is clumsy ... he is a terrible fool ... he is always doing the wrong
+thing. Oh, my beautiful vase!" and he wrung his hands, lost in the pose.
+Out he strode through the front door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The musicale had been broken up.
+
+"My poor, dear Johnnie, I am so sorry," murmured the young woman. I was
+sitting in the large armchair where she had sat the memorable night of
+the lecture that neither of us attended. She had seated herself on one
+of the arms.
+
+"You mustn't be despondent!" She was patting my hand.
+
+She mistook my rage at the gratuitous insults Spalton had heaped on me
+as despondency. She leaned closer against me ... quickly I caught her
+into my arms, drew her into my lap ... held her little, quiet, amazed
+face in my hands firmly, as I kissed and kissed her.... I knew how to
+kiss now....
+
+She rose presently. I stood up and caught her in my arms. Slowly and
+firmly she disengaged herself ... silently she slid away. She stopped in
+the shadow a moment before going up the long, winding stairs.
+
+"Good night, my dear poet," she whispered.
+
+She had no sooner disappeared than I started out, my heart beating like
+a drum to a charge in me. Spalton frequently wrote till late, in his
+office. I would go over there and, if he was there, call him to account
+for his insults. There was a light lit within, and I could see him
+through the window at his desk.
+
+"Come in!" in answer to my knock. "Oh, it's you, Razorre!" and his eyes
+snapped with fresh resentment. "What do you want? Don't you know that
+I'm busy on _A Brief Visit_?"
+
+"You know why I'm here!"
+
+"Well?" challengingly.
+
+"I've come for two reasons. I want to apologise to you for breaking that
+vase ... and I demand an equal apology from you, in turn, for the way
+you insulted me in Mrs. Tighe's presence."
+
+"You deserved everything I said to you," he replied, rising quietly
+from his chair.
+
+"I may have deserved it ... but that doesn't alter in the least my
+intention of smashing your face flat for the way you spoke to me, unless
+you tell me you're sorry for it."
+
+"My dear Gregory, don't be a fool."
+
+"A fool?" I replied, inflamed further by the appellation applied to
+quiet me in such a superior tone, "if you'll come on out into the street
+and away from your own property, I'll show you who's a fool ... you'll
+find you can't treat me like a dog, and get away with it!"
+
+"Why, Razorre ... my dear, dear boy," calling me by my nickname and
+taking another tack ... he laid his hand gently on my shoulder and gave
+me a deep, burning look of compassionate rebuke ... though I saw fear
+flickering back of it all....
+
+"Look here, John," I burst out, never able to hold my wrath long, "I
+like you ... think you're a great man--but you humiliated me before
+other people ... and I've come to such a pass in my life that I wouldn't
+let God Himself get away with a thing like that!"
+
+"Then I apologise ... most humbly!"
+
+"That was all I wanted. Good-night!" But I could not bring myself to
+leave so abruptly.
+
+"John," I wavered, "you _are_ a great man ... a much greater man than
+you allow yourself to be ... I'm--I'm going away from here forever, this
+time ... and I--I want you to know how I reverence and love the bigness
+in you, in spite of our--our differences."
+
+He was pleased.
+
+"And so you're going to college somewhere?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Where?"
+
+I had talked much of college being my next aim.
+
+"Either the University of Chicago, or further west."
+
+"I can give you commutation as far as Chicago."
+
+"I cannot accept it."
+
+"You must, Razorre."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A week from then I left.
+
+I went up to Mrs. Tighe's room to say good-bye. Awkwardly and with the
+bearlike roughness of excessive timidity I put my arms about her, drew
+her to me tentatively.
+
+"Be careful, poet dear, or you'll hurt me," she warned, giving me a look
+of fondness. Her left arm was in a sling. She had fallen on the steps a
+few days before and had broken a small bone in the wrist. "My sweet
+poet!"
+
+The bandaged arm being in the way, I put my head down in her lap again,
+as she sat there on the edge of the great, white bed.
+
+She leaned over, turned my face up with her free hand, kissed me full in
+the mouth....
+
+"My sweet poet," she repeated, "good-bye!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While at Mt. Hebron I had chosen German as my modern language. And it
+was a Professor Langworth's grammar and exercise book that we used as a
+text-book. Langworth, I learned from the title page, was professor of
+Germanic languages in Laurel University, at Laurel, Kansas.
+
+And now I bethought me that it would be much better to go to college in
+Kansas than attend the University at Chicago, where, I felt, education
+was made an industry, just like pork-packing and the hundred other big
+concerns in that city. Kansas would encourage individuality more, be
+less appallingly machine-like.
+
+The great, roaring city bewildered me, and the buildings of the
+University of Chicago (for I got so far as to ask for the registrar's
+office) overwhelmed me with their number. And I fled. With the exception
+of a few days I put in washing dishes in a restaurant there, I stayed no
+longer, but freighted it southwest to Kansas City ... from whence I rode
+a freight further to Laurel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the evening twilight I climbed out of a box car in the railroad yards
+at Laurel....
+
+I enquired my way to the university.
+
+"Up on the hill."
+
+I veered off from the main street of the town ... a length of marching
+telegraph poles and flat-roofed Western houses. I struck across lots in
+the cold and dark. I floundered through half-hardened puddles of mud,
+over vacant lots that afterward seemed to have been conjured up for my
+impediment by some devil of piquaresque romance....
+
+The hill, the very top of it, I had laboriously attained. On all sides
+the college buildings gloomed in dusky whiteness of architecture.
+
+One of them was lit inside with the mellow glow of electric lights. As I
+stepped into the vestibule timidly, to enquire my way to Professor
+Langworth's house (for it was his I decided to seek out first), a group
+of fragrant, white-clad girls herded together in astonished tittering
+when they saw me. And I surely looked the tramp, dusty and soiled from
+my long ride.
+
+I asked them the direction to Langworth's house, but they ignored me,
+and scattered. Turning in confusion, I ran into a man-student bodily ...
+excused myself ... the girls, standing further off, tittered again.
+
+"Can you direct me to Professor Gustav Langworth's house?"
+
+The student looked me over curiously. But he was of the right sort.
+
+"Certainly. Come with me. I'm going that way. I'll show you where it
+is...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In silence we descended the hill....
+
+"That house, in there a bit, under the trees ... that is where the
+professor lives."
+
+My knock set a dog barking inside ... the quick, insistent bark of a
+collie that romped against me, putting up its paws on me when the door
+was opened by a slim-bodied man of middle height. The man was dressed in
+a grey suit ... he had a kindly, smooth-shaven face except for a
+close-cropped pepper-and-salt moustache ... and grey-blue, quizzical,
+but kindly eyes.
+
+"Here, Laddie, come here!" called the voice of a frail, little woman
+whose hair was white like wool, and like wool in texture. She sat
+crumpled up by an open gas fire of imitation logs. She Was wry-backed,
+her right shoulder thrust out into a discernible hunch.
+
+She flung her arm tenderly about the dog, when it came to her. She was,
+I figured, the professor's mother.... He held a hurried, whispered
+consultation with her--after I had told him that studying his German
+book at Mt. Hebron had impelled me to come to Laurel. Which story I
+could see pleased and flattered him.
+
+I was waiting in the storm porch.
+
+He returned. He thrust his hand into his pocket and fetched forth a
+two-dollar bill.
+
+"Go downtown to one of the restaurants you will find on the main street.
+You can get a square meal in one of them for a quarter or, at the most,
+fifty cents ... a bed for the same price ... climb the hill again in the
+morning, say about ten o'clock, and ask for me at the German Department
+... I am sorry I can't invite you to stay here for the night ... but we
+have no room ..." and he glanced timidly at the woman whom I had taken
+to be his mother, but who, I afterward learned, was his wife.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found a restaurant-hotel, as he had directed me, and procured my
+supper for a quarter ... fried potatoes and a cold slab of steak ... and
+a big Westerner who wore a sombrero and had a stupid, kindly, boyish
+face, showed me to a bed ... which also cost but a quarter for the night
+... with a scattered ambuscade of bedbugs thrown in for good measure.
+
+In the morning, fried pork chops, pancakes and two cups of coffee--and I
+set out for the hill.
+
+The place buzzed with activity. The fall term was already in full swing,
+and students poured in lines up and down both sides of the steep street
+that led to the college ... girls and boys both, for it was
+co-educational. They were well dressed and jolly, as they moved in the
+keen windy sun of autumn.
+
+I was not a part of this. I felt like an outcast, but I bore myself with
+assumed independence and indifference. I thought everybody was looking
+at me. Most of them were.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Langworth enrolled me as a special student. He himself paid my tuition
+fee, which was a nominal one. I enrolled in Philosophy, Economics,
+German, Latin.
+
+My patron, furthermore, slipped a ten-dollar bill into my hand. "For the
+books you will need."
+
+He directed me to the Y.M.C.A. employment bureau. "They will see that
+you get work at something, so you can be sure of board and room ... in
+the early days we did not have things so well arranged. I worked my way
+through college, too. I nearly perished, my first year. After you
+settle somewhere, come and see me once in a while and let me hear how
+you're getting on."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My first job was milking a cow and taking care of a horse, for board and
+room.... The man for whom I worked was an old, retired farmer.
+
+The disagreeable part of taking care of horses and cows is the smell. My
+clothes, my room, even the skin of my body, soon reeked with the faint
+yet penetrating odour of stable and barn.
+
+But I was happy. Many great men had done as I was doing. Always trust me
+to dramatise every situation!
+
+I arranged my meagre row of text-books on the shelf in my attic. I set
+Keats apart in a sacred nook by himself.
+
+I sat humming softly to myself, studying my first lessons.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Look," cried a girl, her voice vibrating with the hard sarcasm of
+youth, "look, there goes Abe Lincoln," to another girl and two boys, who
+lolled with her on the porch of the house next mine.
+
+I was stabbed with a bitter pang of resentment. For my face was thin and
+weather-beaten ... my sharp, bent knees never straightened as I walked
+along, like a man going through snow drifts. Yet I held my head erect,
+ridiculously erect ... and my chest was enormous through
+over-development, as my arms and legs were thin.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My first few days at Laurel University brought me that beginning of
+newspaper notoriety that has since followed me everywhere as a shadow
+goes with a moving object. And then originated the appellation which has
+since clung to me, that of "The Vagabond Poet."
+
+One morning, when I was hardly awake, there came a knock at my door.
+
+"Just a moment," I called, getting into my shirt and trousers, "who is
+it?"
+
+"A reporter to interview you."
+
+I opened the door to admit a pale, young chap, who expertly flirted the
+ashes off a cigarette as he said, leaning his head sidewise, that he
+represented the Kansas City _Star_. As he spoke his keen grey eyes
+looked me over impartially, but with intelligent, friendly interest.
+Though he was dressed in the student's conventional style, even to the
+curiously nicked and clipped soft hat then predominant, there was still
+about him an off-handedness, an impudent at-homeness that bespoke a
+wider knowledge, or assumed knowledge, of the world, than the average
+student possesses.
+
+The interview appeared the next afternoon.
+
+           "VAGABOND POET ARRIVES.
+
+        LAUREL ENROLLS BOX-CAR STUDENT."
+
+It made me a nine days' wonder with the students. I caught the men
+staring at me, the girls shyly observing me, as I strode from class room
+to class room....
+
+But the reek of the stable. It went with me like a ghost everywhere.
+Maybe it was because I had no change of suits ... I saw that it was
+noticeable to others, and I sat 'way back, in a seat apart, by myself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Langworth watched my progress narrowly the first few weeks.
+
+One afternoon as I was passing his house he beckoned me in.
+
+"You're making good, and I'm glad of it ... because they're looking on
+you as my protégé ... holding me responsible for you. Munday, in the
+Schiller class, tells me you sometimes bring in your daily lesson in
+_Wilhelm Tell_, translated into blank verse ... and good stuff, too....
+And King says he turns over the most difficult lines in Horace in class
+for you to translate and construe."
+
+Langworth had only half the truth from King.
+
+Whenever the latter came upon a passage a little off colour, he put me
+on it, chuckling to himself ... he knew I would go right through with it
+without hesitation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About this time I received a letter from William Hayes Ward, editor of
+the New York _Independent_. He informed me that he had taken a poem of
+mine. And, as indubitable proof, he enclosed a check for five dollars.
+
+Professor Langworth was himself a poet of no mean ability: he was
+pleased to hear that I had sold a poem to the _Independent_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was sick of being shunned because I carried stable smells about with
+me wherever I went.
+
+Also, sanguinely, with the sale of my first poem, I was sure that my
+literary career had begun, and that from now on I would be enabled to
+earn my living by my pen, and pay my way as a student, too. So I threw
+up the job that made me smell so unpleasantly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The city of Laurel had been, in the early days, in the memory of
+settlers yet living a hale life, a pioneer outpost. Through it flowed a
+great, muddy river. The flat roofs of its main street still preserved a
+frontier appearance. It was surrounded by high, wind-swept bluffs.
+
+They still talked of the Quantrell raid and repeated the story of it ...
+and of how the six men were lynched under the bridge that swung over the
+dam....
+
+At the time of the slavery agitation its citizens had encouraged the
+negroes to escape, had petted them, idealised them as no human beings of
+any race should be idealised ... had run schools specially for them
+where it was considered an honour for the women of the settlers to
+teach.
+
+Now, the great negro population, at first so encouraged, was crowded
+into a festering multitude of dilapidated buildings that stood on the
+flats close by the region where the river coiled through level acres of
+low-lying country. This place was known as the "Bottoms."
+
+I am trying to give you the flavour of the town.
+
+They had prohibition there, too ... long before it won nation-wide power
+... consequently the negroes drove a vast trade in bootlegging ... and a
+concomitant prostitution of coloured women and girls throve. One or two
+students on the hill had, to my knowledge, negro mistresses of whom they
+were fond....
+
+The drug stores did a thriving business in the sale of spiritus
+frumenti--for "snake bite" and "stomach trouble," which seemed to be
+prevalent and epidemic throughout the community.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Saturday was market day for the farmers who lived in the adjoining
+countryside ... and the livery stables where they put up their horses
+were also resorts for gambling and the selling of "bootleg" booze....
+
+These farmers were a wild lot ... something like European peasants in
+their smacking of the soil and the country to which they belonged, but
+with a verve and dash of their own distinctly American.
+
+There were three or four cheap restaurants that catered solely to their
+trade ... "a square meal for a quarter" ... and a square meal they
+served ... multitudes of fried stuff ... beefsteak, potatoes, boiled
+ham, cabbage, heaps of white bread constantly replenished as it was
+voraciously devoured ... always plenty of hot, steaming coffee. Where
+these restaurants profited I could never see ... unless by a little
+bootlegging on the side.
+
+It was to one of them that I repaired when I left my malodorous job. The
+same one where I had spent my first night in town.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Langworth sent for me one day.
+
+"I have heard wild tales about you, Johnnie. I don't usually listen to
+gossip, but these tales are so recurrent and persistent ... about your
+going about with the degraded people who live in the Bottoms, that I
+considered I ought to see you about it."
+
+I confessed that, though I did not drink their bootleg booze, I did have
+a wide acquaintanceship with the folk of the Bottoms, and that I knew
+all the rowdies among the farmers ... that I passed a lot of time about
+the livery stables talking with them. That I often rode out to their
+farms in the hills and spent Saturdays and Sundays there. I avowed that
+there people were more interesting to me than the carefully tailored
+professors and students.
+
+My schoolmates had met me on the streets in company with these
+wild-looking yokels, sometimes taking them to their waggons when they
+were too drunk to pilot themselves effectively. And they had applied to
+me the proverb of "birds of a feather."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before I left, Langworth drew from me the admission that I was away
+behind in my board bill at the Farmers' Restaurant. My hopes of making
+immediate money as a writer of poems for the magazines had so far been
+barren of fruit.
+
+"Sh! sit down a minute and wait." His wife was coming downstairs,
+querulously, waveringly; her eyes red from weeping.
+
+"Laddie has just died."
+
+"The shepherd dog?" I enquired; for she had spoken as of a human demise.
+
+"Yes, the dog ... but he was human, if anyone was." There was an
+acidulous resentment in the tone of her answer that indicated that she
+wanted her husband to send me away.
+
+"She wants you to go," whispered Langworth, humouring his wife like a
+sick child. He escorted me into the storm porch. "You have no idea," he
+apologised defensively, "how human a dog can be, or how fond of one you
+can become...."
+
+"What's this?" I asked, taken aback. He had thrust a check into my hand
+as he shook hands good-bye.
+
+"It's a check I've just endorsed over to you. Royalties on a recent
+text-book. Please do take it." I had intimated that I would probably be
+compelled to quit college and go on the tramp again ... confessing
+frankly, also, that a stationary life got on my nerves at times.
+
+"I want you to keep on, not go back to the tramp life ... we'll make
+something of you yet," he jested, diffidently, steering me off when he
+noticed that I was about to heap profuse thanks on him.
+
+"How can I ever thank you--"
+
+"By studying hard and making good. By becoming the great poet I wanted
+to be."
+
+"But how can I pay this back? It will take a long time--"
+
+"When you arrive at the place where you can afford to pay me back, pass
+it on to someone else who is struggling as you are now, and as I myself
+have struggled."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Always, always I wrote my poetry and kept studying in my own fashion ...
+marks of proficiency, attendance at class went by the board. My studying
+was rather browsing among the multitudes of books in the college
+library. I passed hours, back in the stacks, forgetting day and night
+... recitations ... meals....
+
+I was soon in trouble with my professors ... I was always up, and even
+ahead, with my studies, but I was a disrupting influence for the other
+students, because of my irregularity.
+
+I discovered wonderful books back there in the "stack" ... the works of
+Paracelsus, who whispered me that wisdom was to be found more in the
+vagabond bye-ways of life than in the ordered and regulated highways.
+That the true knowledge was to be garnered from knocking about with
+vagrants, gipsies, carriers ... from corners in wayside inns where
+travellers discoursed....
+
+And there was Boehmen, the inspired German shoemaker, who was visited
+by an angel, or some sort of divine stranger, and given his first
+illumination outside his shop ... and later walked a-field and heard
+what the flowers were saying to each other, seeing through all creation
+at one glance, crystal-clear.
+
+And there were the unusual poets ... old Matthew Prior, who wrote
+besides his poems, the Treaty, was it, of Utrecht?... hobnobbed with the
+big people of the land ... yet refused all marks of honour ... the best
+Latinist of the day ... at a time when Latin was the diplomatic language
+of Europe.
+
+When he wasn't hobnobbing with the aristocracy or writing treaties he
+was sitting in inns and drinking with teamsters ... had a long love
+affair with a cobbler's wife, and married the lady after the cobbler
+died....
+
+There was Skelton and his rough-running, irregular rhythmic rather than
+strictly metrical verses ... mad and ribald ... often tedious ... but
+with wild flashes of beauty interwoven through his poems ... the poem
+about his mistress's sparrow ... the elegy on its death ... where he
+prayed God to give it the little wren of the Virgin Mary, as a wife, in
+heaven--"to tread, for _solas_!"
+
+And Gay, the author of many delightful fables ... who must wait still
+longer for his proper niche, because he showed gross levity on the
+subject of death and life ... he who wrote for his own epitaph:
+
+  "Life is a jest, and all things show it;
+  I thought so once, but now I know it."
+
+For all those who would not keep step, who romped out of the regular
+procedure and wantoned by the way, picking what flowers they chose, I
+held feeling and sympathy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _Annual_, a book published by the seniors each spring, now
+advertised a prize for the best poem submitted by any student ... a
+prize of twenty-five dollars. I had no doubt but that the prize was mine
+already. Not that I had become as yet the poet I desired, but that the
+average level of human endeavour in any art is so low that I knew my
+assiduity and application and fair amount of inspiration would win.
+
+I wrote my poem--_A Day in a Japanese Garden_, ... only two lines I
+remember:
+
+  "And black cranes trailed their long legs as they flew
+  Down to it, somewhere out of Heaven's blue,"
+
+descriptive of a little lake ... oh, yes, and two more I remember,
+descriptive of sunset:
+
+  "And Fujiyama's far and sacred top
+  Became a jewel shining in the sun."
+
+The poem was an over-laquered, metaphor-cloyed thing ... much like the
+bulk of our free verse of to-day ... but it was superior to all the rest
+of the contributions.
+
+The prize was declared off. After an evening's serious discussion the
+committee decided that, though my effort was far and away the best, it
+would not do to let me have the prize, because I was so wild-appearing
+... because I was known as having been a tramp. And because seniors and
+students of correct standing at the university had tried. And it would
+not be good for the school morale to let me have what I had won.
+
+They compromised by declaring the prize off.
+
+A year after, Professor Black, assistant professor in English
+literature, who served on the judging board, told me confidentially of
+this ... though he declared that he had fought for me, alleging how I
+needed the money, and how I had honestly won the award.
+
+I thought of the couplet of Gay:
+
+  "He who would without malice pass his days
+  Must live obscure and never merit praise."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outwardly I maintained a bold and courageous rudeness. Inwardly a panic
+had swept over me ... not the panic of deep solitude when a man is alone
+at night in a boundless forest ... I have known that, too, but it is
+nothing to that which comes to a man who knows all society, by its very
+structure, arrayed against him and his dreams.
+
+When the ancient Egyptians had finished the building of a pyramid, they
+began polishing it at the top, proceeding downward. And it has been said
+that on the finished, hard, smooth exterior even a fly would slip....
+
+Huge, granite, towering, the regularised life appeared to me, the life
+that bulked on all sides ... I saw that it was the object of education,
+not to liberate the soul and mind and heart, but to reduce everything to
+dead and commonplace formulae.
+
+On all sides, so to speak, I saw Christ and Socrates and Shelley valeted
+by society ... dress suits laid out for them ... carefully pressed and
+creased ... which,--now dead,--it was pretended their spirits took up
+and wore ... had, in fact, always worn....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And my mind went back to those happy days at Eos ... happy despite the
+fly in the ointment....
+
+I thought of my Southern widow, Mrs. Tighe.
+
+"Poet," she had once said, "come to my place in the South. I have a
+bungalow back of my house that you may live in ... write your poems
+unmolested ... I won't be going there for awhile yet, but I will give
+you a letter to the caretaker, and you can use the place. And my pantry
+and ice box will be at your service ... so you'll need do nothing but
+write."
+
+Now, fed full of rebuffs, I wished I had accepted her offer. And I wrote
+her, care of the Eos Artworks ... an ingenuous letter, burning with
+naïve love....
+
+She had once told me how she had scandalised the neighbours by painting
+a little boy, in the nude, in that same bungalow ... the story being
+carried about by the servants ... and if it had not been for her social
+prestige!--
+
+I thought there could be nothing pleasanter than living in her place,
+perhaps becoming her lover....
+
+I imagined myself posing, nude, for her canvases....
+
+But my brief hope fell to earth. A curt note from a married sister of
+hers ... who first apologised for having read my letter.... But Mrs.
+Tighe was abroad, painting in Spain.
+
+The shock of having someone else, indubitably with a hostile eye, read
+my letter, in which I had poured forth all my heart, made me almost
+sick. I was chagrined inexpressibly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The truth was, spring was coming on. Spring affects me as it does
+migratory fowls. With its first effort of meadow and bough toward
+renewed flowers and greenness, the instinct for change and adventure
+stirs anew in me.
+
+The school year was not yet up, but I didn't want to graduate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At that time I had a passion for meeting well-known people.
+
+It was then my only avenue of literary publication, so to speak. The
+magazines were steadily returning my deluge of poems--I sent at least
+three a week to them ... but to those who had established themselves I
+could show my work, and get their advice and notice....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Walking along the main street, I ran into Jack Travers, the young
+reporter who had dubbed me the "Vagabond Poet," the "Box-car Bard."...
+
+"Well, what are you up to now, Gregory?"
+
+"Nothing, only I'm thinking of a trip south to Osageville to pay a visit
+to Mackworth, the Kansas novelist."
+
+"That's the stuff ... I need another good story for the _Era_."
+
+"I'm going to make it a sort of pilgrimage a-foot."
+
+"Great! 'Vagabond Poet' Pilgrims to Home of Celebrated Kansan. It's only
+ninety miles to Osageville from here ... still rather cold of nights ...
+but you'll find plenty of shelter by the way ... start to-day and I can
+get the story in in time for this Sunday's _Era_...."
+
+Travers got a camera from a fraternity brother.
+
+"Come on, we'll walk up an alley and I'll snap you just as if you were
+on the way...."
+
+"No, I won't do that!"
+
+--"won't do what?"
+
+--"won't fake it ... if you want a picture of me on the way, it will
+have to be on the way!"
+
+"Of all the fools! Ain't the alleys muddy enough to be like the gumbo
+you'll have to plough through?" he teased. But I wouldn't allow him to
+take a fraudulent picture. He had to come with me, through the mud,
+grumbling, to the edge of town.
+
+There, on the country road that led in the direction of Osageville, my
+feet rooted in gumbo, a sort of thick composite of clay and mud that
+clings to the feet in huge lumps, I had my photograph taken ... actually
+on the march toward my destination ... no hat on ... a copy of Keats in
+my hand.
+
+Travers waved me good-bye. "You'll see the story in the _Era_ Sunday
+sure," he shouted, in a tone half affection, half irony. I was nettled
+at the irony. I wanted it to be looked on as a quest entirely heroic.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It began to rain. Far off, like a high, great ship riding on the
+horizon, rode the hill, with its cluster of university buildings.
+
+My first impulse was to turn back, to quit. That is always my first
+impulse. The instincts of my bourgeois ancestry against the unusual, the
+impractical,--the safe-and-sane conservatism of the farmers and clerks
+and small business men bred in my people for generations!...
+
+I pushed on through the clinging, maddening gumbo, slithering and
+sliding. Fortunately, I wore an overcoat, which, after it had reached
+the saturation point, shed most of the steady, oblique-driving rain that
+came for miles over the plains in a succession of grey, windy sheets.
+But my wrists and hands were aching, wet, and my thin, plying legs, to
+my knees. And the "squash-squish!" of my soaked feet in the mud plodded
+a steady refrain of misery.
+
+My Keats, at least, was dry. I kept the volume under my belt and against
+my naked belly.
+
+And I was happy and buoyed up by the thought, which lessened my
+discomfiture, that Sunday morning thousands of readers in comfortable
+homes would be reading about me, would gaze upon my photograph.
+
+People looked out of their farmhouse windows at me as if an insane man
+were stalking by.
+
+It darkened rapidly.
+
+My first night's shelter was in a leaky outhouse. The farmstead to which
+it belonged had burned down. I might have been taken in at any number of
+places, but my access of timidity was too great ... it might on the
+following dawn be followed by as great an effrontery. My year in college
+had disorganized me, pulled me out of my tramp character. It was no more
+a usual thing to beg or ask for shelter.
+
+I could not sleep. My muscles were already overstrained from the
+excessive effort of struggling along in the tenacious mud, like a fly
+escaping from the edge of spilled molasses.
+
+I had brought a box of small candles for just such an emergency. I lit
+one after the other, sat on the seat, and read Keats all night ... in
+an ecstasy, forgetting my surroundings, my pitiful poverty, my
+pilgrimage that would seem ridiculous to most.
+
+The rain increased. Outside it drummed and drummed. Inside it dripped
+and dripped.
+
+And as I sat there, upright, to escape the drip from the leaks, I
+climbed to a high, crystal-clear state of spirit.
+
+Again I burned through Keats' life as if remembering that it was what I
+had myself suffered ... as if suddenly I awoke to the realisation that
+_I_ was Keats, re-born in America, a tramp-student in Kansas....
+
+And now Severn, my true, faithful friend, was with me.... Severn, who
+had given up his career as painter to be near me in my last days ... we
+were on the _Maria Crowther_ ... we were still off the coast of England,
+and I had gone ashore for the last touching of my foot on English
+soil....
+
+There hung the great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment
+of twilight, before any other of the stars had come forth....
+
+  "Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
+  Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
+  And watching, with eternal lids apart,
+  Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
+  The moving waters at their priestlike task
+  Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,..."
+
+The evening star made me dream of immortality and love--my love for
+Fanny Brawne....
+
+Now we, Severn and I, were journeying across the country to Rome ...
+voyaging, rather, through fields of flowers ... like my procession of
+Bacchus in _Endymion_ ... that was a big poem, after all....
+
+Now the fountain played under the window ... where I was to die....
+
+"Severn, I feel the daisies growing over me."
+
+"Severn, I--I--Severn ... I am dying ... Severn, lift me up--I--"
+
+"Here lies one whose fame was writ in water." (How they cruelly laughed
+at that--for a time!)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I gave a start, almost a scream of agony ... the candle, somehow, had
+served me a ghastly trick ... it had cast my shadow backward on the wall,
+like that shadow cast by the head of the dying poet, as Severn had
+sketched it.... I ran my hand over my face ... it was hollow and
+tight-drawn like the face of a consumptive.
+
+The mass of resistance I had to face, for poetry's sake, was too
+enormous ... my country's motto was not "beauty is truth, truth beauty,"
+but "blessed be that man who can make two hills of corn grow where one
+bank of violets grew before," ... and my pilgrimage, in that hour of
+vision, it disgusted me ... for I was making it not to some grand poet
+like L'Estrange, but to the home of the chief exponent of the
+"Honest-to-God, No-Nonsense-About-Me Hick School of Literature" ... and
+associated with him was the syndicate poet, William Struthers, called
+familiarly Uncle Bill, whose daily jingles run together as prose, were
+now making him a fortune.
+
+With the coming of dawn the day cleared, the sun glistened on a thousand
+puddles, making them silver and gold....
+
+By walking carefully on the side of the road, I made progress less
+muddy. I was used to the squashing of the water in my shoes. The weather
+turned warmer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found myself on the usual long one-street called Main Street, in the
+prosperous little city of Osageville. It was Sunday. A corner loiterer
+directed me to Jarvis Alexander Mackworth's house.
+
+A habitation of sequestered quiet ... as I stood before the door I heard
+the sunrise song of Rossini's _Wilhelm Tell_ ... a Red Seal record ...
+accompanied by the slow, dreamy following of a piano's tinkle ... like
+harp sounds or remote, flowing water.
+
+I halted, under a charm. I waited till the melody was at an end before I
+knocked. A small, pale-faced, pretty little woman answered.
+
+"Does Mr. Jarvis Mackworth live here?"
+
+"Yes. Come in. We have been expecting you. You are the poet, aren't
+you?"
+
+"Yes, I am the poet."
+
+"You're a good walker ... we didn't expect you before Monday or
+Tuesday.... Jarvis, here's the poet-boy from the university."
+
+My host, unseen within, turned off another Red Seal record he had just
+started, again to the accompaniment of the piano.... Kreisler's _Caprice
+Viennoise_....
+
+Jarvis Alexander Mackworth came forth like a leisurely duck, waddling.
+He was very, very fat. He extended me a plump, white hand ... a slack
+hand-shake ... but not an unhearty one, rather a grip of easy welcome.
+
+A kind, rubicund, moon-round face, full of large blue eyes smiling a
+gentle and kindly welcome ... if the face of Shelley's father, plump and
+methodic-oracular, could have been joined to the wild, shining ecstasy
+of Shelley's countenance itself--you would have had Mackworth's face
+before its time. I never beheld such spirituality in a fat man. His
+stoutness was not unpleasing.
+
+"My boy ... come in ... my God, you're all wet ... you look frail, too."
+A pity shone in his eyes. "Minnie, call up Ally Merton ..." turning to
+me, "I have, as you can see, no clothes to fit you ... but Ally might
+have ... he's about your size, but he carries a trifle more meat on his
+bones....
+
+"Come in and dry yourself before the fire till he gets over."
+
+We sat before the gas-fire of artificial logs.
+
+"Minnie, will you make a cup of tea for this--poor boy," and he lowered
+his voice at the last two words, realising that I was hearing, too.
+
+"Yes, Jarv!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I sat at the table in the dining room. Jarvis Alexander Mackworth sat on
+the piano-stool, again playing the piano in rhythm rather than in
+accompaniment with the records ... it was Caruso now....
+
+"A glorious voice, isn't it, young man?" Mackworth asked, as I ate
+voraciously of the cold roast set before me ... of the delicious white
+bread and fresh dairy butter, just from the churn of some neighbouring
+farmer.
+
+"I know nothing much about music," he continued, "--just appreciate it
+... --seems to me that's what we need now, more than anything else ...
+appreciation of the arts.... I like to sit here and pick out the
+melodies on the piano as the tune runs on. It inspires me. The precious
+people, the aesthetic upstarts, make fun of Edison and his 'canned
+music,' as they call it ... but I say Edison is one of the great forces
+for culture in America to-day. Everybody can't go to New York, London,
+Paris, Bayreuth ... not to Chicago even....
+
+"Beauty must come to Osageville, since Osageville cannot come to
+Beauty."
+
+I was charmed.
+
+"Mr. Mackworth, you are a great man," I said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A ring at the bell. Ally Merton....
+
+"Ally, this is Mr. John Gregory, poet at large, Villon of American
+Literature ... let us hope, some day a little more of the Whittier ...
+Ally--" and the speaker turned to me, "Ally Merton is my right hand man
+... my best reporter...."
+
+He took Merton aside, in private talk.... Ally looked me over with a
+keen, swift glance that appraised me from head to foot instantly ...
+sharply but not hostilely ... as one who takes in a situation in a
+comprehensive instant.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Mackworth, I can do it easily ... if they'll fit him."
+
+There was an impersonality, however, about Merton's cryptic words that
+annoyed me.
+
+"You are going home with Ally, John," Mackworth said to me, using my
+familiar name for the first time, "and borrow a suit of his clothes ...
+and you are coming back with him to dinner ... where you'll meet a very
+famous person--Miss Clara Martin."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ally's blue serge suit was too short in the legs and arms for me ...
+otherwise it fitted. His gentleness and unobtrusive quietness entered
+into me, along with the putting on of his apparel. He led me upstairs in
+his house.
+
+"Mr. Mackworth has asked me to put you up while you are in town ...
+because his own house is full at present, otherwise he would accommodate
+you there ... I guess we can make shift to entertain you properly.
+
+"Here is the bathroom ... if you don't mind my saying it, when you throw
+the toilet seat up, let the water run from the tap over the wash basin
+... my mother and sisters!" he trailed off in inaudible, deprecative
+urge of the proprieties.
+
+Ally was anything but a small-town product. Suave, socially adroit, an
+instinctive creature of Good Form....
+
+He came into the room he had given me to stay in. I looked like a
+different man, togged out in his clothes. Ally was surprised that I
+could wear his shoes ... he had such small feet ... I informed him
+proudly that I, too, had small feet....
+
+"No, no, that is not the way to tie a tie ... let me show you ... you
+must make both ends meet exactly ... there, that's it!" and he stepped
+back, a look of satisfaction on his face ... he handed me a pearl stick
+pin.
+
+"This is a loan, not a gift," he murmured.
+
+I returned a quick, angry look.
+
+"I don't want your pin."
+
+"No offence meant," he deprecated, "and you must wear it" (for I was
+putting it aside) "Mr. Mackworth and I both want you to look your best
+when you meet Miss Martin at dinner to-night".... I angrily almost
+decided to take his pin with me when I left, just to fulfill his
+pre-supposition.
+
+"No, that's not the place to stick it ... let me show you ... not in the
+body of the tie, but further down," and he deftly placed the pin in the
+right spot. Then he stepped back like an artist who is proud of having
+made a good job of bad materials....
+
+"You look almost like a gentleman."
+
+I was about to lick into Merton and lend him a sample of a few strong
+objurgations of road and jail, when I saw myself in the glass. I stood
+transfixed. He had not meant to be ironic. The transformation was
+startling....
+
+"If you would only keep yourself tidy all the time that way!... it's
+easy."
+
+"Not for me ... everything material that I touch seems to fall apart....
+I lose my shirts inexplicably ... my socks ... holes appear overnight in
+my clothes. Books are the only things I can keep. I am always cluttered
+up with them."
+
+"Appearances mean everything ... then, if you have the rest, the goods
+to deliver, there is no place a man might not go nor attain."
+
+I looked the small town reporter over in surprise. I studied him closely
+for the first time. He belonged to the world, not to Osageville ... the
+world of fashion, of smartness ... a world I despised. My world and his
+would always be like separate planets. He would consort with people for
+the mere pleasure of social life with them. The one thing I did not like
+about him was his small mouth ... but then I did not like my own mouth
+... it was large, sensual, loose and cruel.
+
+And his walk ... it was almost dainty mincing. But then my walk was a
+loose, bent-kneed method of progression....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss Martin, the celebrated exposer of corrupt millionaires and captains
+of industry, was dark and tall. She had been good-looking in girlhood.
+She had fine eyes in a devastated face.
+
+I found myself petted, mothered by her. As soon as she saw me she
+removed a thread that hung to my coatsleeve.
+
+At supper I was told of a new project. A group of writers, especially of
+writers who were in revolt against big business and the corruption of
+the trusts, were about to effect a combination and start what was to be
+called the _National Magazine_; for it was to be no less than that, a
+magazine embracing all America, to serve as a re-invigorant and
+re-corroborant for new national ideals ... really only a tilting against
+the evils of big combinations, in favour of the earlier and more
+impossible ideals of small business units--the ideal of a bourgeois
+commercial honesty and individual effort that could no more be
+re-established than could the big shoe factory be broken up and returned
+to the shanty of the village shoemaker.... Bryan's dream ... the last
+effort of the middle classes to escape their surely destined
+strangulation ... which gave birth to the abortive progressive party.
+
+I was assured by Miss Martin and Mackworth that a poet who could sing
+American ideals and dreams was needed by them.... Ray Stannard Baker,
+Peter Finley Dunne, Upton Sinclair, were all to write for them....
+
+I saw clearly that their revolution was a backward-working one. That the
+country's business could never again be broken up into a multitude of
+small shops and individual competitors.
+
+Of course, I was at that time a Socialist of the violent, fiery
+type--with a strong cast toward the anarchism of Emma Goldman.
+
+But it flattered me to be taken, as it were, into the inner councils of
+such great folk....
+
+"Send us some of your poetry, with the right American ring to it,
+Johnnie," suggested Miss Martin, "and we will make you the poet of the
+group."
+
+I think that Ally Merton's clothes on me, and his correct tie, made my
+good impression, as much as my after-talk around the fireplace, where I
+spun yarns of my strange life and adventures.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You made a hit," commented Ally, as he conducted me back to his house,
+"it's a great opening for you. Follow it up!"
+
+"I will!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night I could not sleep. My blood made a tumult through my body.
+Before dawn I had written two poems on national themes; didactic verses,
+each with a moral of democracy tagged to it, and much about the worth of
+simplicity in it, and the dignity of honest labour.
+
+Yes, I would be their poet. And America's poet....
+
+And visions of a comfortable, bourgeois success took me ... interminable
+Chautauquas, with rows of women listening to my inspiring verses ...
+visits as honoured guest to the homes of great popular leaders like
+Roosevelt ... dignity and rides in parlour cars, instead of dusty, dirty
+box cars ... interviews of weight and speeches of consequence ... and
+the newspapers would drop their undercurrent of levity when I was
+written about in them, and treat me with consideration.
+
+Finally, I would possess a home like Mackworth's, set back amid shade
+trees, a house not too large, not too small ... a cook and maid ... a
+pretty, unobtrusive wife devoted to me....
+
+And I would wear white linen collars every day, tie the ends of my tie
+even ... and each year would see a new book of mine out, published by
+some bookseller of repute ... and I could afford Red Seal records ...
+and have my largest room for a library....
+
+Middle-class comfort was upon me ... good plumbing ... electric light
+... laundry sent out ... no more washing of my one shirt overnight and
+hanging it up to dry on the back of a chair, while I slept ... and
+putting it on, next morning, crinkly and still damp.
+
+I was already seduced, if there hadn't been that something in me which I
+myself could not control!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was when I caught Mackworth on the streets of his town and in his
+newspaper office that I discovered the man himself.
+
+In our country, especially in the Middle West, everybody watches
+everybody else for the least lapse in the democratic spirit.
+
+Though he was truly democratic at heart, Mackworth laid it on in
+theatric outward appearance, in true line with the Kansas tradition of a
+sockless Jerry Simpson, who went without socks, as the adjective
+implies, and made Congress on that one platform of his sartorial lack
+... of William Roscoe Stubbs, who rode into the office of governor
+partly on the fact that his daughter could make salt-rising bread ... a
+form of bread-making cultivated by the hardy pioneers of the state, and
+now no longer necessary.
+
+Mackworth was "in-legged" ... that is, his legs on the insides rubbed
+together from the crotch to the knees ... and he wore old patches,
+hanging there actually in strips ... and, I think, had his trouser-seat
+patched, too ... and though he could have afforded a car, he drove
+about, he and his family, in a rickety old two-seated rig, deliberately
+kept, it seemed, in ill-repair ... and it was such an old ex-plow horse
+that dragged it about!
+
+His fellow townsmen laughed, but they liked it. "Jarv's all right! No
+nonsense about Jarv, even ef he is one o' them lit'rary fellers!"
+
+To call everybody by the first name--that was the last word in honest,
+democratic fellowship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whether this exterior appearance of Mackworth was sincere or affected in
+him I never could quite tell. I am almost inclined to believe it was not
+done for effect,--but out of an Assisian simplicity of heart, as a sign
+manual of Bourgeois integrity.
+
+If it was an affectation, his personal attitude toward the people with
+whom he came into contact was not ... in his office everybody loved him,
+and worked for him with that easy efficiency that comes of good will and
+respect....
+
+Unostentatiously and affectionately he went about helping people.
+
+"We've got a wonderful town here ... very little vice, except that which
+always will be in every community because it is inherent in human nature
+... we have a fine college of our own ... a fine electric plant ...
+everybody's lawn is well-kept ... nobody in this town need be out of a
+job ... for miles around us the land is rich in real wealth of waving
+corn and wheat....
+
+Kansas will be the centre, the Athens, of our civilisation, one day....
+
+We have a fine Harvey Eating House at our railway station, managed by a
+hustler ... you must have Ally take you there for dinner before you go
+back to Laurel."
+
+The idealisation of small comfort ... in a case like Mackworth's, fairly
+unobjectionable ... but in most cases insufferably stodgy ... the
+dry-rot of art, literature, life ... leading to a smug conceit that in
+turn ends in that school of "two hills of corn where one cluster of
+violets grew before."
+
+No wonder that the _National Magazine_, starting with a splendid
+flourish of knight-errantry, degenerated into the mere,
+"let-well-enough-alone" thrift-crier it is.... "'How I Became an Expert
+Tombstone Salesman' ... 'How I collected Tin Foil After Work-Hours and
+Added Three Hundred a Year Extra to My Salary as Stenographer.'..."
+
+Rather, far rather, the Rockefeller, that shrewd manipulator of
+businesses ... with all his parsimony in personal economics ... his diet
+of bread and milk ... and his giving away of millions to missions and
+scientific institutions....
+
+Rather the big Morgan, who knew the old masters as well as he knew the
+weaknesses of men ... who hobnobbed, not as a democrat, but as
+aristocratic as the best of them, with princes, kings, emperors, in his
+grim, forbidding dignity.
+
+This at least presented bigness and romance!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Want to meet Uncle Bill?" and Mackworth led me into a close-shut room
+blue-thick with smoke....
+
+I coughed and choked. A fire extinguisher should have preceded our
+entry.
+
+There sat--the lumbering trot of his typewriter heard long before he
+assumed visible, hazy outline--William Struthers, known to the newspaper
+world as "Old Uncle Bill," the writer of daily prose-verse squibs on the
+homely virtues, the exalter of the commonplaces of life, the deifier of
+the ordinary.
+
+Uncle Bill's head of strong, black hair stood upright like thick wire.
+His thick, stubby fingers trotted like cart horses on and on. He stopped
+and drew up a chair for me.
+
+"Of course I ain't calling my stuff poetry," he began deprecatingly,
+"but I do a lot of good for folks ... folks read my stuff when they
+ain't got time to read the real poets."
+
+Instead of flattering him, I gave him, frankly but gently, my opinion
+of the cornfed school of literature, easing the sting by inferring that
+he without doubt had bigger things up his sleeve than his so-called
+prose poems.
+
+What I said struck the right chord.
+
+"Of course a fellow has to make a living first."
+
+(But, in my heart, I thought--it is just as vile for a man to send his
+wife out as a street-walker, and allege the excuse about having to live,
+as it is for a poet to prostitute his Muse.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nevertheless, Mackworth, Uncle Bill and I stood together, in the sunny
+street outside, posing for the photographer. And I swelled with
+inordinate pride. Though I knew I was bigger than both of them put
+together, yet, in the eyes of the world, these men were big men--and
+having my photograph taken with them was an indication to me, that I was
+beginning to come into my own.
+
+Perhaps our picture would be reproduced in some Eastern paper or
+magazine ... perhaps even in the _Bookman_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Uncle Bill Struthers is an example of what Kansas can do for a man...."
+said Mackworth, when we were alone. "Bill, in the old days, was a sort
+of tramp printer ... clever, but with all his ability in him unexpressed
+... he was always down and out ... and drink! It verged on dipsomania.
+He never held a job long ... though he was a good compositor, he was
+always on the move from place to place....
+
+"Then he came to Kansas where we have prohibition ... and it has panned
+out in Uncle Bill's case pretty fine.
+
+"He came to work for me ... fell by chance into his prose-poetry vein.
+It took; was instantly copied in all the newspapers ... of course, I
+could do it as well, or anyone else with a rhyming turn ... but he was
+the originator ... and people liked his sturdy common sense, his
+wholesome optimism.
+
+"Now Bill is happy; his stuff's syndicated--in thousands of households
+wherever English is spoken his name is a familiar word. He gives whole
+communities strength to go on with the common duties of life."
+
+"And his drinking?"
+
+"He has conquered that entirely ... once every so often the fit comes
+over him--the craving for it--then, when Uncle Bill turns up missing, as
+the Irishman puts it, none of us worries....
+
+"We all know he has hitched up his horse and buggy and is off, driving
+and driving and driving across country, to work the fit out ... no, he
+never touches anything stronger than tobacco and coffee now....
+
+"In a few days he comes back ... no one says a word ... we all know ...
+and love and respect him....
+
+"He's happy now, is Uncle Bill ... married a young wife ... has a home
+all his own ... money piling up in the bank."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ally Merton smiled quizzically when I spoke of Uncle Bill to him....
+
+"Yes, Uncle Bill's a fine, quaint old chap ... whenever he has a tiff
+with his wife--of course, never anything serious--he locks himself in
+the kitchen ... closes all the windows ... smokes up terrifically with
+his corncob ... and plays and plays for hours on end ... his Red Seal
+records of classical music of which he is so fond.
+
+"This behaviour of his is a well-known joke among us, a joke with his
+wife, to!" ... the speaker paused, to continue--
+
+"He has a good library and quite a large knowledge of the English
+poets."
+
+"That makes it all the more terrible," I replied, "for if he wrote his
+verse-prose out of ignorance, he might be somewhat forgiven ... but he
+knows better."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I gave a lecture on Keats to a woman's club. They paid me thirty dollars
+for the lecture....
+
+"Well, you surely made a killing ... those old birds will worship you
+for life," sniggered Ally.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mackworth and I had a farewell talk before I returned to Laurel. We
+stood again in front of his office, on the sunny street ... he had come
+out to bid me good-bye.
+
+
+We talked of the folk poetry of America.... Mackworth recited to me
+several of the songs and ballads which I have since seen in Lomax's book
+of Cowboy Songs.... I repeated the tale of how I had collected the
+jail-songs that I subsequently lost while jumping a freight....
+
+"There's lots of poetry in American life ... Stephen Foster Collins
+scratched the surface of it ... but he was a song writer....
+
+"There's poetry on farm, ranch, in small town, big city, all waiting for
+the transmuting touch of the true singer ... not newspaper rhymes ...
+neither the stock effusions on Night, Love, Death and Immortality
+inserted as tail-piece to stories and articles in magazines....
+
+"There's the negro mind ...--ought to hear them sing, making up songs as
+they load and unload boats along the Mississippi ... nobody's ever dug
+back into the black mind yet--why don't you do these things?"...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Good-bye, Mister Mackworth--I've had a fine time!"
+
+"Good-bye, my boy ... be a good boy ... God bless you!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Harvey Eating House the manager brought me out a cardboard box
+neatly packed, full of all manner of good things to eat....
+
+"Good-bye, Ally! thanks for your hospitality, Ally! thank your folks for
+me again!"
+
+"I will. See you up at Laurel some day soon!"
+
+For Merton was coming to study there, in the fall.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Back in Laurel I resumed my studies again in my intense though haphazard
+way. Doctors' degrees and graduation certificates did not interest me. I
+meditated no career in which such credentials would stand me in stead.
+But the meat and substance of what the world had achieved, written,
+thought--it was this that I sought to learn and know.
+
+Already the professors were beginning to row about me and report me for
+cutting recitations. On the score of my scholarship and my knowing my
+subject they had no complaint. It was that I disrupted their classes and
+made for lax discipline.
+
+But I seldom cut class deliberately.... I would find myself lost in a
+book back in the "stack" as the big room that housed the tiers of books
+was called. The day would be dusking, the lights of evening glimmering
+below in town, to my bewildered eyes! The day gone, when I had stepped
+back among the books at nine o'clock, intending to while away a half
+hour between classes! (Once it was Sidney's Arcadia that entranced me
+so).
+
+Or I would set out for class ... hatless ... my hair tousled and long
+... in my sandals that were mocked at by my colleagues ... my books
+under arm ... and fall into a reverie that would fetch me up, two miles
+or so away, a-stray up a by-road flanked with a farmhouse and young
+cornfields.
+
+Then it would be too late for my schoolday, and I would make a day of it
+... would perhaps get acquainted with some farmer and his family, have
+dinner and supper at his house, and swap yarns with him and the rest of
+his people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jack Travers was as proud of my foot-trip to Osageville as if he had
+accomplished it himself.
+
+"The boys out at the Sig-Kappa house expect three or four kegs of beer
+in from Kansas City ... come on out and help us to celebrate."
+
+"But I don't drink."
+
+"Go on! you've told me about the time you did what you called 'slopping
+up' down in Texas!"
+
+"That was only once ... and since then I've become a physical
+culturist."
+
+"Well, come and join the party anyhow ... it won't hurt you to look on."
+
+My curiosity impelled me to accept the invitation to the "keg party" as
+such a jamboree was known among the students.
+
+The kegs of beer waited us at the station ... disguised with misleading
+labels ... "chemicals, handle with care." Tenderly we loaded them on the
+waggon that had been hired. The driver sat smiling as the solicitious
+students heaved them up and secured them firmly....
+
+We sat dignified and quiet, till the outskirts of the town were reached
+... then the whip was brought down and away we whooped, bouncing along
+the country road....
+
+We whipped off down the road into the open country with a roar of
+singing and shouting. We sat on the kegs to keep them from jumping out,
+as we urged the driver to ply the whip.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a corner in a cornfield that bent inward, hidden from the
+casual passer-by by a grove of Osage orange trees. Here we drew up,
+jumped out, tenderly conveyed the kegs forth ... the ground we had
+chosen, in the corner of the field, was too rocky for planting. It was
+sultry early afternoon, of a late spring day.
+
+The driver was offered a drink.
+
+"Nope," he shook his head, grinning wisely, "I'm a teetotaler."
+
+"Be back for us at dark," we shouted, as he jee-d about, heading toward
+town again.
+
+"Here's to old Gregory and his first drunk!"
+
+Tin cups had been produced, and the bung of one of the barrels started
+... the boys lifted their full, foaming cups in unison.
+
+"Bottoms up!"
+
+I joined in the drinking, despite my previous protestation that I would
+not....
+
+"Where's the old boy that runs this farm?"
+
+"All the family's probably in town, this being Saturday afternoon."
+
+"Let's whoop 'er up, then!"
+
+We sang and shouted at the top of our voices.
+
+The cups had been four times filled.
+
+Though I had poured half of mine on the ground, I already felt dizzy.
+But also a pleasant tingling, a warmth, was slowly increasing in my
+nerves and veins and body ... an increased sense of well-being permeated
+me. I stopped spilling my beer on the ground and drank it eagerly.
+
+Someone proposed races up and down the cornfield. We rolled up our
+trousers, to make it more hilarious, and ran, smashing through the
+tender spring growth ... yelling and shouting....
+
+Then the game unaccountably shifted into seeing who could pull up the
+most corn stalks, beginning at an equal marked-off space out in each row
+and rushing back with torn-up handfuls....
+
+The afternoon dropped toward twilight and everybody was as mellow as the
+departing day--which went down in a riot of gold....
+
+A great area of the field looked as if it had fallen in the track of a
+victorious army, or had been fallen upon by a cloud of locusts.
+
+A chill came in with twilight, and we built a fire, and danced about it.
+
+I danced and danced ... we all danced and howled in Indian disharmony
+... wailing ... screeching ... falling ... getting up again ... when I
+danced and leaped the world resumed its order ... when I stood still or
+sat down plump, the trees took up the gyrations where I had left off,
+and went about in solemn, ringing circles ... green and graceful minuets
+of nature....
+
+"Here's to good old Gregory, drink 'er down, drink 'er down!" I heard
+the boys, led by Jack Travers, bray discordantly.
+
+"Want 'a hear some songs?" I quavered, interrogating.
+
+"What kind o' songs?" asked a big, hulking boy that we called 'Black
+Jim,' because of his dark complexion.
+
+"Real songs," I replied, "jail songs, tramp songs, coacaine songs!"
+
+All those Rabelaisan folk-things I had lost while hopping the freight,
+came surging back, each not in fragments, but entire. Drunk, I did then
+what my brain since, intoxicated or sober, cannot do ... I rendered them
+all, one after the other, just as I had copied them down....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And more! Gregory, more!" the boys kept shouting.
+
+I sat down and began to cry because I had lost the script. It had all
+gone out of my head again as quickly as it had come, so that I could not
+even repeat one they'd asked for.
+
+"Hell, he's got a crying drunk the first thing!"
+
+"Cheer up, old scout ... here's another cupful."
+
+"No ... I don't want any more ... I'm never going to drink again."
+
+And I knocked the cup out of Travers' hand with a violent drunken sweep
+of negation.
+
+"No use getting huffy about it," someone put in belligerently.
+
+"If anybody wants to fight," it was Black Jim, huge and menacing and
+morose, advancing....
+
+Fight! knives! jails!...
+
+Ah, yes, I was still in jail ... and Bud and the burly cotton thief were
+at it....
+
+I staggered to my feet.
+
+"Wait a minute, Bud ... I'm coming." I gave a run toward a barrel, sent
+it a violent kick, a succession of kicks....
+
+"Wait a minute! I'm coming!"
+
+"So am I!" grinned Black Jim belligerently, thinking I meant him and
+advancing slowly and surely.
+
+The barrel burst asunder, the beer sumped and gurgled about my ankles as
+I stooped and picked up a stave.
+
+"The damn fool's ruined a whole keg."
+
+I was going to lick everybody in the jail, if I must.
+
+"Put that stave down Gregory! put it down, for Christ's sake!"
+
+"Good God! Grab Jim, someone!"
+
+"Don't be a fool ... hold Gregory ... he's got the stave!"
+
+"He'll kill Jim!"
+
+"Or Jim'll kill him!"...
+
+Then came a shout from nearby.
+
+"I'll heve the law on ye, I will! destroyin' a man's cornfield like a
+lot o' heathens!"
+
+Yelling and menacing, the farmer and his big, raw-boned son were upon
+us. They evidently thought that we were all in such a drunken condition
+that they could kick us about as they choose. They had just driven home
+from market-day in Laurel.
+
+Everything was mixed up in my head ... but one thing out-stood: I must
+do my duty by my barrel stave ... as the farmer leaped into the circle
+he did not notice me staggering on the outskirts. I rushed up and let
+him have the barrel stave full across the head.
+
+At the same time Black Jim had turned his attention to the rangy boy,
+felling him at a blow. The boy leaped to his feet and ran away to a safe
+distance.
+
+"Paw!" he called out, 'I'll run back to th' house an' 'phone th'
+p'lice."
+
+"Come on, boys, we'd better dig out!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We straggled along in silent, rolling clusters, like bees smoked out,
+down the road ... we heard the rumble of a waggon ... when we recognised
+that it was our teetotaler coming back for us....
+
+"God, if my old man hears of this I'm done for at Laurel."
+
+"So'm I!"
+
+"If we only lay low and don't go spouting off about it, things will be
+all O.K."
+
+"We'll send Travers back with a little collection, to fix it up with the
+farmer, and blarney him out of taking any action."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning I had a roaring headache ... as long as I lay quiet there
+was only the slow, deep regular pulse of pain driving through my head,
+but when I made an effort to get up, my eyeballs throbbed with such
+torment that they seemed to be starting out of my head....
+
+I fell asleep in the broad day again, waking to find Jack Travers
+standing by my bed, pale and cynical, dusting off the ashes from the end
+of his eternal cigarette.
+
+"How are you feeling this morning?"
+
+"Rotten," I answered. I sat up and triphammers of pain renewed their
+pounding inside my racked head.
+
+--"thought you would, so's soon as I got up, I came down to see you."
+
+--"lot of good that'll do."
+
+He whipped a flask out of his hip pocket. "Take a nip of this and it
+will set you right in a jiffy."
+
+"No, I'll never drink another drop."
+
+"Don't be a fool. Just a swallow and you'll be on your feet again."
+
+I took a big swallow and it braced me up instantly.
+
+"Now, come on with me, Johnnie, I'm taking you in tow for to-day! A
+fellow who's not used to getting drunk always mopes around after a good
+time like we had.... I'm seeing you through _the day after_ ... you're
+going to lunch with me at the frat-house and this afternoon there's a
+sacred concert on in Aeolian Hall that I have two tickets for."
+
+"I'll never drink another drop as long as I live."
+
+"That's what they all say."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Sig Kappas I met Black Jim, the first one, at the door. He shook
+hands shyly, laughingly.
+
+"You sure fetched that rube a wallop ... he let one croak out of him and
+flopped flat ... it would have made a good comic picture."
+
+"Lunch is ready, boys!"
+
+I was made into a sort of hero--"a real, honest-to-God guy."
+
+"You'll have to come to some of our frat jamborees ... Jack'll bring you
+up."
+
+"We and the Sigma Deltas are Southern fraternities ... we have a hell of
+a sight more fun than the others ... there's the Sigma Pis--though they
+have some live birds, they're mostly dead ... and the Phi Nus put on too
+much side ... the Beta Omicrons are right there with the goods, though."
+
+"I see."
+
+A little freshman made an off-colour remark.
+
+"You'd better go and see Jennie!" advised a genial young senior, who,
+for all his youth, was entirely bald.
+
+"Jennie, who's Jennie?" I asked, curious.
+
+"Our frat woman!" answered Travers casually.
+
+"Frat woman?" I was groping for further information, puzzled.
+
+"Yes, often a fraternity keeps a woman for the use of its members ...
+when a kid comes to us so innocent he's annoying, we turn him over to
+Jennie to be made a man of."
+
+"This innocence-stuff is over-rated. It's better to send a kid to a
+nice, clean girl that we club in together and keep, and let him learn
+what life is, once and for all, than to have him going off somewhere and
+getting something, or, even worse, horning around and jeopardizing
+decent girls, as he's bound to otherwise."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were signs of failure at the Farmers' Restaurant. The curious
+farmer-family that ran it were giving it up and moving back into the
+country again. I was soon to have no place to board, where I could
+obtain credit.
+
+But it was summer by now, and I didn't care. I meditated working in the
+wheat harvest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The editors of the _National Magazine_ had given a new impulsion to my
+song--and a damned bad one. Already they had accepted and printed
+several of my effusions.
+
+I was to sing for them the life of present-day America, the dignity of
+labour, the worth of the daily, obscure endeavour of the world around
+me.....
+
+In other words, instead of flattering one man of influence and power
+with a dedication, as was done by the poets of the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries, I was to install Demos as my patron, must warp the
+very tissue of my thought to inform the ordinary man that the very fact
+that he wore overalls, acquired callouses on his hands, and was ignorant
+and contemptuous of culture--somehow made him a demigod! I was
+continually to glorify the stupidity of the people, and always append a
+moral.
+
+For a time I even succeeded in working myself up into a lathering
+frenzy of belief in what I was doing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The bedrock of life in the Middle West is the wheat harvest.
+
+There was a man named Carl Bonton who owned a threshing machine. I heard
+he was in need of hands for the season.
+
+I nailed my few books up in a drygoods box and left them in care of
+Professor Langworth's housekeeper, the former having gone away to
+Colorado for the summer. As for clothes, tramp-life had taught me the
+superfluity of more than a change of shirts and b.v.d's.
+
+Bonton looked me over.
+
+"You don't look strong enough ... the work is mighty hard."
+
+"I'm pretty wiry. Try me out, that is all I ask. If I buckle in, I won't
+mind walking back to town."
+
+Bonton's buckboard carried us the matter of five miles to where his
+machine, separator and cook-shack stood ... lurking behind a grove of
+Osage orange trees.
+
+Bonton had brought two other men besides me, as accessories to his gang.
+We found the gang just tumbling forth from the cook waggon, a small,
+oblong sort of house on wheels ... a long table in it, with benches ...
+much like the lunch waggons seen standing about the streets in cities.
+
+"Hello, boys, is it dry enough to begin loadin' yet?"
+
+"Naw; the dew's still as heavy as rain on the bundles."
+
+"We'd best wait a little longer, then."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though it seemed that half the day had wheeled by already, by seven
+o'clock we rode a-field, and the less experienced of us were hard at it,
+tossing up bundles to the loaders, who placed them swiftly here and
+there till the waggons were packed tight and piled high.
+
+I pitched up bundles from below, to an old man of sixty, who wore a
+fringe of grey beard, like a Mennonite.
+
+"I don't see why Bonton ever hired you," he remarked unsympathetically,
+peering over the top at me from his high-piled load. Several times I had
+missed the top and the bundle of wheat had tumbled back to me again....
+
+"I can't be reaching out all the time to catch your forkfuls."
+
+"Just give me time till I learn the hang of it."
+
+I was better with the next load. The waggons came and went one after
+the other ... there was a light space of rest between waggons. It was
+like the rest between the rounds of a prizefight.
+
+From the cloudless sky the sun's heat poured down in floods. A
+monotonous locust was chirr-chirr-chirring from a nearby cottonwood ...
+and in the long hedge of Osage oranges moaned wood doves....
+
+By noon I had achieved a mechanical swing that helped relieve the
+physical strain, a swinging rhythm of the hips and back muscles which
+took the burden off my aching and weaker arms.
+
+That afternoon, late, when the old man drove his waggon up to me for the
+hundredth time it seemed, he smiled quizzically.
+
+"Well, here you are still, but you're too skinny to stand it another day
+... better draw your two bucks from the boss and strike out for Laurel
+again."
+
+--"that so, Daddy!" and I caught three bundles at once on the tines of
+my fork and flung them clear to the top, and over. They caught the old
+man in the midriff.... I heard a sliding about and swearing ... the next
+moment he was in a heap, on the ground ... on the other side of the
+waggon.
+
+"What th' hell did ye do that for?"
+
+I looked innocent. "Do what?"
+
+--"soak me in the guts with three bundles to onct an' knock me off'n the
+top of the load?"
+
+"Ever since morning you've been kidding me and telling me I went too
+slow for you.... I thought I'd speed up a bit."
+
+After surveying me scornfully for a minute, he mutely reascended the
+load, and we finished the job in silence together....
+
+We laboured on after sunset till the full moon swung over the tree-tops.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Usually they did not use the cook-shack much ... it was used while on
+the road from one wheat farm to another. Usually the farmers' wives and
+daughters in the valleys and on the hillsides vied with each other as to
+heaping food before the threshers ... every morning saw mountains of
+pancakes ... bacon ... eggs ... ham ... beefsteak ... we laboured like
+giants, ate like hogs, slept like senseless stocks.
+
+I climbed to my bed in the haymow that first night. It was chill enough
+for the use of my blanket.
+
+I drowsed off, to wake with a jump of all my body from a dream that a
+giant was pressing down on me, that he had my legs doubled up over me
+and was breaking them into my breast....
+
+The cramps....
+
+I stood up and rubbed my legs till the taut tendons softened and
+stretched ... but when I dared bend them the littlest, the tautening and
+drawing twisted them again. And so I suffered half the night through,
+till, in wrathful agony, I stumbled to the watering trough and stood
+naked-white in the flood of the full moon, rubbing the icy water over my
+body....
+
+The dutiful house dogs ... barking furiously, the two of them rushed at
+my apparition as I stood up in the trough and splashed. They embayed me
+as a quarry. I jumped out of the trough and threw stones at them. They
+backed from my attack and bit at the stones. I stepped back in the water
+and rubbed myself more. The dogs squatted on their haunches at a safe
+distance and bayed lugubriously at me and the moon in common.
+
+The rest of the night I lay preternaturally awake, hearing the snoring
+and murmuring of my fellows in the mow ... hearing the horses as they
+crunched and whickered ... all the noises of the outside night came in
+at the open door of the mow. Even the hay began to annoy me as it
+continually rustled in my ear.
+
+I took my blanket and went to lie on the hard ground, under the water
+waggon. There I heard the multitudinous insects of the night, and the
+whippoorwill.
+
+Ordinarily I do not have an appetite for breakfast. That morning I
+thought I would eat little, but I ended by devouring six eggs, two dozen
+pancakes, drinking three cups of coffee ... all of which immediately lay
+like a lump of rock in me....
+
+No, I could not keep it up! It was too much of an effort, such frightful
+labour, for sixteen hours of the day. But I thought of the old man who
+had jeered at me, and I trudged a-field with the rest, my fork slung
+over my shoulder ... sore ... I ached in every muscle ... muscles I
+never knew existed before talked to me with their little voices of
+complaint.
+
+But after the first load I began to be better....
+
+And by noon I was singing and whistling irrepressibly.
+
+"You'll do ... but you'll have to put a hat on or you'll drop with
+sun-stroke," Bonton remarked.
+
+"I never wear a hat."
+
+"All right. It's your funeral, not mine," and the boss walked away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Have a nip and fortify yourself against the sun ... that's the way to
+do," suggested the old driver. He proffered his whiskey flask.
+
+"Nope ... I've plenty of water to drink."
+
+The water boy kept trailing about with his brown jug. I tipped it up to
+my mouth and drank and drank ... I drank and drank and worked and worked
+and sweated and sweated ... the top of my head perspired so that it felt
+cool in the highest welter of heat.
+
+In the hot early afternoon I saw the old man lying under a tree.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+--"too hot!"
+
+"Where's your whiskey now?"
+
+--"'tain't the whiskey. _That_ keeps a fellow up ... it's because I'm
+old, not young, like you," he contested stubbornly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These men that I worked with were unimaginably ignorant. One night we
+held a heated argument as to whether the stars were other worlds and
+suns, or merely lights set in the sky to light the world of men by ...
+which latter, the old man maintained, was the truth, solemnly asserting
+that the Bible said so, and that all other belief was infidelity and
+blasphemy. So it was that, each evening, despite the herculean labour of
+the day, we drew together and debated on every imaginable subject....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the third day of my employment by him, Bonton put me at the mouth of
+the separator, where the canvas ran rapidly in, carrying the bundles
+down into the maw of the machine. My job was feeding the bundles to it
+... up in the air in the back the threshed straw was kicked high, and
+the chaff whirled in dusty clouds ... from a spout in the side of the
+separator the threshed grain poured in an unending stream....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was difficult to keep the horses from the straw stacks that the daily
+threshing built up.
+
+Also Bonton speeded so terrifically that much of the grain was shot out
+into the straw....
+
+One night three of the horses made their way to the straw and ate and
+gorged ... in the morning one of them was dead and the other two were
+foundered....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The cramps bothered me no more.
+
+The boss came up to me and slapped me on the back.
+
+"--thought you'd sag under," but, putting his hand on my back, "you've
+got powerful back muscles, though your arms and legs are like beanpoles
+... a fellow never can tell about a man, till he's tried out."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After nearly a month of the work, Bonton began acting glum toward me....
+
+"Gregory, I'm going to pay you off to-day!"
+
+"--pay me off to-day?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What's the matter? ain't I working hard enough?"
+
+"I've no fault to find with your work ... you're a better worker than
+most of the men ... in fact they complain that you set too hard a pace
+at the separator....
+
+"But you argue too much ... keep the men up o' nights debating about
+things they never even considered before. And it upsets them so, what
+with the arguing and the sleep they lose, that they ain't up to the
+notch, next day.
+
+"No, that's the only fault I have to find in you," he continued, as he
+counted out sixty dollars into my hand ... "but," and he walked with me,
+disquieted to the road, "but if you'll wait around till this afternoon,
+I'll drive you back to town."
+
+"No. It's not over ten miles. I'll walk."
+
+I was glad to be paid off. I was missing my books and my leisure,
+longing for the cool alcoves of books in the university "stack."
+
+"You understand me, I hope ... business is business and work is work.
+I've found it doesn't do to argue ... only stirs up trouble....
+
+"I hope you don't think all this debating will end after you're gone?...
+Oh, no,--for the next week or so the boys will continue shooting their
+mouths off ... the Baptist will fight the Methodist, and both will join
+against the Seventh Day Adventist ... and the one Catholic will be
+assailed by all hands....
+
+"Before you came, no one knew what the other fellow believed, and no
+one cared ... but now you've started something."
+
+"I'm sorry, Mr. Bonton."
+
+"It can't be helped now ... don't fail to let me know in what magazines
+your poems on threshing and the harvest will appear."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I trudged townward, light-hearted ... a poem began to come to me before
+I had gone a mile ... at intervals I sat down and wrote a few lines....
+
+That fall the _National Magazine_ printed _The Threshers_ and _The
+Harvest_ and _The Cook-Shack_, three poems, the fruit of that work. All
+three written on the road as I walked back to town ... and all three
+didactic and ridiculous in their praise of the worker.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frank Randall, tinsmith and plumber, who ran his shop on the main
+street, rented me a back room over his store, for two dollars a week. It
+had been occupied by big Sam, the negro shoemaker, and it was neither in
+order, nor did it smell very sweet. But I cleaned and aired it, and
+sprinkled disinfectant about that I had bought at the drug store.
+
+Then I fetched my books down from Langworth's in a wheelbarrow, and I
+set them up in several neat rows.
+
+I lay back on my cot and looked at them in satisfaction and happiness. I
+had enough for food and lodging for nearly three months, if I cooked for
+myself. Two dollars a week for food and two for rent, and I'd do my own
+washing ... say five a week at the most! that would mean twelve weeks of
+doing nothing but reading and writing and studying.
+
+The first day of my sojourn over the tinsmith's shop, Sunday, I drew
+down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks
+I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive
+study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness,
+such effectiveness of epigrammatic expression.
+
+I opened the _Buch der Lieder_ at the poem in his preface--the song of
+the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the
+poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his
+soul with kisses. And the nightingale was singing....
+
+  "O, shöne Sphinx, O löse mir
+  Das Rätsel, das wunderbare!
+  Ich hab' darüber nachgedacht
+  Schon manche tausand Yahre."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Monday morning ... by six or seven o'clock a rustling below, in the
+shop, by eight, the day's work in full blast ... a terrific pounding and
+hammering on sheets of tin and pieces of pipe. The uproar threw my mind
+off my poetry.
+
+I went down to speak with Randall about it....
+
+"Frank, I can't stand this, I must leave."
+
+"Nonsense; stay; you'll get used to it."
+
+"No, I must go if the noise keeps up continually like this."
+
+"Well, it won't ... we have a special job to finish ... tin-roofing ...
+but if you want a place to stay where it is quiet, I have a camp, not
+far out, on the Ossawatomie, where I go for week-ends...."
+
+"Where is it? That would be fine. I'd like to stay there."
+
+"You know where old Farmer Brown lives, by the abandoned church, just
+outside of Perthville?"
+
+"Yes. That's seven miles out on the Osageville road."
+
+"Take the first turn to the right from his house, going west. It's an
+unused bye-road and it runs plumb into my cabin. There's a frying pan
+there ... and some flour ... and bacon ... tell you what ... it's been
+broken into several times. I'll consider it worth while if you go and
+live there, and I get no rent from you for it nor the room upstairs ...
+you'll be alone, God knows--excepting Saturdays and Sundays."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I packed my Heine in a bundle ... with my Bible and my Josephus in the
+Greek, along with Whiston's English version ... and I included a bundle
+of books on New Testament times that made me groan under their weight.
+For I planned to begin a four-act play on Judas, and must study for
+writing that, as well as learn the "how" of the lyric....
+
+The stupendousness of the silence of absolute solitude! At first the
+thoughts run on with a tangle and jangle, a turmoil almost of madness
+... then they quiet down into the peace that only a hermitage gives and
+the objects of life are seen in their true relativity and perspective.
+
+My diet was one of sow-belly, bread, and coffee, and what fish I caught
+in the sluggish, muddy stream....
+
+Saturday, toward sunset, I heard a whooping in the woods. It was Randall
+coming with a few friends for his week-end, as he had warned. With him,
+his wild brother, Jack; and Bill, his assistant plumber and
+man-about-shop.
+
+The drinking had begun before they were in sight of the shack. And it
+was kept up till late Sunday night ... around a big fire in a cleared
+space they sang and gambled and drank.
+
+Randall served great hilarity to the party by trying to breed his gelded
+horse to his mare ... the mare kicked and squealed, indignant at the
+cheat, looking back, flattening her ears, and showing the vicious whites
+of her eyes. Several times the infuriated beast's heels whished an inch
+or so from Randall's head, as he forced the gelding to advance and
+mount. We rolled on the grass, laughing ... myself included.
+
+Then all stripped to the buff for a swim in the stream ... a treacherous
+place where the bottom was at times but two or three feet from the
+surface, and the mud, soft and semi-liquid for five feet more. And there
+were snags, and broken beer and whiskey bottles all over the bottom
+where it was decent and gravelly.
+
+Bill, with his solemn dundreary whiskers, leaped high in the air like a
+frog, kicking his legs and yelling drunkenly as he took off.
+
+"Look out, Bill," I shouted, "it's nothing but mud there!"
+
+But Bill didn't heed me. He hit with a swish and a thud instead of a
+splash, and didn't come up.
+
+We put out in our rickety boat.
+
+By that luck that favours the drunkard and fool, we laid hold on Bill's
+feet sticking out, just under the water. We tugged mightily and brought
+him forth, turned into a black man by the ooze ... otherwise, unharmed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was not till two hours after midnight that they whisked away townward
+and left me alone, so that the graciousness of silence could enfold me
+again. I looked forward to a week's peace, before they descended on the
+camp again. But I had a premonition that there was to be no peace for me
+there. For Randall had said to me before he drove away....
+
+"You know Pete Willets? Well, he's liable to come here for a few days,
+during the week ... a nice quiet fellow though ... won't disturb you."
+
+The thought of another visitor did disturb me. Though I knew Pete
+Willets as a quiet, gentle shoemaker in whom seemed no guile, I wanted
+to be alone to think and read and write.
+
+Wednesday noon Pete Willets drove up, accompanied by a grubby Woman whom
+at first glance I did not relish.
+
+"Hello, Johnnie, Frank said we could use the shack for a day or two."
+
+"Forever, as far as I'm concerned," I answered, beginning to tie up my
+books in a huge bundle as big as a peddler's pack, and as heavy.
+
+Impatiently tying the horse to a post, they were in the shack and
+immediately prone on my bunk.
+
+As I shouldered my load their murmuring voices full of amorous desire
+stung me like a gadfly. I hurried off toward Laurel, angry at life.
+
+I explained to Randall why I had left his camp so soon. He was gravely
+concerned.
+
+"I didn't tell Willets he could have my shack to take Gracie there. This
+is a bit too thick."
+
+"Who's Gracie?"
+
+"--a bad lot ... a girl that's been on the turf since she was in knee
+skirts--as long as I've known her. He loves her. She can twist him
+around her little finger. She's going to get him into something bad some
+day. He'll do anything she wants. And she's capable of putting him up to
+anything."
+
+"Willets is weak, when it comes to women ... don't drink much ... a hard
+worker ... everybody likes him....
+
+"Did you ever notice his limp ... only slight ... scarcely noticeable,
+isn't it?... he's a corking mechanic as well as shoemaker ... mighty
+clever ... now for instance, you wouldn't ever have known, unless I told
+you, that his left leg is made of wood?"
+
+"I wouldn't even suspect it."
+
+"--lost his left leg when he was a brakeman ... made that wooden leg for
+himself ... it works so smoothly that he's thinking of taking out a
+patent on it."
+
+"Why does a woman take to a man with a wooden leg?"
+
+"--makes good money ... and he has a way about him with the girls ...
+he goes about so quietly. He's so gentle and considerate ... acts, but
+doesn't say much, you know! that's what they like!"
+
+"--damned sorry for his wife and two kids, though; when Willets comes to
+town again I'm not going to let him have my shack any more ... might be
+some trouble ... divorce or something."
+
+There was trouble and very shortly. In a month Willets had poisoned his
+wife ... with rough-on-rats ... and the quiet little shoemaker went to
+the penitentiary for life ... a life-time of shoe-making.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I rented a tent and pitched it on an island in the middle of the Kaw, or
+Kansas River. There I was alone. I rented a boat to take out my
+possessions.
+
+I lived naked till I grew brown all over. I studied and read and wrote
+to my full desire, there in the grateful silence of trees and waters--a
+solitude broken only by an occasional train streaming its white trail of
+smoke as it whistled and raced round the curve of shining track toward
+Laurel.
+
+I read Josephus entirely through, haltingly, line by line, in the Greek.
+I read all the books the "stack" at the university could afford me on
+New Testament life and times, in preparation for my play on Judas.
+
+My only companions were a flock of tiny mud-hens with their dainty proud
+little rooster. I heard them talking in bird-language, saw them paddling
+with diminutive gravity up and down in the mud, on the island mud-bank
+just beneath the high place on which my tent was pitched.
+
+When I grew lonesome for company, human company, I swam ashore, my
+clothes tied on top of my head to keep them dry, and, dressing, walked
+into Laurel. Where I lounged about for the day on the streets, or in the
+stores, or in the livery stables ... I knew everybody and everybody knew
+me, and we had some fine times, talking.
+
+I had access to the local Carnegie Library as well as to the university
+"stack".
+
+My food did not cost me above a dollar a week. For I went on a whole
+wheat diet, and threw my frying pan away.
+
+I was the tramp, as ever, only I was stationary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The opening days of the fall term came round again. Summer weather, hot
+and belated, lingered on. I was now more native to the river than to
+life in a four-walled room and on street pavements.
+
+I debated seriously whether I should return to classes, or just keep on
+studying as I was, staying in my tent, and taking books out at the two
+libraries. I knew that they'd allow me to continue drawing out books at
+the university, even though I attended classes no longer--Professor
+Langworth would see to that.
+
+Also, most of the professors would whisper "good riddance" to
+themselves. I camped at their gates too closely with questions. I never
+accepted anything as granted. The "good sports" among them welcomed this
+attitude of mine, especially the younger bunch of them--who several
+times invited me to affairs of theirs, behind closed blinds, where good
+wine was poured, and we enjoyed fine times together....
+
+I was invited on condition that I would not let the student-body know of
+these _sub rosa fiestas_. Which were dignified and unblameworthy ...
+only, wine and beer went around till a human mellowness and
+conversational glow was reached.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A trifling incident renewed my resolve to continue as a student
+regularly enrolled....
+
+Though considered a freak and nut, I was generally liked among the
+students, and liked most of them in turn....
+
+They used frequently to say--"'s too bad Johnnie Gregory won't act like
+the rest of the world, he's such a likeable chap...."
+
+As the boys came back to school I went about renewing acquaintances.
+
+The afternoon of the day of the "trifling incident" I was returning from
+a long visit to Jack Travers and the Sig-Kappas.
+
+It was about ten o'clock when I reached the river-bank opposite my
+island. There was a brilliant moon up. If daylight could be
+silver-coloured it was day.
+
+I stood naked on the water's edge, ready to wade out for my swim back to
+my island. My clothes were trussed securely, for dryness, on my head.
+
+A rustling, a slight clearing of the throat, halted me.
+
+I glanced through a vista of bushes.
+
+There sat a girl in the full moonlight. She had a light easel before
+her. She was trying to paint, evidently, the effects of the moon on the
+landscape and the river. Painters have since told me that it is
+impossible to do that. It is too dark to see the colours. Nevertheless
+the girl was trying.
+
+I stopped statue-still to find if I had been seen. When assured that I
+had not, I slowly squatted down, and, naked as I was, crept closer,
+hiding behind a screen of bushes. And I fastened my eyes on her, and
+forgot who I was. For the moon made her appear almost as plain as day.
+And she was very beautiful. And I was caught in a sudden trap of love
+again.
+
+Here, I held no doubt, was my Ideal. I could not distinguish the colour
+of her hair. But she was maiden and slenderly wonderful.
+
+I lay flat, hoping that she would not hear my breath as she calmly
+painted. My heart beat so hard it seemed to shake the ground beneath me.
+
+She, too, was original, what the world would call "eccentric" ... out
+here, three miles from town, with the hours verging toward midnight ...
+seated on the river bank, trying to capture the glory of the moon on
+canvas.
+
+But, unusual as her action was, there was nothing mad about her mode of
+dressing ... her white middy blouse, edged with blue ... her flowing tie
+... her dainty, blue serge skirt and dainty shoes.
+
+I lay there, happy in being near her, the unknown.
+
+After a long time she rose ... gave a sigh ... brushed her hand over her
+hair.
+
+Fascination held me close as she stooped over ... began leisurely to
+untie her shoes ... set them, removed, aside, toe to toe and heel to
+heel, equal, as if for mathematical exactness ... paused a moment ...
+lifted her skirts, drew off her garters with a circular downward sweep
+... drew down her stockings....
+
+She sat with her stockings off, stuffed into her shoes,--her skirt up to
+her hips, gazing meditatively at her naked legs held straight before
+her.
+
+I was close enough to hear her breathing--or so keen in my aroused
+senses that I thought I heard it. She wiggled her toes to herself as she
+meditated.
+
+She paused as if hesitating to go on with her undressing. A twig
+snapped. She came to her knees and looked about, startled, then
+subsided again, tranquil and sure of her solitude.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She stood in the moonlight, naked. My gaze grew fat with pleasure as it
+fed on her nakedness....
+
+She stepped down to the water's edge, dabbling her outstretched toes in
+the flow.
+
+Ankle-deep, she stood and stooped. She scooped up water and dashed it
+over her breasts. She rose erect a moment and gazed idly about.
+
+Then, binding her hair in a careful knot, she went in with a plunge and
+I saw that she could swim well.
+
+My heart shook and thundered so that its pulse pervaded all my body with
+its violence. I held in curb a mad, almost irresistible impulse to rush
+in after her, crying out that I was a poet ... that this was the true
+romance ... that we must throw aside the conventions ... that no one
+would ever know.
+
+Then I thought of my skinniness and ugliness in comparison with her
+slight but perfect beauty. And I knew that it would repel her. And I
+held still in utter shame, not being good-looking enough to join her in
+the river.
+
+I lay prone, almost fainting, dizzy, not having the strength to creep
+away, as I now considered I must do.
+
+I saw her return and watched her as she slowly resumed her clothes,
+piece by leisurely piece. She folded her camp stool, packed her small
+easel in a case and started off toward town.
+
+Shouldn't I now intercept her, explain who I was, and offer to escort
+her along the tracks back to town? For it was surely dangerous for her
+to come so far into the night, alone. There were tramps ... and the
+stray criminal negro from the Bottoms ... God knows what else, in her
+path!
+
+But my timidity let her pass on alone.
+
+I needed the coolness of the water about me, as I swam out to my tent. I
+forgot my clothes on my head and they soused in the water as I swam. All
+night I tossed, sleepless. I lay delirious with remembrance of her ...
+imagined myself with her as I lay there, and whispered terms of love and
+endearment into the dark.
+
+Who was she? One thing I knew--she must be a student, and an art
+student under Professor Grant in the Fine Arts Department.
+
+This was the incident that decided me to enroll again as regular
+student, and to fold my tent, leave my solitary island, and return to
+town ... where I sought out Frank Randall, and he again offered me the
+room I had given up. And he gave me work as his bookkeeper, several
+hours of the day ... which work I undertook to perform in return for my
+room. In addition he gave me two dollars a week extra.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon soon after my enrollment, I met Ally Merton coming down
+hill.
+
+"Well, here I am, as I said I'd be," said he.
+
+He was, as usual, dressed to perfection--not a minute ahead of the
+style, not a minute behind ... gentle-voiced and deferential, learning
+to be everywhere without being noticed anywhere.
+
+"I see you're still eccentric in dress ... sandals ... shirt open at the
+neck ... denim too ... cheap brown socks ... corduroys...."
+
+"Yes, but look," I jested in reply, "I wear a tie ... and the ends pull
+exactly even. That's the one thing you taught me about correct dressing
+that I'll never forget."
+
+"If I could only persuade you, Johnnie, of the importance of little
+things, of putting one's best foot forward ... of personal appearance
+... why create an initial prejudice in the minds of people you meet,
+that you'll afterward have to waste valuable time in trying to remove?"
+
+"Where are you putting up, Ally?"
+
+"At the Phi Nus" (the bunch that went in the most for style and society)
+"I'm a Phi Nu, keep in touch with me, Johnnie."
+
+"Keep in touch with me," was Merton's stock phrase....
+
+"Mr. Mackworth asked me particularly to look you up, and 'take care of'
+you ... you made a hit with him ... but he's very much concerned about
+you--thinks you're too wild and erratic."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The tinshop was a noisy place, as I have said before. It was as
+uproarious as a boiler factory. All day long there was hammering,
+banging, and pounding below ... but I was growing used to it ... as you
+do to everything which must be.
+
+Keeping Randall's books occupied a couple of hours each morning or
+afternoon, whenever I chose. All the rest of the day I had free....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had almost come to the conclusion that the girl I had seen in the
+moonlight had been an apparition conjured up by my own imagination, when
+I glimpsed her, one afternoon, walking toward Hewitt Hall, where the art
+classes held session, in the upper rooms. I followed the girl, a long
+way behind. I saw her go in through the door to a class where already a
+group of students sat about with easels, painting from a girl-model ...
+fully clothed ... for painting from the nude was not allowed. They had
+threshed that proposition out long before, Professor Grant explained to
+me, once,--and the faculty had decided, in solemn conclave, that the
+farmers throughout the state were not yet prepared for that step....
+
+I sought Grant's friendship. He had studied in the Julian Academy at
+Paris, in his youth. He invited me to his house for tea, often; where I
+met many of his students, but never, as I had hoped, the girl of the
+moonlight....
+
+But by careful and guarded inquiry I found out who she was ... a girl
+from the central portion of the state, named Vanna Andrews.
+
+When Grant asked me to pose for his class, sandals, open shirt,
+corduroys, and all ... I agreed ... almost too eagerly ... he would pay
+me twenty-five cents an hour.
+
+My first day Vanna was not there. On the second, she came ... late ...
+her tiny, white face, crowned with its dark head of hair ... "a star in
+a jet-black cloud," I phrased, to myself. She sailed straight in like a
+ship.
+
+When she had settled herself,--beginning to draw, she appraised me
+coolly, impartially, for a moment ... took my dimensions for her paper,
+pencil held at arm's length....
+
+Slowly, though I fought it back, a red wave of confusion surged over my
+face and neck. I turned as red as ochre. I grew warm with perspiration
+of embarrassment. I gazed fixedly out through the window....
+
+"You're getting out of position," warned Professor Grant.
+
+Vanna still observed me with steadfast, large, blue eyes. She started
+her sketch with a few, first, swift lines.
+
+"Excuse me," I rose, "I feel rather ill." I posed, "I've been up all
+night drinking strong coffee and writing poems," I continued, my voice
+rising in insincere, noisy falsetto.
+
+"Step down a minute and rest, then, Mr. Gregory," advised Professor
+Grant, puzzled, a grimace of distaste on his face.
+
+"Isn't he silly," I overheard a girl student whisper to a loud-dressed
+boy, whose easiness of manner with the female students I hated and
+envied him for....
+
+I resumed my pose. I blushed no more. I endured the cool, level,
+impersonal glances of the girl I had fallen in love with....
+
+"The model's a little wooden, don't you think, professor?" she observed,
+to tease me, perhaps. She could not help but sense the cause of my
+agitation. But then she was used to creating a stir among men. Her
+beauty perturbed almost the entire male student body.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I noticed that her particular chum was a very homely girl. I straightway
+found charms in this girl that no one had ever found before. And Alice
+and I became friends. And, while posing, I came before the time, because
+she, I discovered, was always beforehand, touching up her work.
+
+Alice was a stupid, clumsy girl, but she adored Vanna and liked nothing
+better than to talk about her chum and room-mate. She took care of Vanna
+as one would take care of a helpless baby.
+
+"Vanna is a genius, if there ever was one ... she doesn't know her hands
+from her feet in practical affairs ... but she's wonderful ... all the
+boys," and Alice sighed with as much envy as her nature would
+allow--"all the boys are just crazy about her ... but she isn't in love
+with any of them!"
+
+My heart gave a great bound of hope at these last words.
+
+"Professor Grant's students--about two-thirds of them--have enrolled in
+his classes, because she's there."
+
+And then I went cold with jealousy and with despair ... one so popular
+could never _see_ me ... if it were only later, when my fame as a poet
+had come!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Vanna has to be waited on hand and foot. I don't mind though,"
+continued Alice, "I hang up her clothes for her ... make her bed ...
+sweep and dust our rooms ... it makes me happy to wait on anything so
+beautiful!" and the face of the homely girl glowed with joy....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was poor and miserable. I bent my head forward, forgetful of my
+determination to walk erect and proud, with a pride I did not possess.
+
+Langworth was coming behind me. He slapped me on the back. I whirled,
+full of resentment. But changed the look to a smile when I perceived who
+it was....
+
+"Why, Johnnie, what's the matter? you're walking like an old man. Brace
+up. Is anything wrong?"
+
+"No, I was just thinking."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first cold blasts of winter howled down upon us. No snow yet, but
+winds that rushed about the buildings on the hill, full of icy rain, and
+with a pushing strength like the shoulders of invisible giants out of
+the fourth dimension ... we men kept on the sidewalks when we could ...
+but the winds blew the girls off into the half-hardened mud, and, at
+times, were so violent, that the girls could not extricate themselves,
+but they stood still, waiting for help, their skirts whirling up into
+their very faces.
+
+It was what the boys called "a sight for sore eyes."
+
+They stood in droves, in the sheltered entrances of the halls, and
+occasionally darted out by ones and twos and threes to rescue distressed
+co-eds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Down in the room over the tin and plumbing shop in which I lived, I
+found it cold indeed. I could afford no heat ... and, believing in
+windows open, knew every searching drop in the barometer.
+
+But never in my life was I happier, despite my secretly cherished love
+for Vanna. For I assured myself in my heart of certain future fame, the
+fame I had dreamed of since childhood. And I wore every hardship as an
+adornment, conscious of the greatness of my cause.
+
+Isolation; half-starvation; cold; inadequate clothing;--all counted for
+the glory of poetry, as martyrs had accepted persecution and suffering
+for the glory of God.
+
+My two hours of daily work irked me. I wanted the time for my writing
+and studying ... but I still continued living above the din of the shop
+that I had grown accustomed to, by this time.
+
+Rarely, when the nights were so subarctic as to be almost unbearable,
+did I slip down through the skylight and seek out the comparative warmth
+of the shop ... and there, on the platform where the desk stood so that
+it could overlook all the store, I wrote and studied.
+
+But Randall said this worried the night watchman too much, my appearing
+and disappearing, all hours of the night. He didn't relish coming every
+time to see if the store was being burglarised.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The outside world was beginning to notice me. My poems, two of which I
+had sold to the _Century_, two to _Everybody's_, and a score to the
+_Independent_, were, as soon as they appeared in those magazines,
+immediately copied by the Kansas newspapers. And the Kansas City _Star_
+featured a story of me at Laurel, playing up my freaks and oddities ...
+but accompanied by a flattering picture that "Con" Cummins, our college
+photographer, had taken.
+
+Also I was receiving occasional letters from strangers who had read my
+poems. But they were mostly letters from cranks ... or from girls very,
+very young and sentimental, or on the verge of old-maidhood, who were
+casting about for some escape from the narrow daily life that environed
+them....
+
+But one morning a letter came to me so scrawlingly addressed that I
+marvelled at the ability of the postal authorities in deciphering it.
+The writer of it hailed me as a poet of great achievement already, but
+of much greater future promise.... Mr. Lephil, editor of the _National
+Magazine_, for whom he was writing a serial, had showed him some of my
+verse, and he must hasten to encourage me ... I puzzled long over the
+writer's signature.... It could not be possible! but it seemed to be
+inscribed with the name of a novelist famous for his investigations of
+capitalistic abuses of the people ... the author of the sensational
+novel, _The Slaughter House_, which was said to out-Zola Zola--Penton
+Baxter.
+
+I hurried downstairs from my attic, to intercept some friend who would
+confirm me in my interpretation of the signature.
+
+It was Travers I ran into. I showed the letter to him.
+
+"By Jove! It _is_ Baxter!" he cried.
+
+He was as overwhelmed as I had been.
+
+"Say, Johnnie, you must really amount to something, with all these
+people back East paying such attention to you ... come on into Kuhlman's
+and have a "coke" with me."
+
+In Kuhlman's, the college foregathering place, the ice cream and
+refreshment parlour of the town, we joined with Jimmy Thompson, our
+famous football quarterback. The room was full of students eating ice
+cream and drinking coco-cola and ice cream sodas.
+
+"Say, let me print this."
+
+"No, but you may put an item in the _Laurelian_, if you want to."
+
+"I must write a story for the _Star_ about it."
+
+It would have pleased my vanity to have had Jack put the story in the
+papers, but I was afraid of offending Baxter ... afterward I learned
+that it would not have offended him ... he had the vanity of a child, as
+well as I.
+
+I answered his letter promptly, in terms of what might have seemed, to
+the outside eye, excessive adulation. But Penton Baxter was to me a
+great genius ... and nothing I could have written in his praise would
+have overweighed the debt I owed him for that fine letter of
+encouragement.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So at last I was reaping the fruits of my years of struggle for the
+poetic ideal--my years of poverty and suffering.
+
+A belated student at college, twenty-five years of age ... a tramp for
+the sake of my art ... as I sat in my cold room ... propped up by my one
+overturned chair ... in bed ... betaking myself there to keep from
+freezing while I wrote and dreamed and read and studied,--I burst out
+singing some of my own verses, making the tune to the lines as I went
+along.
+
+"John Gregory, you are a great man, and some day all the world shall
+know and acknowledge it!" I said over and over again to myself....
+
+"And now, Vanna, my love, my darling," I cried aloud, so that if anyone
+overheard, the auditor would think I was going mad, "now, Vanna, you
+shall see ... in a year I shall have my first book of poetry out ... and
+fame and money for royalties will be mine ... then I will dare speak to
+you boldly of my love for you ... and you will be glad and proud of it
+... and be happy to marry me and be my wife!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the meantime Vanna Andrews was daily seen driving down the streets
+with Billy Conway, whose father was Governor of a Western State ... as I
+saw her going by in her fragile beauty, I bowed my head to her, and in
+return came a slight nod of mere, passing acquaintanceship.
+
+I made friends with Billy, as I had done with Vanna's homely room-mate
+... who thought I was becoming interested in her--because I often spoke
+in Vanna's dispraise, to throw her off the track, and to encourage her
+to speak at greater length of the woman I loved and worshipped from
+a-far.
+
+Now I sought through Billy Conway a nearer opportunity for her favour.
+He approached me one day while we were out on the football field,
+practicing formations. I was on the scrub team--whose duty it was to
+help knock the big team into shape.
+
+"Johnnie, you know Vanna, don't you?... Vanna Andrews, the art student."
+
+"Slightly," I concealed, thanking God I hadn't blushed straightway at
+the mention of her name ... "--met her when I posed for Professor
+Grant's classes."
+
+"She's a beaut, ain't she?"
+
+"Everybody thinks so."
+
+"Don't you?"
+
+"She'd be perfect, if she weren't so thin," I answered, almost
+smothering from the thumping of my heart.
+
+"I've often wondered what makes you so cold toward the girls ... when
+you write poetry ... poets are supposed to be romantic."
+
+"We have a good imagination."
+
+"--wish you'd exercise your imagination a little for me ... I'd pay you
+for it."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"--writing poems on Vanna, for me."
+
+My heart gave a wild jump of joy at the opportunity.
+
+"I'll think it over. But if I do so, I won't take anything for it."
+
+Billy shook my hand fervently.
+
+"You're all right, Gregory ... it'll help me a lot ... I've got a case
+on her, I'll admit."
+
+"Come on!" roared Coach Shaughnessy, "get on the job."
+
+He began calling letters and numbers for a play.
+
+And just for a joke, he took "Barrel" Way, the two hundred pound
+fullback, aside, and "Rock-crusher" Morton ... he whispered them, I
+afterward learned, to give me rough stuff, go through me with a bang....
+
+"Rock-crusher" took the ball, with "Barrel" for interference ... they
+came flashing my way.
+
+I was so frenzied with joy over the prospect of getting my poems through
+to Vanna, even if it was in another man's behalf, that I flung myself
+forward and brought both stars down with only a yard gained.
+
+Shaughnessy gave a whoop of joyous amazement and the other boys shouted,
+and kidded "Barrel" and "Rock-crusher," the latter of whom won his
+nickname from the gentle way he had of hitting his antagonists with his
+hard knees as he ran into them, and bowling them over ... he was a
+recruit from the hurdles, who ran "high."
+
+Shaughnessy came over to me.
+
+"Gregory, I want to say right here, I wish you took enough studies, and
+you could make sub on the big team right off. You're skinny, but you've
+got the mettle I wish all my boys had."
+
+No sooner was I out of my football clothes than I hurried to Kuhlman's,
+drank three coco-colas to stimulate me, and went to my room, to write my
+first poem for Vanna....
+
+Nearly every day Billy received a poem from me. Henceforth, when I
+passed Vanna, I received a gentle, appreciative smile ... but I was too
+timid even to speak to her ... and too self-conscious of my clothes,
+which were worn and frayed....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were a few negro students at Laurel. One of them, a girl named
+Matty Smith, approached me in the library one day, introduced herself as
+one of the chairmen of the entertainment committee of the First African
+Methodist Church, and asked me if I would come and give them a talk the
+following Saturday night....
+
+The night came ... I found myself on the platform with the preacher by
+my side. They had seated me in the chair of honour.
+
+First the congregation prayed and sang ... such singing, so clear and
+soaring and melodious. It rocked the very church, burst out through the
+windows in great surges of melody.
+
+I was introduced as their friend, as the coloured man's friend.
+
+I spoke. I read my poems simply and unaffectedly.
+
+Afterward I shook hands all round.
+
+Matty Smith, the negro girl, as black as soot, and thoroughly African,
+stood by me as introducer. If I had shut my eyes, her manner of speech
+might not have been told from that of any cultured white woman's. She
+was as refined and sensitive a human being as I have ever met.
+
+As I walked back to my attic over the plumber shop, it was with head
+erect and heaving chest. I deemed myself a champion of the negro race. I
+was almost putting myself alongside of Lincoln and John Brown.
+
+Their reason for inviting me was that I had had a scathing poem printed,
+in the New York _Independent_, on the lynching of a negro in Lincoln's
+home State of Illinois.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within two days of my talk at the First Methodist African Church, I met
+simultaneously in front of the library, two women, each going in
+opposite directions....
+
+"Good afternoon, Mr. Gregory!"
+
+It was Matty Smith. She was hesitating for a cue from me. She wished to
+stop and thank me again for my speaking.
+
+But from the other side Vanna Andrews was passing.
+
+I ignored Matty with a face like a stone wall.
+
+"Good afternoon!" I bowed to Vanna ... who ignored me ... perhaps not
+seeing me.
+
+The fearful, hurt look in the negro girl's eyes made me so ashamed of
+myself that I wanted to run away and hide forever somewhere.
+
+That night I was so covered with shame over what I had done to another
+human soul, a soul perhaps as proud and fine as any in Laurel, that it
+was not till dawn that sleep visited me....
+
+So I was just as rotten, just as snobbish, just as fearful of the herd,
+as were these other human beings whom I made fun of as the bourgeoisie.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Speaking with Riley, one of the English professors, about the mixture of
+colours on the hill....
+
+"I must confess," he admitted sincerely, "that I feel awkward indeed
+when a negro student walks by my side ... even for a few steps...."
+
+Coach Shaughnessy declared himself boldly--
+
+"I'll admit frankly to you, Gregory, but don't, of course, repeat what
+I say--that I'll never let a nigger play on the football team ... when
+they sweat they stink too badly ... no, sir, John Brown's State or not,
+the negro was never meant to mix with the white on terms of equality."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was mainly out of consideration for Langworth, and desire to please
+him, that I now joined the Unitarian Church, of which all the old
+settlers of Laurel were members. This included a testy old gentleman
+named Colonel Saunders, who had been one of John Brown's company, had
+quarrelled with him,--and who now, every year, maintained, at the annual
+meeting of old settlers, that Brown had been a rogue and murderer ... a
+mad man, going about cutting up whole families with corn knives....
+
+At this juncture in his speech, which was made undeviatingly every year,
+a sentimental woman would rise and cry out--
+
+"John Brown, God bless him, whatever you say, Colonel Saunders, his soul
+still goes marching on--"
+
+"I grant that, madam--that his soul still goes marching on--I _never_
+contested that--but _where_ does it go marching on!"
+
+Then the yearly riot of protests and angry disputation would wake.
+
+And every spring, in anticipation of this mêlée, reporters from the
+Kansas City papers were sent to cover the story of the proceedings of
+the Old Settlers' Society.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bob Fitzsimmons stopped off at our town, with his show. Though I
+couldn't afford to attend the performance, I did race down to the
+station, go up to him, and ask the privilege of a handshake.
+
+His huge, freckled ham of a hand closed over mine in a friendly manner
+... which disappeared up to the wrist. He exchanged a few, simple, shy
+words with me from a mouth smashed to shapelessness by many blows. He
+smiled gently, with kind eyes.
+
+I was prouder of this greeting than of all my growing associations with
+well-known literary figures. And I boasted to the boys of meeting "Bob"
+... inventing what I said to "Bob" and what "Bob" said to me, _ad
+infinitum_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though the great athlete shared my admiration with the great writer,
+yet my staying awake at night writing, my but one meal a day,
+usually,--except when I was invited out to a fraternity house or the
+house of a professor--and my incessant drinking of coffee and coco-cola
+to keep my ideas whipped up--all these things incapacitated me from
+attaining any high place in athletic endeavour. I was fair at boxing and
+could play a good scrub game of football. But my running, on which I
+prided myself most--I entered for the two-mile, one field day, and won
+only third place. I had gone back in form since Hebron days.
+
+Dr. Gunning, head of our physical instruction, informed me that,
+exercise as I might, I could never hope to be stronger or put on more
+weight ... "you had too many hardships and privations in your growing
+years ... and you are of too nervous a temperament."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But my love for Vanna had regularised me somewhat. I discarded my
+sandals and bought Oxford ties. And I preserved a crease in my trousers
+by laying them, folded carefully, under my mattress every night. And I
+took to wearing shirts with white linen collars....
+
+And I kept a picture of the girl I adored, secretly, among my
+manuscripts--it was one I had begged of "Con" Cummins, frankly taking
+him into my confidence as to my state of heart toward Vanna. Which
+confidence "Con" never abused, though it might have afforded endless
+fields of fun.
+
+"Con" framed the picture for me.
+
+When alone with it, I often actually knelt to it, as to a holy image.
+And I kissed and kissed it, till it was quite faded away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emma Silverman, the great anarchist leader, came to Laurel, with her
+manager, Jack Leitman. I went to the Bellman House, the town's swellest
+hotel, to see her. I had never met her but had long admired her for her
+activities and bravery.
+
+I found her a thick-built woman, after the gladiatorial fashion ... as
+she moved she made me think of a battleship going into action. There was
+something about her face ... a squareness of jaw, a belligerency, that
+reminded me of Roosevelt, whom I had seen twice ... once, at Mt. Hebron,
+when he had made a speech from the chapel platform ... (when I had
+determined not to join in the general applause of one whom I considered
+a mere demagogue--but, before I knew it, found myself on my feet
+roaring inarticulately as he strode in) and again, after he had returned
+from his African expedition, and had come to Laurel to dedicate a
+fountain set up for the local horses and dogs by the S.P.C.A.
+
+Jack Leitman looked to me like a fat nincompoop. Such a weakling as
+great women must necessarily, it seems, "fall for." But he was an
+efficient manager. Possessed of a large voice and an insistent manner,
+he sold books by the dozen before and after Emma Silverman's
+lectures....
+
+Miss Silverman already knew of me through Summershire, the wealthy
+socialist editor and owner of _Summershire's Magazine_, and Penton
+Baxter. It thrilled me when she called me by my first name....
+
+Her first lecture was on Sex. The hall was jammed to the doors by a
+curiosity-moved crowd.
+
+She began by assuming that she was not talking to idiots and cretins,
+but to men and women of mature minds--so she could speak as she thought
+in a forthright manner. She inveighed against the double standard. When
+someone in the auditorium asked what she meant by the single standard
+she replied, she meant sexual expression and experience for man and
+woman on an equal footing ... the normal living of life without which no
+human being could be really decent--and that regardless of marriage and
+the conventions!
+
+"The situation as it is, is odious ... all men, with but few exceptions,
+have sexual life before marriage, but they insist that their wives come
+to them in that state of absurd ignorance of their own bodily functions
+and consequent lack of exercise of them, which they denominate 'purity.'
+...
+
+"I doubt if there is a solitary man in this audience--a married man--who
+has not had premarital intercourse with women."
+
+All the while I kept my eye on Professor Wilton, who sat near me, in the
+row ahead ... he was flushing furiously in angry, puritanic dissent ...
+and I knew him well enough to foresee a forthcoming outburst of protest.
+
+"Yes, I think I can safely say that there is not one married man here
+who can honestly claim that he came to his wife with that same physical
+'purity' which he required of her."
+
+Wilton leaped to his feet in a fury ... the good, simple soul. He was
+so indignant that the few white hairs on his head worked up sizzling
+with his emotion....
+
+"_Here's one!_" he shouted, forgetting in his earnest anger the
+assembled audience, most of whom knew him.
+
+There followed such an uproar of merriment as I have never seen the like
+before nor since. The students, of course, howled with indescribable joy
+... Emma Silverman choked with laughter. Jack Leitman rolled over the
+side table on which he had set the books to sell as the crowd passed
+out--
+
+After the deafening cries, cat-calls and uproars, Emma grew serious.
+
+"I don't know who you are," she cried to Professor Wilton, "but I'll
+take chances in telling you that you're a liar!"
+
+Again Wilton was on his feet in angry protest.
+
+"Shame on you, woman! have you no shame!" he shouted.
+
+This sally brought the house down utterly. The boys hooted and
+cat-called and stamped again....
+
+Emma Silverman laughed till the tears streamed down her face....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the four days she remained in Laurel her lectures were crowded.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Walking up the hill one day, I overtook Professor Wilton, under whom I
+had studied botany, and whom I liked, knowing he was sincere and had
+spoken the incredible though absolute truth.
+
+"That woman, that anarchist friend of yours, Gregory, is a coarse
+woman!"
+
+I rose to Emma's defence ... but he kept repeating ... "no, no ... she
+is nothing but a coarse, depraved woman."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At my instigation, the Sig-Kaps gave an afternoon tea for her. And I was
+proud to act as her introducer. The boys liked her. She was like a good
+gale of wind to the minds and souls of us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I saw Emma and Jack off at the train. I carried two of her grips for
+her.
+
+"Take Johnnie with you!" jovially shouted some of the boys--a motor car
+full of them--Phi Alphs--as we stepped to the station platform....
+
+She answered them with a jolly laugh, a wave of the hand....
+
+"No, I'll leave him here ... you need a few like him with you!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I have something on my conscience," remarked Miss Silverman to me,
+"Johnnie, do you really think that old professor was speaking the
+truth?"
+
+"I'm sure of it, Miss Silverman."
+
+"Why, then, I'm heartily sorry ... and it was rough of me ... and will
+you tell the professor for me that I sincerely apologise for having hurt
+his feelings ... tell him I have so many jackasses attending my lectures
+all over the country, who rise and say foolish and insincere things,
+just to stand in well with the communities they live in--that sometimes
+it angers me, their hypocrisy--and then I blaze forth pretty strong and
+lay them flat!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Professor Wilton was a Phi Alph. From that time he was spoken of as "the
+only Phi Alph Virgin."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The periods when I had rested secure in the knowledge of where my next
+meal was coming from, had been few. Life had pressed me close to its
+ragged edge ever since I could remember.
+
+Now I was accorded a temporary relief. Penton Baxter wrote me that he
+had procured me a patron ... Henry Belton, the millionaire Single-Taxer,
+had consented to endow me at fifteen dollars a week, for six months. I
+had informed Baxter, in one of my many letters to him--for we had
+developed an intimate correspondence--that I had a unique fairy drama in
+mind, but could not write it because of the harassment of my struggle
+for bread and life.... I had laid aside for the present my projected
+"Judas."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Singing all the time, I packed my books in a large box which the corner
+grocer gave me, and, giving up my noisy room over the tinshop, I was off
+to the Y.M.C.A., where I engaged a room, telling the secretary, who knew
+me well, of my good luck, and enjoining him not to tell anyone else ...
+which I promptly did myself....
+
+I selected one of the best rooms, a corner one, with three windows
+through which floods of light streamed. It was well-furnished. The bed
+was the finest I had ever had to sleep in.
+
+Immediately I went to Locker's, the smart students' clothier, and put
+on a ready-made suit of clothes, of blue serge. And I charged new shirts
+and little white collars ... and several flowing ties. And a fine, new
+pair of shoes.
+
+"You sure look nifty," commented Locker, who himself waited on me.
+
+Then I went to a bookstore and plunged recklessly, purchasing Gosse and
+Garnett's _Illustrated History of English Literature_, in four volumes,
+an expensive set.
+
+I charged everything on the strength of my endowment, and, of course, in
+order to gain the credit I sought, I showed Baxter's letter, and pledged
+each storekeeper not to spread the story....
+
+Before nightfall practically the whole student body knew of my good
+luck. And Jack Travers had found me, lying back, luxuriously clad in my
+newly acquired, big blue bathrobe, in my morris chair....
+
+He looked me over with keen amusement.
+
+Somehow, for several years, my one dream of luxury and affluence had
+been to own a flowered bathrobe to lounge in, and to wear on the
+athletic field. I had hitherto had to be content with a shabby overcoat.
+
+On my new sectional bookcase stood a statue of the Flying Mercury, that
+my eye might continually drink in my ideal of physical perfection.
+Opposite that, stood my plaster cast of Apollo Belvedere, as indicative
+of the god of song that reigned over my thoughts and life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Jack, I want you to come and have supper with me!"
+
+"Johnnie, you are just like a big baby ... all right, I'll dine with
+you, after I've shot in the story about your endowment to the _Star_."
+
+"Hurry up, then,--it's after five now. I've never had enough money
+before, to treat you ... it's you that have always treated me."
+
+"Where'll we dine?"
+
+"At the swellest place in town, the Bellman House ... Walsh will charge
+me." Walsh Summers was the proprietor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Big, fat Walsh welcomed me and Travers.
+
+"No, Johnnie, I won't charge you. Instead, you and Jack are dining as
+guests of the house."
+
+And he would have it no other way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ally Merton was right about appearances. To have your shirts laundered
+regularly makes a man a different being. People that only noticed me
+before with a sort of surreptitious mockery now began to treat me with
+surprised respect. Professors invited me even more--the more
+conservative of them--to dine at their homes.
+
+And it was delightful to have living quarters where there was both hot
+and cold running water. I took a cold bath, every morning, after my
+exercise, and a hot bath, every night, before going to bed.
+
+The place was well-heated, too. I no longer had to sit up in bed, the
+covers drawn to my chin to keep from freezing, while I read, studied,
+wrote. Nor did I need sit on my hands, in alternation, to keep one warm
+while I rhymed with the other, during those curious spells of
+inspiration, those times of ecstasy--occurring mostly in the night--when
+I would write and write so rapidly that morning would find me often not
+able to decipher the greater part of what I had written ... five or ten
+poems in a night ... scrawled madly almost like automatic writing....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+William Jennings Bryan came to talk to us at our school auditorium. His
+lecture, _The Prince of Peace_, soon degenerated into an old-fashioned
+attack on science and the evolutionary theory.
+
+The professors sat bored and mute on the platform beside him, while he
+evacuated the forty-year-old wheeze of "your great-great-great-grandfather
+might have been a monkey, but, thank God, mine was not!" he won the
+usual great response of handclapping and laughter with this....
+
+And then he held out a glass of water, to prove that miracles might
+happen, because God, being omnipotent, could, at will, suspend natural
+laws.
+
+"Look at this glass of water. I hold it out at arm's length, so. If I
+did not hold it, it would drop to the floor and shatter into pieces.
+Thus I, by a human act, suspend the law of gravitation ... so God!--"
+There was huzzaing and applause. Several professors uneasily shifted the
+crossing of their knees ... one or two stared diplomatically at the
+ceiling.
+
+I grew angry and sent forth several sharp hisses before I knew what I
+was doing ... the effect was an electric stillness for the moment. Then
+a roar of indignant applause drowned my protest. And I stopped and
+remained quiet, with much craning of necks about me, to look at me.
+
+As the crowd poured out, I ran out into the road, from group to group,
+and, wherever I found a professor walking along, I vociferated my
+protest at our allowing such a back-water performance at the State's
+supposed centre of intelligence.
+
+"But, Gregory, it makes no difference ... the argument is settled, let
+platform orators like Bryan tilt at windmills all they may."
+
+"The hell it doesn't make a difference! if you professors are worth your
+salt, you won't let a Chautauqua man get by with such bunco."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The writing of my fairy drama progressed amain.
+
+I mailed a copy of it to Penton Baxter, who said that it had genuine
+merit. Was not great, but showed great promise.
+
+Henry Belton, from London, wrote me that it was beautiful and fine, but
+too eccentric for production in even the eccentric theatre.
+
+And Belton kept deluging me with Single Tax pamphlets. And I wrote him
+hot letters in reply, villifying the Single Tax theory and upholding
+revolutionary Socialism. And he grew angry with me, and informed me that
+he had meditated keeping me in his patronage longer, but I was so
+obdurate that he would end my remittance with the six months ... as, in
+fact, was all that was originally promised me.
+
+I replied that it made no difference ... that I would be always grateful
+to him. His letters stopped. The money stopped. But I went on living at
+the Y.M.C.A., charging up rent ... said that I was nearing the end of my
+rope again, glad because I had shown to myself that I was capable of
+sustained creative effort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Many well-known men came to Laurel for lectures to the students.
+
+Lyman Abbott appeared.
+
+"The ancient bell-wether of the Standard Oil," Travers irreverently
+dubbed him.
+
+The College Y.M.C.A. accorded him a reception. I was one of those
+invited to meet him.
+
+After he had delivered a brief talk on God and The Soul, questions were
+invited--meant only to be politely put, that the speaker might shine.
+But my question was not put for the sake of social amenity ... though
+I'll admit, just a little for the sake of showing off.
+
+"Dr. Abbott," I asked, "it is quite possible that there are other worlds
+in the sky--that, also, the rest of the planets either are or will be,
+homes for souls, for living beings equal to or higher than our present
+human grade of development?"
+
+"Yes, yes, that is quite probable."
+
+"Well, then, God, to prove a just God, would have to send his Son to be
+crucified a million times--once for each world ... for, if He did not,
+then the souls on these worlds would either be damned without a chance
+for salvation, or, if God made an exception in their case, that would be
+an unfair deal--for us to suffer from a fault other worlds are free of."
+
+Dr. Abbott hemmed and hawed.
+
+"It is not yet proven that there are other inhabited worlds. I an only
+dealing with questions of practical theology," he answered, with some
+heat and an attempt to be sarcastic.
+
+The members of the Y.M.C.A. were indignant at me for putting a maladroit
+question.
+
+"It doesn't do to invite Gregory anywhere. You can't tell what stuff he
+might pull."
+
+"A legitimate question--" egged on Travers at my side, "bump the old boy
+again, Johnnie."
+
+But I was not given another chance. After a short but painful silence
+the Secretary rose and put a suave and stereotyped query ... and others
+filled the breach in rapid succession. And the prestige of the great
+theologian was salvaged.
+
+Commencement day approached. There came to deliver the address for the
+day, George Harvey, then editor of _Harper's Weekly_. Travers was
+assigned to interview Harvey....
+
+"The fellow's a pompous big stiff," complained Jack, "the kind that
+makes a fetish of morning and evening dress ... wears kid gloves ... and
+a top hat ... he has both valet and secretary with him."
+
+"That's no disgrace. Don't you think, Jack, that we Middle-Westerners
+only make fun of such people and their habits for the reason that we're
+either unable to do the same, or do not dare do it because of our
+jealousy of each other--our so-called hick democratic spirit?"
+
+"There's a lot of truth in that. But fundamentally I would say that the
+newspaper editors who are here this week, holding a conference and
+tendering Harvey a banquet, _mean_ their plainness of dress and life ...
+and do not hanker after the clubman's way of life as Harvey represents
+it to their eyes ... you just watch for what Ed. Lowe and Billy Dorgan
+do to our Eastern chap at the banquet ... they'll kid him till he's
+sick."
+
+That banquet will live in the memory of Kansas newspapermen.
+
+Harvey, when he entered the hall where the journalists were already
+seated, first snapped his top hat sidewise to his attending valet. Then
+he sat down grandly.
+
+Billy Dorgan and Ed. Lowe "rode Harvey around," as Jack phrased it. The
+distinguished editor, with his solemnity, invited thrusts. Besides, most
+of those present were what was denominated as "progressive" ... Jarvis
+Alexander Mackworth was there ... and Alden ... and Tobbs, afterward
+governor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day Travers printed a supposititious interview with Harvey's
+English valet on how it felt to be a valet of a great man. Both the
+valet and Harvey waxed furious, it was said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Arthur Brisbane visited us. He ran down from Kansas City over night.
+This man was Jack Travers' God ... and we of the Press or Scoop Club--a
+student newspaper club of which I had recently been made a member--also
+looked up to him as a sort of deity.
+
+Travers informed me reverentially that Brisbane was so busy he always
+carried his stenographer with him, even when he rode to the Hill in an
+auto ... dictating an editorial as he drove along.
+
+"A great man ... a very great man."
+
+I won merit with Travers by reciting an incident of my factory life.
+Every afternoon the men in my father's department would bring in
+Brisbane's latest editorial to me ... and listen to me as I read it
+aloud. To have the common man buy a newspaper for its editorials--that
+was a triumph.
+
+And Brisbane's editorials frequently touched on matters that the mob are
+supposed not to be interested in ... stories of the lives of poets,
+philosophers, statesmen....
+
+One of the men who could barely read ... who ran his fingers along the
+lines as he read, asked me--
+
+"Who was this guy SO-krats?"
+
+It was an editorial on Socrates and his life and death that brought
+forth the enquiry ... after I had imparted to him what information I
+possessed:
+
+"Where can I find more about him, and about that pal of his, Plato?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was hanging on to my comfortable room at the Y.M.C.A. by bluff. I had
+not let on to the secretary that my Belton subsidy had stopped. Instead,
+I affected to be concerned about its delay. But I did this, not to be
+dishonest, but to gain time ... I was attempting to write tramp stories,
+after the manner of London, and expected to have one of them accepted
+soon, though none ever were....
+
+Decker, the student-proprietor of the restaurant where I ate every day,
+was more astute.
+
+"Now look here, Gregory, you just can't run your bill up any higher."
+
+I already owed him fifteen dollars.
+
+I compounded with him by handing him over my _Illustrated History of
+English Literature_. It was like tearing flesh from my side to part with
+these volumes.
+
+And now I had no more credit at the Y.M.C.A.
+
+And I went back to Frank Randall, to apply again for my old room over
+his shop. He was using it now to store old stoves in. But he moved them
+out.
+
+With a sense of despair, compensated by a feeling of sacrifice for my
+poetry, I found myself once more back over the tinshop, the hammers
+sounding and crashing below.
+
+Old Blore, the cancer doctor, lived in a room in the front. All day long
+he sat drinking rum and sugar ... and shipping out his cancer cure, a
+white mixture like powdered sugar. Whether it did any good or not, he
+believed in it himself....
+
+I have not written about him before ... there are so many odd characters
+that I came in contact with that I have not written about ... for this
+book is about myself....
+
+But old Blore ... he came waddling back to me, drunk, as usual, on his
+rum and sugar.
+
+"Welcome back, Johnnie ... come on, you and Frank, into my room ...
+we've got to celebrate your return."
+
+Frank and I set down the stove we were moving, dusted our hands off,
+and followed.
+
+"But I won't drink any of your rum, Ed! It's got too much of a kick."
+
+"--nonsense ... good Jamaica rum never hurt nobody."
+
+We drank several rounds of rum and water, with sugar. And we jocosely
+joined together in singing the cancer doctor's favourite hymn--"We're
+drifting down the stream of time, we haven't got long to stay."
+
+Then Frank and Ed. retailed to me the practical jokes they had played on
+each other since I had been gone from among them ... on big Sam, the
+chocolate-coloured shoemaker who had his shop next door ... and an
+obscene one on a half-wit named Elmer, who was one of Frank's helpers
+... that, though it was pretty raw, made me choke and gasp with
+merriment ... and they told me how, one night, they had wired the iron
+roof in the back, so that about ten cats that were mewling and
+quarrelling there, received a severe electric shock ... how funny and
+surprised they'd acted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most serviceably a check from the _National Magazine_ came, for
+twenty-five dollars ... I had sold them a prophetic poem on airships.
+The check ameliorated my condition. I saw my way clear to a few weeks
+more of regular eating.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then, on top of that, one day a telegram came....
+
+"Am on my way West. Will stop off visit you at Laurel--Penton."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Travers rushed the story to the Kansas City _Star_.
+
+           "KANSAS POET HONOURED
+          ------------------------
+     AUTHOR OF 'SLAUGHTER HOUSE' TO VISIT HIM"
+
+
+I waited in a fever of eagerness and impatience for the arrival of this
+man whom I idealised and looked on as a great man ... the man who had
+written the _Les Miserables_ of the American workingman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Harry Varden, editor of the _Cry for Right_, had been to Laurel a week
+previously, to address a socialist local, and I had looked him up, at
+the house of the "comrade" where he was passing the night. The comrade
+sent me up to Varden's room, where I found the latter just getting out
+of bed. I shall always think of him in his proletarian grey woollen
+underdrawers and undershirt. In which he had evidently slept. He had the
+bed-habits of the masses. And the room was stale with bad air; like the
+masses, he, too, slept with windows shut.
+
+Varden's monthly magazine _The World to Be_, had occasionally printed a
+poem of mine ... and I was paid five dollars for each poem.
+
+Varden was a frail, jolly little chap, absolutely fearless and alert and
+possessed of a keen sense of humour which he could turn, on occasion,
+even against himself.
+
+I breakfasted with him. He had good table manners, but, from time to
+time, he forgot himself and smacked his lips keenly. And the egg dripped
+on his chin as he flashed a humorous incident that had happened to him
+on one of his lecture trips....
+
+After breakfast he and I took a long walk together ... we began speaking
+of Penton Baxter ... I spoke in high praise of the great novelist ...
+reverently and with awe.
+
+"Yes, yes," Varden assented, "Penton is all you say, but he has no sense
+of humour ... and he takes himself and his work as seriously as if the
+destiny of the human race depended on it ... which is getting in a bad
+way, for a reformer, you know--gives a chap's enemies and antagonists so
+many good openings....
+
+"When Penton was writing _The Slaughter House_ and we were running it
+serially, his protagonist, Jarl--it seemed he didn't know how to dispose
+of him ... and the book was running on and on interminably.... I wired
+him 'for God's sake kill Jarl.' ...
+
+"Baxter took my telegram much to heart ... was deeply aggrieved I
+afterward learned ... the dear boy ... he did 'kill Jarl' finally ...
+and absent-mindedly brought him to life again, later on in his book."
+
+And Harry Varden laughed excitedly like a boy, and he leaned sideways
+and smote his half-bent, sharp, skinny knee with his left hand. I could
+perceive that that was a grotesque platform gesture of his, when he
+drove a comic point home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was waiting at the station ... where I had shaken hands with Bob
+Fitzsimmons, and had seen Emma Silverman off....
+
+Penton Baxter was due on the eleven o'clock train from Kansas City.
+
+I surely must be on the road to becoming somebody, with all these famous
+people taking such an interest in me. I remembered Emerson's dictum
+about waiting in one's own doorway long enough, and all the world would
+come by.
+
+Was I to be disappointed? It did not seem credible that the great man
+would make a special stop-off on his way to the coast, just to pay me a
+visit.
+
+One after another the passengers stepped down and walked and rode away.
+Then a little, boyish-looking man ... smooth-faced, bright-complexioned,
+jumped down, wavered toward me, dropping his baggage ... extended his
+hand ... both hands ... smiling with his eyes, that possessed long
+lashes like a girl's.
+
+"Are you Johnnie Gregory?"
+
+"Penton Baxter?" I asked reverently. He smiled in response and drew my
+arm through his.
+
+"This is great, this is certainly great," he remarked, in a high voice,
+"and I'm more than glad that I stopped off to see you."
+
+He expanded in the sun of my youthful hero-worship.
+
+"Where's the best hotel in town?"
+
+"The Bellman House ... but I've arranged with the Sig-Kappas to put you
+up."
+
+"Are you a fraternity man?"
+
+"No--a barb."
+
+"I'd rather go to the hotel you named ... but thank the boys for me."
+
+I contended with Penton Baxter for the privilege of carrying his two
+grips. They were so heavy that they dragged my shoulders down, but, with
+an effort, I threw my chest out, and walked, straight and proud, beside
+him.
+
+As we walked he questioned and questioned. He had the history of Laurel
+University, the story of my life, out of me, almost, by the time we had
+covered the ten blocks to the hotel.
+
+"Penton Baxter!" I whispered in a low voice to the proprietor, who, as
+he stood behind the desk, dipped the pen with a flourish, and shoved the
+open register toward his distinguished guest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Travers, of course, was the first to see the great novelist. He wired an
+interview to the _Star_, and wrote a story for the Laurel _Globe_ and
+the _Laurelian_.
+
+Baxter said he would stay over for two days ... that he didn't want to
+do much beside seeing me ... that he would place himself entirely in my
+hands. I was beside myself with happy pride.
+
+"This is a glorious country. You must take me for a long walk this
+afternoon. I want to tramp away out to that purple bluff toward the
+South East."
+
+"We call it Azure Mound."
+
+"Has it any historical interest?"
+
+"--don't know! It might have. Richard Realf, the poet, camped out about
+here, on the heights with his men, during the Quantrell Raid, And there
+are one or two old settlers in Laurel who were members of John Brown's
+company."
+
+Baxter was a good walker. He made me think of Shelley as he traipsed
+along, indefatigably talking away, his voice high-pitched and shrill ...
+unburdening his mind of all his store of ideas....
+
+His head was much too large for his body ... a strong head ... strong
+Roman nose ... decisive chin, but with too deep a cleft in it. His mouth
+was loose and cruel--like mine. His face was as smooth as a boy's or
+woman's ... on each cheek a patch here and there of hair, like the hair
+on an old maid's face.
+
+More than a year later his wife confided to me that "Pennie," as she
+dubbed him affectionately, could not grow a beard ... and she laughed at
+his solemnly shaving once a week, as a matter of ritual, anyhow....
+
+Each of us went with bent knees as we walked, as if wading against a
+rising tide of invisible opposition.
+
+I discoursed of a new religion--a non-ascetic one based on the
+individual's spiritual duty to enjoy life--that I meditated inaugurating
+as soon as I left college. He advised me to wait till I was at least
+Christ's age when he began his public ministry, thirty-five or six. His
+face lit with frolic....
+
+Then, in rapid transition, he soberly discoursed on the religion he
+himself had in mind ... instinctively I knew it would not do to make
+sport of his dreams, as he had of mine.
+
+Harry Varden was right. Where he himself was involved in the slightest,
+Baxter absolutely had no sense of humour.
+
+Baxter told me of the great men he had met on intimate terms, in the
+wider world of life and letters I had not yet attained to ... of
+Roosevelt, who invited him to dinner at the White House ... and of how,
+at that dinner attended by many prominent men ... by several Senators
+... Roosevelt had unlimbered his guns of attack on many men in public
+office.... "Senator So-and-so was the biggest crook in American public
+life.... Senator Thing-gumbob was the most sinister force American
+politics had ever seen ... belonged to the Steel Trust from his shoes to
+his hat...."
+
+"Suppose, Mr. President," Baxter had put to him, at the same time
+expressing his amazement at the president's open manner of speech before
+men he had never even met before ... men perhaps of antagonistic shades
+of opinion, "suppose I should go out from here and give to the
+newspapers the things you have just said! How would you protect, defend
+yourself?"
+
+"Young man, if you did--_as you won't_--" smashed Roosevelt, with his
+characteristic of clenched right fist brought down in the open palm of
+the left hand--"if you did--I'd simply brand you as a liar ... and shame
+you before the world."
+
+"And so it was that Roosevelt expressed himself freely ... and at the
+same time protected himself."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We stood on the top of Azure Mound. Baxter was puffing heavily, for it
+had been a hard climb.
+
+At our feet extended a panorama of what seemed like a whole State.
+
+The wide-spread fields of wheat, of corn, exalted us.
+
+"God, what a glorious country!... no wonder Walt loved America ... in
+spite of the abuses capital has perpetrated in it."
+
+"Walt Mason?" I enquired, mischievously....
+
+"No," he responded, seriously, "Walt Whitman."
+
+"But our poet laureate to-day is Walt Mason ... and our State
+philosopher, the sage of Potato Hill, Ed Howe, is an honest-to-God
+stand-patter ... that's Kansas to-day for you, in spite of her wide,
+scenic vistas....
+
+"Nevertheless," I went on, "Kansas does develop marvellous people ... we
+have Carrie Nation--"
+
+"And Johnnie Gregory!" put in Baxter.
+
+"I don't want just to belong to Kansas."
+
+It was I who was humourless now, "I'm sick of its corn-fed bourgeois
+ideals ... I want to belong to the world--as--you do!"
+
+We trudged back to town.
+
+"What a site for a university!... the men who put those buildings up
+there on the Hill must have dreamed greatly ... look at the sun!... the
+buildings are transfigured into a fairy city!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My office as social manager for Baxter during his stay I conducted
+badly. I was so excited and flattered by the visit of one whom I
+considered one of the first geniuses of the world, that I hardly knew
+what I was doing. I listened to all he said as if an oracle spoke.
+
+I asked him if he would like to meet some of the professors on the
+Hill.... I hurriedly gathered together a small group of them and Baxter
+gave a talk to them in one of the unoccupied recitation rooms. Nor did
+he fail in telling them that in me Kansas had a great poet in the making
+... the professors who were not invited to my hasty reception considered
+themselves slighted.
+
+When I saw Baxter off at the station we were calling each other by our
+first names.
+
+"Good-bye, Johnnie!"
+
+"Good-bye, Penton!"
+
+"Don't fail to visit me at Warriors' River, this fall, if you can do so
+conveniently."
+
+I assured him that I would not fail.
+
+For I had spoken with him of my determination to ship on the Great Lakes
+for a few months, to see if I couldn't garner some poetic material for
+my poems of modern life that I was writing for the _National Magazine_.
+
+"My wife and I will be at Warriors' River till late in the fall. We're
+staying at Stephen Barton's Health Home. Barton is a good friend of
+mine.... I am helping him out, since he left New Jersey, where he was
+forced, by a series of petty prosecutions, to give up Perfection
+City.... My wife will be glad to see you ... she knows your poetry
+already."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The weather was warm again. My next to my last college year was drawing
+to a close. Not that I was a graduate ... my course was a special one,
+and I had not followed even that closely.
+
+"If you'll graduate," Jarvis Alexander Mackworth urged me, joking in the
+Kansas fashion, "I will present you with a great bouquet of beauty
+roses.... I'd like to see you vindicate Langworth's and my judgment of
+you. For you have many, many professors and people on the Hill who don't
+believe in you, and, frankly,--say it was a mistake ever to have let you
+in."
+
+Mackworth was one of the regents of the school.
+
+"In fact, once one of the professors rose, at a meeting, ably reinforced
+by several others, to complain that you were actually crazy, and a
+detriment to the school."
+
+"And what did you say, Mr. Mackworth, didn't you defend me?"
+
+"Yes, God pity me, I did," he jested. "I remembered how I was asked to
+quit here, too. In the days when General Fred Furniss was also looked on
+as an unruly, rather undesirable member of the student body ... we were
+classmates....
+
+"I replied that no doubt you were crazy, you starry young tramp, you!...
+but that I wished some of the professors shared a little of your virus
+... it might make them more alive and interesting."
+
+Again I was absolutely starvation-ridden. Several tramp-poems that I
+sold to _Everybody's_ kept me literally in bread and cheese for a month.
+I was still madly in love with Vanna at long distance.
+
+There came an opportunity for me to make a few dollars and to show off
+before her, at the same time.
+
+The Copperwell Street Show came to town. They lined the main street with
+booths, and outside of town, in a large pasture, circus tents were
+pitched, in which the usual one-ringed circus was to be shown ... and
+they had six lions in a cage ... advertised as Nubian lions, the largest
+and fiercest of their kind ... their trainer never going in among them
+except at peril of his life. A gold medal was offered to anyone who
+would go in among the lions alone, and make a speech to the audience
+from the inside of the cage.
+
+I negotiated with the management, but asked for the medal's equivalent
+in money. I was offered twenty-five dollars if I would go in, and repeat
+my speech, each one of the three nights the show would be held.
+
+I was to go in for the first time that very night ... to clinch my
+lagging resolution, the story was printed in the local papers....
+
+        "JOHN GREGORY TIRED OF LIFE
+          ------------------------
+       KANSAS POET TO TALK AMONG LIONS,"
+
+Jack Travers was at his facetious best.
+
+Considering myself heroic, and thinking with inner joy how Vanna Andrews
+would be there, I spent the day in committing to memory the salient
+points on the nature and habits of lions, from the Encyclopedia
+Britannica....
+
+People looked at me both with amusement and admiring amazement as they
+saw me about, late that afternoon....
+
+"Now tell me the honest truth about the lions," I asked of the trainer.
+
+"They're a pretty bad lot."
+
+"Come on. I've made up my mind to go in, and I'm not afraid."
+
+"--though lions are not as bad as leopards and tigers ... there's no
+telling when they might jump you ... there's only one chance in a
+thousand that they will ... but you may bring one up from being a cub
+... and, one morning, because of something you can't read in its animal
+mind--it not liking its breakfast or something--it may jump you, give
+one crunch, and snuff you out like a candle ... it's that chance that
+you take that makes it seem brave."
+
+"Thanks, I'll take the chance."
+
+"Are you sure you'll have enough command of yourself to make a speech?"
+
+"--Certain ... I've committed to memory almost all the Encyclopedia
+Britannica article on lions ... I'm going to give them that...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Gregory! Gregory!" the crowd was calling, half in derisive jocularity,
+half in uneasy admiration....
+
+The trainer shunted me into the cage, after seating his lions in a
+half-moon on their tubs.
+
+"Quick! Step in! We'll be on the outside ready with hot irons in case
+anything goes wrong!"
+
+I didn't know whether the trainer was jesting or serious.
+
+"Don't think of them at all. They'll sit still ... you can turn your
+back to them and face the audience. It will be safe. Only don't make any
+unexpected, quick motions."
+
+I was in among them. The door clanged behind me.
+
+Nobody jeered now. All was filled with an expectant hush.
+
+Then, as if strange and a-far from myself, I stepped easily into the
+very centre of the half moon of squatting beasts, and made my speech ...
+at the end, there was hardly any applause till I was safely out of the
+cage ... Then there was a tumult. Shouts, cat-calls, whoops, and a great
+noise of hearty hand-clapping.
+
+I stood beside the ropes as the people of Laurel surged by, many of them
+shaking me by the hand ... Vanna came by, with the big football player
+with her, bulking behind her slight loveliness ... lightly she put a
+tiny, gloved hand in mine ... a glove neatly mended at the fingers ...
+congratulating me, half with feeling, half with amusement....
+
+"That was reckless and brave, Mr. Gregory."
+
+I was speechless with frightened delight over her words, and the
+pressure of her hand.
+
+I turned to the trainer before I went to my room over the tin-shop.
+
+"You say the leopards are most dangerous?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"For twenty-five dollars a night I will go in with them, alone, and run
+them around with a whip." As I proposed this, in the background of my
+consciousness was the conviction that by so doing I could win Vanna's
+love....
+
+"No ... the leopards are too uncertain."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The papers were full of my deed. And I was not made fun of, but
+commended. And it was announced (for advertising purposes only, of
+course) that the management of the show had approached me with an offer
+to travel as a trainer of wild animals.
+
+The second night I was rather blasé. I shook my finger playfully in the
+face of one of the seated lions ... to have a sensation of a thousand
+prickles running sharp through each pore, when the lion responded with
+an open, crimson-mouthed, yellow-fanged snarl; I smelt the carrion
+fetor of his breath. I stepped back rather quickly. All the animals grew
+restless and furtive. Little greenish-amber gleams lit and flickered in
+their eyes.
+
+I pulled myself together. Deliberately I turned my back on them.
+
+"--So you see plainly, ladies and gentlemen, that a lion is, after all,
+a much misrepresented, gentle beast."
+
+The trainer was piqued when I walked out, that night.
+
+"I don't want you to tell the people that my lions are harmless and
+gentle ... if you do that to-morrow night, I'll see to it that you get
+the medal, and not the money."
+
+The afternoon of the following day, while the girl who trained the
+leopards was in the cage of the latter, they jumped on her, and tore her
+back with their claws. Dripping with blood, she whipped them back, inch
+by inch, into their living-cage, that led by a small door into the big
+one used for exhibitions. A shiver ran through me at the news of the
+girl's mishap. I was glad they had not taken me up as regards the
+leopards. And my being among the lions now also seemed less of a joke.
+At least, that last night, I felt it not to be, I delivered a
+constrained discourse and only breathed freely when outside their cage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And in a few weeks my unique and single glory was snatched from me. The
+show had moved to Salina, and a barber in that town had shaved their
+keeper in the cage, while the lions sat around.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before leaving for my projected summer as worker on the boats of the
+Great Lakes, I snatched at a passing adventure: the Kansas City _Post_
+had me walk from Laurel to Kansas City with the famous walker, Weston.
+
+The man was going across the continent a-foot. When he saw I was
+sticking the fifty miles or so with him, he became friendly and talked
+with me of the athletes of former days ... the great runners, walkers,
+fighters, oarsmen ... and he knew intimately also many well known
+journalists and literary men of whom he discoursed.
+
+Time and again, like a bicycle pedalled too slow, he stepped awry on so
+small an obstacle as a cinder, and toppled over on his face like an
+automaton running down.
+
+"No, no! Don't touch me. I must get up myself ... that's not in the
+game ..." his rising was a hard, slow effort ... he regained his feet
+with the aid of his metal-tipped cane....
+
+"Keep back! Keep back!" to the people, gangs of curious boys mostly, who
+followed close on his heels. And he poked backwards with the sharp
+metallic point of the stick....
+
+"People follow close on me, stupid, like donkeys. If I didn't keep that
+point swinging back, when I slacked my pace or stopped they would walk
+right up on me...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Percival Hammond, managing editor of the New York _Independent_. the
+first magazine to print my poems, came to town ... to lecture on his
+favourite topic of international peace.
+
+It occurred to me strongly that I ought to afford him some witness of my
+gratitude for what his magazine had done for me.
+
+Though broke, I borrowed ten dollars from the owner of a lunch counter
+where I ate.
+
+"I want to give a dinner to Dr. Hammond ... his magazine has helped me
+as a poet ... it is obvious that I can't give the dinner at your lunch
+counter."
+
+Ten dollars was all the lunchcounter man would lend me.
+
+But Walsh Summers of the Bellman House said I could give a luncheon in
+honour of Hammond at fifty cents a plate ... he would allot me two
+tables ... and a separate room ... and I could invite nineteen
+professors ... and he would throw in two extras for Jack Travers and
+myself.
+
+I gave the lunch, inviting the professors I liked best.
+
+After dessert and a few speeches I told them how I had borrowed the
+money. Hammond privately tried to pay me back out of his own pocket, but
+I wouldn't let him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I asked Hammond if he knew Penton Baxter.
+
+"Yes; we printed his first article, you know ... just as we gave you
+your start....
+
+"Baxter is the most remarkable combination of genius and jackass I have
+ever run into. But don't ever tell him that I said that. He has no sense
+of humour ... everything is of equal import to him ... his toothache is
+as tragic as all the abuses of the capitalist system."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the way to the Great Lakes there are several people I must stop and
+see, and show myself to.
+
+I stop at Topeka and visit Dad Rother ... a columnist on a newspaper
+there, of more than local fame ... an obviously honest-to-God bachelor
+... he is afflicted with dandruff and his hair is almost gone. He shows
+me photographs of Mackworth and of Uncle Bill Struthers, each
+autographed with accompanying homely sentiment.
+
+I catch myself pretending an interest in Rother's column, but really
+actuated by a desire to plant myself in his mind, and to have a notice
+in his paper about me ... anything that Dad Rother has in his column is
+copied in all the Kansas papers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I drop in at a Leavenworth newspaper office, ostensibly to borrow the
+use of a typewriter.
+
+But the stick or so put in the paper about my passing through
+Leavenworth pleases me.
+
+General Fred Furniss is stationed at Fort Leavenworth. I must visit him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+General Furniss walked in rapidly as if executing a military manoevour,
+both hands held forth in welcome. He was "Napoleonic" in size, and, also
+like Napoleon, he carried too much belly in front of him. He wore a
+closely curling salt-and-pepper beard....
+
+He commented on my "military carriage"--asked me if I had ever gone to a
+military academy....
+
+I yielded to an instinct for deprecative horse-play, one of my worst
+faults, begot of an inferiority-complex.
+
+"No, I've never gone to a military academy, but I've had a hole in the
+seat of my pants so generally, and I have had to walk erect so much to
+keep my coat tail well down to hide it, that that is where I acquired my
+military carriage."
+
+The general's eyes twinkled.
+
+"Take a chair. I have heard of you, Mr. Gregory ... I have watched your
+work, too. Roosevelt knows about it ... has spoken of it to me ... has
+remarked: 'there's a young fellow--your poet-chap in Kansas--that will
+be worth watching ... why is it, Fred, that every man of any talent
+whatever in Kansas, instantly gets the eye of the nation?... we're
+always expecting something big from William Allen White's State'."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A week or so of work for a Polish-Catholic farmer ... who locked me out
+of his house, when he and his family went to mass the one Sunday I was
+with him. He asked me if I wanted a book to read. As the only book he
+possessed was Thomas à Kempis' _Imitation of Christ_, I took it, and
+learned Christian humility, reading it, in the orchard. Surely this
+farmer was a practical Christian. He believed in his fellow man and at
+the same time gave him no opportunity to abuse his faith in him....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was pleasant, this working for from a few days to a week, then
+sauntering on ... putting up at cheap little country hotels overnight. I
+liked it better than tramping....
+
+I pitched hay, I loaded lumber, I dug, I planted, I reaped.
+
+In lower Minnesota a Swedish emigrant farmer hired me to help him with
+his hay crop. He and I and his lanky son, Julius ... just coming out of
+adolescence ... we worked away from sun-up till moon-rise....
+
+The first day I congratulated myself for working for that particular
+farmer. The meat at table was abundant and fresh.
+
+But before my two weeks were up I had grown weary of the diet. They had
+killed a cow ... and cow-meat was what I found set before me morning,
+noon, and night,--every day. I complained about it to Julius ... "when
+we kill a cow ain't we got to eat it?" he replied.
+
+Every afternoon we participated in a pleasant Swedish custom. The two
+women of the household, the mother and grandmother, with blue cloth
+rolled about their head for headgear, brought us coffee and cake
+a-field....
+
+"Aeftermittagscaffee," they called it.
+
+It refreshed us; we worked on after that till late supper by lamp,
+driving back to the house by moonlight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Duluth I found that a strike prevailed on the Lakes. I was held in
+doubt whether I ought to sail, for I would have to do so as
+strike-breaker, which was against my radical code ... but, then, I had
+come over-land all the way from Laurel, to voyage the Great Lakes for
+the poetry to be found there ... and I must put my muse above such
+things as strikes.
+
+I signed on, on a big ore boat, as porter....
+
+That means, as third cook; my task the washing and scouring of greasy
+pots, pans, and dishes ... and waiting on the firemen and deckhands at
+meals.
+
+The _James Eads Howe_ took on a cargo of rust-coloured iron ore at Twin
+Harbours ... the gigantic machinery grided and crashed all night,
+pouring the ore into the hold, to the dazzling flare of electric
+lights....
+
+Here for the first time I conceived myself to be caught in the great
+industrial turmoil. If I were to derive song from this, it would be song
+for giants, or rather, for machines that had grown to gigantic
+proportions from the insect world ... diminutive men made parts of their
+anatomy as they swung levers and operated cranes....
+
+We kicked outward on the long drop down Lake Superior, the largest of
+the five Great Lakes. It was like an inland ocean. The water of it is
+always so cold that, when a ship is wrecked there, good swimmers who
+might otherwise keep up till rescued, often perish of the cold....
+
+Day and night the horizon was smoky-blue with forest fires ... one
+afternoon our deck was covered with birds that had flown out over the
+water to escape the flames....
+
+And once we saw lifted in the sky three steamboats sailing upside down,
+a mirage ... and, once, a gleaming city in the clouds, that hung there
+spectrally for about five minutes, then imperceptibly faded out....
+
+"That's a reflection of some real city," explained the tall
+Canadian-Scotch cook ... "once I recognised Quebec hanging in the sky
+...--thought I even saw people walking and traffic moving."
+
+Half-way across to the Soo Canal we ran into my first lake-storm.
+
+"The sailor on the Great Lakes has a harder time than the ocean sailor.
+He can't make his ship run before a storm. He's got to look out for land
+on every side."
+
+Right over my bunk where I slept, ceaselessly turned and turned the
+propeller shaft. The noise and roar of the engines was ever in my ears,
+and the peculiar ocean-like noise of the stokehold ... and the metallic
+clang of coal as it shot from shovels....
+
+The night of the storm the crashing of the water and the whistling
+impact of wave-weighted winds kept me awake.
+
+I jumped into my clothes and went into the fire-room. Hardly able to
+keep their feet, the firemen toiled away, scattering shovels-full of
+coal evenly over the fires, wielding their slice bars ... greeting with
+oaths and comic curses the awkward coal passer who spilled with his
+laden wheelbarrow into the slightly lower pit where they stood.
+
+I quit the _James Eads Howe_ at Ashtabula, after several round trips in
+her, the length of the Lakes.
+
+I freighted it to Chicago, where I shipped, again as porter, on a
+package freighter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The captain of the package freighter _Overland_ should have been
+anything but a captain. He was a tall, flabby, dough-faced man, as timid
+as a child just out of the nursery.
+
+We had taken on, as one of our firemen, a Canuck, who, from the first,
+boasted that he was a "bad man"....
+
+He intimidated the cook right off. He punched in a glass partition to
+emphasise a filthy remark he had made to the head engineer. He went
+after me, to bully and domineer me, next.
+
+It looked as if we were in for a hard voyage to the Georgian Bay.
+
+The Canuck, at the very first meal, terrorised the crew that sat down
+with him. I looked him over carefully, and realised that something must
+be done.
+
+He flung a filthy and gratuitous expression my way. Silently I stepped
+back from the mess room, untied my apron, and meant to go in and try to
+face him down. But at that juncture, my courage failed me, and instead
+of inviting the rough-neck out on deck, as I had tried to force myself
+to do, I hurried to the captain's cabin.
+
+The captain said, "Come in!" to my knock. He was sitting, of all things,
+in dirty pajamas, at a desk ... though it was mid-day ... his flabby,
+grey-white belly exuded over his tight pajama waist-string ... the
+jacket of the pajamas hung open, with all but one button off.
+
+I complained to the captain of the bully--repeated how he had bellowed
+at me to tell the unmentionable skipper he would receive his bumps
+bloody well, too, if the latter did not stick to his own part of the
+ship.
+
+I saw fright in the captain's face....
+
+"It's up to the chief engineer."
+
+"Either that fellow goes off this ship or I do. You'll have to hire
+another third cook."
+
+The boat was sailing in an hour.
+
+I walked back for my few effects. But, on the way back, I took hold of
+myself and determined to stick by my guns. I made up my mind that I
+would not leave the boat, and that, at the first hostile move of the
+bully I would oppose him--besides, what had the fellow done, so far,
+besides chucking a bluff?
+
+My opportunity to live up to my resolve came at mess for supper. There
+was a smoking platter of cabbage set before the boys.
+
+"What the hell! Who wants to eat bloody cabbage."
+
+And snatching up a handful of the dripping, greasy vegetable, he was
+about to fling it into the face of one of the men opposite, when,
+without giving myself a chance to hesitate, I stepped up quickly and
+grabbed the "bad man's" wrist. The cabbage went high and spattered all
+over the opposite wall.
+
+The bully glared like an enraged bull at me.
+
+"I'll--"
+
+Quaking in my boots, I made my eyes glare level with his.
+
+"Listen to me, bo," I bluffed, "I ain't much on guff, and I don't want
+specially to fight ... but I'm waiter in this mess room and you don't
+pull anything like this here, unless you do it over my dead body."
+
+"That's just what I will do ... I'll--I'll--" and the chap, pale with
+what seemed insane rage, started to his feet.
+
+"Ah, sit down!" I commanded, marvelling at my nerve, and pushing him
+violently by the shoulders back on the bench ... then, deliberately, I
+turned my back, and walked away, expecting any moment to have him on me
+like a clawing wild cat.
+
+With seeming calm and nonchalance I made the kitchen. With a semblance
+of outward serenity I picked up a rag and returned to wipe off the wall.
+I was vastly relieved to find that the bluff had worked.
+
+The Canuck was finishing his meal in silence.
+
+From that moment till the end of the voyage he was as quiet and
+Unobtrusive as anyone could wish him to be....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have a curious habit of often waking up in the night from deep
+slumber, and breaking into laughter over some funny incident or other
+that has happened to me a long time ago ... I have chuckled over this
+incident many times ... if that bully only knew how terrorised he really
+had me!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is impossible to describe the Georgian Bay and the beauty of its
+thousands of islands ... as we steamed through them in the dawn, they
+loomed about us through sun-golden violet mists.... Here as small as the
+chine of some swimming animal, there large enough for a small forest of
+trees to grow upon them....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another storm ... on Lake Huron ... a fair-sized one.
+
+I was walking along the deck, just after dawn, the waves riding and
+running and shattering aboard. I carried the dinner bell, was ringing it
+for breakfast ... when the greatest wave I have ever seen on the Lakes
+came running, high-crested, toward the boat,--that seemed to know what
+was happening, for it rose to meet it, like a sentient being....
+
+The wave smashed ... hit the galley and washed over the top of it,
+catching me in a cataract as I hugged close. I was driven hard against
+the taut cable wire that made our only railing. For a moment I thought
+the water reaching up from over-side as the vessel lurched would clutch
+me and suck me down.
+
+A close and breathless call. A rending, splintering sound told me damage
+had been done. I looked toward the captain's cabin ... and laughed
+heartily, for all my discomfort and dangerous escape ... for the whole
+side of the cabin had been stove in,--and, terrified, his eyes sticking
+out, in his dirty underclothes the captain had been hurtled forth, his
+face still stupid from sleep though full of fear.
+
+I rushed up to him. His drawers sagged pitiably with wet.
+
+"A close shave, sir!" I remarked.
+
+When I brought him his breakfast he was still trembling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I left the package freighter _Overland_. It was almost time for the new
+school year. But Warriors' River lay in my way back to Laurel, and I
+determined to stop off and pay a visit to Baxter, at Barton's Health
+Home....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was disappointed with my summer. In terms of poetic output. I had
+written only three or four poems dealing with life on the Lakes, and
+these were barely publishable in the _National Magazine._ I realise now
+that poetic material is not to be collected as a hunter goes gunning for
+game. It cannot be deliberately sought and found. It must just happen.
+
+Yet all the things that I had seen and been through, I knew, would live
+in my mind till they were ready of themselves to get birth in words. I
+knew that I had not lost a single dawn nor one night of ample moon. And
+there drifted back into my remembrance that night when the Italian
+coal-passer had come to my bunk and wakened me, that I might come forth
+with him and observe a certain wonderful cloud-effect about the full,
+just-risen moon, over Huron....
+
+I had cursed at him, thought he was trying to make a monkey of me ...
+for I had dropped on deck a letter to me from Lephil of the _National_,
+and so the crew had learned that I was a poet among them.
+
+But I was not being spoofed ... actual tears of surprise and chagrin
+came into the coal-passer's eyes. Then I had been ashamed of myself ...
+
+"Of course I'll go on deck ... mighty fine of you to wake me!" I slid
+into my pants and went up the ladder--
+
+To envisage, rapturous, a great, flaming globe of shadowy silver ... and
+across it, in a single straight ebony bar, one band of jet-black cloud
+... and the water, from us to the apparition of beauty, danced, dappled,
+with an ecstasy of quivering silver....
+
+I have met many a man in my wanderings, simple and silent, who felt
+beauty like a poet or an artist, without the poet's or artist's gifts of
+expression,--with, on the contrary, a queer shame that he was so moved,
+a suspicion that, somehow, it was not manly to be moved by a sunrise or
+sunset.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found Penton Baxter, his wife Hildreth, and their child, Dan, living
+in two tents, among a grove of trees, near the main building of the
+Health Home. These two tents had, of course, board floors, and there
+was a woman who kept them in condition ... and there was a rack for
+towels, and hot water was supplied by pipes from a nearby building. I
+think the tents were even wired for electric light.
+
+Baxter welcomed me. But I took a room for a week in town, though he
+urged me to stay with him. But when I had the means I liked better to be
+independent. I calculated living a week in Warriors' River for ten or
+twelve dollars. That would leave me thirty dollars over, from what I had
+earned while working on the _Overland_.
+
+Then, back to the university for my last year of leisurely study and
+reading, in the face of the desolate poverty that would have defeated
+many another man, but to which I was used as a customary condition.
+After that--Paris or London, or both! Kansas was growing too small for
+me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have mentioned that Baxter had a head too large for his body. Daniel,
+his son, slight and frail and barely eight years of age, possessed the
+same characteristic....
+
+I footed it out to Baxter's tents, faithfully as to a shrine, each
+afternoon. The mornings he and I both occupied in writing. He, on a
+novel which was the story of the love-life of his wife and himself, and
+of his literary struggles, called _Love's Forthfaring_; I, on my
+abortive songs of the Great Lakes that all came forth still-born ...
+because I was yet under the vicious literary influence of the _National
+Magazine_, and was writing my verse, trying to be inspired by the
+concepts of middle-class morality ... or what was even worse, I was
+attempting to glorify the under-dog; who, if he were the demigod
+Socialists portray him, would by no means remain the under-dog.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found Baxter more a-flame than ever for the utter reformation of
+mankind ... in the way they dressed ... stiff collars hurt the nervous
+system, pressing as they did, on the spine ... in the books they read
+... he wished to start a library that would sell cheaply and bring all
+the world's great thought and poetry into factory, and every worker's
+home ... all conventional ideas of marriage and religion must go by the
+board and freedom in every respect be granted to men and women.
+
+It was good to listen to this sincere, naïve man, still young ... who
+would re-make life nearer to the beauty and harmony that Shelley also
+dreamed for mankind. I lived in a state of perpetual reverence toward
+Baxter. This man tried to live his ideals, as well as write about them.
+
+In matters of diet I accepted Baxter's theories but, humanly, did not
+live up to them. He was a vegetarian.
+
+Later I was to learn that he was to himself an experiment station. On
+his own person he directly and practically tried out each idea ... his
+wife was also a convertee, slightly reluctant, to his tests ... and his
+son, perforce. Baxter actually kept a vegetarian dog. "Even carnivorous
+animals thrive better on a vegetarian diet." But the dog was no
+corroboration of his theory. It lacked gloss and shine to its coat, and
+seldom barked.
+
+One afternoon I came upon Dan, Baxter's son, puking in the bushes, not
+far from the tents.
+
+"What's the matter, Dan," he turned to me, wan, and serious, and with a
+grown-up look on his face.
+
+"Nothing! Only sometimes the warm milk father has me drink makes me
+throw up. I'm on a milk diet, you know."
+
+"Does your father know that you can't keep the milk down?"
+
+"Mostly it does stay down ... I guess father's all right," he defended,
+"maybe the diet will do me good."
+
+"Do you ever get a beefsteak?"
+
+"Father says meat is no good ... maybe he's right about killing animals.
+He says it wouldn't be half so bad if everyone killed their own meat,
+instead of making brutes out of men who do the killing for them ... but
+it is kind of hard on the dog, though," and the little fellow laughed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I think my boy is going to become an engineer of some sort; he's always
+playing about with machinery," Penton said to me....
+
+"Suppose you let him take a trip with me to town, then? I'm going to
+look through the Best o' Wheat factory this afternoon, and watch how
+Best o' Wheat biscuits are made. Perhaps he'd like to see the machinery
+working!"
+
+"Johnnie, I'll trust him with you, if you'll promise me not to meddle
+with his diet."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"I don't like people stuffing him full of candy and ice cream. I want
+to bring him up with a good digestion and sound teeth."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Daniel took my hand as we went through the factory from department to
+department. I enjoyed a paternal pride in the handsome, pale,
+preternaturally intelligent little fellow.
+
+"Look at the young father!" exclaimed one girl softly to another, with a
+touch of pathos in her voice, intimating that perhaps I was a widower.
+
+I blushed with pleasure to the tips of my ears, to be thought the father
+of so prepossessing a child.
+
+It delighted him to look into the huge bake ovens where first the wheat
+was baked in big brown loaves, before it was broken up into biscuit
+form. I thought of Hank Spalton and how he was supposed to have grown
+strong on a diet of Best o' Wheat.
+
+It was customary to serve sight-seers, in a dining room kept for that
+purpose, with Best o' Wheat and cream, and wheat coffee ... free....
+
+With a little reluctance Dan sat down and ate.
+
+"Hum! that was good; but look here, Buzzer" (that was the nickname he
+had invented for me) you mustn't tell Mubby."
+
+"Mubby?"
+
+"That's what mother and I call my father."
+
+"Of course I won't tell him ... and now we must go to a restaurant and
+have something real to eat."
+
+"I can't. I don't dare. But I'll sit and watch you eat."
+
+I ordered a steak, and persuaded Dan, finally, to have one too.
+
+"If it's not good for people to eat, why does it taste so good?" mooted
+Dan meditatively....
+
+"Now I'll be in for it," he added, as we walked out of the door and
+started back to the Health Home.
+
+"But your father need never know."
+
+"At first I thought it might be all right to fool him just this once.
+But I mustn't. I've promised him I'd never lie to him about what I ate,
+and I must keep my word ... he'll whip me, perhaps."
+
+"Does he whip you much?"
+
+"Not very much ... only when I need it ... and then when I cry, he
+stops--so it is never very hard!"
+
+I laughed at the boy's frank philosophy....
+
+"But daddy's so funny ... not at all like other daddies," wistfully.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I did not grow friendly enough with Mrs. Baxter even to call her by her
+first name of Hildreth ... during that brief visit....
+
+Hildreth Baxter was always moving about leisurely, gracefully, like some
+strange, pretty animal. Not shy, just indifferent, as if processes of
+thought were going on inside of her that made an inner world that
+sufficed, to the exclusion of all exterior happenings.
+
+She had a beautiful small head with heavy dark hair; large, brown,
+thoughtful eyes ... a face so strong as to be handsome rather than
+beautiful. She walked about in bloomers, languidly conscious that her
+legs were graceful and lovely....
+
+To her I was, at that time, merely one of her husband's visiting
+friends....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After little Daniel had manfully squared himself with his conscience,
+Penton did not whip him. He came to me.
+
+"I did not punish my boy: because it was you, Johnnie, that tempted
+him," and he flushed angrily. "I'm sure you didn't consider what you
+were doing. If I thought you did it out of deliberation, I would never
+speak to you again ... you must learn not to tamper with the ideals of
+others, Johnnie."
+
+I apologised. I spoke of my reverence and regard for him and his
+greatness. I asked him to forgive me, which he did. And, as I pronounced
+him to be as great at Shelley, the Rousseau of America--his naïve,
+youthful face wreathed with smiles and peace fell between us again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I am thinking of going to live at Eden, the Single Tax Colony not far
+from Philadelphia ... I want you to come there and visit us in the
+spring. In the meantime don't let them make you bourgeois in Kansas ...
+don't let them smash you into the academic mould."
+
+"They haven't so far, have they?"
+
+"But what in the world are you going back to Kansas for?"
+
+"Because I have them trained there to accept me. I can do pretty much
+as I choose at the university. But mainly I want to write my four-act
+play in earnest--my New Testament drama, _Judas_. And I know of no
+better place to go to."
+
+"Good-bye, and don't fail to pay me a visit in the spring."
+
+"I will ... for a few weeks ... on my way to Paris."
+
+"Paris? How are you going to get there?"
+
+"I'll take a few cars of cattle east to New York from the Kansas City
+stock yards ... and I'll work my way across on a cattle boat."
+
+"Good-bye! I wish I had your initiative!"
+
+"Good-bye! Mrs. Baxter ... glad to have met you!"
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Gregory," and she dropped my hand quickly and turned on
+her heel, walking away with easy grace. I admired the back of her legs
+as she disappeared into her tent.
+
+"Good-bye, Dan!"
+
+"Good-bye, Buzzer!"
+
+"Daniel," called Mrs. Baxter from the interior of her tent, "you mustn't
+call Mr. Gregory that!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Laurel again, I found it still a month before fall session. All
+summer I had lacked my nude sunbaths to which I had become accustomed.
+So again I sought my island.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I rented my room over the tinshop again, and was soon in the thick of
+the fall term. By this time I had my contemporaries on the hill very
+much puzzled.
+
+Henry Belton, the Single Tax millionaire, had come to Kansas City. He
+was so diminutive as to be doll-like. He had to stand on a box to be
+seen, when he spoke from the floor, at the banquet tendered him ... and
+I had gone in to Kansas City as his guest, and had been seated on his
+right hand--I, in my painfully shabby clothes.
+
+The professors and students could not see why I made such a stir with
+prominent people, how I held their friendship despite my eccentricities
+and deep poverty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I can't help you any more," observed Belton to me, as we sat in the
+lobby of the Coates House where he was putting up.
+
+"Who the hell's asking you to help me?" I replied. "I came down from
+Laurel with no ulterior motive; I came just to pay you a visit, and to
+thank you personally for giving me six months of freedom from economic
+worry while I wrote my fairy drama ... anyhow, please remember that it
+wasn't me you helped, but Poetry!"
+
+"It's too bad you can't be a Single Taxer," he sighed. "I like you,
+Gregory, and I'd put you on my pension list if you'd only shift some of
+your fanaticism for poetry to the Single Tax cause."
+
+Since then I have been frankly sorry that I did not play the hypocrite
+to Belton, in order to be put on a pension for several years. I might
+have achieved great verse during the leisure so afforded for calm,
+creative work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I started a poetry club on the Hill.... I determined that it should be
+anarchistic in principle ... we should have no officials ... no dues ...
+not even a secretary to read dull minutes of previous meetings ... we
+should take turns presiding as chairman. And the membership was to be
+divided equally with girls.
+
+But the school year had begun unhappily for me. I did not find Vanna
+there. I went to visit her homely roommate.
+
+"Vanna has gone off to Arkansas ... she is teaching school down there
+for the winter."
+
+"Thank God she's not married somebody!" I cried, forgetting, and giving
+myself away. Then Vanna Andrews' roommate saw at last that it was not
+she I was interested in. She gave way to invective.
+
+"You! a worthless tramp like you! A crazy fool!... to dare even hope
+that Vanna Andrews would ever love _you_!" In a torrent of tears she
+asked me never to speak to her again.
+
+I was sorry I had not procured Vanna's address before I had betrayed
+myself. But, anyhow, I wrote her a long letter and sent it in care of
+the university registrar.
+
+Flamboyantly I confessed my love ... rehearsed the story of my worship
+of her from afar....
+
+For a month, every day, I sent her a bulky envelope full of mad verse
+and declarations of undying love. As the letters were not being
+returned, she must be receiving them.
+
+One morning, with trembling hands and a pounding heart that nearly bore
+me down, it acted so like a battering ram on the inside, I drew a
+delicately scented envelope from my mailbox ... addressed in a dainty
+hand.
+
+I kissed the letter again and again before I tore it open ... it was
+well that I did it then. I would not have kissed it afterward.
+
+It was filled with stinging rebuke for my presumption ... if I had a
+shred of the gentleman in me I would cease troubling her.... I had
+caused her exceeding annoyance by my deluge and torrent of absurd
+letters ... she did not care for me ... she thought my poetry was bad
+... and why had I behaved so brutally toward her former roommate?...
+
+I saw that the homely girl had not been remiss in writing to Vanna about
+me....
+
+My reply was a very poetic letter.
+
+"I will trouble you no more," I ended; "but do not destroy my letters
+and poems, for, long after your wonderful beauty has become a mere
+handful of oblivious dust blowing about the stones of the world, you
+will be famous because a great poet loved you ... a poet whom you
+unwisely and ignorantly scorned."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Van Maarden, the Dutch psychiatrist and playwright, author of _De
+Kleine Man_, was to come to Laurel to deliver his celebrated lectures on
+"The Socialisation of Humanity."...
+
+Professor Dineen, a flabby, feminine little fellow, one of our
+professors of philosophy, and hated by the dean of his department
+because he was a real philosopher, despite his physical
+ludicrousness,--and had published a book which the critics were hailing
+as a real contribution to the world of thought--
+
+Dineen had engineered the bringing of the semi-radical Van Maarden to
+Laurel....
+
+"For such men are needed here ... to rouse us out of the petty, dogmatic
+ways of our crude pioneers...."
+
+"Van Maarden is a remarkable man," continued Dineen; "he writes plays,
+poems, books of economic philosophy, novels ... recently he tried to
+start a co-operative colony for Dutch farmers in South Carolina, but it
+went on the rocks ... and now Van Maarden, for all his genius, is
+practically stranded here in America.
+
+"It is, or ought to be, one of the duties of an educational centre like
+Laurel, to aid such men ... men who travel about, disseminating ideas,
+carrying the torch of inspiration ... like Giordano Bruno, in former
+days."
+
+Van Maarden came ... a little, dapper, black-bearded man ... but a very
+boy in his enthusiasm. He advanced many doctrines at variance with even
+the political radicalism of Kansas.
+
+But whether it was his winning way or his foreign reputation, he was
+accepted gravely, and ideas won consideration, enunciated by him, that
+would have been looked on as mad, coming from me....
+
+Again the faculty were nonplussed ... puzzled....
+
+Dineen, Van Maarden and I were together much. And the latter found more
+delight in the time when he could discuss freely and unacademically with
+me than when he was invited to formal teas and dinners by the weightier
+members of the faculty and community.
+
+It was psychic research that we particularly discussed. Van Maarden was
+the greatest scholar in the Mystic, the Occult, the Spiritualistic that
+I have ever met. He claimed to be able to go out of the body at will and
+see what any friend was up to at any time, in any out-of-the-way place
+in the world....
+
+When I jested that such a faculty might sometimes prove embarrassing to
+his friends, he laughed and slapped me on the back.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dineen was a queer little chap. He roomed de luxe at the Bellman House.
+
+One night, during a cyclone that swept the town and the adjacent
+country, a fragment of roof was lifted off the hostelry in which he
+dwelt. The women-servants and waitresses were thrown into a panic. One,
+who collapsed on a lounge in the upstairs hall, swore that Dineen had
+felt of her leg as she lay there. A scandal was started. I know that
+Dineen, in his European fashion, was free with his hands, when he meant
+no harm. He had merely laid his hand on the girl's leg, in friendly
+fashion, and asked if she was hurt.
+
+But the nasty Puritan mind of the community went to work, and the story
+was hawked about that Professor Dineen, taking advantage of the cyclone,
+had tried to "feel the girl up."
+
+This, and the fact that he had been a friend of mine (after my
+forthcoming scandal it counted strongly against him) later effected in
+his being requested to resign from the faculty.
+
+But the real cause of the brilliant, strange man's persecution was the
+jealousy of the dean of the philosophical department of the former's
+real ability.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We must do more for this man than we have ... he is a genius ... he has
+not enough money to return to Europe on....
+
+"He has written a curious, mad play called _Iistral_ ... one dealing
+with psychic phenomena, which we ought to put on....
+
+"That way we'll net him three or four hundred dollars."
+
+It was Dineen who spoke.
+
+We chanced to be walking up the Hill together.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The school cheer-leader was tall and statuesque, and his voice was deep
+and resonant ... but, though pleased with his stature and his vocal
+qualifications, Van Maarden decided on me to play the lead in his
+abnormal play.... I did not possess as fine a voice, but I knew the
+mystics almost as well as he did.... I believed in spiritism, and would
+be accordantly sympathetic with the author's ideas....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The rehearsal of the play progressed. Van Maarden, receiving' from
+Dineen's own personal bank-account a substantial advance on the expected
+receipts from the two performances, returned East, and sailed away for
+Holland.
+
+But an intimate friend of Penton Baxter's, before he left, he related to
+me many fine things about the latter, and spoke in special admiration of
+his wife, Hildreth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I rehearsed and rehearsed.
+
+I fought and fought with the directress, a teacher of elocution, who
+tried to make me mouth my words in the old style.
+
+She swore that she would get rid of me as Iistral (pronounced Eestral),
+if it were not for the fact that it would seriously embarrass her to try
+others for the part, the time of production being so near.
+
+Dineen upbraided me for being insubordinate....
+
+I asked Dineen please to believe in me, and watch results.
+
+My idea of acting was to go into the part, be burned alive by it ... to
+recite my lines naturally.
+
+I was proud of myself. I was to act as lead in a play by a
+world-celebrated author, in its premier American production.
+
+The story of it was that of a young poet-student, Iistral ... eccentric
+... a sensitive ... who had, while tutoring the children of a count,
+fallen in love with the countess, his wife ... on the discovery of the
+liaison, she had committed suicide in a lake on their private
+grounds....
+
+The play opened up with the young student, Iistral, come back home,
+after the wife's death....
+
+The tragedy had affected him strangely.
+
+He wore a Hindoo robe, let his beard grow like a Yogi ... was irritated
+with the unimaginative, self-seeking smugness of the grown-ups.
+
+He found in Lisel, a little niece of his, the wise, innocent,
+illuminated imagination of childhood. And he associated with her,
+teaching her the mystic meanings of flowers in the garden.
+
+But he lived for one thing only--the coming of the voice of Egeria, as
+he called the spirit of the dead countess....
+
+Her voice came to him continually ... preluded by strains of music ...
+he lived from day to day with her lovely speech, a clairaudient.
+
+As long as nothing material was involved, he was regarded as merely a
+gentle eccentric ... by his relatives and the bourgeoisie....
+
+But as soon as word came that he had inherited a fortune through the
+death of a rich uncle in America--the attitude of the people around him
+changed. His relatives began intriguing to have him declared insane.
+
+But the village burgomaster, ordinarily decent, saw through their
+artifices....
+
+Goaded and goaded, finally Iistral assailed his pestering relatives with
+a shovel with which he was working among the gentle flowers in the
+garden ... at his customary task of tending them with Lisel....
+
+And now the burgomaster, bribed, had reason to adjudge him insane.
+
+And Iistral was dragged off, wailing, to the asylum.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With my clothes in literal rags I went through the rehearsals, attended
+classes, kept up my athletics....
+
+Often I woke up in the night, crying out, with tears rolling down my
+cheeks, the lines of unhappy Iistral ... the spirit-woman Egeria grew
+real as flesh and blood to me....
+
+"Egeria! Egeria!--"
+
+I woke, time and again, and heard my own voice, like the voice of
+another, calling her name in the dark.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You mustn't take the play so desperately ... remember it's just a play
+... you rehearse as if the whole thing were a part of your life."
+
+"Some of the boys," I replied, "some of the football boys lost ten or
+twelve pounds in our Thanksgiving game at Kansas City last fall ... why
+do you rebuke me for taking art and beauty as seriously as athletes take
+a football match?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two days before the play, as I was walking by the Bellman House, I saw
+Jarvis Alexander Mackworth standing there, come up from Osageville for a
+regents' conference....
+
+"Hello!" the dear, good man called, "you heavenly bum! You starry young
+tramp!"
+
+His eyes were twinkling in appreciative merriment over his quaint
+phraseology.
+
+"What are you doing in Laurel, Mr. Mackworth?"
+
+I noticed that he did not wear his many-patched trousers, but was well
+dressed....
+
+--"attending a regents' meeting, young man,--where I suppose I'll have
+to stand up in your defence again....
+
+"It's a good thing you don't run after the women, Gregory, or your case
+would be entirely lost."
+
+(Yet Mackworth didn't know of the dirty trick that had been played on
+me:
+
+One of the boys from the school, running wild down in Kansas City, had,
+with a curious sense of humour, given my name as his ... to the "girls"
+in various houses of prostitution....
+
+And "do you know Johnnie Gregory?" and "when is Johnnie Gregory coming
+to see us again?" other students were asked who frequented the
+"houses.")
+
+"And what are you up to now?" asked Mackworth.
+
+--"acting ... in Van Maarden's _Iistral_ ... leading rôle!"
+
+"You look skinnier than ever!"
+
+"I am taking the part seriously, and it's bringing me down. I like to
+do real things when I get a chance, Mr. Mackworth ... and I am going
+to make the two performances of _Iistral_ memorable ones."
+
+"You need a new suit of clothes very badly."
+
+"I know I do. But I have no money, and no credit."
+
+"Well see about that, my young Villon."
+
+Mackworth took me to one side and thrust a fifty-dollar bill into my
+hand.
+
+I hurried down to Locker, the clothier....
+
+In a very little while I was again walking by the Bellman House,
+completely togged out in new apparel from head to heel.
+
+Mackworth was still standing there, and he laughed with astonishment at
+the lightning-quick change in my appearance....
+
+"You're a card, Gregory!"
+
+He afterward repeated the story with gusto....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The day before the night of our first performance at the Bowersby Opera
+House, Jack Travers, always turning up, came to me with a smile of faint
+sarcasm on his face--
+
+"How's the great actor, eh?"
+
+"Don't be an ass, Jack!"
+
+"I've got a good proposition to make for advertising the show--and
+there'll be a lot of fun in it, too....
+
+"Suppose we kidnap you, take you out somewhere in the country--then,
+after a day or so--find you bound, in a farm house....
+
+"Of course it would compel them to put off the performances for a few
+days ... but look at the excitement; and the stories in the papers!...
+afterwards you could go on tour through all the principal cities of
+Kansas."
+
+The idea fascinated me, in spite of myself....
+
+"But how about Dineen? He'd go nearly crazy!"
+
+"There's where a lot of the fun would come in. And to see the way Gertie
+Black, the elocution teacher, would carry on!..."
+
+But after a long pause of temptation I shook my head in negation of the
+suggestion....
+
+It _would_ be a lark, but I had pledged Dineen that I would give him no
+more trouble with my vagaries....
+
+And, besides, I didn't trust Jack Travers--once they had me in their
+power, he and his kidnappers might hide me away for several weeks ... to
+"bust up" the play entirely; would, I wisely reflected, be, to Travers,
+even a greater joke than merely to delay its production.
+
+And I wanted this time to show my enemies that I could be depended on in
+affairs of moment....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We had to have recourse to Kansas City for our costumes. And we were
+more fortunate in them than the cast of _She Stoops to Conquer_ had been
+the year before....
+
+Costumes had then been rented for them which left the children
+mysteriously itching, driven to the inexplicable necessity of scratching
+in embarrassing localities....
+
+The poor girls especially were terror-stricken ... and many of the boys
+were too innocent to conjecture what was the matter ... at first they
+thought that the rented costumes had imparted some obscure skin disease
+to the entire company ... and word was conveyed to the costuming firm
+that they were to be sued....
+
+But when it was discovered that an indecent sort of vermin was the
+cause, the case was dropped....
+
+Suit could not be conducted on such grounds....
+
+But the joke was passed around and caused considerable merriment among
+the wise ones.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The only thing I allowed the elocution teacher and directress to do was
+to put on my make-up for me ... including the sticking to my face of a
+close Van Dyke beard....
+
+I refused to avail myself of her instruction for acting, as I perceived
+that was all bosh....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The curtain went up, I sitting there, the orchestra softly breathing
+Massenet's _Elegy_--meant to be the music sent from the spirit world,
+the melody that I, Iistral, heard, whenever my dead mistress was
+present....
+
+The orchestra finished the melody. It stopped and left the house in
+expectancy.
+
+A mistake had been made on the entrance-cue of little Lisel, my
+child-nephew.
+
+There I sat, in my strange robe, like a bath-robe, with stars cast over
+it, waiting.
+
+I knew something had gone wrong.
+
+Several girls (of course everyone in the audience knew me) began to
+titter at my strange appearance, in my apotheosised bathrobe, in my
+close Van Dyke beard....
+
+I knew inwardly that in a moment all the house would be laughing ... at
+first out of sheer nervousness over the delay in the progress of the
+play--then from genuine amusement....
+
+I threw my will, my entire spirit, against the incoming tide of ridicule
+which would wreck the play even with the rising of the curtain.
+
+I pictured to myself the beautiful woman who had drowned herself; I
+burned with her unhappiness ... I felt her hovering near me ... I
+thought of the lovely passion we had known together ... I _was_ Iistral.
+
+I was not on a stage, but in a room, holding actual and rapt communion
+with my spirit-bride, Egeria!...
+
+"Egeria! Egeria!" I sobbed ... and tears streamed down my face.
+
+I was miserable, without her, in the flesh ... though she was there,
+beside me, in soul!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was aware of the audience again. I was proud and strong in my
+confidence now. The tittering had stopped. The house was filling with
+awe. I was pushing something back, back, back--over the footlights. I
+did not stop pushing till it had reached the topmost galleries....
+
+I _had_ them....
+
+The applause after the first act was wonderful.
+
+"Great! You're great ... you've vindicated my belief in you entirely!"
+Dineen was shouting, as he clapped me on the back, beside himself.
+
+"Oh, I knew I'd do it!... I want a drink!"
+
+"Here's some grape juice!" Gertie Black hold out a glass to me....
+
+"No, I won't drink that stuff," I replied, with all the petulance and
+ill-humour traditionally allowed a star.
+
+A Sig-Kapp, whom I had got into the play as a supe, slipped me a drink
+of real booze....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had to run to the toilet three times before the second act, I was so
+nervous and excited.
+
+"For God's sake, keep it up!" urged Dineen.
+
+"For Christ's sake, let me alone, all of you,--I know what I'm doing,"
+this, as the elocution teacher tried to press home some advice....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the second act I was as electric as during the first, but now I
+allowed myself to see over the foot-lights and recognise people I knew.
+I even overheard one girl say to another, "why, Johnnie Gregory is
+handsome in that Van Dyke!"
+
+"Yes, he has a fine profile ... he looks quite distinguished."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before the curtain for the third act, Jack Travers worked his way back
+through the props to my dressing room....
+
+"Sh! I've brought a nip of something real for you, Johnnie!"
+
+"Bill already has given me some. It's enough! I don't want any
+more!--wait till the last act, and then I'll take it!
+
+"I don't want it _now_! _Do you hear_!" I almost screamed, as he
+mischievously insisted.
+
+The bell rang for the third curtain....
+
+The news had come for Iistral that his rich uncle in America had died
+and left him a fortune ... now his family would try and have him
+adjudged insane, in order to lay hands on the wealth for their own
+uses....
+
+That third act went off well....
+
+"But you skipped a few lines in that act, Mr. Gregory," warned the
+directress, concerned.
+
+"Oh, let me alone, will you!" I returned, enjoying the petulance of
+stardom to the full....
+
+"Remember the fight-scene at the finish," she persisted, "just _pretend_
+to strike with the shovel ... you might hurt someone!" anxiously.
+
+"I am going to act the thing realistically, not as a matter of
+stagecraft."
+
+She tiptoed away. And I had the satisfaction of hearing her instruct the
+boys who acted as guards, and who were to seize on me--in my moment of
+physical exasperation--
+
+"Grab him before the cue, just a trifle before it! I think Mr. Gregory
+is going to forget himself!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I swung the shovel high in the air, making at all my relatives, crying
+out terms of reproach ... sobbing....
+
+In the audience, everybody sat still with wonder.
+
+The actors scattered from my brandished shovel, just as they would have
+done in real life ... the directress had schooled them to crowd about me
+so as to mask the action.
+
+But the action needed no masking. It was real.
+
+The two guards were on me,--boys who, in everyday life, were big
+football men on the freshman team....
+
+I fought them, frenzied, back and forth over the stage, smashing down
+the pasteboard hedge, falling ... getting up again....
+
+But, though the scenery went down, the audience did not laugh, but sat
+spellbound.
+
+I was finally dragged away ... on the way to the asylum, half my costume
+torn from my body ... and I kept crying aloud ... for mercy ... for
+deliverance ... after the curtain had long gone down....
+
+"Big Bill" Heizer gave me a thump in the ribs.
+
+"For God's sake, Mr. Gregory" (he had called me "Johnnie" always,
+before) "it's only play-acting ... it's not real ... quit it ... it gets
+me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The audience went wild with applause. I had won Laurel's complete
+approbation--for the day, as I had won Mt. Hebron's, that fall Field
+Day, long before!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Travers had slipped me just one shot of whiskey before the last act went
+on. He had tried to persuade me to drink more. He was in my dressing
+room....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I could hardly stand, from the weakness of excitement and exertion.
+
+After the play was over--
+
+"_Now_ you can give me the rest of the bottle."
+
+"We'll drink it together ... to your success, Gregory!"
+
+"Yes--you devil!" I replied, fond of him, "you'd have had me reeling
+drunk, that last act, if I had listened to you."
+
+And I gave him an affectionate clout in the ribs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again the professors were urging me to become more "regular" and
+pointing out the great career that awaited me--if I only would work.
+
+There was some subsequent talk of sending the play to Osageville,
+Topeka, Kansas City....
+
+But the faculty opposed it ... it would not be proper to send girls and
+boys out together, travelling about like a regular theatrical company.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As it had been said that I was going to take up the career of animal
+trainer,--after my going into the cage with the lions--so it was now
+pronounced, and reported in the papers--Travers saw to that--that I
+meditated a career as a professional actor....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gleeful, and vastly relieved, Professor Dineen slipped me twenty-five
+dollars out of his own pocket.
+
+Several fraternities showed indications of "rushing" me, after my star
+performance ... but my associations with the odd characters about town
+and the wild, ignorant farmers of the lower type that drove in each
+Saturday from the adjacent country, made them, at first, hesitate ...
+then utterly drop the idea....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Broke, I now wrote a long letter to Jarvis Alexander Mackworth.
+
+I boldly complained of my poverty, inasmuch as it deterred me from my
+work.
+
+"I have now proven my case," I wrote him,--"my poems have appeared in
+the _Century_, in _Everybody's_, in _Munsey's_....
+
+"I have acted, as well, as a professional in a first-rate play, by a
+great European dramatist ... giving Kansas the distinction of being the
+first to produce _Iistral_ on the American stage....
+
+"_Now_ I want to finish my four-act play on Judas. To do so I must have
+enough to eat and a place to sleep, without being made to worry about
+it, for a year....
+
+"Can't you help me to a millionaire?"
+
+Mackworth answered me generously, affectionately.
+
+In two weeks he had procured my millionaire ... Derek, of Chicago, the
+bathtub magnate ... how much could I get on with?
+
+I wrote that I could do with seven dollars a week....
+
+Mackworth replied not to be a fool--that Derek was willing to make it
+fifteen, for a year's duration....
+
+I replied that I could only take enough to fill my simplest wants....
+
+Derek jocosely added fifty cents to the sum I asked--"for postage
+stamps"-- ... for one year, week in, week out, without a letter from me
+except those indicating changes of address, without sending me a word of
+advice, criticism, or condemnation, no matter what I got into ... Derek
+sent me that weekly stipend of seven dollars and fifty cents!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I settled down to consecutive literary work.
+
+Lyrics I could write under any condition. They came to me so deeply from
+the subconscious that at times they almost seemed like spirit-control,
+which, at times, I am sure they had been, till I set the force of my
+will against them. For I was resolved that what _I_ wrote should be an
+emanation from my own personality, not from dead and gone poets who used
+me for a medium.
+
+But when it came to long and consecutive effort, the continual petty
+worry of actual penury sapped my mind so that I lacked the power of
+application....
+
+With Derek's remittances this obstacle was removed....
+
+I had soon completed the first act of my apostolic play....
+
+And then I plunged into a scrape, together with my fellow members of the
+press or "Scoop Club," as it was more popularly known, which halted my
+work mid-way....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our common adventure derived its inception from a casual remark of Jack
+Travers', at one of our meetings....
+
+Ever since Arthur Brisbane had come to Laurel, Jack had been on his
+toes....
+
+"Brisbane brought me a breath of what it must mean to be a big newspaper
+man in the world outside," said Travers, as he stretched and yawned,
+"why don't we," he continued, "_start_ something to show 'em we're
+alive, and not dead like so many of the intellects on the Hill!"
+
+"--s all right to talk about starting something ... that's easy to do.
+The hell of it is, to stop it, after you've got it started,"
+philosophised "The Colonel"....
+
+"Just what is it that you propose starting?" asked practical, pop-eyed
+Tom Jenkins.
+
+"Oh, anything that will cause excitement!" waved Travers, serenely.
+
+"If you boys really want some excitement ... and want to do some service
+for the community at the same time,--I've got a scheme to suggest ...
+something I've been thinking over for a long time," suggested Jerome
+Miller, president of the club....
+
+"Tell us what it is, Jerome!"
+
+"The Bottoms ... you know how rotten it is down there ... nigger
+whorehouses ... every other house a bootlegger's joint ... blind pigs
+... blind tigers, for the students....
+
+"We might show up the whole affair....
+
+"--how the city administration thrives on the violation of the law from
+that quarter ... how the present administration depends on crime and the
+whiskey elements to keep it in power by their vote....
+
+"_That_ would be starting something!"
+
+"I should say it would!" shouted Jack Travers, ablaze with enthusiasm.
+
+"Then we might extend operations," continued the masterful, incisive
+Jerome, "and show up how all the drug stores are selling whiskey by the
+gallon, for 'medicinal' purposes, abusing the privilege of the law."
+
+"But how is all this to be done?"
+
+"Through the _Laurelian_?"
+
+"No ... I have a better plan than that ... we might be able to persuade
+'Senator' Blair and old Sickert, joint editors of the _Laurel Globe_, to
+let the Scoop Club run their paper for a day--just as a college stunt!"
+
+"They'd never stand for it!" I averred, innocently.
+
+"Of course they wouldn't--if we let them in on what we were up to!--for
+they are staunch supporters of the present administration--but they
+won't smell a rat till the edition is off the press ... and then it will
+be too late to stop it!"
+
+"In other words," laughed Travers, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke
+from his nose, "they'll think they're turning over their paper, _The
+Globe_, to a bunch of boys to have some harmless fun ... a few
+sophomoric jokes on the professors, and so forth....
+
+"And they'll wake up, to find we've slipped a real man-size sheet over
+on them, for the first time in local history!"
+
+"It'll raise hell's all I've got to say!" sagely commented the
+prematurely bald "Colonel," his eyes glinting merrily.
+
+"It'll be lots of fun," remarked Travers, characteristically, "and I'm
+for it, lock, stock, and barrel."
+
+"That's not the reason I'm for it; I'm for it for two reasons,"
+reinforced Jerome Miller magisterially, "first, because it will put the
+Scoop Club on the map as something more than a mere college boys'
+organisation; secondly, because it will lead to civic betterment, if
+only temporary--a shaking up where this old burg needs a shaking up ...
+right at the court house and in the police station....
+
+"But, make no mistake about it,--it's going to kick up a big dust!
+
+"Also, remember, no one is going to stand by us ... even the Civic
+Betterment League, headed by Professor Langworth--your friend,
+Johnnie--will be angry with us--say our methods are too sensational.
+
+"And the university authorities will say we shouldn't have done it
+because it will give the school a black eye ... it will be Ibsen's
+_Enemy of Society_ all over again!..."
+
+Immediately some of our more conservative members set themselves against
+the "clean up" ... but Jack Travers and I delivered eloquent, rousing
+speeches. And the decision was more for full steam ahead.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Senator" Blair was easily deluded, and persuaded to turn his paper over
+to us, for one day.
+
+Our strong-featured, energetic president, Jerome Miller, together with
+the suave, plausible Travers, went to see him, deputation-wise, where he
+sat, in the Laurel _Globe's_ editorial office,--white and
+unhealthy-looking, a great, fat slug of a man, with the slug's nature,
+which battens on the corruption of earth.
+
+He liked the idea of the publicity his paper would get through the stunt
+of the "boys." He did not guess the kind of publicity he would really
+come into.
+
+During the three weeks that we had before we were to bring out the paper
+we grew quite proficient in the tawdry life lived in the "Bottoms."
+
+We found out that most of the ramshackle "nigger" dives were owned by a
+former judge ... from which he derived exorbitant rents.
+
+We located all the places where booze was sold, and ascertained exactly
+how much whiskey was disposed of in the town's drug stores for "snake
+bite" and "stomach trouble." We discovered many interesting
+things--that, for instance, "Old Aunt Jennie," who would allow her
+patrons any vice, but demurred when they took the name of "De Lawd" in
+vain--"Old Aunt Jennie" ran a "house" where the wilder and more
+debauched among the students came (in justice to Laurel University, let
+me add, very few) girls and boys together,--and stayed for the
+night--when they were supposed to be on trips to Kansas City....
+
+Travers and "The Colonel" and I were half-lit for two weeks....
+
+That was the only way to collect the evidence.
+
+I drank but sparingly, as I loafed about the joints and "houses."
+
+Jerome Miller did not drink at all ... and was the spirit and soul of
+our activities.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Senator" Blair came out with a humorous editorial the night before we
+were to take the day's charge of his paper.
+
+He headed his editorial "A Youthful Interim ... Youth Must Be Served!"
+
+He was laying down his pen, he wrote, for a week-end holiday ... he had
+dug a can of bait and would go fishing, turning all the care and trouble
+of a newspaper over to youth and eagerness ... would forgot all his
+troubles for a few days....
+
+The editorial made us roar with laughter ... Blair didn't know the
+trouble that was preparing for him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wrote a poem for the Scoop Club Edition of the Laurel _Globe_ ...
+
+  "The Bottoms now I sing, where whiskey flows
+  And two-cent makes life coleur de rose,
+  Where negro shanties line the sordid way
+  And rounders wake by night who sleep by day--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By noon of the day, hints of what was coming were riding the winds of
+general report....
+
+Carefully we read the proofs.
+
+At last there it was--all the data, statistics, and details of the
+town's debauchery and corruption ... damning, in cold type, the
+administration, and the aquiescent powers in the university.
+
+We ourselves had not as yet begun to perceive what it would lead to--a
+state-wide scandal that would echo in the Chicago, San Francisco and New
+York newspapers, and result in severe criticism of the university
+faculty for remaining blind to such a condition of affairs ... and how
+there would be interrogations in the Kansas Legislature and a complete
+shake-up of the political power in Laurel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+News of the forthcoming exposé spread mysteriously in "The Bottoms"
+before the paper was off the press. To avoid the coming storm, already
+negro malefactors and white, were "streaming" as Travers phrased it, "in
+dark clouds" out of town, for brief sojourns, beyond reach of the
+compelling subpoena, in Kansas City, Missouri.
+
+By five o'clock the edition, an extra large one, had been almost
+exhausted, and people were lining up at the newspaper office, paying
+five cents a copy....
+
+"Senator" Blair rushed back, having heard of what he called our
+"treachery" and abuse of his confidence, over telephone....
+
+He looked sick and worried, as if he had run in all the way from the
+little lake, five miles from town, where he had gone for his week-end of
+idyllic, peaceful fishing....
+
+"You've ruined me, you boys have!" he almost sobbed, collapsing fatly in
+his chair, then he flamed, "by God, I'll have you each investigated
+personally and clapped in jail," ... which threat, however, he did not
+even try to carry through....
+
+Instead, his paper, and the other two town papers, tried to turn off the
+affair as a mere college joke, played on a whole community....
+
+But we had expected just such action--rather the executive genius of
+Jerome had expected it--for which reason we had confronted the readers
+of the _Globe_ with damning facts and statistics, carefully gathered,
+which presented an insurmountable barrier to evasion.
+
+And as we also had expected, the Civic Betterment League was also dead
+against us....
+
+"Why," cried Langworth to me, "why didn't you bring all the evidence to
+us, and let _us_ proceed calmly and soberly with the case?"
+
+"Professor Langworth, you are a friend of mine, and a very good
+one--but you know very well that the conditions exposed you people knew
+of all along ... and for years you have dallied along without acting on
+it."
+
+"We were biding the proper time!"
+
+"The reason you never started something was your fear of involving the
+university in the publicity that was sure to follow!..."
+
+Langworth was a good man, but he knew I had him. He hemmed and hawed,
+then covered his retreat in half-hearted anger at me....
+
+"You know well enough, Johnnie Gregory, that all you boys did it for was
+to 'pull a stunt'--indulge in a little youthful horseplay."
+
+"Granted--but we have effected results!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"What results? merely a lot of trouble for everybody!"
+
+"The Civic Betterment League now has a chance afforded it to make good
+... we've provided you with the indisputable data, the evidence ... it's
+up to you, now, to go ahead."
+
+"So God help me, Johnnie, sometimes you make me wish I had never
+sponsored you here."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The editor of the _Globe_ made a right-about-face--repudiating us.
+
+Jack Travers, in the style of his beloved Brisbane, put an editorial in
+the school paper, the _Laurelian_, addressed to Blair, beginning, "Get
+back into the collar of your masters, you contemptible cur."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The usual thing took place. Most of the worst criminals were
+mysteriously given ample time to make their get-away ... probably aided
+in it. The humorous side of the resulting investigation and trials of
+various minor malefactors were played up almost exclusively.
+
+Little by little the town dropped back to its outward observance of not
+seeing in its civic life what it did not care to see, and which no one
+could radically remedy till human nature is itself different.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The school year was drawing to a close, my last year at Laurel.
+
+Professor Black, of the English department, had assured me that, if I
+would tone down a bit, I could easily win a scholarship in his
+department, and, later, an assistant professorship.
+
+But I preferred my rambling, haphazard course of life, which was less
+comfortable, but better for the freedom of mind and spirit that poets
+must preserve....
+
+Dr. Hammond, when I had given him that luncheon on the borrowed money,
+had taken me aside and informed me that one of the professors--an
+influential man on the Hill (beyond that, he refused to identify him
+further) had advised him, Hammond, not to accept the luncheon in his
+honour....
+
+"We don't approve generally of Gregory, on the Hill, you know...."
+
+And Hammond had, he told me, replied--
+
+"I'm sorry, but Mr. Gregory is my friend, and Dr. Ward, our literary
+editor, looks on him as a distinguished contributor to the
+_Independent_, and a young writer of great and growing promise" ... so
+the luncheon was given ... I wonder if the protesting professor was one
+of those invited, and if so, if he attended?...
+
+I saw clearly that I could never fit into the formal, academic life of
+the college--where professors were ashamed to be seen carrying packages
+and bags home from the stores, but must have them delivered ... for fear
+of losing their social status!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a park on the outskirts of town where I loved to loaf, when
+the weather was sunny,--a place where the blue jays fought with the
+squirrels and the leaves flickered in the sun ... sometimes I lay on the
+grass, reading ... sometimes I lounged on a bench ... I read my Greek
+and Latin poets there ... and my English and German poets ... and, when
+hungry, I sauntered home to my bread and cheese, or, now that I was in
+receipt of Derek's weekly stipend, to a frugal meal at some lunch
+counter. I dearly liked rib-ends of beef....
+
+One day, when I was in my park, lying on my belly, reading Josephus, I
+was aware of the deputy sheriff, Small, whom I knew, standing over
+me....
+
+"Oh, it's _you_, Gregory!"
+
+"Yes, what's the matter, Deputy Small? what do you want?"
+
+"People who drove in from the country complained about your lying here."
+
+"Complained about my lying here? what the hell!... look'e here, Jim
+Small, there's no ordinance to prevent me from lying on the grass."
+
+"Well, Johnnie, you either got to git up and sit, proper, on a bench, or
+I'll have to pull you in, much as I dislike to do it."
+
+"Jim, you just 'pull' ahead, if you think you're lucky ... it'll be a
+fine thing for me ... I'll sue the city for false arrest."
+
+Deputy Small was puzzled. He pushed his hat back and scratched his
+head....
+
+"Jim, who put you up to this?"
+
+"The people what saw you lying here, as they drove in, stopped off at
+the office of the _Globe_ ... it was 'Senator' Blair telephoned the
+courthouse--"
+
+"Blair, eh?... trying to get even for what we boys did with his dirty
+paper ... he knows I like to lie out here and read my books of poetry!"
+
+I was thoroughly aroused. I jumped to my feet.
+
+"Jim, do me a favour, and arrest me ... and I'll sue you, the city of
+Laurel, and 'Senator' Blair ... all three of you!"
+
+"--guess I won't do it ... but _do_ sit on the bench ... I ask it as a
+personal favour, Johnnie."
+
+"As a personal favour, Jim, till you are out of sight. Then I'll go back
+to the grass."
+
+That night Blair, cocksure, had the story of my arrest in the paper.
+But, as it happened, he was too previous....
+
+Jerome Miller and Jack Travers joined me in going to the office of the
+_Globe_, the next morning....
+
+After we had finished telling him what we thought of him, the "Senator"
+begged my pardon profusely, and the next day a retraction was
+printed....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now school was over at Laurel.
+
+And I determined to bum my way to New York, and, from there, ship on a
+cattleboat to Europe. Where I would finish writing my play, _Judas_.
+
+Farewell to Laurel!--
+
+I went up to the athletic field and ran my last two miles on its track,
+at top speed, as good-bye to its cinders forever!
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+"I'm no good at that, either ... let's stop playing ... I'm tired."
+
+We caught sight of a little man crossing a field, trotting like a dog
+out hunting on his own. He looked back twice as he went.
+
+"--wonder if he saw us?"
+
+"--perhaps--but what matter if he did?"
+
+"Then I hope he's not a fellow Edenite. You have no idea what an
+undercurrent of gossip runs in this place."
+
+We sank down together on a small knoll under the low-spreading branches
+of a live oak. We watched the man who we thought had observed our antics
+bobbing off down the road, as if running for exercise.
+
+We sat quite apart, at first. Then our hands met in instinctive fondness
+... met in the spirit in which we had been romping together.
+
+"You're like a small boy, Johnnie."
+
+"And you haven't acted so very much like a grown woman, have you,
+Hildreth?" It was the first time I had called her by her first name.
+
+"Can you, or anyone else, tell me just how grown women do act? I myself
+don't know, yet I'm a woman."
+
+I drew closer to her as if drawn by some attractive power. A stray wisp
+of her hair lit across my cheek stingingly. Then the wind blew a
+perfumed strand of it across my lips and over my nostrils.
+
+It made me rub my lips, it tickled so. Hildreth noticed it.
+
+"Wait," she bade playfully, "I'll bet I can make you rub your lips
+again."
+
+"No, you can't."
+
+"Hold still!" she leaned toward me; I could look down into her bosom.
+She just touched my lips with her forefinger.
+
+"Now!" she exclaimed triumphantly.
+
+"--think you've tickled me, do you?"
+
+"--just wait!"
+
+I forgot myself. My lips tickled and I rubbed them with the length of a
+finger ... Hildreth laughed....
+
+"Hildreth!"
+
+I leaned toward my friend's wife, calling her again by her first name.
+
+I lay in a half-reclining posture, my head almost against her hip. I
+was looking up into her face. She glanced down at me with a quick start
+at the tone of my voice. She looked gravely for a moment into my face. I
+observed an enigmatic something deep in her eyes ... which sank slowly
+back as the image of a face does, in water,--as the face itself is
+withdrawn. She moved apart a little, with a motion of slow deliberation.
+
+"Hildreth!" I heard myself calling again, with a deep voice, a voice
+that sounded alien in my own ears....
+
+"Come, boy!" and she pulled back her hand from my grasp, and catching
+mine in hers a moment, patted the back of it lightly--"come, don't let's
+be foolish ... we've had such a happy afternoon together, don't let's
+spoil it ... now let's start home."
+
+As soon as I was on my feet and away from her, she became playful again.
+She reached up her hand for me.
+
+"Help me up!"
+
+I brought her to her feet with a strong, quick pull, and against my
+breast. But I did not dare do what I desired--take her in my arms and
+try to kiss her. She paused a second, then thrust me back.
+
+"Look, the sun's almost gone down ... and Mubby and Darrie will be home
+a long time by this time ... and Mubby will be getting fidgety."
+
+The sun's last huge shoulder of red was hulking like a spy behind a
+distant, bare knoll ... separate blades of grass stood up in microscopic
+yet giant distinctness, against its crimson background.
+
+Our walk home was a silent, passively happy one that went without
+incident....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Penton and Darrie were indeed home before us.
+
+"Where have you two been all this time," Penton asked, a slight touch of
+querulousness in his voice.
+
+"Oh, Johnnie and I have been out for a walk, too!" replied Hildreth in
+an even voice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At lunch, the next day,--a day when Penton was called in to Philadelphia
+on business--while Darrie, Ruth, Hildreth and I sat talking together
+peacefully about our outdoor board, Hildreth suddenly threw a third of a
+glass of milk on Darrie's shirt-waist front.
+
+We were astounded.
+
+"Why, Hildreth, what does this mean?" I asked.
+
+"I won't stop to explain," she said, "but from now on I won't stay in
+the same house with her ... I'm going to move this afternoon, down to
+Penton's house" (meaning the little cottage but a few steps from my
+tent).... Ruth rose to intercede ... "Don't Ruth, don't! I want to be
+let alone." And Hildreth hurried away.
+
+"What in the world could be the matter with Hildreth?" I asked of Ruth.
+Darrie had also departed, to the big house, to rub her blouse quickly,
+so that no stain would remain.
+
+"Hildreth's capricious," answered Ruth, "but the plain explanation is
+downright jealousy."
+
+"Jealousy?"
+
+"Yes ... even though Hildreth no longer loves Penton, she's jealous of
+him ... the fact is, Hildreth doesn't know what she wants."
+
+"But Darrie--Darrie is her friend?"
+
+"Of course ... and remains her friend. Darrie doesn't want Penton. She
+only pities him."
+
+I quoted the line about pity being akin to love ... "they do a lot of
+strolling together."
+
+"Yes. But there's nothing between them ... not even a kiss ... of that
+I'm certain. Darrie is as cool as a cucumber ... and Penton is as shy
+with women as--you are!"
+
+I smiled to myself. If Ruth had seen us that preceding afternoon!
+
+"Of course the fault could not all be on Hildreth's side."
+
+"No, they're both a couple of ninnies ... but there's this to be said
+for Penton, he's trying to get something done for the betterment of
+humanity ... while Hildreth's only a parasite."
+
+"And Darrie--how about her? What does she do but loaf around in a more
+conventional manner, talking about her social prestige, the dress of one
+of her ancestresses in the Boston Museum, her aristocratic affiliations
+... how many and how faithful those negro servants of hers are, down
+South ... between the two, Hildreth has the livest brain, and puts on
+less."
+
+"Take care! You'll be falling in love with Penton Baxter's wife yet!"
+
+Our talk was halted by Darrie's re-appearance. Hildreth came furtively
+back, too, from the little cottage, like a guilty child. She apologized
+to Darrie, and her apology was accepted, and, in a few minutes we were
+talking ahead as gaily as before....
+
+We rehearsed Hildreth in her part as Titania ... for that was the part
+she was to play in _The Mid-Summer Night's Dream_, that the Actors'
+Guild of the colony was to put on in their outdoor theatre, a week from
+that afternoon ... Hildreth insisted on dressing for the part ... in her
+green, skin tights ... letting her black hair flow free ... wearing even
+her diadem, as fairy queen. She had a good, musical voice ... a way of
+speaking with startled shyness that was engaging.
+
+But Hildreth stuck to her original intention of moving to the cottage.
+She had Mrs. Jones move her things for her.
+
+As I sat in the library of the big house reading Tolstoy's _Anna
+Karenina_, I overheard Darrie telling Ruth in the bathroom that Hildreth
+would not have insisted on donning her tights, if she had not been proud
+of her symmetrical legs, and had not wanted to show them off to me.
+
+Between the three women, nevertheless, Hildreth was easily my choice
+already ... Darrie was lovely, but talked like a débutante from morning
+till night....
+
+Ruth had too much of the quietist in her, the non-resistent. She had a
+vast fund of scholarship, knew English poetry from the ground up ... but
+her bringing that knowledge to me as an attraction was like presenting a
+peacock's feather to a bird of paradise....
+
+However, when Penton came home that night, he found us all in huge good
+humour. I had just received a check from Derek, and had insisted on
+spending most of it for a spread for all of us, including a whopping
+beefsteak.
+
+And we ate and joked and enjoyed ourselves just like the bourgeoisie.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If Penton only had had a sense of humour ... but this I never detected
+in him.
+
+Even at singing classes, which I attended one evening with him ... his
+whole entourage, in fact....
+
+With solemn face he sang high, and always off key, till the three women
+had to stuff their handkerchiefs in their mouths to keep from laughing
+at him before his face....
+
+After class, we strolled home by a devious path, through the moonlight.
+This time Ruth walked ahead with little Dan, Hildreth with her husband,
+Penton,--Darrie with me....
+
+"Drag back a little, Johnnie ... Penton and Hildreth are having a
+private heart-to-heart talk, I can tell by their voices."
+
+We hung back till they disappeared around a bend. We were alone. Darrie
+began to laugh and laugh and laugh.... "Oh, it's so funny, I shall die
+laughing"....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Why--why, what's the matter!"
+
+For I saw tears streaming down the girl's face in the moonlight.
+
+"It's so awful," replied Darrie, now crying quietly, "--so tragic ...
+yet I had to laugh ... I'm so sorry for Penton ... for both of them....
+
+"Penton _is_ such a jackass, Johnnie," she gulped, "and God knows, as I
+do, he's such an honest, good man ... helping poor people all over the
+country ... really fighting the fight of the down-trodden and the
+oppressed."
+
+I put my arm around the girl's waist, and she wept on my shoulder.
+
+Finally she straightened up her head, stopping her crying with
+difficulty.
+
+"We're all so funny, aren't we?"
+
+"Yes, we're a funny bunch, Darrie ... all so mixed up,--the world
+wouldn't believe it, would they, if we told them?"
+
+"And you could never make them understand, even if you did tell them.
+You know, my dear, old Southern daddy--he thinks Penton is a limb of the
+old Nick himself ... with his theories about life, and the freedom of
+relations between the sexes, and all that ... even yet he may leave me
+out of his will for coming up here, though he has all the confidence in
+the world in me."
+
+And Mary Darfield Malcolm--whom we always called "Darrie"--went quickly
+to her room when we got back, so the others wouldn't notice that she had
+been crying....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Quite often, in the afternoons, toward dusk, around a dying fire, the
+whole community had "sings" out in the woods, near the one large stream
+that abutted the colony, and gathered into itself, all the little
+brooks....
+
+The old songs were sung; rich, beautiful, old Scotch and English and
+Irish ballads--which were learnt, by all who wanted to know them, at the
+singing school ... and the old-fashioned American songs, too.
+
+And the music softened our hearts and fused us into one harmony of
+feeling. And all the bickerings of the community's various "isms" melted
+away ... after all, there was not so very much disharmony among us. And,
+after all, the marvel is that human beings get along together at all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The afternoon before the "circus" the little settlement more than ever
+took on the appearance of a medieval village ... almost everybody took
+turns in participating in the "circus" ... almost everybody togged out
+in costume. But first we had a parade of the "guilds" ... the Actors'
+Guild, in which Hildreth bore a part; in her pretty tights she looked
+like a handsome boy page in some early Italian prince's court.
+
+Don Grahame was the son of the leader of the community whom Jones had
+promised to rake over the coals that night, after the circus.
+
+Don led the Carpenters' Guild, looking like nothing else than a handsome
+boy Christ. Don, secretly disliking in his heart the free-love doctrines
+his father and others taught (though he always rose loyally in his
+father's defence) had gone to the other extreme, he lived an ascetic,
+virgin life. But it didn't seem to hurt him. He was as handsome as
+Hildreth was beautiful.
+
+Everybody liked the young fellow. He had sworn that he would maintain
+his manner of abstinent living till he fell in love with a girl who
+loved him in return. Then they would live together....
+
+That, he maintained, was the true and only meaning of free love. He had
+no use for varietism nor promiscuity.
+
+The Guilds paraded twice around the Village Green, led by the Guild of
+Music Masters, who played excellently well.
+
+The Children's Guild was a romping, lovely sight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The circus was held shortly afterward in the huge communal barn, in the
+centre of its great floor,--the spectators seated about on the sides....
+
+There was the trick mule, made up of two men under an ox-hide, the mule
+fell apart and precipitated Don Grahame in between its two halves ...
+each half then ran away in opposite directions.
+
+Don rode so well that that was the only way they (I mean the mule) could
+unseat him. He won much affectionate applause.
+
+Then there was the fearful, great boa-constrictor ... which turned out
+to be a double-jointed, lithe, acrobatic, boy-like girl whom we knew as
+Jessie ... Jessie, they whispered, was marked for death by consumption,
+if she didn't look out and stop smoking so many cigarettes ... she was
+slender and pretty--but spoke with an adenoidal thickness of speech.
+
+The colony was as merry as if no storm impended.
+
+We adjourned for supper.
+
+After supper, under the evening star we marched back to the barn again,
+which also served as our town hall. On the way there our talk was
+subdued and expectant. Many people were disgruntled with Jones.
+
+"Why must he do this?"
+
+"Why can't old Jones let well enough alone?... no community's perfect,
+not even our community."
+
+Daniel had been put to bed, angrily objecting.
+
+The five of us joined the flow of people toward the barn. Penton carried
+a lantern.
+
+"Jones is all right," said Penton to me, "I like his spirit. I'm going
+to stand by him, if he finds himself seriously pressed, just because the
+man's spirit is a good one ... nothing mean about him ... but I know
+he'll place me among the snobs and wealthy of the community."
+
+When all were gathered, as still as at the opening of a prayer meeting,
+Grahame came in, and, with his son and other friends, took seats
+opposite Jones. Grahame, who had been master of ceremonies and ring
+master for the afternoon circus, had not changed his dress of
+knee-britches and ruffed shirt.
+
+The debate was prolonged and fiery....
+
+Jones launched into a gallant attack on Grahame, and was replied to
+evasively. Don Grahame wanted to punch Jones's head for what he called
+slurs cast at his father's good name....
+
+Penton made a famous speech reconciling, almost, the irreconcilable
+parties.
+
+And so we adjourned.
+
+Penton and I accompanied Jones home. All the way the latter was arguing
+against Baxter's plea, that he be more lenient with Grahame....
+
+"You look out, Penton," Jones warned with genial firmness ... "Grahame
+has been trying to persuade people in this community not to bring shoes
+to me to be mended ... a dirty attempt to starve me out ... Oh, no!... I
+haven't the slightest trace of persecution mania....
+
+"And you'd better look out, Penton, and not play tennis this Sunday, for
+I'm going to strike back at the tennis-playing snobs here, of whom
+you're one."
+
+"Jones, what do you mean by that? Surely not a bomb to smear us all over
+the courts!" Penton joked.
+
+"A bomb, yes ... it will be a bomb of sorts ... but I warn you you
+shan't play games on Sunday any more. I'll see to that ... not that I've
+unexpectedly grown religious, but that I mean to strike back as pettily
+as the way in which I'm being persecuted."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I suppose he means the Blue Laws," Penton commented seriously, "but
+surely he can get no one to enforce them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But Jones found a facetious officer of the law or so, down in
+Philadelphia, who were as glad of a chance to molest a radical colony as
+of an opportunity to put over a good joke....
+
+Baxter, Grahame, Bedell, and others of the prominent members of the
+community were haled in to court ... and, to the surprise of everyone,
+sentenced to forty-eight hours hard labour on the rock-pile, in the
+workhouse....
+
+And Jones sang triumphant snatches of song and hammered away merrily at
+shoes in his little shack along the road, while unused hands gathered
+water blisters making big stones into little ones, with other and
+heavier hammers.
+
+The newspapers made a great to-do about the matter. The affair was just
+serio-comic enough to attract nation-wide attention. And the story was a
+good one--the story of the anarchist-shoemaker who invoked the use of
+archaic, reactionary laws, in his battle against his less radical
+antagonists, the Single Taxers and Socialists.
+
+Story after story was also written about our curious little colony.
+
+Penton Baxter shared honours with the shoemaker. Reporters swarmed over
+his front porch and into his house to interview him, on the triumphant
+return of the party when they had served their forty-eight hours.
+
+Penton gave out interview after interview. And, to his credit let it be
+said, though he revelled in the notice accorded him, he also effected
+two serious results from what had begun as almost a practical joke ...
+he started a fight on the absurd Blue Laws by focusing publicity on them
+... and he exposed the bad prison conditions his unknown fellow
+prisoners lived under, who had _not_ gone to the workhouse in a jocular
+mood because of resurrected Blue Laws.
+
+Jones was willing to let the matter rest, as well as were his other
+opponents ... but Baxter kept the fight going as long as he could. He
+was accused of loving notoriety. His attitude toward it was mixed. He
+did love notoriety ... he enjoyed every clipping about himself with
+infinite gusto. But he also used publicity as a lever to get things done
+with, that would otherwise never have been noticed. The others were
+willing to consider what had happened to them, as a private affair.
+Penton gracelessly used that, and every private adventure for
+propaganda--turned it sincerely in the way he thought it might benefit
+people....
+
+He gave the papers a very bad poem--_The Prison Night_. I remember but
+one line of it--
+
+  "The convict rasped his vermin-haunted hide."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Come, get into the group; I want the papers to tell the public about
+you, too," he urged me, prophetically, as I stood on the outskirts,
+while three camera men were focusing on him, as he stood, expectant,
+blandly smiling, and vain-glorious.
+
+"Boys, I want my friend, the poet, Mr. John Gregory, in the picture,
+too."
+
+"Oh, all right!" they assented indifferently, which injured my egotism.
+But I was too adroit to show it. I still demurred with mock modesty.
+Penton would have been franker.
+
+Finally, at his urgency, they snapped us, our arms about each other's
+shoulders.
+
+In the light of subsequent events, they were glad of that picture.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our tennis-playing, Blue-Law martyrs, as I have said, were held over
+night in the workhouse ... or maybe two nights, I do not exactly
+remember which ... and when they came back they were full of the
+privations of jail-life, and the degradation of the spirit and mind
+suffered by prisoners there. To me, their attitude seemed rather
+tender-foot and callow. It was something that would have been accepted
+off-handedly by me. I had been in jail often, not for a cause, as I
+punned wretchedly, but _be-cause_. I did not accord hero-worship to
+Penton when he returned, as the women of the household did.
+
+For a week it quite reconciled Hildreth with him....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But on the first night of his absence Hildreth and I took a stroll
+together in the moonlight.
+
+Long the three women and myself had sat in the library, while I read
+aloud from a MSS. volume of my poetry, which I intended submitting to
+the Macmillans soon. For Ruth knew Mr. Brett and promised to give me an
+introduction to him. And I was to make a special trip to the city on the
+money I had saved from my weekly remittances ... for Penton would not
+permit me to spend a cent for my keep while I visited him. And I had
+already been with him three weeks....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I read them many love poems--those I had written for Vanna....
+
+"Why," commented Hildreth, "these verses sound like what a very callow
+youth would write, who never had experience with women ... I mean by
+that, intimate knowledge of them."
+
+I flushed and sat silent.
+
+"Some day, when you've lived more," remarked Ruth, "you'll write
+love-poetry more simple, more direct."
+
+  "Though infinite ways He knows
+    To manifest His power,
+  God, when He made your face,
+    Was thinking of a flower!"
+
+I read.
+
+"There again you have an instance, of what I mean ... you are only
+rhetoricising about love; not partaking of its feelings."
+
+"But I wrote all these poems about a real girl," and I told them the
+story of my distant passion for Vanna.
+
+"No matter--you're a grown-up man who, as far as knowledge of women is
+concerned, has the heart of a baby," observed Hildreth.
+
+--"in these days of sex-sophistication a fine thing!" cried Ruth.
+
+"Yes, when out of the mouths of babes and sucklings come quotations from
+Havelock Ellis and Ellen Key!" cried Darrie.
+
+"Good! Darrie, good!" Hildreth applauded....
+
+"--time to go to bed ... here it's almost one o'clock."
+
+"--had no idea it was so late. I have a lot of typing to do to-morrow.
+Good night, folks!" and Ruth was off to her room upstairs.
+
+"Good-night, Hildreth,--suppose you're going to sleep down in the little
+house!" It was Darrie who spoke.
+
+"Yes," answered Hildreth, in a simple tone, "I will feel quite safe
+there ... Johnnie's tent is only a few yards away."
+
+Hildreth and Darrie kissed each other on the mouth tenderly.
+
+"Good night, Johnnie--" and impulsively Darrie stepped up to me, took me
+by the two shoulders, and kissed me also a kind sisterly kiss.... I
+responded, abashed and awkward.
+
+A ripple of pleasant laughter at me from both women.
+
+"Johnnie's a dear, innocent boy!" Darrie.
+
+"He makes me feel like a mother to him!" said Hildreth.
+
+Though each of these remarks was made without the slightest colour of
+irony, I did not like them ... I lowered my head, humiliated under them.
+
+Ever since I had been among them the three women had treated me in the
+way they act with small boys, preserving scarcely any reserve in my
+presence. Penton himself had lost all his first disquiet.
+
+Outside--
+
+"I'll take you as far as the cottage ... it's right on the way, you
+know."
+
+"All right, but where are you going?"
+
+"Into the kitchen to get a lantern."
+
+"The moon is almost as bright as day. We won't need it."
+
+We stepped out into the warm, scented night. In a mad flood of silver
+the moon reigned high in the sky, dark and bright with the contours and
+shades of its continents and craters, as if nearer the earth than it had
+ever been before....
+
+"This night reminds me of those lines in Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_,
+the ones that follow after 'Is this the face that launched a thousand
+ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilion?' which are, to me, a
+trifle over-rhetorical ... the ensuing lines are more lovely:
+
+"'Fair as the evening air--
+
+"'Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,' or is it 'ten thousand
+stars'?"
+
+Hildreth turned her face up to me. Her arm went through mine. She drew
+my arm close against her body and held it tight in silent response for a
+quiet interval....
+
+"You _are_ a poet ... a _real_ poet ... and," she dropped her voice,
+"and, what is more, a real man, too!" there was a world of compassion in
+her voice....
+
+"--You remember Blake's evening star--that 'washed the dusk with
+silver?'"
+
+"Jesus, how beautiful!" I cried.
+
+We were standing in front of her cottage, that darkled in the trees.
+
+Suddenly, roused by our voices, like some sweet, low, miraculous thing,
+a little bird sang a few bars of song, sweet and low, in the bushes
+somewhere, and stopped....
+
+"Hildreth, don't let's go to bed yet." I caught her arm in my hands,
+"it's too beautiful ... to go to bed."
+
+I was trembling all over....
+
+"Yes, boy?"
+
+"Let's--let's take a walk."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We went through the little sleeping community. She clung to my arm
+lightly....
+
+"You're the first woman I haven't been frightened of, rather, have felt
+at home with."
+
+"You, who have been a tramp, a worker all over the country ... in big
+cities ... do you mean to tell me that?--"
+
+"Yes ... yes ... before God, it is true! You don't think I'm a fool, do
+you--a ninny?"
+
+"No, on the contrary, I think you are a good man ... that it is
+miraculous ... I--I feel so old beside you ... how old are you,
+Johnnie?"
+
+"Twenty-six."
+
+"Why, I'm only two years older ... yet I feel like your mother."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the groves adjoining the colony, for a mile on either side, wherever
+there was a big tree, a circular seat had been built about it. It was on
+one of these that we sat down, without a word.
+
+I laid my head against Hildreth's shoulder. Soothingly she began
+stroking my hair. With cool fingers she stroked it.
+
+"What fine hair you have. It's as soft and silky as a girl's."
+
+"I took after my mother in that."
+
+"What a mixture you are ... manly and strong ... an athlete, yet
+sensitive, so sensitive that sometimes it hurts to look at your face
+when you talk ... you've suffered a lot, Johnnie."
+
+"In curious ways, yes."
+
+"Tell me about yourself. I won't even whisper it in the dark, when I'm
+alone."
+
+"I know I can trust you, Hildreth."
+
+"What are you doing, boy?"
+
+"I want to sit at your feet."
+
+"You dear boy."
+
+"I feel quite humble ... I don't want you to see my face when I talk."
+
+She drew my head against her knees. Threw one arm as if protectingly
+over my shoulder.
+
+"There. Are you comfortable, boy?"
+
+"Yes. Are you?"
+
+"Quite ... don't be ashamed ... I know much about life that you do not
+know ... tell me all."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So I told her all about myself ... my ambition ... my struggles ... my
+morbidity ... my lack of experience with girls and women....
+
+"And I must have experience soon ... it's obsessing me ... it can't last
+this way much longer ... I shall go mad."
+
+And I rehearsed to her a desperate resolve I had made ... to find a
+woman of the streets, in New York, when I went in, the ensuing week ...
+and force myself, no matter how I loathed it--
+
+I buried my head in her lap and sobbed hysterically.
+
+Then I apologised--"forgive me if I have been too frank!"
+
+"I am a radical woman ... Penton and I both believe in the theory of
+free love, though we happen to be married ... what you have told me is
+all sweet and natural to me ... only--you must not do what you say
+you'll do--in New York!--"
+
+"I must, or--" and I paused, to go on in a lower, embarrassed voice ...
+"Do--do you know what else I thought of--dreamed of--?
+
+"In Paris--I understand--men live with women as a matter of course--
+
+"You see--" I was hot with shame to the very ears, "you see--there, you
+know,--I thought if I went there I would find some pretty little French
+girl that I would take to live with me ... in some romantic attic in the
+Montmartre district ... and we would be happy together ... and I would
+be grateful, so grateful, to her!"
+
+"Why you're the Saint Francis of the Radicals," Hildreth exclaimed.
+
+"Please don't make fun of me ... I suppose you think me very foolish."
+
+"Foolish?... No, I think you have a very beautiful soul. I wish every
+man had a soul like that."
+
+She took my head in her hands and kissed me on the brow.
+
+"Hildreth, only tell me what I am to do?"
+
+"I do not know ... theoretically I believe in freedom in sex ... I wish
+to God I could help you."
+
+"Why can't you?"
+
+"Hush, you do not know what you're asking!"
+
+"By the living Christ, I only know that I would crawl after you, and
+kiss your holiest feet before all the world, if you helped me."
+
+"Now I understand what Lecky meant when he spoke of the sacrificial
+office of a certain type of women ... I only wish ... but come, we must
+go."
+
+I was on my feet beside her, as she rose.
+
+"Yes, we had better go home," I spoke quietly, though my heart pumped as
+if I had taken strychnine.
+
+I put my arms about her, to steady her going, for she stumbled.
+
+"Why, Hildreth, dearest woman, you're trembling all over, what's the
+matter?... have I--I frightened you with my wild talk?"
+
+"Never mind ... no, take your arm away ... Let me walk alone a minute
+and I'll be all right ... I'll be all right in a minute ... it's just
+turned a trifle chilly, that's all."
+
+"Hush!" going down the path by the big house, Hildreth stopped,
+hesitated. "I'm--I'm not going to the little cottage to-night."
+
+"Then I'll say good-night!"
+
+"No, come on in and we'll sneak out to the kitchen and find something to
+eat ... aren't you hungry?"
+
+"A little bit. But I'm afraid we might wake Ruth and Darrie up."
+
+We tip-toed in. Hildreth searching for the matches, knocked the
+wash-basin to the floor. We stood hushed like mice.
+
+"Who's down there?" asked Darrie's voice, with a dash of hysteria in it
+... of hysteria and fright.
+
+"Damn it, there's Darrie waked up."
+
+"Such a clatter would wake anyone up!"
+
+_"Who's there, I say!"_
+
+"It's only me, Darrie ... I got hungry in the night and came up to the
+house to snatch a bite to eat."
+
+"Oh ... I'm coming down to join you, then."
+
+We saw Darrie standing at the top of the stairs, her eyes luminous and
+wide with emotion.
+
+She stood, rosy-bodied, in her night-dress, which was transparent in the
+light of the lamp she carried....
+
+"Johnnie's here, too!" warned Hildreth.
+
+"Oh!" cried Darrie, and turned back, to re-appear in her kimono.
+
+"I'm sorry we waked you up. But I knocked that infernal basin down off
+the sink."
+
+"You didn't wake me. I was awake already. I haven't slept a wink."
+
+"Neither have we!" I responded.
+
+"What?" Darrie asked me in so startled, impulsive a manner that Hildreth
+and I laughed ... and she laughed a little, too ... and then grew grave
+again....
+
+"It was such a beautiful night, Johnnie and I took a walk in the
+moonlight."
+
+Darrie looked from one to the other of us with a wide, staring look.
+
+"You needn't look that way, Darrie!"
+
+"Please, please, Hildreth!"
+
+"You and Penton have taken walks in the moonlight."
+
+"Hildreth, dear, I'm not rebuking you ... and you know my walks with
+Penton are all right, are harmless."
+
+"Yes, I know they are ... but you mustn't rebuke me, either."
+
+"I wasn't rebuking either you or Johnnie ... it isn't that I'm thinking
+of at all ... but everything has been so uncanny here to-night ... I
+could not sleep ... every little rustle of curtains, every creak or
+motion in the whole house vibrated through me ... something's going to
+happen to someone."
+
+"You're only upset because Penton's in jail," I explained.
+
+"No, that's not it ... that's nothing compared to this feeling ... this
+premonition--"
+
+"Come on, let's make some coffee ... in the percolator."
+
+"You girls sit down and I'll make it. I've been a cook several times in
+my career."
+
+Someone was knocking about in the dark, upstairs. We heard a match
+struck....
+
+"There, we've waked Ruth, too."
+
+"What's the matter down there?" Ruth was calling.
+
+"Come on down and join us, Ruth,--we're having a cup of coffee a-piece."
+
+"It's only two o'clock ... what's everybody doing up so early? Has
+Penton come back?"
+
+"No ... but do come down and join us," I replied.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I tell you, I thought it was burglars at first, and I was going to the
+drawer in Penton's room and get out his six-shooter."
+
+"Does Penton keep a gun?" I asked.
+
+"Yes ... it's the one he bought to shoot the mongrel dog with."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We ate some cold roast beef sandwiches and drank our coffee.
+
+Hildreth stayed in the big house, not going down the path with me.
+
+I went silently to my tent. It was blowing a little now. The moon was
+surging along behind little, grey, running clouds. It would rain before
+daylight. A haunted shiver swept through my back as I stole along the
+path. I repeated poetry rapidly aloud to crowd out uncanny imaginings. I
+had a silly, sick impulse to run back to the big house and sleep on the
+couch in the library.
+
+But I forced myself on. "If you're ever going to be a man, you'd better
+begin now," I muttered to myself, as if talking to another person.
+
+In my tent ... I lit the lamp. I removed all hanging objects because
+their lurching shadows sent shivers of apprehension through me....
+
+"That damned coffee--wish I hadn't drunk it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The wind and rain came up like a phantom army. It sang in the trees, it
+drummed musically on my tent. It comforted me.
+
+The floodgates of my mind, my inspiration, broke loose. I rose to my
+super-self. And now if a horrible thing had stood grey at my elbow,
+unmoved, I would have looked it unflinchingly in the sightless
+visage....
+
+My pencil raced over paper ... raced and raced.
+
+"Here it comes ... just like your good rain, so kind to earth.... Oh,
+beautiful God, I thank Thee for making me a poet," I prayed, tears
+streaming down my face.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The second act of _Judas_ stood complete, as if it had written itself.
+
+I rose. It seemed hardly an hour had passed.
+
+It took me a few minutes to work the numbness out of my legs. How they
+ached! I stepped out of the tent-door like a drunken man ... fell on my
+face in some bushes and bled from several scratches. The blare of what
+was full daylight hurt my eyes. I had been writing on, entranced, by
+unneeded lamp, when unheeded day burned about me.
+
+Stepping inside again, I saw by my Ingersoll that it was twelve o'clock.
+I fell into a deep sleep, still dressed ... I was so exhausted. Usually
+I slept absolutely naked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These were the things that happened while Penton was in jail because he
+played tennis on Sunday.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now I was part and parcel of the household, no longer a stranger-friend
+on a visit. Though Penton's jail-experience did not thrill me, the
+continued thronging of reporters did, as did Baxter's raging desire to
+do good for the poor ordinary prisoners in jail. He had got at several
+of them who had received a raw deal in the courts, and was moving heaven
+and earth to bring redress to them. He gave interviews, dictated
+articles ... the State officials were furious. "What's the matter with
+the fellow? What's he bother about the other fellows for, he ought to be
+glad he's not in their shoes!"...
+
+In agitations for the public good, in humanitarian projects, Baxter was
+indeed a great man ... I loomed like a pigmy beside him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Darrie and I in dialogue:
+
+She met me on the path, as I was proceeding toward the big house. She
+carried Carpenter's _Love's Coming of Age_ in her hand. She was dressed
+daintily. Her brown eyes smiled at me, and a rich dimple broke in her
+cheek.
+
+But Darrie was taller than Hildreth, and I like small women best;
+perhaps because I am myself so big.
+
+"Don't go up to the house, Johnnie."
+
+"I want a book from the library."
+
+"Hildreth and Penton are there. Hildreth is having a soul-state."
+
+"A what?" I laughed.
+
+"Oh, she thinks something is the matter with her soul, and, for the
+three hundredth time since I've known them, Penton and she are
+discussing their lives together."
+
+"I don't see anything to jest about in that."
+
+"I'm tiring of it ... if Hildreth has a tooth-ache, or anything that the
+rest of us women accept as a matter of course, she runs to Mubby, as she
+calls him ... and, as if it were some abstruse, philosophical problem,
+they talk on, hour after hour ... like German metaphysics, there's no
+end to it. They've been at it since ten and they'll go on till four, if
+they follow precedents ... Penton takes Hildreth too seriously."
+
+"You talk as if you, you were jealous of Hildreth and in love with
+Penton."
+
+"It's neither the one nor the other. I love them both, and I want to see
+them happy together."
+
+"You see, Darrie, neither you nor I are married, and neither of us knows
+anything about sex, except in the theory of the books we've read--how
+can _we judge_ the troubles of a man and woman who are married?"
+
+"There's a lot in what you say."
+
+"I believe it would be better if we both cleared out and left them to
+fight this out alone."
+
+"Perhaps it would."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Darrie, Oh, Darrie!--want to come for a walk with Hildreth and me?"
+
+So the three set off together, leaving me and Ruth alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ruth and I had just settled down to a discussion of the writing of
+narrative poetry, how it was done, and the reason why it was no longer
+customary with the poets to write longer stories out of real life, like
+Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_,--when we heard a rustling as of some wild
+thing in the bushes beside the house, and here came Hildreth breaking
+through, her eyes blazing, her hair down, her light walking skirt that
+she had slipped on over her bloomers torn by catching on thorns.
+
+She staggered into the open, swept us with a blazing glance as if we had
+done something to her, and hurried on down the path toward the little
+house where Penton had written in quiet till she had strangely routed
+him out and taken its occupancy for herself.
+
+"Hildreth!" I leaped to my feet, starting after her, "Hildreth what's
+the matter?"
+
+I had put all thought of narrative poetry out of my head.
+
+"Don't follow her," advised Ruth, in a low, controlled voice, "it's best
+to let her alone when she acts like that ... she'll have it out, and
+come back, smiling, in an hour or so."
+
+I plunged on. Ruth ran after me, catching me by the shoulder from
+behind.
+
+"Listen to me. Take my advice and keep out of this--Johnnie!" she called
+my name with a tender drop in her voice.
+
+If it had not been for her tell-tale pronouncement of my name I might
+have listened to her ... but that made me angry, and it ran through my
+mind how she and Penton had fatuously arranged my marrying her....
+
+I ran after Hildreth. She slammed the door when I was so close upon her
+that the wind of its shutting went against my face like a blow.
+
+I found myself on my knees by the door.
+
+"Let me in," I said through the key-hole, for the door was locked; she
+had thrown the bolt on the inside.
+
+"Go away, Johnnie, I want to be alone."
+
+"Hildreth, dearest woman, do let me in. It hurts my heart to see you so
+suffer so."
+
+"I don't want to see anybody. I want to die."
+
+"I'll come in the window."
+
+I was at the window madly. I caught it. It was locked. But I pulled it
+up like a maniac. The lock, rusty, flew off with a zing! The window
+crashed up. I tumbled in at one leap.
+
+My whole life was saying, "this is your woman, your first and only
+woman--go where she is and take her to yourself!"
+
+That avalanche of me bursting in without denial, struck little Hildreth
+Baxter dumb with interest. She had been kneeling by her bed, sobbing.
+Now she rose and was sitting on it.
+
+"Well?" and she smiled wanly, looking at me with fear and a twinkle of
+amusement, and intrigued interest, all at one and the same time, on her
+face--
+
+"I couldn't stand seeing you suffer, Hildreth. I had to come in. And you
+wouldn't unlock the door ... what has gone wrong?"
+
+"It's Darrie!--"
+
+"But you all three started on your hike like such a happy family, and--"
+
+"For God's sake don't think I'm jealous of Darrie ... I'm only wild
+about the way she encourages Mubby to talk over his troubles with
+her--and tell her about him and me, asking _her_ advice ... as if _she_
+could give any advice worth while--
+
+"They began to talk and talk about me just as if I were a laboratory
+specimen....
+
+"Damn this laboratory marriage! damn this laboratory love!
+
+"Penton experiments, and Penton experiments ... on his cat, his dog,
+himself, me--you, if you'd let him ... everybody! let him marry Humanity
+if he loves it so much."
+
+"But what did you do?"
+
+"I caught myself running away from them, and sobbing."
+
+"And what did they do?"
+
+"'Hildreth, for God's sake!' Mubby called, 'what's the matter now?' in
+that bland, exasperating tone of his,--that injured, self-righteous,
+I'm-sacrificing-myself-for-mankind tone--"
+
+I had to laugh at her exact mimicry....
+
+I stroked her hair....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I'm glad you came to Eden, John Gregory. You might be a poet, but you
+have some human sense in you, too....
+
+"Oh, you don't know what I've been through," then, femininely, "poor,
+poor Mubby, he's been through a lot, too."
+
+Her tears began to flow again. I sat beside her on the bed. I put my arm
+about her and drew her to me. I kissed her tear-wet mouth. The taste of
+her ripe sweet mouth with the salt of her tears wet on her lips was very
+good to me....
+
+In a minute unexpectedly she began returning my kisses ... hungrily ...
+her eyes closed ... breathing deeply like one in a trance....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Go up to the house now, Johnnie, my love ... go, so Mubby won't be
+suspicious of us ... I want to stay here ... leave the blinds drawn as
+they are....
+
+"You have been so gentle, so sweet."
+
+"Hildreth ... listen to me ... this has been the greatest day in my
+life, will always be! If I died now, I would go to death, singing....
+
+"You're the most wonderful woman in the world....
+
+"I want you to be mine forever....
+
+"I know what it all means now....
+
+"It's like Niagara, sweetheart ... one hears so much of it ... expects
+so much ... that it seems disappointing, the first actuality....
+
+"Then afterward, it's more than any dream ever dreamed of what it would
+be!
+
+"I want to work for you....
+
+"I want to let you walk all over me with your little feet....
+
+"I want you to kill me, sweetheart....
+
+"I want to die for you....
+
+"Hildreth, I love you!
+
+"I'll tell Penton ... I'll tell everybody--'I love Hildreth! I love
+Hildreth!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie, my own sweet darling, my own dear, pure-hearted, mad, young
+poet....
+
+"Don't talk that way....
+
+"Come to me again...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Penton must not know. Not yet. You must let _me_ tell him.
+
+"It is my place to tell him, sweetest of men, my darling boy...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Go to your tent.
+
+_"He'd see it in your eyes now."_
+
+"No, I won't go to my tent. I'll go right up to the house."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"If he says anything to me I'll kill him.
+
+"I'm a man now.
+
+"I'll fight him or anybody you want me to."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These were the words we said, or left unsaid. I am even yet too confused
+to remember the exact details of that memorable time.
+
+For I was re-born then, into another life.
+
+Is there anyone who can remember his birth?
+
+I returned to my tent in a blissful daze.
+
+I had not the least feeling of having betrayed a friend.
+
+The only problem that now confronted us was divorce! I would ask Penton
+to divorce Hildreth, and then Hildreth and I would marry.
+
+But why even that? Was not this the greatest opportunity in the world
+for Hildreth and me to put to practical test our theories ... proclaim
+ourselves for Free Love,--as Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher
+Godwin had done, a century or so before us?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following day Ruth and I ate breakfast together, alone. I had
+behaved with unusual sedateness, had showed an aplomb I had never before
+evidenced. Full manhood, belated, had at last come to me.
+
+With more than usual satisfaction I drank my coffee, holding the cup
+with my hands around it like a child ... warming my fingers, which are
+nearly always cold in the morning....
+
+Then, while Ruth sat opposite me, eyeing me curiously, I began to sing,
+half-aloud, to myself.
+
+A silence fell. We exchanged very few words.
+
+And it was our custom, when together, Ruth and I, to hold long
+discussions concerning the methods and technique of the English poets,
+especially the earlier ones.
+
+This morning Baxter's secretary rose and left part of her breakfast
+uneaten, hurrying into the house as if to avoid something which she had
+seen and dreaded.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I ate a long time, dreaming.
+
+Darrie came out, followed immediately by Daniel. Daniel was in an
+obstreperous mood ... he cried out that I must be his "telegraph pole,"
+that he would be a lineman, and climb me. I felt an affection for him
+that I had not known before. I played with him, letting him climb up my
+leg.
+
+He finished, a-straddle my shoulders. I reached up and sat him still
+higher, on my head. And he waved his arms and shouted, as if making
+signals to someone far off.
+
+Darrie laughed.
+
+"Which would you rather have, a son or a daughter?" she asked me.
+
+"I don't know," I replied, letting Daniel slide down, "but I think I'd
+rather have a daughter ... the next generation will see a great age of
+freedom for women ... feminism....
+
+"Then it would be a grand thing, too, to have a beautiful daughter to go
+about with ... and I would be old and silver-haired and
+benignant-looking ... and people would say, as they saw the two of us:
+
+"'There goes the poet, John Gregory, and his daughter ... isn't she a
+beautiful girl!'
+
+"And she would be a great actress."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Penton came forth from the big house ... he poised tentatively like a
+queer bird on the verge of a long flight ... then he wavered rapidly
+down the steps.
+
+"--slept late!... has the mail come yet?... where's Ruth?"
+
+"Isn't she in the house?" I queried.
+
+"I saw her stepping out at the back door a minute ago" ... said Darrie.
+
+"We had breakfast together ... I...."
+
+"I hope she doesn't stay away long ... I have an article on Blue Laws as
+a Reactionary Weapon, that I want to dictate for a magazine ...--one of
+her moods, I suppose!"
+
+I looked the little, large-browed man over almost impersonally. I saw
+him as from far away. He came out very clear to me.
+
+I found a profound pity for him waking in my heart, together with a
+sort of contempt.
+
+"And where's Hildreth?"
+
+"Not up yet I presume," replied Darrie.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I excused myself and hurried back to my tent ... where, instead of
+settling down to work on the third act of my play, I lay prone on my
+cot, day-dreaming of the future. How beautiful it would be, now that I
+had at last found my life-mate!
+
+I thanked God that nothing trivial was in my heart to mar the
+stupendousness of my love, my first real passion for a woman!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie!"
+
+I leaped alert. It was Hildreth, at my tent door....
+
+"Get up, you lazy boy ... surely you haven't been sleeping all this
+time?"
+
+"No, darling."
+
+"I ate my breakfast all alone," she remarked, in an aggrieved tone,
+"where's Darrie and Mubby and Ruth?"
+
+"God knows! I don't--and I don't care!"
+
+"You needn't be peevish!"
+
+"Peevish?--as long as you are with me I don't care if all the rest of
+humanity are dead."
+
+I stepped out beside her. We stood locked in a long embrace.
+
+She drew back, with belated thoughtfulness....
+
+"We ought to be more careful ... so near the house."
+
+"I'm so glad you're in the little house near my tent, Hildreth."
+
+"But we can't be together there much ... it's too near the big house."
+
+"What shall we do, then?"
+
+"There's the fields and the woods ... miles of them ... the whole
+outside world for us."
+
+"I don't see why _we_ shouldn't go strolling together ... the rest are
+all abroad somewhere, too ... but we must be careful, Johnnie, very
+careful."
+
+"Careful--why?"
+
+"Because of Mubby."
+
+"But he doesn't love you any more?"
+
+"I'm not so sure about that ... I'm not so sure about anything."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I never saw the world so beautiful as on that day. I was translated to
+the veritable garden of Eden. The community had been named rightly. I
+was Adam and Hildreth was my Eve.
+
+And so it went on for two blissful weeks....
+
+If the Voice of God had met us, going abroad beneath the trees, I would
+not have been surprised.
+
+Hildreth took her volume of Blake with her on our rambles ... and we
+revelled in his "Songs of Experience" as well as "Songs of Innocence";
+and we were moved deeply by the huge, cloudy grandeur of his prophetic
+books....
+
+Why could it not go on forever thus? eternal summer, everlasting love in
+its first rosy flush?...
+
+Hildreth was very wise and very patient with one who was as yet a mere
+acolyte in love's ways and uses ... she taught me many things, and I
+adored her for it--as little by little, day by day, she brought me to
+the full stature of my manhood....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of course the two other women of the household immediately sensed what
+was happening. But Penton remained pathetically blind....
+
+What an incredible man! A mole would have gotten a glimmer of the
+gradually developing change.
+
+With bravado I acted my part of the triangular drama ... but Hildreth
+carried off her part with an easiness, a femininely delicate boldness,
+that compelled my utmost admiration ... she even threw suspicious Ruth
+and Darrie off the scent--at times.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The night of the performance of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ I shall
+never forget ... Hildreth as Titania in her green tights ... I sat in
+the back (she would not allow me in the front because it might fluster
+her, she pleaded) and enjoyed a sense of blissful ownership in her, as
+she glided about, through the Shakespearean scenes ...--such a sense of
+ownership that it ran through my veins with a full feeling, possessed my
+entire body....
+
+Who was this little, alien man, Penton Baxter, who also dared claim her
+possession!...
+
+Nonchalantly and with an emotion of inner triumph I let him walk
+homeward with Hildreth, while I paced along with Ruth and Darrie.
+
+Let him congratulate her now on her triumph ... that she had had, as
+Titania, there under the wide heaven of stars, in our outdoor theatre
+... in the midst of the Chinese lanterns that swayed in the slight
+breaths of summer air....
+
+Later on, when she was warm in my arms, _I_ would congratulate her
+... --tell her she was greater than Bernhardt ... than Duse herself!...
+tell her every incredible thing that lovers hold as mere, commonplace
+truths.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jones had acquitted himself wonderfully as Bottom ... roaring like any
+suckling dove ... putting real philosophic comedy in his part ... to the
+applause of even the elder Grahame, who, to do him credit, was not such
+a bad sport, after all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie, we are having a sing to-night ... there'll be a full moon up.
+I have informed the committee that you will read a few of your poems by
+the camp-fire."
+
+"--the first time I ever heard of it," I replied, concealing my pride in
+the invitation, under show of being disgruntled....
+
+That was Penton's way, arranging things first, telling you afterward.
+
+"But you will do it? I have said you would!"
+
+"Yes, Penton, if you wish me to!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth was always insistent on my strength ... my greyhound length of
+limb, my huge chest ... she stood up and pounded on my chest once....
+
+"Oh, why do I pick out a poor poet, and not a millionaire, for a lover!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There grew up between us a myth ... we were living in cave-days ... she
+was my cave-woman ... I was her cave-man....
+
+As I came to her in my bath-robe (for now, bolder with seeming immunity,
+we threw caution aside, and met often in the little house)--
+
+As I came to her in my bath-robe, unshaven, once ... she called me her
+Paphnutius ... and she was my Thaïs ... and she told me Anatole France's
+story of _Thaïs_.
+
+But the cave-legend of our love ... in a previous incarnation ... was
+what spelled her most ... she doted on strength ... cruel, sheer, brute
+strength....
+
+That I could carry her, lift her high up with ease, toss her about,
+rejoiced her to the utmost....
+
+I caught her up in my arms, pleasing this humour, tossing her like a
+ball ... till my muscles were as sore as if I had fought through the two
+halves of a foot-ball game....
+
+Out of all this play between us there grew a series of Cave Poems.
+
+One of them I set aside to read at the sing, beside the camp-fire.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had chorused _Up With the Bonnet for Bonny Dundee_ and _You Take
+the Highway_....
+
+There ran a ripple of talk while they waited for me.
+
+In the red glow of the camp-fire I towered over the stocky little
+husband as he introduced me. Hildreth was sitting there ... I must make
+a good impression before my mate. All I saw was she--too patently, I
+fear.
+
+I went through poem after poem, entranced with the melody of my verse
+... mostly delicate, evanescent stuff ... like this one ...
+
+  "THE EMPEROR TO HIS LOVE
+
+  "I've a green garden with a grey wall 'round
+  Where even the wind's foot-fall makes no sound;
+  There let us go and from ambition flee,
+  Accepting love's brief immortality.
+  Let other rulers hugely labour still
+  Beneath the burden of ambition's ill
+  Like caryatids heaving up the strain
+  Of mammoth chambers, till they stoop again ...
+  Your face has changed my days to splendid dreams
+  And baubled trumpets, traffics, and trirèmes;
+  One swift touch of your passion-parted lips
+  Is worth five armies and ten seas of ships."
+
+Hildreth's applause was sweet. My heart almost burst with happiness
+within me, as those tiny hands, that had run through my hair and been so
+wonderful with me ... hands that I had kissed and fondled in
+secret--joined in unison with Penton's and Darrie's and Ruth's
+hand-claps.
+
+"And now I will finish with the _Song of Kaa, the Cave-Man_," I
+announced ... it seemed that the poem was not, after all, in the bunch
+of MSS. I had brought along with me....
+
+At last I found it--and read:
+
+  "THE SONG OF KAA
+
+  "Beat with thy club on a hollow tree
+  While I chant the song of Kaa for thee:
+  I lived in a cave, alone, at first,
+  Till into a neighbouring valley I burst
+  Wild and bearded and seeking prey,
+  And I came on Naa, and bore her away ...
+  Away to my hole in the crest of the hill,
+  Where I broke her body to my fierce will....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  "My fellow cave-men, fell in a rage:
+  'What hast thou done?' cried Singh, the Sage,
+  'For I hear far off a battle-song,
+  And the tree-men come, a hundred strong ...'
+  Long the battle and dread the fight;
+  We hurled rocks down from our mountain height"--
+
+I copy this from memory alone ... Hildreth has all my cave-poems. I gave
+them to her, holding no transcripts of them--
+
+The upshot--
+
+ "All of our tribe were slain ... Naa and I alone escaped--
+       going far off--
+   To start another people and clan:
+   She, the woman, and I, the man!"
+
+In my love-drunkenness, I looked directly at Hildreth as I read the
+last lines ... she lowered her head and picked at her sandal....
+
+The applause was tumultuous....
+
+Penton Baxter rose to his feet, as chairman of the occasion....
+
+"I'm sure we all thank Mr. Gregory--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Events trod rapidly on one another's heels. Though Penton had gone on
+frequent walks with Darrie, after his day's work,--chiefly because
+Hildreth had not wanted to go on walks with him herself, or had not
+wanted to accompany them both--yet she and I seized on the precedent
+Penton and Darrie had set, and we were abroad most of the time ...
+roaming idyllically in the fields, the woods ... passionate ... mad with
+the new love that had come to us ... unseeing, in our absorption in each
+other's arms ... praying with devout lover's prayers that we were as
+unseen as unseeing....
+
+We were abroad in the fields so much that even Penton himself must
+notice it....
+
+So we developed the flimsiest of all flimsy pretexts ... pretended to be
+engrossed, together, in of all things, the study of--toadstools and
+mushrooms ... taking with us Neltje Blanchan's book on _Mushrooms and
+Toadstools_, with its beautiful coloured illustrations ... and we did
+learn a lot about these queer vegetations that grow without the need of
+chlorophyll ... entering into a world of new colours in the vegetable
+kingdom ... exquisite pinks and mauves and greys ... blues ... purples
+... reds ... russets ... in the darkest spots of the woods we sought and
+found strange species of these marvellous growths ... that grow more
+readily in the dark and obscurity, the twilights of nature, than in the
+open sunlight of green summer days....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Down vistas of forest we often pursued each other ... often got lost so
+that it took hours for re-orientation ... once, for awhile, to our great
+fright, we could not re-discover our clothes, that we had lightly tossed
+aside on the bank of a brook lost and remote,--that had never before
+laved a human body in its singing recesses of forest foliage ... for I
+had been playing satyr to her nymph, pursuing her....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And each day saw us a little more reckless, more bold and open in our
+love, our passion, for each other.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"How handsome love is making you, my Paphnutius!"
+
+I was wearing my bath-robe, had stopped at her cottage a moment, in the
+morning, where she sat, in an easy chair, reading peacefully ... I was
+on my way for my morning dip in a nearby brook....
+
+My bath-robe, that made me, somehow, feel so aristocratic, so like a
+member of the leisure class ... I forgot to tell how I had brought it
+all the way from Kansas, together with my MSS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I swam about in the brook, not over four feet deep, I sang and
+shouted. I had never been so happy in my life....
+
+I dried myself in the sun, using its morning heat for a towel....
+
+As I sat there on a rock, I heard a crackling of twigs, and Penton
+thrust his way through the intervening branches to my bare rock and my
+bare self ... I hastily, I do not know why, put on my bathrobe....
+
+"Hello, Penton."
+
+"Good morning, Johnnie. I felt you'd be down here for your morning bath
+... I came to have a serious talk with you."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I want you to take calmly what I am about to say!"
+
+Penton was much impressed with my stories of tramp days and tales of
+adventure on land and sea, which you may be sure my sense of the
+dramatic had encouraged me to lay on thick--and he, plainly, did not
+desire any heat in the discussion which was to follow....
+
+"Recently it has come to my attention that there has been a lot of
+gossip about you and Hildreth ... your conduct together." He drew his
+lips together tightly, settled himself for a long siege....
+
+"Why, Penton," I began, protestingly and hypocritically,--I had planned
+far other and franker conduct in such an emergency--but here I was,
+deprecating the truth--
+
+"Why, Penton, God knows--"
+
+"Never mind ... if it is true, I am very sorry for you--for Hildreth's
+sake, for yours, for mine ... but I want to warn you, if it is not true,
+to look out ... you, as a friend, owe me some obligations ... I have
+taken you in here, accepted you as one almost of my family, and--"
+
+"But, Penton, this is unfair," I lied, "unfair even to suspect me--"
+
+"If it had been anybody but you, Johnnie, I would have been suspicious
+weeks ago ... Oh, I know, Hildreth ... she is giving all the
+manifestations ... how her face shines, how beautiful she has grown, as
+she does, with a new heart interest!... and her taking my little cottage
+... ousting me from it....
+
+"If it was anyone else," and he fetched a deep sigh, with tears standing
+in his eyes, leaving the sentence incomplete.
+
+At that moment I was impelled almost to cast myself at his feet, to
+confess, and beg forgiveness....
+
+"I want to warn you," he went on, "of Hildreth ... once before this has
+happened ... she is a varietist by nature, as I am essentially a
+monogamist."
+
+"--and the free love idea, it was you who taught her this, brought her
+into contact with Havelock Ellis, Ellen Key, Rosa Von Mayerreder?"
+
+"I deny that. I believe in human freedom ... divorce ... remarriage ...
+but not in extreme sex-radicalism ... Hildreth has misinterpreted me ...
+the people you mention are great idealists, but in many ways they go too
+far ... true--I brought Hildreth into contact with these books; but only
+that she might use her own judgment, not accept them wholly and blindly,
+as she has done...."
+
+I looked at the man. He was sincere. An incredible, naïve, almost
+idiotic purity shone in his face....
+
+Again I was impelled to confess. Again I held my tongue. Again I lied.
+
+"Penton, what you have just said about you and Hildreth and your lives
+together, I shall consider as sacred between us."
+
+He gave me his hand.
+
+"Promise me one thing, that you will not take Hildreth as your
+sweetheart ... be true to our friendship first, Johnnie."
+
+"Penton, I am only flesh and blood; I will promise, if anything happens,
+to tell you, ultimately, the truth."
+
+He looked at me with close scrutiny again, at this ambiguous speech.
+
+"Johnnie, _have_ you told me the absolute truth?"
+
+"Yes!" evading his eyes.
+
+"--because there is a wild strain in Hildreth that only needs a little
+rousing--" He paused.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie," as we walked away, "don't you think you had better pack up
+and leave? _The next time_ I am going to sue for a divorce."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We walked home arm in arm. I simulated so well that it was Baxter who
+begged pardon for even suspecting me.
+
+But I felt like a dog. I, for my part, determined to bid farewell to
+Hildreth that very evening, before she retired for the night, in her
+cottage--take train to New York, and so to Paris, without first
+finishing my _Judas_, as I had intended.
+
+We would bury forever in the secret places of our hearts what had
+already happened between us ... this was my first impulse....
+
+My next was--that we should up and run away together, and defy Penton
+Baxter and the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth could see by the strangeness in my behaviour, as I came into
+the cottage, to kiss her good-night ... and stay a little while--a new
+custom of ours, as we grew bolder--could see that I had something on my
+mind.
+
+I related to her all that had taken place between me and Penton that
+morning....
+
+"The cad," she cried, "the nasty cad, to talk to you so about me ... I
+would have told you myself because you are my lover ... but he had no
+right to tell you ... as far as he has proof positive, you are merely a
+mutual friend....
+
+"But that's the way with him. He has mixed his own life up so that it is
+all public, to him.
+
+"Yes," she cried impetuously and passionately ... "it's true ... I have
+not been faithful to him before...."
+
+"--and you returned to him? wasn't that weak?"
+
+I took her hands in mine, with mind and soul made up at last....
+
+"This time you can go through with it. Here's a man who will stand by
+you forever. I can earn a living for both of us, and--"
+
+"Don't let's discuss the horrid old subject any more to-night ... I'm
+tired of discussing ... as you love me, read some poetry to me ... or I
+shall scream!"
+
+"Have you ever read the sonnets of George Santayana?... I know most of
+them by heart ... let me quote you his best ...
+
+  'O world, thou choosest not the better part!
+  It is not wisdom to be only wise,
+  And on the inward vision close the eyes,
+  But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
+  Columbus found a world, and had no chart
+  Save one that faith deciphered in the skies
+  To trust the soul's invincible surmise
+  Was all his science and his only art.
+  Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
+  That lights the pathway but one step ahead
+  Across a void of mystery and dread.
+  Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
+  By which alone the mortal heart is led
+  Unto the thinking of the thought divine!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I wish I had written that!" I said, in a hushed, awed voice, after a
+moment's silence....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Now kiss me good-night and go to your tent ... I feel restless,
+troubled in spirit, to-night," she said, continuing:
+
+"Perhaps I have been too harsh with Penton....
+
+"He is steering on a chartless sea with no compass....
+
+"No wonder he, and all radicals and pioneers in human thought, blunder
+ridiculously....
+
+"The conservative world has its charts, its course well mapped out....
+
+"I suppose I am not strong enough, big enough, for him."
+
+"Hush! now it is you who're just talking!" I replied.
+
+"You're jealous!"
+
+"By God, yes. I _am_ jealous, though I suppose I ought to be ashamed of
+it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She sat in bed, propped up with pillows. She had been reading
+Shakespeare's sonnets aloud to me. The big green-shaded reading lamp
+cast a dim light that pervaded the room.
+
+She reached out both arms to me, the wide sleeves falling back from
+them, and showing their feminine whiteness....
+
+I sat down beside her, caught her to me, kissed her till she was
+breathless....
+
+"There ... there ... please! _Please!_"
+
+"What! you're not tiring of my kisses?"
+
+"No, dearest boy, but I have a curious feeling, I tell you ... maybe
+we're being watched...."
+
+"Nonsense ... he believes I told him the truth."
+
+And I caught her in my arms again, half-reclining on the bed.
+
+"Sh!" she flung me off with a sudden impulse of frightened strength, "I
+hear someone."
+
+"It's only the wind."
+
+"Quick!... my God!"--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I snatched up a volume of Keats. It fell open at "St. Agnes Eve." I
+hurled myself into a chair ... gathering my breath I began aloud, as
+naturally as I could--
+
+  "St. Agnes' Eve! ah, bitter chill it was;
+  The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold--"
+
+At that very instant, Penton burst in at the door.
+
+He paused a dramatic moment, his back to it, facing us.
+
+I stopped reading, in pretended astonishment.
+
+"Well, Penton?" acted Hildreth languidly....
+
+The look of defeat and bewilderment on the husband's face would have
+been comic if it had not been pitiable.
+
+I rose, laying the book down carefully.
+
+"I think I'll go now, Hildreth ... you wish to see Penton alone." I put
+all the calm casual deference in my voice possible. I started to walk
+easily to the door.
+
+"No! stop! I wish you to stay here, John Gregory ... since you've got
+yourself into this--"
+
+"I'd like to know what you mean by 'got yourself into this'?"
+
+"Oh, Gregory, let's not talk nonsense any longer."
+
+"You don't believe what I assured you this morning?"
+
+"Johnnie, it's not human ... I can't make myself, and I've tried and
+tried, God knows!"
+
+"I'd like to know, for my part, just what you mean, Penton Baxter,
+spying on me this way--bursting in on poor Johnnie Gregory and me like a
+maniac, while we were only reading poetry together."
+
+"--reading poetry together!" he echoed bitterly, almost collapsing, as
+he went into a chair.
+
+Again I tried to make my exit.
+
+"Johnnie, I want you to stay. I want to have all this out right here and
+now," snapped Baxter decisively.
+
+"Very well ... if you put it that way."
+
+"--a nice way to treat your guest," Hildreth interposed, "the way you've
+been raving about him, too. 'Johnnie Gregory' this, and 'Johnnie
+Gregory' that!--and the minute he arrives, first you try to make him put
+up at the community inn; and now you accuse him of--of--"
+
+Hildreth began to weep softly....
+
+And then began a performance at which I stood aside, mentally, in
+admiration ... the way that little woman handled her husband!
+
+She wept, she laughed, she upbraided, she cajoled ... at one moment
+swore she wanted nothing better than to die, at the other, vowed eternal
+fidelity till old age overtook them both....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I _must_ go," I cried, quite ashamed of myself in my heart. Baxter's
+credulity had expanded again, in the sun of Hildreth's _forgiveness_ of
+him for his unjust suspicions!...
+
+For the first time in my life I perceived how a desperate woman can
+twist a man any way she wants.
+
+"No, you must not go! it is I who am going--to show that I trust you."
+
+"Good God!" I protested--this was too much! "no, no ... good-night,
+both of you ... good-night, Penton! good-night, Hildreth!"
+
+Penton Baxter stepped in my way, took hold of one of my hands in both of
+his....
+
+"Please, Johnnie, please, dear friend ... I wish you to stay while I
+myself go. Finish reading the poem to Hildreth ... I think I have been
+too harsh in my judgment of both of you ... only please do be more
+discreet, if only for appearance's sake, in the future....
+
+"Sit down where you were. I wish to show that I trust you both....
+
+"Good-night, Hildreth!" and he kissed his wife in fond contrition.
+
+"Good-night, Johnnie ... forgive me!"
+
+And he wavered out at the door, his face set in pain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As soon as he had gone I rose swiftly.
+
+"And now I must go."
+
+"If you men aren't the funniest things!" she caught me by the hand,
+detaining me ... "not yet ... wait a minute. Read more of that poem you
+began, if only for a blind."
+
+I picked up the book, started reading again ... strangely a rush of
+tears flooded my eyes and blurred the type....
+
+I began to sob, heart-sick. I did love the absurd little man. My heart
+ached, broken over my lies....
+
+"Oh! Oh!" I sobbed, "Hildreth, my woman, my sweetheart--he trusted me,
+Hildreth ... he trusted me!"
+
+I knelt by the bed, thrusting my head into the lap of my First Woman.
+
+She kissed me on top of the head.
+
+"You're both two big, silly babies, that's all you are."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was dawn when I returned to my tent, pulled the flap aside, fell,
+exhausted, on my cot in dreamless sleep....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How was it all going to end?
+
+It seemed to me that I had tapped violent, subterranean currents in life
+and passion, that I had not hitherto known existed....
+
+Free Love, Marriage, Polygamy, Polyandry, Varietism, Promiscuity--these
+were but tossing chips of nomenclature, bits of verbal welter, upborne
+by deep terrible human currents that appalled the imagination!
+
+The man who prated glibly of any ready solution, orthodox or heterodox,
+radical or conventional, of the problem of the relationships between men
+and women was worse than a fool, he was a dangerous madman!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth and I, a-field, had found a bed of that exceptionally poisonous
+mushroom named _Pallida_ something or other ... the book said its poison
+was kin to that of the poison in the rattlesnake's bite. My eyes met
+with Hildreth's ... we needed say no word, both thinking the same
+thought that frightened us!... "how easy it would be--!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now we were plumbing the darker side of passion. Something that
+Carpenter does not write of in his _Love's Coming of Age_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A night of wind, shifting into rain. Hildreth I knew would be afraid,
+alone.
+
+I stepped into her cottage, in my bath-robe. She almost screamed at my
+sudden appearance. For I came in at the door like a shadow, the wind and
+rain making such a tumult that a running horse would not have been
+heard.
+
+"Dearest ... you're all wringing wet ... you're dripping all over the
+floor. Throw off that robe. Dry yourself--there's a towel there!"
+
+She flung me her kimono. "Here, put this on, till you're comfortable
+again."
+
+I came out in her kimono, which I was bursting through ... my arms
+sticking out to my elbow.
+
+She laughed herself almost into hysteria at my funny appearance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It will be quite safe to-night. I don't think he'd venture out. This is
+a hurricane, not a rainstorm ... besides, I believe he's a little afraid
+of you, Johnnie ... I was watching him rather closely, while I handled
+him, the other night ... he kept an uneasy eye on you all the time."
+
+"God, but you were superb, Hildreth ... if you could only act that way
+on the stage!--"
+
+"I _could_ act that way on the stage," she replied unexpectedly, a
+trifle put out....
+
+Then--
+
+"A woman has to do many things to save herself--"
+
+"Oh, I swear that you are the most marvellous, the most beautiful woman
+in the world ... I love you ... I adore you ... I'd die for you ...
+right here ... now!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we lay there in the dark the storm pulled and tugged and battered as
+if with great, sinister hands, striving to get in at us.
+
+Hildreth trembled in my arms, shaking afresh at each shock of the wind
+and the rain.
+
+"Don't be afraid, my little woman!"
+
+"I wonder if he'd dare come down to-night?"
+
+"If he did, and caught us, I'd kill him."
+
+"He knows that, if he knows anything, I'm sure ... that's why I think
+we're all right!"
+
+And she came up closer into my arms with a sigh of content.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had been asleep....
+
+The sudden madness and saturnalia of love into which I had these few
+weeks been plunged tapped, it seemed, my subliminal consciousness, maybe
+my memory of former incarnations....
+
+I never had such a vision in my life....
+
+I was fully aware of my surroundings, yet through them shone another, a
+far reality that belonged to me, too.
+
+I described it to Hildreth, as she lay, thrilled, beside me.
+
+A cave ... high up on the hill-crest ... our cave, that we had imagined,
+now come true....
+
+I was a huge chap, with a girdle of leaves about my waist ... strange,
+tropic leaves ... there was black hair all over my body ... there was a
+little, red fire back in the cave's obscurity....
+
+I had come in, casting a dead fawn down from my shoulder....
+
+Hildreth came forward ... it was plainly she ... though with fine red
+hair like down on her legs....
+
+"But your name is Naa ... my name is Kaa, the hunter, the slayer of
+good, red meat."
+
+"Johnnie, do you really see that,--_all_ that!"
+
+She was enthralled like a child, as I described the landscape that lay,
+spread immense, beneath us ... and the wide ocean, great and blue, that
+tossed to the east.
+
+Though I was genuinely possessed by this strange vision, though it was
+no make-believe, I could not help injecting a little Kansas horse-play
+into it....
+
+I sank my teeth in "Naa's" shoulder, till she cried aloud. I seized her
+by the hair and dragged her till she lay prone on the floor.
+
+I stood over her, making guttural noises, which I did so realistically
+that it made shivers run up and down my back while doing it....
+
+I was almost as frightened as she was.
+
+Before I knew it, she was thinking I had suddenly gone mad. She was
+shouting "Mubby" for help--her husband's pet name....
+
+The little fool! I caught her over the mouth with a grim hand.
+
+"Don't do that ... can't a fellow play once in a while?"
+
+"But it wasn't _all_ play, was it?"
+
+"No, I really saw the cave, and the primeval landscape.
+
+"Shall I tell you some more?"
+
+"No, it frightens me too much ... it seems too real. And you've bruised
+me, and my head feels as if you've torn half my hair out."
+
+"Why did you call out your husband's pet name?"
+
+"I don't know ... did I?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"After a pause in the dark.
+
+"Tell me, was he ... was Mubby.. back there, in our former life?"
+
+"O yes, he was there."
+
+"And Darrie, too?"
+
+"Yes, Darrie, too!"
+
+"If my name was Naa and your name was Kaa, what were their names?"
+
+"Mubby was named Baa and Darrie was Blaa!"
+
+This convulsed Hildreth.
+
+"You great, big, sweet fool of a poet, I do love you, I really do!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We were made for each other in every way ... my head just fits your
+shoulder," she observed quaintly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Mubby came down to me this morning," said Hildreth one evening, "and
+pleaded to be taken back again ... as husband...."
+
+"And what?--"
+
+"What did I do?... when I love you?... the mere idea made me sick to
+think of. I couldn't endure him again."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon Penton and Hildreth were closeted together from lunch to
+dark. It was my turn to cry out in my heart, and suffer agonies of
+imagination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning Hildreth began packing up, with the aid of Mrs. Jones.
+I came upon her, in the library, where I had gone to get a book. My face
+fell dismally.
+
+"I can't endure it any longer, Johnnie, I'm going back home, to New York
+... my father will take me in."
+
+"And how about me?"
+
+"--wait patiently a few days then, if you still feel the same about me,
+follow me!... and, until you come to join me, write me at least three
+times a day."
+
+"I'll do it ..." then I couldn't help being playful again, "I'll write
+you entirely in cave-fashion."
+
+"I am taking a big step, Johnnie, I'm through with Penton Baxter
+forever--but I wonder if my new life is to be with you ... you are such
+an irresponsible, delightful madman at times....
+
+"You're wonderful as a lover ... but as a man with a woman to take care
+of--!"
+
+"Don't worry about that! just give me a chance, and I'll show you I can
+be practical too."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth had gone. With her going the bottom seemed to drop out of my
+existence, leaving a black hole where it had fallen through. I walked
+about, looking so truly miserable, that even Baxter spoke with gentle
+consideration to me.
+
+"Poor Johnnie, to think you'd run into a proposition like this, the
+first pop out of the box."
+
+"No, it isn't what you think ... I'm getting malaria, I believe."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But to be deprived of her, my first love. No longer to be in her
+presence, no longer to watch her quiet smile, the lovely droop of her
+mouth's corner ... to feed on the kisses no more that had become as
+necessary as daily bread itself to me--
+
+I began to lose weight ... to start up in the night, after a brief fit
+of false slumber, hearing myself, as if it were an alien voice, crying
+her name aloud....
+
+I whispered and talked tender, whimsical, silly things to my pillow,
+holding it in my arms, as if it were she....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Each day I sent her four, five letters ... letters full of madness,
+absurdity, love, despair, wild expressions of intimacy that I would Have
+died to know anybody else ever saw.
+
+Her first letter in return burned me alive with happiness....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"--you know why she went to the city," Penton teased, "it's because
+'Gene Mallows, the California poet, is up there. He and she got on
+pretty well when we were on the coast."
+
+"You lie!" I bellowed, beside myself, "Hildreth will be faithful to me
+... she has promised."
+
+Penton Baxter looked me up and down, courageously, coolly, for a long
+time. Slowly I realised what I had just said.
+
+"That's all I wanted to know, John Gregory! I've got it out of you at
+last!"
+
+He turned on his heel.
+
+Changing his mind, he faced me again. This time there was a despairful
+agony of kindness in his face.
+
+"Dear boy, I'm sorry for all this thing that has come between us. But
+there is yet time for you to keep out of it. Hildreth and I are done
+with each other forever ... but you needn't be mixed up in this
+affair....
+
+"Johnnie, let her stay in New York, and, no matter how much she wants
+you, don't go up there to join her."
+
+"I love her. I adore her. I want to be where she is. Now the whole truth
+is out."
+
+"My poor friend!"
+
+"Don't call me your friend--you--"
+
+He tightened his lips....
+
+"If you go up there to join her, remember that I gave you fair warning."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I could endure it no longer, the torment of not seeing her, of not being
+with her....
+
+As her favourite sonneteer, Santayana, writes--lines she often quoted--
+
+  "Love leads me on, no end of love appears.
+  Is this the heaven, poets, that ye paint?
+  Oh then, how like damnation to be blessed!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I informed Ruth, Darrie, Penton that I was going to New York in the
+morning....
+
+Penton immediately whisked out of my sight, full of uncontrollable
+emotion....
+
+Darrie and Ruth almost fell upon me, trying to persuade me not to rejoin
+Hildreth. I evaded by saying that I was now on my way to Europe, that
+possibly I might see her before I went, but--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had an hour till train time. My MSS. was packed again, my Josephus, my
+Homer, my Shakespeare, my Keats, my bath robe.
+
+I thought I would escape without saying good-bye.
+
+But Penton came down the front porch, stood in my path.
+
+"Johnnie, a last warning."
+
+"I want none of your last warnings."
+
+"Are you going to Hildreth?"
+
+"I'm tired of being a liar. I've never lied so much in my life ... yes,
+I'm going to Hildreth ... and I'm going to persuade her to live with me,
+and defy the whole damned world--the world of fake radicals that talk
+about divorces when the shoe pinches them, as well as the world of
+conservatives," I announced harshly.
+
+"I've done all I could!" he responded wearily, "I see you won't come to
+your senses--wait a minute!" and he turned on his heel. He had asked me
+to wait with such solemnity that I stuck still in my tracks, waiting.
+
+He disappeared into the big house, to re-emerge with, of all things,
+_the coffee percolator_!
+
+"Here!" he exclaimed, holding out the object to me ceremoniously and
+seriously, "you can take this to your goddess, this poison-machine, and
+lay it on her altar. Tell her I offered this to you. Tell her that it is
+a symbol of her never coming back here again."
+
+Here was where I too lacked a sense of humour. I struck the coffee
+percolator out of his hands. I stalked off.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the way to New York I built the full dream of what Hildreth and I
+were to effect for the world--a practical example, in our life as we
+lived it together, of the rightness of free love....
+
+We would test it out, would rent a cottage somewhere, preferably on the
+Jersey coast near the sea shore ... autumn was coming on, and there
+would be lovely, crystal-clear weather ... and the scent of pines in the
+good air.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perhaps Penton, Hildreth and I could all three join in amicable accord,
+over the solution of our difficulty, along radical and idealistic lines.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I hurried to the address given me by Hildreth. She was not in, but her
+mother was ... a plump, rather good looking, fashionably dressed woman.
+Evidently the mother did not know of the relationship between me and her
+daughter.
+
+"So you are the poet Hildreth has told me about?" after we had
+discoursed for upwards of an hour--
+
+"I can easily see how Hildreth has grown so fond of you," and she patted
+me on the head as if I were a schoolboy, in motherly fashion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Mother's rather stupid and old-fashioned ... there'd be no use trying
+to explain the situation to her. The best thing we can do is to persuade
+her that Daniel needs her, down in Eden ... that will remove her from
+the flat, so we can have it all to ourselves for a few days, in order to
+plan what is to be done next."
+
+Next morning Mrs. Deuell, Hildreth's mother, as innocent as a new-born
+lamb as to what was up, permitted herself to be shipped off to Eden, to
+take care of Daniel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Instead of planning, however, and marshalling our resources, Hildreth
+and I abandoned ourselves to the mutual happiness and endearments of two
+love-drunk, emotion-crazed beings on a honeymoon....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The bell rang. In walked Darrie.
+
+"Well, Darrie!" and Hildreth embraced her friend. And I was glad to see
+her, too. I knew that, in spite of the high pressure we had lived under
+during the past summer, Darrie was trying hard to be just, to be friend
+to all of us....
+
+She laughed at the disorder of the place ... dishes unwashed ... food
+scattered about on the table....
+
+"What a pair of love-birds you two are."
+
+"And has Penton accepted the situation?"
+
+"I came up to tell you that he has ... it has made him quite sick,
+though!"
+
+"Poor Mubby!" Hildreth ejaculated.
+
+"--but he has sent me to tell you that you can go away together wherever
+you please, that he won't molest you in the least."
+
+"It's too incredible!" cried Hildreth, almost disappointed, "you don't
+know him ... he's changed his mind, I am sure, since you left."
+
+"He said he would follow me by Saturday (it was Wednesday) leaving your
+mother in care of Daniel."
+
+"Does mother suspect?--"
+
+"No ... not at all."
+
+"If the entire world fell about mother's ears, she wouldn't know."
+
+"What do you two lovers purpose doing?"
+
+I unfolded my scheme of living with Hildreth in a Jersey bungalow ...
+Derek's income to me would go on a while yet ... I could sell stories
+and poems to the New York magazines ... Hildreth could write a book as
+well as I ... we would become to the modern world an example of the
+radical love-life ... the Godwin and Wollstonecraft of the age.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We ate supper together, the three of us, in the flat. It was so cosy.
+Darrie and Hildreth joined in cleaning the house that afternoon.
+
+But a bomb was to be hurled among us.
+
+At twelve o'clock of the next day the 'phone rang.
+
+Darrie answered it. After a few words she came for me, her face as white
+as a sheet....
+
+"My God, Penton is in town!"
+
+"--this is only Thursday ... he was not coming till Saturday!" I
+exclaimed, full of forboding.
+
+"I knew, I knew he wouldn't keep his original mind!" exclaimed Hildreth.
+
+"He's holding the wire ... wants to say something to you, Johnnie."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Yes, Penton, what is it?"
+
+"Only this," his voice replied, as if rehearsing a set speech,
+"yesterday afternoon I sent a telegram to my lawyer to institute
+proceedings for a divorce, and I mentioned you as co-respondent...."
+
+"Damn you to hell ... I thought we were going to settle this in the
+radical way?"
+
+"It's the only way out that I can see. I've stood this business till
+it's almost killing me."
+
+"Well, is that all?"
+
+"No ... somehow--how, I do not know, the _New York Journal_ has gotten
+hold of my wire ... it will be in all the papers to-night or to-morrow
+... so I advise you and Hildreth to disappear quietly somewhere, if you
+don't want to see the reporters,--who will all presently be on the way
+to the flat."
+
+"Damn you, Penton ... needn't tell _me_ about the news leaking out ...
+you've done it yourself ... now I want you to promise me only one thing,
+that you'll hold the reporters off for a couple of hours, till we have a
+good start."
+
+"I'll do my best," answered he, "but please believe me. How they got the
+contents of the telegram I do not know, but on my honour I did not give
+it out nor did I tell the reporters where you are."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth was so angry she could hardly speak.
+
+"This is a fine to-do," exclaimed Darrie, "Penton distinctly promised
+me--"
+
+"I'd like to get a good crack at him!" I boasted, at the same time
+enjoying the excitement.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth began packing her clothes in a large suitcase ... as we later
+found she cast all her clean clothes aside, and in her excitement
+included all her soiled linen and lingerie....
+
+We had our last meal together. I brought in a large bottle of white
+wine. All of us grew rather hilarious and made a merry joke of the
+adventure. We poked fun at Penton.
+
+We sallied forth at the front door, Darrie to go to the Martha
+Washington. "I don't want to be mixed up in the coming uproar and
+scandal," she exclaimed ... "so far, I'm clear of all blame, and I know
+only too well what the papers would insinuate."
+
+Hildreth and I took train for New Jersey ... two tickets for--anywhere
+... in our excited condition we ran off first to Elizabeth. We had with
+us exactly one hundred dollars, which I had borrowed of Darrie before we
+parted on our several ways.
+
+I registered for Hildreth and myself as "Mr. Arthur Mallory and wife,"
+in the register of an obscure hotel hear the noise and clatter of a
+hundred trains drawing continually out and in.
+
+It made me happy and important to sign her name on the register as
+something belonging to me.
+
+Once alone in the room, Hildreth, to my consternation, could talk of
+nothing else but Penton.
+
+"--to think that he would do such a thing to me, only to think of it!"
+she cried vehemently, again and again.
+
+"If he believes in freedom for men and women, why was all this
+necessary? the sordidness of the public clamour? the divorce court?...
+oh, my poor, dear, sweet, wild poet-boy, you're in for it! Don't you
+wish you were well out of all this and back in Kansas again?"
+
+"No; I am glad. As long as I am with you I don't care what happens. I
+love you, Hildreth!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the night she woke, screaming, from a nightmare. I could hardly stop
+her.
+
+"Hush, dearest ... darling ... sweetheart ... I am with you; everything
+is all right" ... then, as she kept it up, "for God's sake ... Hildreth,
+do be quiet ... you're all right ... the man you love is here, close by
+you ... no harm shall come to you."
+
+"Oh, Johnnie," clutching me, quivering, "I've just had such a horrible
+dream," sobbing as I took her tenderly in my arms....
+
+"There, there, darling!"
+
+She was quiet now.
+
+"In a few minutes we would have had the whole hotel breaking in at the
+door ... thinking I was killing you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She woke up again, and woke me up.
+
+"Johnnie, find me some ink and a pen. I'm going to write that cad a
+letter that will shrivel him up like acid."
+
+"Can't you wait till morning, Hildreth?" sleepily.
+
+"No ... I _must_ write it now."
+
+I dressed. I went down to the hotel writing-room and came back with pen
+and ink.
+
+She sat up in bed and wrote the letter. She then read it aloud to me.
+She was immensely pleased with her effort.
+
+With a final gesticulation of vindictive, feminine joy, she succeeded in
+spilling the whole bottle of ink on the white bed-spread.
+
+"Now you've done it."
+
+"We'll have to clear out early before the chambermaid comes in ...
+we're only staying here for one night and can't waste our money paying
+for the damage."
+
+In the morning I bought the papers.
+
+The _American_ had made a scoop. There it was, the story of the whole
+thing on the front page.
+
+      "PENTON BAXTER SUES FOR DIVORCE
+         --------------------------
+   NAMES VAGABOND-POET AS CO-RESPONDENT"
+
+There it stood, in big head-lines.
+
+The actuality stared us in the face. We belonged to each other now. It
+was no longer a summer idyll, but a practical reality.
+
+As we took the train for Long Branch we realised that we had plunged
+midmost into the action that would put all our theories to the test....
+
+I looked at my woman with a sidelong glance, as she sat beside me on the
+train seat.... She was so pretty, so frail, so feminine that I pitied
+her, while at the same time my heart swelled with tenderness for her,
+and with pride of possession. For she was mine now without dispute. She,
+for her part, spoke but little, except illogically to upbraid Penton
+Baxter, as if he had perpetrated an ill on two people thoroughly
+innocent.
+
+I was angry with him on other grounds ... he was not playing the radical
+game, but taking advantage of the rules of the conventional world.
+
+With a fugitive sense of pursuit, we hired a cabby to drive us to a
+summer boarding house at Long Branch ... where Hildreth and I rented a
+single large room for both of us....
+
+And there Hildreth immediately went into hysterics, and did nothing but
+weep. While I waited on her hand and foot, bringing up food to her
+because she was sensitive about the probability of people recognising
+her.
+
+We stayed there a week. Each day the papers were full of our mysterious
+disappearance ... reporters were combing the country to find us. Reports
+of our being in various places were sent in by enterprising local
+correspondents....
+
+Again we entrained ... for Sea Girt.
+
+An old cabman who drove a dilapidated rig hailed us with uplifted whip.
+
+"We are looking for a place to board."
+
+"I'll take you to a nice, quiet place, just suited to two home-loving
+folks like you," he replied, thinking he had paid us a compliment, and
+whipping up his ancient nag.
+
+Hildreth gave me a nudge and a merry look and it pleased me to see she
+still had her sense of humour left.
+
+That night, as I held her in my arms, "Don't let these little, trivial
+inconveniences and incidents--the petty persecutions we are undergoing,
+have any effect on our great love," I pleaded.
+
+"That's all very well, darling Johnnie, but where are we going to?"
+
+"We'll find a cottage somewhere ... a pretty little cottage within our
+means," I replied, visioning a vine-trellised place such as poets and
+their brides must live in.
+
+"Our money is giving out ... soon we'll have--to turn back to New York!"
+
+"If we do, that need not part us.... I'll get a job on some newspaper or
+magazine and take care of you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I called for my mail at the Sea Girt post office, sure of hearing
+from Darrie, anyhow,--who promised us she would keep us posted, I found
+no letter. And the man at the window was certain he had handed over
+several letters addressed to me to someone else who had called for them,
+giving my name as his.
+
+A wave of hot anger suffused my face. How stupid of me not to have
+noticed it before. Now I remembered the men who had followed us.
+
+Our mail was being intercepted. How was Baxter to procure his divorce
+without gaining evidence in just such a way?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One night I started on a long walk alone. I walked along the beach. In
+the dark I took off my clothes and plunged for a swim into the chilly
+surf ... a high sea was thundering in. I was caught in the undertow,
+swept off my feet, and dragged beyond by depth ... for a moment I was of
+a heart to let go, to permit myself to be drowned ... I was even
+intrigued, for the moment, by the thought of what the newspapers would
+say about my passing over in such a romantic way.
+
+But the will to live rose up in me. And I fought my way,--and it was a
+bitter fight,--back to shallow water. I flung myself prone on the beach,
+exhausted.
+
+When I reached our room again, I related my adventure to Hildreth.
+
+It was she who took care of me now. I lay all night in a high fever ...
+but I was so happy, for the woman of my heart sat close by me, holding
+my hand, speaking soft terms of endearment to me, tending to all my
+wants.
+
+This tenderness, this solicitude and companionship seemed for the first
+time better to me than the maddest transports of passion that swept us
+into one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning mail came a letter, general delivery, from Penton.... Now
+I was sure he was having our every step watched. A blind passion against
+him rose in me ... the little bounder!
+
+In the letter he asked me to meet him at the Sea Girt railway station at
+four o'clock. I made it by the time indicated, by a brisk walk.
+
+There he was, dropping off the train as it came to a stop. Another scene
+flashed through my mind, a visual remembrance of the day he had dropped
+off to visit me at Laurel.
+
+Then we had rushed toward each other, hands extended in warm,
+affectionate greeting ... now ... I slowly sauntered up to him.
+
+"Yes, Penton, what do you want; how much longer are you going to torture
+your wife?"
+
+"--yours now, Johnnie; mine no longer!" grimly.
+
+"If she were wholly mine, I'd knock you flat ... but you still have a
+sort of right in her that protects you from what I otherwise might do to
+you."
+
+"For heaven's sake, let's be calm."
+
+"Calm--when you say in your letter, 'you need not be afraid, I meditate
+no harm?'--do you mean to imply that, under any circumstance, I would be
+afraid of you?"
+
+"Johnnie, there is only one way to settle this ... I'm set on getting
+the complete evidence for a divorce ... exactly where is Hildreth now?"
+
+"None of your damned business ... all I can say is that she is somewhere
+near here ... and she's sick and hysterical through your persecutions
+... and if you don't call off your snooping detectives, by the Lord God,
+if I run into any of them, I'll try to kill them."
+
+"Johnnie, it's the best thing to deliver the legal evidence and have it
+over with. Let me accompany you to where Hildreth is, and--"
+
+"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.
+
+"Now, now, my dear boy," he replied very gently, "I am older than you
+say ... I am a very, very old man ... and I know life--"
+
+"But do you know the woman you speak of?"
+
+"I have met Mrs. Baxter casually with her husband several times." He
+stopped short. He paused, gave a gesture of acquiescence.
+
+"Oh, come, Mr. Gregory, you're right ... quite right ... I had no right
+whatever to speak to you as I have--
+
+"But please interpret it as my serious concern over your career as a
+poet ... it seems such a pity ... you had such a good start."
+
+"You mean?--" I began, and halted.
+
+"Precisely ... I mean that for the next two or three years all the
+reputable magazines will not dare consider even a masterpiece from your
+hands."
+
+"In other words, if Shelley were alive to-day and were the same
+Shelley, he would be presented with a like boycott?"
+
+"If his manner of living came out in the papers--yes."
+
+"And François Villon?"
+
+"Undoubtedly."
+
+"I'm in good company then, am I not?"
+
+"You should thank me for being frank with you."
+
+"I do thank you ... that explains why the atmosphere up at the office of
+the _National_ was as cold as the refrigerator-box of a meat car, when I
+was up there an hour ago ... but they were not as frank as you ... they
+acted like a company of undertakers officiating at my funeral."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was glad to find myself back in my little cottage, that same
+night--back in my little cottage, and in the arms of the woman who was
+everything to me, no matter if they said she spelled the ruination of my
+career.
+
+For any man, I held, and still hold, who lets a woman ruin his career,
+ought to have it ruined.
+
+I did not tell her of what Dr. Ward had told me. Why cause her
+unnecessary worry?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, the magazine world was not the only medium to present my
+literary wares to the public. There remained the book world, a less
+narrow and prejudiced one.
+
+Kennerley had written me that he waited eagerly the completion of my
+Biblical play.
+
+And Zueblin, of the now defunct _Twentieth Century_ had just sent me a
+twenty-five dollar check for a poem called _Lazarus Speaks_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I brought back with me from New York two books as a present for Hildreth
+... Mary Wollstonecraft's _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,_ and
+_The Life of Mary Wollestonecraft_ ... these were two books she had long
+desired. She was thoroughly pleased with her resemblance to the
+frontispiece picture of the celebrated woman radical, in the _Life_.
+
+"You possess all her vivacity, all her intelligence ... but you are
+beautiful where she was plain ... she is like a plainer sister of
+yours."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While in New York I had also paid a visit to the editor of one of the
+biggest sensational magazines in the city, and I had arranged with him,
+acting as Hildreth's agent, for a thousand dollars advance on her
+unfinished novel. The editor had dictated a letter in which he promised
+to deliver the thousand on receipt of two-thirds of the book....
+
+Hildreth kissed me again and again when I gave her the letter....
+
+"Johnnie, you really are wonderful ... and quite practical, after all."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And now, my darling Hildreth, we'll take this old world and shake it
+into new life, into the vital thing I have dreamed!" I boasted
+grandiloquently....
+
+"Here in this little sequestered dream-cottage of ours you and I will
+carry out, popularise, through novels, poems, plays, essays, and
+treatises, the noble work that Ellis, Key, and Rosa Von Mayerreder, and
+others, are doing in Europe ... and we ourselves will set the example of
+true love that fears nothing but the conventional legal slavery."
+
+"It will soon be very cold down here," commented Darrie, irrelevantly,
+"this is only a summer cottage, and they say--the old settlers--that we
+are to have a severe winter ... the frost fish are already beginning to
+come ashore."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was generally known, sub rosa, that Hildreth and I were living
+together. But, as long as she pretended it was not so, as long as I
+lived seemingly in another house, pretending, under another name, to be
+Mrs. Baxter's literary adviser, the hypocrisy of the world was
+satisfied.
+
+I was, in other words, following the accepted mode.
+
+It was a nasty little article by a fellow literary craftsman from the
+Pacific coast, that set me off, brought me to the full realisation that
+I was but playing the usual, conventional game,--that roused me to the
+determination that I must no longer sail under false colours.
+
+This writer retailed how, after a brief, disillusioning few weeks
+together, Hildreth had grown tired of the poverty and spareness of the
+living a poet was able to make for her ... of how I was lazy, impliedly
+dirty ... of how, up against realities, we had parted ... I had, he
+stated, in fact, deserted her, and was now on my way back to Kansas,
+riding the rods of freights, once more an unsavoury outcast, a knight of
+the road ... he ended with the implication, if I remember correctly,
+that the reception that awaited me in Kansas, would be, to say the
+least, problematical.
+
+Of course this story was made up out of whole cloth.
+
+'Gene Mallows afterward informed me that the big literary club in San
+Francisco that this hack belonged to had seriously considered
+disciplining him by expulsion for his unethical behaviour toward a
+fellow-writer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But I maintain that it was good that he penned the scurrilous article.
+For I had allowed happiness to lull my radical conscience asleep. It was
+now goaded awake. I held a conference with Hildreth.
+
+"There is now only one thing for me to ... to come right out with it
+that you and I are living here together in a free union, and that the
+love we bear each other not only justifies, but sanctifies our doing as
+we do--as no legal or ecclesiastical procedure could....
+
+"That here we are and here we intend to abide, on these principles--no
+matter what the rest of the world does or says or thinks."
+
+"I admit, Johnnie, that that would be the ideal way, but--" interrupted
+Darrie--
+
+"But nothing--I'm tired of sneaking around, hiding from grocers and
+butcher boys, when everybody knows--
+
+"And besides, Hildreth," turning to her, taking her in my arms, kissing
+her tenderly on the brow--"don't you see what it all means?
+
+"As long as I pretend not to be living with you I'm considered a sly dog
+that seduced his friend's wife and got away with it ... 'served him
+right, the husband, for being such a boob!' ... 'rather a clever chap,
+that Gregory, don't you know, not to be blamed much, eh?' ... 'only
+human, eh?' ...--'she's a deuced pretty little woman, they say!'
+
+"Can't you see the sly looks, the nudges they give each other, as they
+gossip in the clubs?"
+
+"Don't let your imagination get the better of you, please don't!" urged
+Darrie....
+
+"No," I went on, "I'm going to send right now for Jerome Miller, a
+newspaper lad I knew in Kansas, who's now in New York on a paper, and
+give him an interview that will set us right with the stupid world once
+and for all. Miller was a fellow student of mine at Laurel ... he's a
+fine, square chap who will give me a clean break ... was president of
+our Scoop Club."
+
+"Darling, darling, dearest," pleaded Hildreth, "I thought you had about
+enough of the newspapers ... you've seen how they've distorted all our
+ideals ... how our attempt to use them for propaganda has gone to smash
+... how they pervert ... the filth and abuse they heap upon pioneers of
+thought in any direction--why wake the wild beasts up again?"
+
+"What's the use believing in anything, if we don't stick up for what we
+believe?"
+
+"Oh, go ahead, dear, if you feel so strongly about it, but--" and her
+tiny, dark head drooped, "I'm a little wearied ... I want quiet and
+peace a little while longer ... I'm getting the worst of it--not you so
+much, or Penton.
+
+"I'm the woman in the case.
+
+"Remember the invitation the other night, from the Congregational
+minister--for tea? He invited you for tea, you remember, and left me
+out?"
+
+"--remember, too," I replied fondly, caressing her head, "how I didn't
+even deign to reply to the ---- ---- ---- ----!"
+
+"Sh!" putting her hand gently and affectionately over my mouth, "don't
+swear so ... very well, poke the wild beasts again!... but we'll only
+serve as sport for another Roman holiday for the newspapers."
+
+I wrote Miller to come down, that I had an exclusive interview for him.
+
+He arrived the very night of the day he received my letter.
+
+Darrie stepped out over to the Ronds', not to be herself brought into
+what she had so far managed to keep out of.
+
+Hildreth consumed the better part of two hours fixing herself up as
+women do when they want to make an impression....
+
+"Your friend from Kansas must see that you haven't made such a bad
+choice in picking me," she proclaimed, with that pretty droop of her
+mouth.
+
+"No, no! be a good boy, don't muss me up now!"
+
+She wore a plain, navy-blue skirt ... wore a white middy blouse with
+blue, flowing tie ... easy shoes that fitted snug to her pretty little
+feet ... her eyes never held such depths to them, her face never shone
+with such beauty before.
+
+I wore a brown sweater vest with pearl buttons ... corduroy trousers ...
+black oxfords ... a flowing tie....
+
+A large log fire welcomed my former Kansas friend.
+
+"Well, Johnnie, it's been a long time since I've seen you."
+
+"Jerome, let me introduce you to the only woman that ever lived, or
+shall live, for me ... Hildreth Baxter."
+
+As Hildreth gave Miller her hand, I could see that he liked her, and
+that he inwardly commented on my good taste and perhaps said to himself,
+"Well, Johnnie is not so crazy after all!"
+
+After I had given him the interview, he asked her a few questions, but
+she begged to be left out, that it was my interview.
+
+"Mr. Miller, you are a friend of Johnnie's ... I have often heard him
+speak highly of you; can't you dissuade him from having this interview
+printed ... no matter if you have been sent by your paper all the way
+down here for it?"
+
+Jerome liked what Hildreth had said, admired her for her common sense.
+He offered to return to the city, and risk his job by stating that he
+had been hoaxed.
+
+"I will leave you to argue it out with him, Mr. Miller." And Hildreth
+excused herself and went off down the path to the Ronds' too.
+
+"Johnnie," my friend urged, putting his hand on my shoulder, "your
+little lady has a lot of sense ... it _will_ kick up a hell of a row ...
+it's true what you say about them rather approving of you now, some of
+them, considering you a sly dog and so forth.... Yes, I'm sorry to say,
+what you're doing, much of the world is doing most of the time."
+
+"I beg your pardon, Jerome, but there you've made my point ... do you
+think I want a sneaking, clandestine thing kept up between me and the
+woman I love?"
+
+"Then why not stay apart till the divorce is granted, then marry her
+like a regular fellow?"
+
+"Damn it, Jerome, you don't understand, you don't get what we radicals
+are driving at...."
+
+"I'll take a chance with my job and quash this interview--that's how
+much I like you, Johnnie."
+
+"Oh, I know you mean well enough ... most of you boys have treated me
+rather well, according to your lights ... it's the damned lead-writers
+and re-writers and editorial writers--they're the ones that do the
+damage."
+
+"You want me to go ahead then?"
+
+"Yes, that is the only way."
+
+"It is a big story, a real scoop." Miller was again the newspaper man
+who had scored a beat on rival newspapers....
+
+"Can't you stay over night, Jerome? We can make room."
+
+"I must catch the next train back ... I'm off now ... there's the taxi I
+arranged to have come and take me ... it's out there now ... good-bye,
+Johnny, and God help you and your little girl."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth came in soon after Miller's departure, looking like a
+fresh-faced girl of twelve.
+
+"Did--did your friend think I was good-looking?"
+
+"Yes, I am sure he thoroughly approved of you."
+
+"To-morrow another Roman holiday begins."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The result of that interview was worse than I could have surmised. All
+the batteries opened fire again. The Kansas papers called me "the
+shameless tramp" ... reporters spilled from autos and rigs all over the
+front stoop. After giving a few more interviews in the mad hope that
+this time they would get it straight, I saw that the harvest was even
+greater abuse and defamation ... and, as Hildreth had predicted, she
+came in for more than her share of the moral indignation of people who
+sold that precious ware at so much a line, or were paid salaries for
+such work....
+
+We practically deserted our house so the reporters could not find us....
+
+Many of the reporters never came near the house. Instead, lurid stories
+were concocted in the back rooms of nearby roadhouses. And, failing to
+find us at home, interviews were faked so badly that they verged on the
+burlesque ... where not vulgar, they were vicious ... words were slipped
+in that implied things which, expressed clearly, had furnished ample
+grounds for libel.
+
+Hildreth and I were pictured as living on frost fish almost entirely;
+the fish that run along the ocean shore, and, growing numb with the cold
+of autumn, are tossed up on the sand by the waves....
+
+I was depicted as strident-voiced ... belligerent ... waving my arms
+wildly. It was said that, full of threats, I had taken a shotgun
+menacingly from a rack ... that a vicious bull dog lay between my feet,
+growling ... that I went, sockless, in sandals ... had long, flowing,
+uncombed hair....
+
+Once a party of three reporters, from a big metropolitan paper,--two men
+and a woman, after stopping at a nearby road house till they were well
+lit,--drove about in a livery rig till they finally located us at the
+house of Mrs. Rond....
+
+All the old nonsense was re-written ... things we had never said or even
+had in our thought ... vulgarities alien to Hildreth's mouth or mine....
+
+The final insinuation--a sly touching on the fact that the Rond family
+was on intimate terms with me, and that the young daughters were
+attractive-looking, and seemed to favour the ideals I expressed with
+murmurs of approval ... thus the story afterward appeared....
+
+Mrs. Rond, after a peculiarly impertinent question of the woman member
+of the party, realised by this time that the three reporters were more
+than a little tipsy, and ordered these guardians of the public morality
+out of the house....
+
+In the first place, they had wormed admittance through a fraud to
+Hildreth and me ... the woman falsely pretended that she was a friend of
+Hildreth's mother ... a great stroke of journalistic enterprise.
+
+Mrs. Rond's rebuke was so sharply worded that it got through even their
+thick skins....
+
+I must say, though, that the behaviour of these three was not
+characteristic ... generally the newspaper men and women were most
+considerate and courteous ... even when they afterward wrote unpleasant
+articles about us. And often I have had them blue-pencil wild statements
+I had made, which, on second thought, I wished withdrawn ... and during
+all the uproar I never had a reporter break his word, once given.
+
+"Say, Mr. Gregory, that's great stuff, do let us keep that in the
+interview."
+
+"Please, boys, draw your pencil through that ... it doesn't sound the
+way I meant it."
+
+"Oh, all right"--a sigh--"but it's a shame to leave it out."
+
+The last and final outrage--perpetrated by the papers by orders from
+above, I am sure....
+
+Even the second uproar had died down.
+
+Always the "natives" in West Grove and round about, our neighbours,
+behaved considerately, let us alone ... we were greeted politely
+wherever we went....
+
+But now, Mrs. Rond informed me, strange men were appearing on the street
+corners, conducting a regular soapbox campaign against us....
+
+Some of them were seen to get on and off trains going to and coming from
+New York....
+
+Goaded and spurred by these mysterious outsiders, the village people
+began to act aloof, and the more ignorant of them sullen toward us ...
+but as yet it was only in the air, nothing concrete to lay hold of.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Suydam had run away with her plumber ... the interviews she gave
+out showed that it was our case mainly that had impelled her to launch
+forth in imitation ...
+
+Others, in a wave of sex-radicalism, were running off together all about
+the country ...
+
+But it was Mrs. Suydam's case that interested me and Hildreth most ...
+she was a dainty, pretty little slight thing, as Hildreth was--I could
+judge by her pictures....
+
+"Hildreth," I urged, "let's drop Mrs. Suydam a note encouraging her ...
+she's probably without a friend in the world, she and her man ...
+they're trying to oust her from her flat ... she's being hounded about."
+
+"My God, Johnnie dear, let's _don't!_ ... they'll only give our letter
+to the papers ... let's let well enough alone once more ... the grocer
+boy passed me in the street to-day and didn't tip his hat to me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was sitting at Mrs. Rond's tea-table having afternoon tea with her.
+She had sent one of her girls over to the cottage to tell me she wished
+to see me "alone" ... "on a matter of great importance."
+
+The cats, who had trailed her eldest daughter, Editha, across to our
+place, followed us back again with sailing tails in the air.
+
+Mrs. Rond poured me a cup of strong tea.
+
+"Drink that first, then I'll give you a little information that won't
+be so very agreeable to you."
+
+The glimmer of satiric yet benevolent humour that was never long absent
+from her eyes, lightened there again, as she rolled and lit a "Plowboy."
+
+"Have you noticed a change in the weather? A storm is blowing up. I'm
+speaking figuratively ... I might as well out with it, Johnnie,--there's
+a report, growing in strength, that a mob of townspeople is scheduled to
+come your way to-night, some time, and treat you to a serenade of
+protest and the traditional yokel hospitality of mobs ... a coat of tar
+and feathers and a ride on a rail beyond the town limits."
+
+"So it's come to that, has it?"
+
+"Johnnie, it isn't the townsfolk that started it ... of that I am
+certain ... left alone, they would still have been content to mind their
+business, and accept you and Hildreth on a friendly basis...."
+
+She brought up the story of the strange men haranguing from street
+corners again....
+
+"It's the New York newspapers, or one or two of the most sensational of
+them, that are back of this new phase."
+
+"You mean, Mrs. Rond, that they would dare go so far as to instigate an
+attack on me and Hildreth ... with possibly fatal results?"
+
+"Of course they would ... they need more news ... they want something
+more to happen ... to have all this uproar end tamely in happy,
+permanent love--that's what they couldn't endure....
+
+"Well," she resumed after a pause, "what are you going to do? You're not
+afraid, are you?"
+
+"To tell the truth I am, very much afraid."
+
+"You and Hildreth and Darrie would best take the three o'clock train
+back to New York then."
+
+"I haven't the least intention of doing that."
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"--just let them come."
+
+"You won't--fight?"
+
+"As long as I'm alive."
+
+"You just said you were afraid."
+
+"Where a principle is considered, one can be afraid and still stick by
+one's guns."
+
+"You're a real man, John Gregory, as well as a real poet, and I'm going
+to help you ... if it was the townspeople alone I would hesitate
+advising you ... but it's dirty, hired outsiders who are back of this
+feeling. Here!" and she stepped over to the mantel and brought a
+six-shooter to me and laid it in my hand, "can you shoot?"
+
+"A little, but not very well."
+
+"It's loaded already ... here is a pocketful of extra bullets."
+
+She filled my coat pocket till it sagged heavily. I slipped the gun in
+my hip pocket.
+
+"You're really going to stand them off if they come?"
+
+"As long as no one tries to break into my house I will lie quiet ... the
+minute someone tries to break in, I'll shoot, I'll shoot to kill, and
+I'll kill as many as I can before they take me. I'll admit I'm
+frightened, but I have principles of freedom and radical right, and I'll
+die for them if necessary."
+
+Mrs. Rond put her hand on my shoulder like a man.
+
+"You have the makings of a fine fanatic in you ... in the early
+Christian era you would have been a church martyr."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I held immediate consultation with Darrie and Hildreth and they were
+both scared blue ... but they were game, too.
+
+Darrie, however, unfolded a principle of strategy which I put into
+immediate effect ... she advised me to try a bluff first.
+
+When I walked downtown within the hour, to obtain the New York papers,
+there was no doubt, by the even more sullen attitude of the inhabitants
+that I passed on the street, that something serious was a-foot....
+
+I sauntered up to the news stand, took my _Times_ ... hesitated, and
+then tried the bluff Darrie had suggested:
+
+"Jim," I began, to the newsdealer, who had been enough my friend for us
+to speak to each other by our first names, "Jim, I hear the boys are
+planning a little party up my way to-night!"
+
+"Not as I've heard of, Johnnie," Jim answered, with sly evasion, and I
+caught him sending a furtive wink to a man I'd never seen in town
+before.
+
+"Now, Jim, there's no use trying to fool me. I'm _on_!"
+
+The newspaper stand was, I knew, the centre for the town's
+dissemination of gossip. I knew what I said would sweep everywhere the
+moment I turned my back.
+
+"As I said," I continued, "I'm on!" And I looked about and spoke in a
+loud voice, while inwardly quaking, "Yes, I know all about it, and I
+want to drop just this one hint ... tell the boys they can come. Tell
+them they'll be welcome ... So far I've had no trouble here ...
+everybody has been right decent with me," affecting a Western,
+colloquial drawl, "and I've tried to treat everybody, for my part, like
+a gentleman,--ain't that true?"
+
+"That's true, Mr. Gregory" (it was suddenly "Mr. Gregory" now, not
+"Johnnie"). "As I was saying just the other day, there's lots worse in
+the world than Mr. Gregory that ain't found out."
+
+"I want to leave this message with you, Jim. I'm from the West. I'm a
+good shot. I've got a six-shooter ready for business up at the cottage.
+I've got a lot of extra bullets, too. As I've said, I ain't the kind
+that looks for trouble, but when anybody goes out of their way--Well, as
+I said before, as soon as the boys begin getting rough--I'll begin to
+shoot ... I'll shoot to kill, and I'll kill everybody I can get, till
+someone gets me."
+
+"Yes, Mr. Gregory!"
+
+"Mind you, Jim, I've always considered you as my friend. I mean what I
+say. I'm a householder. I'm in the right ... if the law wants me that's
+another matter ... but no group of private citizens--"
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Gregory."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I walked rapidly back to the cottage. I was thinking as rapidly as I
+walked. For the space of a full minute I thought of packing off
+ignominiously with my little household.
+
+But before I stepped in at the door something murky had cleared away
+inside me.
+
+"Oh, Hildreth! Darrie!"
+
+The women came dragging forward. But with them, too, it was a passing
+mood.
+
+My indignation at the personal outrage of the impending mob incited me
+as them ... till I think not one of the three of us would have stepped
+aside from the path of a herd of stampeding elephants.
+
+"The yokels," and Darrie's nostrils flared, her blue blood showing, "to
+dare even think of such an action, against their betters!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We lit a roaring log fire. We sat reading aloud from Shelley. As the
+hours drew by ... eight ... nine ... ten ... eleven ... there is no
+doubt that our nerves grew to a very fine edge....
+
+And at twelve o'clock--
+
+Far off, at a respectful distance, a carol of rough, humorous voices
+sang the song, "_Happily Married_"!
+
+"H-a-double-p-y," etc.
+
+And we knew that my bluff had worked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day we went through a let-down.
+
+Hildreth was quite nerve-shaken, and so was Darrie.
+
+But I strutted about with my chest out, the cock of the walk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But, nevertheless, and despite their bravery and the fiasco of the mob's
+attack, the hearts seemed to have left the bodies of both "my" women.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The cold weather that Darrie and the old settlers had predicted was now
+descending on the countryside....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One morning Hildreth timidly and haltingly proposed returning to her
+mother's flat in New York....
+
+I could stay and finish my play and, having disposed of it, come
+likewise to the city, and rent a flat, and she would come and live with
+me again. I am sure she was sincere in this. Or I could come to New
+York, rent a furnished room somewhere, and she would be with me daily,
+as now....
+
+Darrie seconded Hildreth's proposal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And yet my heart broke as Hildreth rode off in the carriage that came
+for her. I kissed her, and I kissed her ... despite the stern, unbending
+figure of the aged, moral coachman in the seat.
+
+Then, after she had started off, I pursued the carriage, overtook it by
+a short cut, cried out that I had still something I had forgotten to
+give her ... it was more kisses ... and I kissed and kissed her again
+and again.. and we both wept, with aching hearts.
+
+Then the moral coachman unbent.
+
+"--beg pardon," he ventured, "but I'm sorry for you two children ... oh,
+yes, I know all about you ... everybody knows ... and I wish you good
+luck."
+
+Darrie stayed over for the night, after Hildreth left, in order to see
+to packing the latter's clothes in her trunk ... Hildreth had been too
+upset to tend to the packing....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day Darrie left, too.
+
+"You have no more need of your chaperon," she laughed, a tear glinting
+in her eye....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So now I was left utterly alone....
+
+And a hellish winter descended upon the coast ... bitter, blowing,
+frosty winds that ate into the very bone and made a fellow curse God as
+he leaned obliquely against them.
+
+I learned how little a summer cottage was worth--in winter.
+
+Mrs. Rond lent me a huge-bellied stove, the fireplace no longer proving
+of comfort.
+
+But though I kept the stove so hot that it glowed red, I still had to
+hug it close, my overcoat on, and a pair of huge, woollen socks that I'd
+bought at the general store down in West Grove.
+
+But, despite the intense cold, I worked and worked ... my play, _Judas_
+was nearing completion ... its publication would mean the beginning of
+my life as a man of letters, my "coming out" in the literary world.
+
+I ate my food from open cans, not taking the trouble to cook.
+
+At night (I had pulled my bed out close to the stove) I heaped all the
+blankets in the house over me, and still shivered ... I lived on the
+constant stimulus of huge draughts of coffee....
+
+"Only a little while longer ... only a few days more ... and the play
+will then be finished ... and it will be published. And it will be
+produced.
+
+"Then _the woman_, my first and only woman, she will be with me again
+forever ... I'll take her to Italy, away from all the mess that has
+cluttered about our love for each other."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day, in an effort to keep the house warm--the one room I confined
+myself to, rather,--I stoked the stove so hot that the stovepipe grew
+red to the place where it went through the roof into the attic....
+
+My mind, at the time, was in far-off Galilee. I was on the last scene of
+the last act of my play ... the disciples, after the crucifixion, were
+gathered in the upper room again, waiting for the resurrected Christ to
+appear to take the seat left vacant for Him....
+
+I looked up from the page over which my frosty fingers crawled....
+
+The boards were smoking faintly. If I didn't act quickly the house would
+catch fire ... I laughed at the thought of the curious climax it would
+present to the world; I imagined myself among the embers.
+
+I must lessen the heat in the stove. I ran and brought in a bucket of
+water. I pried open the red-hot door of the stove with a stick that
+almost caught flame as I pried.
+
+With a backward withdrawal, a forward heave, I shot the contents of the
+pail into the stove....
+
+There followed a detonation like a siege gun.
+
+The stove-lid shot so close to my head it was no joke ... it took out
+the whole window-sash and lit in the outside snow. The stove itself,
+balanced on bricks under its four feet, slumped sidewise, fortunately
+did not collapse to the floor ... the stovepipe fell, but the wire that
+held it up at the bend also prevented it from touching the carpet ...
+the room was instantly full of suffocating soot and smoke.
+
+I crawled forth like a scared animal ... found myself in the kitchen. In
+the mirror hanging there I looked like a Senegalese.
+
+Then, finding myself unhurt, I laughed and laughed at myself, at the
+grotesqueness and irony of life, at everything ... but mostly at myself.
+
+I righted the stove as best I could, brought the door in again from
+where it had bitten to the bottom of the snow drift, like an angry
+animal. It was still uncomfortably hot ... shifting it from hand to hand
+I managed to manoeuvre it back to a slant position on its hinges....
+
+Before I could light another and more moderate fire, unexpectedly the
+inspiration for the completion of the last scene of _Judas_--the
+inspiration for which I had been waiting and hoping--rode in on me like
+a wave....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Christ, in the spirit, unseen, comes to his waiting disciples.
+
+_Thomas_. Someone has flung open the door. The wind has blown out the
+candles.
+
+_Andrew_. Nay, I sit next the door. 'Tis closed!
+
+_John_. He has risen. He is even now among us.
+
+_Thomas_. Someone sits in the chair. I feel a presence by my side.
+
+_Peter_. Brethren, 'tis the Comforter of which He spake! [_A misty light
+fills the room_.]
+
+_John_. Ah, 'tis He! 'tis He! He is with us. He has not forsaken us.
+Verily, He has risen from the dead into a larger life than ever! Dear
+Lord, Beloved Shepherd of Souls, is it Thou?
+
+_Thomas_. I believe, I believe! It is past speech! Thy Kingdom comes as
+I dreamed, but dared not believe!
+
+
+_John_. He lives, He lives--the very Son of God!
+
+  Behold the Kingdom that He promised us;
+  'Tis no vain dream, 'tis everlasting truth!
+  He shall bind all the nations into one,
+  The love of him shall flood the world!
+  He shall conquer with love and gentleness, and not with the sword.
+  He shall live again in every heart that loves its fellow men.
+  Peace he will plant where discord grew before.
+  He will save and heal the souls of men forever and forever.
+  Ah, dear Master, forgive us, we beseech Thee,
+  For deeming Thou hadst ever died.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so, having nearly burnt a house down, and perhaps myself with it, I
+had written "finis" to my four-act play called _Judas_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth and I had written faithfully to each other twice a day ... the
+absurd, foolish, improper letters that lovers exchange ... I wrote most
+of my letters in the cave-language that we had invented between us....
+
+And we marked all the interspaces with secret symbols that meant
+intimate caresses ... kisses ... everything....
+
+The play brought to a successful end, I realised that for one day no
+letters had come from Hildreth. And the next none came ... and the
+next....
+
+I besieged the post office five and six times a day in a panic, till the
+postmaster first pitied me, then grew a bit put out....
+
+A week, and not a single letter from the woman I loved....
+
+The day before, Mrs. Suydam and her plumber affinity, for whom I felt
+myself and Hildreth and Penton largely responsible, in the example we
+had set--the day before these two young people had committed suicide.
+
+As I walked about the cottage, alone, I had the uncanny feeling that the
+place was haunted ... that maybe the ghosts of these two poor children
+who had imitated us were down there haunting me ... why had not Hildreth
+and I written that joint letter to them as I had suggested!
+
+--only a little thing, but it might have given them courage to go
+on!....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was at the long-distance phone.
+
+"Hildreth!" I cried, hearing her dear voice....
+
+"Oh, how good, how sweet, my love, my life, it is to hear your voice
+again ... tell me you still love me!"
+
+"Hush, Johnnie, hush!" answered a far-away, strange voice ... "I'm
+writing you a long letter ... somebody might be listening in."
+
+"Did you see in the paper about Mrs. Suydam?"
+
+"Yes, it was a terrible thing."
+
+"--if we had only written to them!"
+
+"--that was what I thought!"
+
+"Shall I come to the city now? My book is finished. I'm a real author
+now."
+
+"The book is finished? That's fine, Johnnie ... but don't come to the
+city now ... wait my letter."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the bulky letter came, the roads rang like iron to my step. I
+wouldn't allow myself to read it in the post office. I hugged the luxury
+of the idea of reading it by the fire, slowly. I kissed the still
+unopened envelope many times on the way home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I broke the letter open ... it fell out of my hands as if a paralysis
+had smitten me....
+
+No, no, I would not believe it ... it could not be true ... in so short
+a time ... with hands that shook as with palsy I plucked it up from the
+chilly, draughty floor again....
+
+"_Another man_!"
+
+She had met, was in love with, another man!
+
+Oh, incredible! incredible! I moaned in agony. I rocked like an old
+woman rocking her body in grief.
+
+Now was my time to end it all!
+
+Damn all marriage! Damn all free love! God damn to hell all women!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I thought of many ways of committing suicide. But I only _thought_ of
+them.
+
+I flung out into the night, meaning to go and tell Mrs. Rond of the
+incredible doom that had fallen upon me, the unspeakable betrayal.
+
+"Poor Penton!" I cried. "Poor Penton!"
+
+At last I sympathised fully with him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ashamed, in my slowly gathering new man's pride, I did not go in to see
+Mrs. Rond. Instead, I drove past her house with that curious, bent-kneed
+walk of mine,--and I walked and walked, not heeding the cold, till the
+ocean shouldered, phosphorescent, in the enormous night toward me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Home again, I slept like a drunkard. It was broad day when I woke.
+
+I had dreamed deliciously all night of Hildreth ... was strangely not
+unsatisfied--when I woke again to the hell of the reality her letter had
+plunged me into.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Rond ... of course I finally took her into my confidence, and told
+her the entire story....
+
+"Not to speak in disparagement of Hildreth, I knew it all along, Johnnie
+... knew that this would be the result ... but come, come, you have
+bigger things in you ... Penton Baxter will win his divorce sooner or
+later. Hildreth has another man, poor little girl! You have all that God
+means you to have at present: _Your first book_!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Tramping on Life, by Harry Kemp
+
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of TRAMPING ON LIFE, by HARRY KEMP.
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tramping on Life, by Harry Kemp
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Tramping on Life
+       An Autobiographical Narrative
+
+Author: Harry Kemp
+
+Release Date: March 19, 2005 [EBook #15415]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAMPING ON LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Martin Pettit and the PG
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
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+
+
+</pre>
+
+<p class="center"><img src="images/cover.jpg" width='455' height='701' alt="Cover" /></p>
+
+<p class="center"><img src="images/frontispiece.jpg" width='508' height='701' alt="THE AUTHOR OF Tramping on Life" /></p>
+
+<hr />
+<h1>TRAMPING ON LIFE</h1>
+
+<h3>AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE</h3>
+
+<h2>HARRY KEMP</h2>
+
+<p class='center'>GARDEN CITY NEW YORK</p>
+
+<p class='center'>GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY, Inc.</p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>Copyright, 1922, by</i><br />
+BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>First Printing, September, 1922</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Second Printing, November, 1922</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Third Printing, January, 1923</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Fourth Printing, April, 1923</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Fifth Printing, July, 1923</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Sixth Printing, September, 1923</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Seventh Printing, November, 1923</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Eighth Printing, May, 1924</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Ninth Printing, November, 1924</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Tenth Printing, July, 1925</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Eleventh Printing, March, 1926</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Twelfth Printing, February, 1927</p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>Printed in the United States of America</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<blockquote><p class='center'>All in this book that is good and enduring and worth while for humanity, I
+dedicate to the memory of my wife,</p>
+
+<p class='center'>MARY PYNE</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Waterbury, Connecticut,</i></p>
+<p><i>May 20, 1922.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+<h2>TRAMPING ON LIFE</h2>
+
+<p>Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother.
+For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in her
+family. And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weakness
+in her. She was not even strong enough to suckle me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section of
+that great, steel-manufacturing city which was neither city, suburb, nor
+country,&mdash;but a muddy, green-splashed, murky mixture of all three.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>They told me, when I was old enough to understand, that my mother was
+English, that her folks lived in Cleveland and owned a millinery and
+drygoods store there ... and that my father met my mother one day in
+Mornington. She was visiting an uncle who ran a candy store on Main
+Street, and, she girl-like, laughed and stood behind the counter, ready
+for a flirtation....</p>
+
+<p>My father was young, too. And he was employed there in the store,
+apprenticed to the candy-maker's trade. And, on this day, as he passed
+through, carrying a trayful of fresh-dipped chocolates, he winked at my
+mother and joked with her in an impudent way ... and she rebuffed him,
+not really meaning a rebuff, of course ... and he startled her by
+pulling off his hat and grotesquely showing himself to be entirely bald
+... for he had grown bald very young&mdash;at the age of sixteen ... both
+because of scarlet fever, and because baldness for the men ran in his
+family ... and he was tall, and dark, and walked with rather a military
+carriage.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was four years old when my mother died.</p>
+
+<p>When she fell sick, they tell me, my grandfather did one of the few
+decent acts of his life&mdash;he let my father have a farm he owned in
+central Kansas, near Hutchinson. But my father did not try to work it.</p>
+
+<p>He was possessed of neither the capital nor knowledge necessary for
+farming.</p>
+
+<p>He went to work as clerk in a local hotel, in the rapidly growing town.
+Crazy with grief, he watched my mother drop out of his life a little
+more each day.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My father and mother both had tempers that flared up and sank as
+suddenly.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I had lung fever when I was a baby. That was what they called it then. I
+nearly died of it. It left me very frail in body.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As soon as I could walk and talk my mother made a great companion of me.
+She didn't treat me as if I were only a child. She treated me like a
+grown-up companion. I am told that I would follow her about the house
+from room to room, clutching at her skirts, while she was dusting and
+sweeping and working. And to hear us two talking with each other, you
+would have imagined there was a houseful of people.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My father's anguish over my mother's death caused him to break loose
+from all ties. His grief goaded him so that he went about aimlessly. He
+roamed from state to state, haunted by her memory. He worked at all
+sorts of jobs. Once he even dug ditches for seventy-five cents a day. He
+had all sorts of adventures, roaming about.</p>
+
+<p>As for me, I was left alone with my grandmother, his mother,&mdash;in the big
+house which stood back under the trees, aloof from the wide, dusty road
+that led to the mills.</p>
+
+<p>With us lived my young, unmarried aunt, Millie....</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother had no education. She could barely read and write.</p>
+
+<p>And she believed in everybody.</p>
+
+<p>She was stout ... sparse-haired ... wore a switch ... had kindly,
+confiding, blue eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Beggars, tramps, pack-peddlers, book-agents, fortune-tellers,&mdash;she lent
+a credulous ear to all,&mdash;helped others when we ourselves needed help,
+signed up for preposterous articles on &quot;easy&quot; monthly payments,&mdash;gave
+away food, starving her appetite and ours.</p>
+
+<p>When, child though I was, even I protested, she would say, &quot;well,
+Johnnie, you might be a tramp some day, and how would I feel if I
+thought some one was turning you away hungry?&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My Grandfather Gregory was a little, alert, erect, suave man,&mdash;he was a
+man whose nature was such that he would rather gain a dollar by some
+cheeky, brazen, off-colour practice than earn a hundred by honest
+methods.</p>
+
+<p>He had keen grey eyes that looked you in the face in utter, disarming
+frankness. He was always immaculately dressed. He talked continually
+about money, and about how people abused his confidence and his trust in
+men. But there was a sharpness like pointed needles in the pupils of his
+eyes that betrayed his true nature.</p>
+
+<p>Coming to Mornington as one of the city's pioneers, at first he had kept
+neck to neck in social prestige with the Babsons, Guelders, and the
+rest, and had built the big house that my grandmother, my aunt, and
+myself now lived in, on Mansion avenue....</p>
+
+<p>When the Civil War broke out, that streak of adventure and daring in my
+grandfather which in peace times turned him to shady financial
+transactions, now caused him to enlist. And before the end of the war he
+had gone far up in the ranks.</p>
+
+<p>After the war he came into still more money by a manufacturing business
+which he set up. But the secret process of the special kind of material
+which he manufactured he inveigled out of a comrade in arms. The latter
+never derived a cent from it. My grandfather stole the patent, taking it
+out in his own name. The other man had trusted him, remembering the
+times they had fought shoulder to shoulder, and had bivouacked
+together....</p>
+
+<p>My grandfather, though so small as to be almost diminutive, was spry and
+brave as an aroused wasp when anyone insulted him. Several times he
+faced down burly-bodied men who had threatened to kill him for his
+getting the better of them in some doubtful business transaction.</p>
+
+<p>For a long time his meanness and sharp dealings were reserved for
+outsiders and he was generous with his family. And my sweet, simple, old
+grandmother belonged to all the societies, charitable and otherwise, in
+town ... but she was not, never could be &quot;smart.&quot; She was always saying
+and doing na&iuml;ve things from the heart. And soon she began to disapprove
+of my grandfather's slick business ways.</p>
+
+<p>I don't know just what tricks he put over ... but he became <i>persona non
+grata</i> in local business circles ... and he took to running about the
+country, putting through various projects here and there ... this
+little, dressy, hard-faced man ... like a cross between a weasel and a
+bird!</p>
+
+<p>He dropped into Mornington, and out again, each time with a wild,
+restless story of fortunes to be made or in the making!</p>
+
+<p>Once he came home and stayed for a longer time than usual. During this
+stay he received many letters. My grandmother noticed a furtiveness in
+his manner when he received them. My grandmother noticed that her
+husband always repaired immediately to the outhouse when he received a
+letter.</p>
+
+<p>She followed after him one day, and found fragments of a torn letter
+cast below ... she performed the disagreeable task of retrieving the
+fragments, of laboriously piecing them together and spelling them out.
+She procured a divorce as quietly as possible. Then my grandfather made
+his final disappearance. I did not see him again till I was quite grown
+up.</p>
+
+<p>All support of his numerous family ceased. His sons and daughters had to
+go to work while still children, or marry.</p>
+
+<p>My Aunt Alice married a country doctor whom I came to know as &quot;Uncle
+Beck.&quot; My Uncle Joe, who inherited my grandfather's business-sense, with
+none of his crookedness, started out as a newsboy, worked his way up to
+half-proprietorship in a Mornington paper ... the last I heard of him he
+had money invested in nearly every enterprise in town, and had become a
+substantial citizen.</p>
+
+<p>My father still pursued his nomadic way of living, sending, very seldom,
+driblets of money to my grandmother for my support ... my uncle Jim went
+East to work ... of my uncle Landon I shall tell you later on.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The big house in which my grandmother, my Aunt Millie, and I lived was
+looking rather seedy by this time. The receding tide of fashion and
+wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing
+city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great,
+flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one ... and a
+welter of strange people we then called the &quot;low Irish&quot; came to work in
+them, and our Mansion Avenue became &quot;Kilkenny Row.&quot; And a gang of tough
+kids sprang up called the &quot;Kilkenny Cats,&quot; with which my gang used to
+fight.</p>
+
+<p>After the &quot;Low Irish&quot; came the &quot;Dagoes&quot; ... and after them the &quot;Hunkies&quot;
+... each wilder and more poverty-stricken than the former.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The Industrial Panic of '95 (it was '95, I think) was on ... always very
+poor since the breaking up of our family, now at times even bread was
+scarce in the house.</p>
+
+<p>I was going to school, scrawny and freckle-faced and ill-nourished. I
+had a pet chicken that fortunately grew up to be a hen. It used to lay
+an egg for me nearly every morning during that hard time.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My early remembrances of school are chiefly olfactory. I didn't like the
+dirty boy who sat next to me and spit on his slate, rubbing it clean
+with his sleeve. I loved the use of my yellow, new sponge, especially
+after the teacher had taught me all about how it had grown on the bottom
+of the ocean, where divers had to swim far down to bring it up, slanting
+through the green waters. But the slates of most of the boys stunk
+vilely with their spittle.</p>
+
+<p>I didn't like the smell of the pig-tailed little girls, either. There
+was a close soapiness about them that offended me. And yet they
+attracted me. For I liked them in their funny, kilt-like, swinging
+dresses. I liked the pudginess of their noses, the shiny apple-glow of
+their cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>It was wonderful to learn to make letters on a slate. To learn to put
+down rows of figures and find that one and one, cabalistically, made
+two, and two and two, four!</p>
+
+<p>It always seemed an age to recess. And the school day was as long as a
+month is now.</p>
+
+<p>We were ready to laugh at anything ... a grind-organ in the street, a
+passing huckster crying &quot;potatoes,&quot; etc.</p>
+
+<p>I have few distinct memories of my school days. I never went to
+kindergarten. I entered common school at the age of eight.</p>
+
+<p>My grandfather, after his hegira from Mornington, left behind his
+library of travels, lives of famous American Statesmen and Business
+Men, and his Civil War books. Among these books were four treasure
+troves that set my boy's imagination on fire. They were <i>Stanley's
+Adventures in Africa</i>, Dr. Kane's Book of <i>Polar Explorations</i>, <i>Mungo
+Park</i>, and, most amazing of all, a huge, sensational book called <i>Savage
+Races of the World</i> ... this title was followed by a score of harrowing
+and sensational sub-titles in rubric. I revelled and rolled in this book
+like a colt let out to first pasture. For days and nights, summer and
+winter, I fought, hunted, was native to all the world's savage regions
+in turn, partook gleefully of strange and barbarous customs, naked and
+skin-painted. I pushed dug-outs and canoes along tropic water-ways where
+at any moment an enraged hippopotamus might thrust up his snout and
+overturn me, crunching the boat in two and leaving me a prey to
+crocodiles ... I killed birds of paradise with poison darts which I blew
+out of a reed with my nostrils ... I burned the houses of white settlers
+... even indulged shudderingly in cannibal feasts.</p>
+
+<p>The one thing that pre-eminently seized my imagination in <i>Savage Races
+of the World</i> was the frontispiece,&mdash;a naked black rushing full-tilt
+through a tropical forest, his head of hair on fire, a huge
+feather-duster of dishevelled flame ... somehow this appealed to me as
+especially romantic. I dreamed of myself as that savage, rushing
+gloriously through a forest, naked, and crowned with fire like some
+primitive sun-god. It never once occurred to me how it would hurt to
+have my hair burning!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>When Aunt Millie was taken down with St. Vitus's dance, it afforded me
+endless amusement. She could hardly lift herself a drink out of a full
+dipper without spilling two-thirds of the contents on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Beck, the Pennsylvania Dutch country doctor who married Aunt
+Alice, came driving in from Antonville, five miles away, once or twice a
+week to tend to Millie, free, as we were too poor to pay for a doctor. I
+remember how Uncle Beck caught me and whipped me with a switch. For I
+constantly teased Aunt Millie to make her scream and cry.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Granma,&quot; I used to call out, on waking in the morning....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Johnnie darling, what is it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Granma, yesterday ... in the woods back of Babson's barn, I killed
+three Indians, one after the other.&quot; (The funny part of it was that I
+believed this, actually, as soon as the words left my mouth.)</p>
+
+<p>A silence....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Granma, don't you believe me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, of course, I believe you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Millie would strike in with&mdash;&quot;Ma, why do you go on humouring
+Johnnie while he tells such lies? You ought to give him a good
+whipping.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The poor little chap ain't got no mother!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Poor little devil! If you keep on encouraging him this way he'll become
+one of the greatest liars in the country.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A colloquy after this sort took place more than once. It gave me
+indescribable pleasure to narrate an absurd adventure, believe it myself
+in the telling of it, and think others believed me. Aunt Millie's scorn
+stung me like a nettle, and I hated her.</p>
+
+<p>In many ways I tasted practical revenge. Though a grown girl of
+nineteen, she still kept three or four dolls. And I would steal her
+dolls, pull their dresses for shame over their heads, and set them
+straddle the banisters.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We took in boarders. We had better food. It was good to have meat to eat
+every day.</p>
+
+<p>Among the boarders was a bridge builder named Elton Reeves. Elton had a
+pleasant, sun-burnt face and a little choppy moustache beneath which his
+teeth glistened when he smiled.</p>
+
+<p>He fell, or pretended to fall, in love with gaunt, raw-boned Millie.</p>
+
+<p>At night, after his day's work, he and Millie would sit silently for
+hours in the darkened parlour,&mdash;silent, except for an occasional murmur
+of voices. I was curious. Several times I peeked in. But all I could see
+was the form of my tall aunt couched half-moonwise in Elton Reeve's lap.
+I used to wonder why they sat so long and still, there in the
+darkness....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Once a grown girl of fourteen named Minnie came to visit a sweet little
+girl named Martha Hanson, whose consumptive widower-father rented two
+rooms from my grandmother. They put Minnie to sleep in the same bed with
+me....</p>
+
+<p>After a while I ran out of the bedroom into the parlour where the
+courting was going on.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Aunt Millie, Minnie won't let me sleep.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Millie did not answer. Elton guffawed lustily.</p>
+
+<p>I returned to bed and found Minnie lying stiff and mute with fury.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Elton left, the bridge-work brought to completion. He had a job waiting
+for him in another part of the country.</p>
+
+<p>It hurt even my savage, young, vindictive heart to see Millie daily
+running to the gate, full of eagerness, as the mail-man came....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, no letters for you this morning, Millie!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Or more often he would go past, saying nothing. And Millie would weep
+bitterly.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I have a vision of a very old woman walking over the top of a hill. She
+leans on a knobby cane. She smokes a corn-cob pipe. Her face is
+corrugated with wrinkles and as tough as leather. She comes out of a
+high background of sky. The wind whips her skirts about her thin shanks.
+Her legs are like broomsticks.</p>
+
+<p>This is a vision of my great-grandmother's entrance into my boyhood.</p>
+
+<p>I had often heard of her. She had lived near Halton with my Great-aunt
+Rachel for a long time ... and now, since we were taking in boarders and
+could keep her, she was coming to spend the rest of her days with us.</p>
+
+<p>At first I was afraid of this eerie, ancient being. But when she dug out
+a set of fish-hooks, large and small, from her tobacco pouch, and gave
+them to me, I began to think there might be something human in the old
+lady.</p>
+
+<p>She established her regular place in a rocker by the kitchen stove. She
+had already reached the age of ninety-five. But there was a constant,
+sharp, youthful glint in her eye that belied her age.</p>
+
+<p>She chewed tobacco vigorously like any backwoodsman (had chewed it
+originally because she'd heard it cured toothache, then had kept up the
+habit because she liked it).</p>
+
+<p>Her corncob pipe&mdash;it was as rank a thing as ditch digger ever poisoned
+the clean air with.</p>
+
+<p>Granma Wandon was as spry as a yearling calf. She taught me how to
+drown out groundhogs and chipmunks from their holes. She went fishing
+with me and taught me to spit on the bait for luck, or rub a certain
+root on the hook, which she said made the fish bite better.</p>
+
+<p>And solemnly that spring of her arrival, and that following summer, did
+we lay out a fair-sized garden and carefully plant each kind of
+vegetable in just the right time and phase of the moon and, however it
+may be, her garden grew beyond the garden of anyone else in the
+neighbourhood.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The following winter&mdash;and her last winter on earth&mdash;was a time of wonder
+and marvel for me ... sitting with her at the red-heated kitchen stove,
+I listened eagerly to her while she related tales to me of old settlers
+in Pennsylvania ... stories of Indians ... ghost stories ... she curdled
+my blood with tales of catamounts and mountain lions crying like women,
+and babies in the dark, to lure travellers where they could pounce down
+from branches on them.</p>
+
+<p>And she told me the story of the gambler whom the Devil took when he
+swore falsely, avowing, &quot;may the Devil take me if I cheated.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She boasted of my pioneer ancestors ... strapping six-footers in their
+stocking feet ... men who carried one hundred pound bags of salt from
+Pittsburgh to Slippery Rock in a single journey.</p>
+
+<p>The effect of these stories on me&mdash;?</p>
+
+<p>I dreamed of skeleton hands that reached out from the clothes closet for
+me. Often at night I woke, yelling with nightmare.</p>
+
+<p>With a curious touch of folk lore Granma Gregory advised me to &quot;look for
+the harness under the bed, if it was a nightmare.&quot; But she upbraided
+Granma Wandon, her mother, for retailing me such tales.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nonsense, it'll do him good, my sweet little Johnnie,&quot; she assured her
+daughter, knocking her corncob pipe over the coal scuttle like a man.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There was a story of Granma Wandon's that cut deep into my memory. It
+was the story of the man who died cursing God, and who brought, by his
+cursing, the dancing of the very flames of Hell, red-licking and
+serrate, in a hideous cluster, like an infernal bed of flowers, just
+outside the window, for all around his death-bed to see!</p>
+
+<p>In the fall of the next year Granma Wandon took sick. We knew it was
+all over for her. She faded painlessly into death. She knew she was
+going, said so calmly and happily. She made Millie and Granma Gregory
+promise they'd be good to me. I wept and wept. I kissed her leathery,
+leaf-like hand with utter devotion ... she could hardly lift it. Almost
+of itself it sought my face and flickered there for a moment.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>She seemed to be listening to something far off.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Can't you hear it, Maggie?&quot; she asked her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hear what, mother?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Music ... that beautiful music!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do you see anything, mother?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes ... heaven!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then the fine old pioneer soul passed on. I'll bet she still clings
+grimly to an astral corncob pipe somewhere in space.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>A week before she died, Aunt Millie told us she was sure the end was
+near. For Millie had waked up in the night and had seen the old lady
+come into her room, reach under the bed, take the pot forth, use
+it,&mdash;and glide silently upstairs to her room again.</p>
+
+<p>Millie spoke to the figure and received no answer. Then, frightened, she
+knew she had seen a &quot;token&quot; of Granma Wandon's approaching death.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the parlour stood the black coffin on trestles; the door open, for we
+had a fear of cats getting at the body,&mdash;we could glimpse the ominous
+black object as we sat down to breakfast. And I laid my head on the
+table and wept as much because of that sight as over the loss of my old
+comrade and playmate.</p>
+
+<p>Something vivid had gone out of my life. And for the first time I felt
+and knew the actuality of death. Like a universe-filling, soft,
+impalpable dust it slowly sifted over me, bearing me under. I saw for
+the first time into all the full graves of the world.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>To my great-grandmother's funeral came many distant relatives I had
+never rested eye on before ... especially there came my Great-aunt
+Rachel, Granma Gregory's sister,&mdash;a woman just as sweet-natured as she,
+and almost her twin even to the blue rupture of a vein in the middle of
+the lower lip. She, too, had a slightly protrusive stomach over which
+she had the habit of folding her hard-working hands restfully, when she
+talked ... and also there came with her my Great-uncle Joshua, her
+husband ... and my second cousins, Paul and Phoebe, their children. The
+other children, two girls, were off studying in a nurses' college ...
+working their way there.</p>
+
+<p>After the burial Josh and Paul went on back to Halton, where they worked
+in the Steel Mills. They left Aunt Rachel and Phoebe to stay on and pay
+us a visit.</p>
+
+<p>Paul and Josh were &quot;puddlers&quot;&mdash;when they worked ... in the open furnaces
+that were in use in those days ... when you saw huge, magnificent men,
+naked to the belt, whose muscles rippled in coils as they toiled away in
+the midst of the living red of flowing metal.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Phoebe was wild and beautiful in a frail way. She wore a pea green skirt
+and a waist of filmy, feminine texture. We instantly took to each other.
+She was always up and off, skimming swallow-like in all directions, now
+this way, now that, as if seeking for some new flavour in life, some
+excitement that had not come to her yet.</p>
+
+<p>We made expeditions together over the country. She joined me in my
+imaginary battles with Indians ... my sanguinary hunts for big game....
+It was she who first taught me to beg hand-outs at back doors&mdash;one day
+when we went fishing together and found ourselves a long way off from
+home.</p>
+
+<p>Once Phoebe fell into a millpond from a springboard ... with all her
+clothes on ... we were seeing who dared &quot;teeter&quot; nearest the end.... I
+had difficulty in saving her. It was by the hair, with a chance clutch,
+that I drew her ashore.</p>
+
+<p>The picture of her, shivering forlornly before the kitchen stove! She
+was beautiful, even in her long, wet, red-flannel drawers that came down
+to her slim, white ankles. She was weeping over the licking her mother
+had given her.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I'm afraid your cousin Phoebe will come to no good end some day, if she
+don't watch out,&quot; said my grandmother to me, &quot;and I don't like you to
+play with her much.... I'm going to have Aunt Rachel take her home
+soon&quot; ... after a pause, &quot;as sure as I have ten fingers she'll grow up
+to be a bad woman.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Granma, what is a bad woman?&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Aunt Rachel and Cousin Phoebe returned home. Uncle Josh, that slack old
+vagabond with his furtive, kindly eye-glances, came for them with a
+livery rig.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I think I read every dime novel published, during those years of my
+childhood ... across the bridge that Elton had helped build, the new
+bridge that spanned the Hickory River, and over the railroad tracks,
+stood a news-stand, that was run by an old, near-sighted woman. As she
+sat tending counter and knitting, I bought her books ... but for each
+dime laid down before her, I stole three extra thrillers from under her
+very eye.</p>
+
+<p>From my grandfather's library I dug up a book on the Hawaiian Islands,
+written by some missionary. In it I found a story of how the natives
+speared fish off the edges of reefs. Straightway I procured a pitchfork.</p>
+
+<p>I searched the shallows and ripples of Hickory River for miles ... I
+followed Babson's brook over the hills nearly to its source.</p>
+
+<p>One day, peering through reeds into a shallow cove, I saw a fish-fin
+thrust up out of the water. I crept cautiously forward.</p>
+
+<p>It was a big fish that lay there. Trembling all over with excitement, I
+made a mad thrust. Then I yelled, and stamped on the fish, getting all
+wet in doing so. I beat its head in with the haft of the fork. It rolled
+over, its white belly glinting in the sun. On picking it up, I was
+disappointed. It had been dead for a long time; had probably swam in
+there to die ... and its gills were a withered brown-black in colour,
+like a desiccated mushroom ... not healthy red.</p>
+
+<p>But I was not to be frustrated of my glory. I tore the tell-tale gills
+out ... then I beat the fish's head to a pulp, and I carried my capture
+home and proudly strutted in at the kitchen door.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look, Granma, at what a big fish I've caught.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, Millie, he's really got one,&quot; and Granma straightened up from the
+wash-tub. Millie came out snickering scornfully.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My Gawd, Ma, can't you see it's been dead a week?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're a liar, it ain't!&quot; I cried. And I began to sob because Aunt
+Millie was trying to push me back into ignominy as I stood at the very
+threshold of glory.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Honest-to-God, it's&mdash;fresh&mdash;Granma!&quot; I gulped, &quot;didn't I just kill it
+with the pitchfork?&quot; Then I stopped crying, absorbed entirely in the
+fine story I was inventing of the big fish's capture and death. I stood
+aside, so to speak, amazed at myself, and proud, as my tongue ran on as
+if of its own will.</p>
+
+<p>Even Aunt Millie was charmed.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But she soon came out from under the spell with, &quot;Ma, Johnnie means well
+enough, but surely you ain't going to feed that fish to the boarders?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, I am. I believe in the little fellow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All right, Ma ... but I won't eat a mouthful of it, and you'd better
+drop a note right away for Uncle Beck to drive in, so's he'll be here on
+time for the cases of poison that are sure to develop.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Cleaned and baked, the fish looked good, dripping with sauce and basted
+to an appetizing brown.</p>
+
+<p>As I drew my chair up to the table and a smoking portion was heaped on
+my plate, Aunt Millie watched me with bright, malicious eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Granma, I want another cup o' coffee,&quot; I delayed.</p>
+
+<p>But the big, fine, grey-haired mill boss, our star boarder, who liked me
+because I always listened to his stories&mdash;he sailed into his helping
+nose-first. That gave me courage and I ate, too ... and we all ate.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say, but this fish is good! Where did it come from?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The kid here caught it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Never tasted better in my life.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>None of us were ever any the worse for our rotten fish. And I was
+vindicated, believed in, even by Aunt Millie.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Summer vacation again, after a winter and spring's weary grind in
+school.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Rachel wrote to Granma that they would be glad to have me come over
+to Halton for a visit.</p>
+
+<p>Granma let me, after I had pleaded for a long while,&mdash;but it was with
+great reluctance, warning me of Phoebe.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Aunt Rachel, Uncle Joshua, Cousin Phoebe and cousin Paul lived in a big,
+square barn-like structure. Its unpainted, barren bulk sat uneasily on
+top of a bare hill where the clay lay so close to the top-soil that in
+wet weather you could hardly labour up the precipitous path that led to
+their house, it was so slippery.</p>
+
+<p>As I floundered upward in the late spring rain, gaining the bare summit
+under the drizzly sky, a rush of dogs met me. They leaped and slavered
+and jumped and flopped and tumbled and whined all about me and over me
+... ten of them ... hound dogs with flop-ears and small, red-rimmed eyes
+... skinny creatures ... there was no danger from them; but they planted
+their mud-sticky paws everywhere in a frenzy of welcome.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A hound ain't got no sense onless he's a-huntin',&quot; drawled Paul, as his
+great boot caught them dextrously under their bellies and lifted them
+gently, assiduously, severally, in different directions from me....</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Rachel's face, ineffably ignorant and ineffably sweet, lit up with
+a smile of welcome. She met me in the doorway, kissed me.</p>
+
+<p>And she made me a great batch of pancakes to eat, with bacon dripping
+and New Orleans molasses ... but first&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Josh, where on earth is them carpet slippers o' yourn?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Josh yawned. He knocked the tobacco out of his pipe leisurely ... then,
+silent, he began scraping the black, foul inside of the bowl ... then at
+last he drawled.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't know, Ma!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But Phoebe knew, and soon, a mile too wide, the carpet slippers hung on
+my feet, while my shoes were drying in the oven and sending out that
+peculiar, close smell that wet leather emanates when subjected to heat.
+Also, I put on Phoebe's pea-green cotton skirt, while my knee britches
+hung behind the stove, drying. The men chaffed me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the industrial Middle West of those days, when the steel kings'
+fortunes were in bloom of growth, these distantly related kinsfolk of
+mine still lived the precarious life of pioneer days. Through the bare
+boards of the uneven floor whistled the wind. Here and there lay a
+sparse, grey, homemade rag rug. And here and there a window pane,
+broken, had not been replaced. And an old pair of pants, a ragged shirt,
+a worn out skirt stuffed in, kept out the draft,&mdash;of which everybody but
+Phoebe seemed mortally afraid. Incidentally these window-stuffings kept
+out much of the daylight.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Rachel, near-sighted, with her rather pathetic stoop, was
+ceaselessly sewing, knitting, scrubbing, washing, and cooking. She took
+care of her &quot;two men&quot; as she phrased it proudly&mdash;her husband and her
+great-bodied son&mdash;as if they were helpless children.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;We're going a-huntin' to-day, Johnny,&mdash;wan' ter come along?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sure!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wall, git ready, then!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But first Paul fed the hounds out in the yard ... huge slabs of white
+bread spread generously with lard. This was all they ever got, except
+the scraps from the table, which were few. They made a loud, slathering
+noise, gulping and bolting their food.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But we started off without the hounds.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ain't you going to take the dogs along?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nope.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why not&mdash;ain't we going to hunt rabbits?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yep.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then why not take them?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Put your hand in my right hand pocket an' find out!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I stuck my hand down, and it was given a vicious bite by a white,
+pink-eyed ferret Paul was carrying there. I yelled with pain and
+surprise. I pulled my hand up in the air, the ferret hanging to a
+finger. The ferret dropped to the ground. Paul stooped and picked it up,
+guffawing. It didn't bite him. It knew and feared him. That was his idea
+of a joke, the trick he played on me!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yew might git blood-pisen from that bite!&quot; teased Josh, to scare me.
+But I remained unscared. I sucked the blood from the tiny punctures,
+feeling secure, after I had done it. I remembered how Queen Eleanore had
+saved the life of Richard C&oelig;ur de Lion in the Holy Land, when he had
+been bitten by an adder, by sucking out the venom. I enjoyed the thrill
+of a repeated historic act.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If we got ketched we'd be put in jail fer this!&quot; remarked Josh with
+that sly, slow smile of his; &quot;it ain't the proper season to hunt
+rabbits in, an' it's agin the law, in season or out, to hunt 'em with
+ferrets,&quot; and he chuckled with relish over the outlawry of it.</p>
+
+<p>We came to a hole under a hollow tree. Paul let the ferret go down,
+giving him a preliminary smack.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mind you, Jim,&mdash;God damn you,&mdash;don't you stay down that hole too long.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Think he understands you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In course he does: jest the same es you do.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And why would Jim stay down?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He might corner the rabbit, kill him, an' stay to suck his blood ...
+but Jim knows me ... I've given him many's the ungodly whipping for
+playing me that trick ... but he's always so greedy and hongry that
+sometimes the little beggar fergits.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And then how do you get him out again?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jest set an' wait till he comes out ... which he must do, sometime ...
+an' then you kin jest bet I <i>give</i> it to him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We waited a long time.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Damn Jim, he's up to his old tricks again, I'll bet,&quot; swore Josh,
+shifting his face-deforming quid of tobacco from one protuberant cheek
+to the other, meditatively....</p>
+
+<p>The ferret appeared, or, rather, a big grey rabbit ... squealing with
+terror ... coming up backward ... the ferret clinging angrily to his
+nose ... and tugging like a playing pup.</p>
+
+<p>Paul took Jim off and put him back in his pocket ... he had to smack him
+smartly to make him let go&mdash;&quot;hongry little devil!&quot; he remarked fondly.</p>
+
+<p>A crack of the hand, brought down edgewise, broke the rabbit's neck, and
+he was thrust into a bag which Josh carried slung over his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>We caught fifteen rabbits that afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>We had a big rabbit stew for supper. Afterward the two men sat about in
+their socks, chairs tilted back, sucking their teeth and picking them
+with broom straws ... and they told yarns of dogs, and hunting, and
+fishing, till bed-time.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The morning sun shone brightly over me through three panes of glass in
+the window, the fourth of which was stopped up with an old petticoat.</p>
+
+<p>I woke with Phoebe's warm kiss on my mouth. We had slept together, for
+the older folks considered us too young for it to make any difference.
+We lay side by side all night ... and like a little man and woman we lay
+together, talking, in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>We could smell the cooking of eggs and bacon below ... an early
+breakfast for Paul, for he had been taken by a whim that he must work in
+the mine over the hill for a few weeks in order to earn some money ...
+for he was a miner, as well as a puddler in the mills ... he worked in
+coal mines privately run, not yet taken into the trust. He often had to
+lie on his side in a shallow place, working the coal loose with his
+pick&mdash;where the roof was so close he couldn't sit up straight....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;What shall we do to-day?&quot; asked Phoebe of me, as we lay there, side by
+side, &quot;I say let's go swimming?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You and me together?&quot; I demurred.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In course!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And you a girl?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Can't I swim jest as well as you can?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Phoebe, git up, you lazy-bones,&quot; called Aunt Rachel, from the bottom of
+the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All right, Ma!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, you git up, too!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Coming down right now, Aunt Rachel!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hurry up, or your breakfast'll git cold ... the idea of you children
+laying in bed like this ... what on earth are you doing up there,
+talking and talking? I kin hear you buzzing away clear down here!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I had been rapt in telling Phoebe how, when I grew to be a man, I was
+going to become a great adventurer, traveller, explorer.</p>
+
+<p>Phoebe sat up on the edge of the bed, lazily stretching for a moment, as
+a pretty bird stretches its leg along its wing. Then, her slim, nubile
+body outlined sharply in the brilliant day, she stood up, slipped off
+her flannel nightgown with a natural, unaffected movement, and stood
+naked before me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was a custom of mine to swing my feet as I ate; &quot;just like a little
+calf wags its tail when it sucks its mother's tit,&quot; my grandmother would
+say. I swung my feet vigorously that morning, but did not eat noisily,
+as my uncles, all my male relatives, in fact, did. I never made a noise
+when I ate. I handled my food delicately by instinct. If I found a fly
+in anything it generally made me sick to my stomach.</p>
+
+<p>Feeling warm, I suppose, in her heart toward me, because I was different
+in my ways, and frail-looking, and spoke a sort of book-English and not
+the <i>lingua franca</i> that obtained as speech in the Middle West, my Aunt
+Rachel heaped my plate with griddle cakes, which she made specially for
+me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're goin' to be diff'rent from the rest, the way you read books and
+newspapers,&quot; she remarked half-reverentially.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>A foamy bend in a racing brook where an elbow of rock made a swirling
+pool about four-foot deep. Phoebe took me there.</p>
+
+<p>We undressed.</p>
+
+<p>How smooth-bodied she was, how different from me! I studied her with
+abashed, veiled glances. The way she wound her hair on the top of her
+head, to put it out of the way, made her look like a woman in miniature.</p>
+
+<p>She dove first, like a water-rat. I followed on her heels.</p>
+
+<p>We both shot to the surface immediately. For all the warmth of the day,
+the water was deceptively icy. We crawled out. We lay on the bank, in
+the good sun, gasping....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As we lay there, I spoke to her of her difference ... a thing which was
+for the first time brought home to me in clear eyesight.</p>
+
+<p>Phoebe proceeded to blaze her way into my imagination with quaint,
+direct, explanatory talk ... things she had picked up God knows where
+... grotesque details ... Rabelaisan concentrations on seldom-expressed
+particulars....</p>
+
+<p>I learned many things at once from Phoebe ... twisted and childish, but
+at least more fundamental than the silly stories about storks and
+rabbits that brought babies down chimneys, or hid them in hollow stumps
+... about benevolent doctors, who, when desired by the mothers and
+fathers, brought additions to the family, from nowhere!...</p>
+
+<p>The house-cat ... kittens and the way they came ... surely I knew, but
+had not lifted the analogy up the scale....</p>
+
+<p>A furtive hand touched mine, interwove itself, finger with thrilling
+finger ... close together, we laughed into each other's eyes, over-joyed
+that we knew more than our elders thought we knew....</p>
+
+<p>Girls, just at the gate of adolescence, possess a directness of purpose
+which, afterwards, is looked upon as a distinct, masculine
+prerogative....</p>
+
+<p>Phoebe drew closer to me, pressing against me ... but a fierce, battling
+reluctance rose in my breast....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>She was astonished, stunned by my negation.</p>
+
+<p>Silently I dressed,&mdash;she, with a sullen pout on her fresh, childish
+mouth.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You fool! I hate you! You're no damn good!&quot; she cried passionately.</p>
+
+<p>With a cruel pleasure in the action, I beat her on the back. She began
+to sob.</p>
+
+<p>Then we walked on a space. And we sat down together on the crest of a
+hill. My mood changed, and I held her close to me, with one arm flung
+about her, till she quietened down from her sobbing. I was full of a
+power I had never known before.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I have told of the big, double house my grandmother had for renting, and
+how she might have made a good living renting it out, if she had used a
+little business sense ... but now she let the whole of it to a caravan
+of gypsies for their winter quarters,&mdash;who, instead of paying rent,
+actually held her and Millie in <i>their</i> debt by reading their palms,
+sometimes twice a day ... I think it was my Uncle Joe who at last ousted
+them....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>When I came back from Aunt Rachel's I found a voluble, fat, dirty, old,
+yellow-haired tramp established in the ground floor of the same house.
+He had, in the first place, come to our back door to beg a hand-out.
+And, sitting on the doorstep and eating, and drinking coffee, he had
+persuaded my grandmother that if she would give him a place to locate on
+credit he knew a way to clear a whole lot of money. His project for
+making money was the selling of home-made hominy to the restaurants up
+in town.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I found him squatted on the bare floor, with no furniture in the room.
+He had a couple of dingy wash-boilers which he had picked up from the
+big garbage-dump near the race-track.</p>
+
+<p>Day in, day out, I spent my time with this tramp, listening to his
+stories of the pleasures and adventures of tramp-life.</p>
+
+<p>I see him still, wiping his nose on his ragged coat-sleeve as he
+vociferates....</p>
+
+<p>When one day he disappeared, leaving boilers, hominy and all, behind, I
+missed his yarns as much as my grandmother missed her unpaid rent.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It appears that at this time my grandfather had a manufacturing plant
+for the terra cotta invention he had stolen from his comrade-in-arms, in
+Virginia somewhere, and that, during all these years, he had had Landon
+working with him,&mdash;and now word had come to us that Landon was leaving
+for Mornington again.</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother was mad about him, her youngest ... always spoke of him
+as &quot;her baby&quot; ... informed me again and again that he was the most
+accomplished, the handsomest man the Gregory family had ever produced.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Landon arrived. He walked up to the front porch from the road. He came
+in with a long, free stride ... he gave an eager, boyish laugh ... he
+plumped down his big, bulged-to-bursting grip with a bang.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hello, Ma!... hello, Millie!... well, well, so this is Duncan's kid?...
+how big he's grown!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Landon's fine, even, white teeth gleamed a smile at me.</p>
+
+<p>Granma couldn't say a word ... she just looked at him ... and looked at
+him ... and looked at him ... after a long while she began saying his
+name over and over again....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Landon, Landon, Landon,&quot;&mdash;holding him close.</p>
+
+<p>Landon began living with us regularly as one of the family. He went to
+work in the steel mills, and was energetic and tireless when he worked,
+which he did, enough to pay his way and not be a burden on others. He
+performed the hardest kinds of labour in the mills.</p>
+
+<p>But often he laid off for long stretches at a time and travelled about
+with a wild gang of young men and women, attending dances, drinking,
+gambling.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing seemed to hurt him, he was so strong.</p>
+
+<p>At most of the drinking bouts, where the object was to see who could
+take down the most beer, Landon would win by drinking all he could
+hold, then stepping outside on another pretext ... where he would push
+his finger down his throat and spout out all he had drunk. Then he would
+go back and drink more.</p>
+
+<p>Sunday afternoons were the big gambling and card-playing times in our
+semi-rural neighbourhood.</p>
+
+<p>The &quot;boys&quot; spent the day till dusk in the woods back of Babson's Hill.
+They drank and played cards. Landon taught me every card game there was.</p>
+
+<p>He could play the mouth-organ famously, too ... and the guitar and
+banjo. And he had a good strong voice with a rollick in it. And he was
+also a great mimic ... one of his stunts he called &quot;the barnyard,&quot; in
+which he imitated with astonishing likeness the sounds every farm-animal
+or bird makes ... and by drumming on his guitar as he played, and by the
+energetic use of his mouth-organ at the same time, he could also make
+you think a circus band was swinging up the street, with clowns and
+camels and elephants.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>His great fault was that he must have someone to bully and domineer. And
+he began picking on me, trying to force me to model my life on his
+pattern of what he thought it should be.</p>
+
+<p>One day I saw him eating raw steak with vinegar. I told him it made me
+sick to see it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, you'll have to eat some, too, for saying that.&quot; And he chased me
+around and 'round the table and room till he caught me. He held me,
+while I kicked and protested. He compelled me, by forcing his finger and
+thumb painfully against my jaws, to open my mouth and eat. He struck me
+to make me swallow.</p>
+
+<p>Everything I didn't want to do he made me do ... he took to beating me
+on every pretext. When my grandmother protested, he said he was only
+educating me the way I should go ... that I had been let run wild too
+long without a mastering hand, and with only women in the house. He must
+make a man out of me....</p>
+
+<p>My reading meant more to me than anything else. I was never so happy as
+when I was sitting humped up over a book, in some obscure corner of the
+house, where Uncle Landon, now grown the incarnate demon of my life,
+could not find me.</p>
+
+<p>It was a trick of his, when he surprised me stooping over a book, to hit
+me a terrific thwack between the shoulder-blades, a blow that made my
+backbone tingle with pain.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Set up straight! Do you want to be a hump-back when you grow big?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His pursuit drove me from corner to corner, till I lost my mischievous
+boldness and began to act timid and fearful.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever I failed to obey Granma, that was his opportunity. (Millie
+would cry triumphantly, &quot;<i>Now</i> you have someone to make you be good!&quot;)
+The veins on his handsome, curly forehead would swell with delight, as
+he caught me and whipped me ... till Granma would step in and make him
+stop ... but often he would over-rule her, and keep it up till his right
+arm was actually tired. And he would leave me to crawl off, sobbing dry
+sobs, incapable of more tears.</p>
+
+<p>A black hatred of him began to gnaw at my heart ... I dreamed still of
+what I would do when I had grown to be a man ... but now it was not any
+more to be a great traveller or explorer, but to grow into a strong man
+and kill my uncle, first putting him to some savage form of torture ...
+torture that would last a long, long while.</p>
+
+<p>He would often see it in my eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't you look at me that way!&quot; with a swipe of the hand.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Out in the woods I caught a dozen big yellow spiders, the kind that make
+pretty silver traceries, like handwriting with a flourish&mdash;on their
+morning webs.</p>
+
+<p>I brought these spiders home in a tin can and transferred them to some
+empty fruit jars in the cellar, keeping them for some boyish reason or
+other, in pairs, and putting in flies for them.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Millie came upon them and set up a scream that brought Uncle &quot;Lan,&quot;
+as we called him, down to see what was the matter....</p>
+
+<p>I took my beating in silence. I would no longer beg and plead for mercy.
+After he had finished, I lay across the sloping cellar door, lumpish and
+still, inwardly a shaking jelly of horror.</p>
+
+<p>I was wanting to die ... these successive humiliations seemed too great
+to live through.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The grey light of morning filtering in.</p>
+
+<p>Lan stood over my bed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;want to go hunting with me to-day?... shootin' blackbirds?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Uncle Lan,&quot; I assented, my mind divided between fear of him and
+eagerness to go.</p>
+
+<p>In the kitchen we ate some fried eggs and drank our coffee in silence.
+Then we trudged on through the dew-wet fields, drenched to the knees as
+if having waded through a brook.</p>
+
+<p>Lan bore his double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulder. He shot into a
+tree-top full of bickering blackbirds and brought three down, torn,
+flopping, bleeding. He thrust them into his sack, which reddened
+through, and we went on ... still in silence. The silence began to make
+me tremble but I was glad, anyhow, that I had gone with him. I
+conjectured that he had brought me a-field to give me a final
+whipping&mdash;&quot;to teach me to mind Granma.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;had to bring you out here ... the women are too chicken-hearted&mdash;they
+stop me too soon....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;Pity your pa's away ... don't do to leave a kid alone with women
+folks ... they don't make him walk the chalk enough!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It was about an hour after sunrise. We had come to an open field among
+trees. Lan set down his gun against a tree-trunk.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;needn't make to run ... I can catch you, no matter how fast you go.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He cut a heavy stick from a hickory.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on and take your medicine ... I'm goin' away to-morrow to Halton,
+and I want to leave you something to remember me by&mdash;so that you'll obey
+Ma and Millie while I'm gone. If you don't, when I come back, you'll
+catch it all over again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My heart was going like a steam engine. At the last moment I started to
+run, my legs sinking beneath me. He was upon me with my first few steps,
+and had me by the scruff of the neck, and brought down the cudgel over
+me.</p>
+
+<p>Then an amazing thing happened inside me. It seemed that the blows were
+descending on someone else, not me. The pain of them was a dull,
+far-away thing. Weak, fragile child that I was (known among the other
+children as &quot;Skinny Gregory&quot; and &quot;Spider-Legs&quot;) a man's slow fury was
+kindling in me ... let Lan beat me for a year. It didn't matter. When I
+grew up I would kill him for this.</p>
+
+<p>I began to curse boldly at him, calling him by all the obscene terms I
+had ever learned or heard. This, and the astounding fact that I no
+longer squirmed nor cried out, but physically yielded to him, as limp as
+an empty sack, brought him to a puzzled stop. But he sent me an extra
+blow for good measure as he flung me aside. That blow rattled about my
+head, missing my shoulders at which it had been aimed. I saw a shower
+of hot sparks soaring upward into a black void.</p>
+
+<p>I woke with water trickling down my face and all over me. I heard, far
+off, my uncle's voice calling, cajoling, coaxing, with great fright
+sounding through it....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, Johnnie ... I'm so sorry ... Johnnie, only speak to me!&quot; He
+was behaving exactly like Aunt Millie when she had St. Vitus' dance.</p>
+
+<p>He began tending me gently like a woman. He built a fire and made some
+coffee over it&mdash;he had brought coffee and some lunch. I crouched white
+and still, saying not a word.</p>
+
+<p>Landon squatted with his back turned, watching the coffee. His shotgun,
+leaning against the tree-trunk, caught my eye. I crept toward that
+shotgun. I trembled with anticipatory pleasure. God, but now I would pay
+him back!...</p>
+
+<p>But it was too heavy. I had struggled and brought it up, however, half
+to my shoulder, when that uncanny instinct that sometimes comes to
+people in mortal danger, came to Uncle Lan. He looked about.</p>
+
+<p>He went as pale as a sheet of paper.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;God, Johnnie!&quot; he almost screamed my name.</p>
+
+<p>I dropped the gun in the grass, sullenly, never speaking.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, were you&mdash;were you?&quot; he faltered, unnerved.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, I was going to give you both barrels ... and I'm sorry I didn't.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>All his desire to whip me had gone up like smoke.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, and I'll tell you what, you big, dirty &mdash;&mdash;, I'll kill you yet,
+when I grow big.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>That night I fainted at supper. When Granma put me to bed she saw how
+bruised and wealed I was all over ... for the first time she went after
+Uncle Lan&mdash;turned into a furious thing.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Shortly after, I was taken sick with typhoid fever. They used the
+starvation cure for it, in those days. When they began to give me solid
+food, I chased single grains of rice that fell out of the plate, about
+the quilt, just as a jeweller would pearls, if a necklace of them broke.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>With my recovery came news, after many days, of my father.</p>
+
+<p>The Hunkies were pushing out the Irish from the mills&mdash;cheaper labour.
+My grandmother could not afford to board the Hunkies, they lived so
+cheaply. Renewed poverty was breaking our household up.</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother was about to begin her living about from house to house
+with her married sons and daughters.</p>
+
+<p>My father was sending for me to come East. He had a good job there in
+the Composite Works at Haberford. He was at last able to take care of
+his son&mdash;his only child.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My grandmother and my aunt Millie took me to the railroad station. I
+tried to be brave and not cry. I succeeded, till the train began to pull
+out. Then I cried very much.</p>
+
+<p>The face of my grandmother pulled awry with grief and flowing tears.
+Aunt Millie wept, too.</p>
+
+<p>No, I wouldn't leave them. I would stay with them, work till I was rich
+and prosperous, never marry, give all my life to taking care of them, to
+saving them from the bitter grinding poverty we had shared together.</p>
+
+<p>I ran into the vestibule. But the train was gathering speed so rapidly
+that I did not dare jump off.</p>
+
+<p>I took my seat again. Soon my tears dried.</p>
+
+<p>The trees flapped by. The telegraph poles danced off in irregular lines.
+I became acquainted with my fellow passengers. I was happy.</p>
+
+<p>I made romance out of every red and green lamp in the railroad yards we
+passed through, out of the dingy little restaurants in which I ate....</p>
+
+<p>The mysterious swaying to and fro of the curtains in the sleeper
+thrilled me, as I looked out from my narrow berth.</p>
+
+<p>In the smoker I listened till late to the talk of the drummers who
+clenched big black cigars between their teeth, or slender Pittsburgh
+stogies, expertly flicking off the grey ash with their little fingers,
+as they yarned.</p>
+
+<p>I wore a tag on my coat lapel with my name and destination written on
+it. My grandmother had put it there in a painful, scrawling hand.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The swing out over wide, salt-bitten marshes, the Jersey marshes grey
+and smoky before dawn!... then, far off, on the horizon line, New York,
+serrate, mountainous, going upward great and shining in the still dawn!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Beneath a high, vast, clamorous roof of glass....</p>
+
+<p>As I stepped down to the platform my father met me.</p>
+
+<p>I knew him instantly though it had been years since I had seen him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My father whisked me once more across the long Jersey marshes. To
+Haberford. There, on the edge of the town, composed of a multitude of
+stone-built, separate, tin-roofed houses, stood the Composite Works. My
+father was foreman of the drying department, in which the highly
+inflammable sheets of composite were hung to dry....</p>
+
+<p>My father rented a large, front room, with a closet for clothes, of a
+commuting feed merchant named Jenkins ... whose house stood three or
+four blocks distant from the works.</p>
+
+<p>So we, my father and I, lived in that one room. But I had it to myself
+most of the time, excepting at night, when we shared the big double bed.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Still only a child, I was affectionate toward him. And, till he
+discouraged me, I kissed him good night every night, I liked the smell
+of the cigars he smoked.</p>
+
+<p>I wanted my father to be more affectionate to me, to notice me more. I
+thought that a father should be something intuitively understanding and
+sympathetic. And mine was offish ... of a different species.. wearing
+his trousers always neatly pressed ... and his neckties&mdash;he had them
+hanging in a neat, perfect row, never disarranged. The ends of them were
+always pulled even over the smooth stick on which they hung.</p>
+
+<p>I can see my father yet, as he stands before the mirror, painstakingly
+adjusting the tie he had chosen for the day's wear.</p>
+
+<p>I was not at all like him. Where I took my knee britches off, there I
+dropped them. They sprawled, as if half-alive, on the floor ... my
+shirt, clinging with one arm over a chair, as if to keep from falling to
+the floor.. my cap, flung hurriedly into a corner.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Christ, Johnnie, won't you ever learn to be neat or civilised? What
+kind of a boy are you, anyhow?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He thought I was stubborn, was determined not to obey him, for again and
+again I flung things about in the same disorder for which I was rebuked.
+But a grey chaos was settling over me. I trembled often like a person
+under a strange seizure. My mind did not readily respond to questions.
+It went here and there in a welter. Day dreams chased through my mind
+one after another in hurried heaps of confusion. I was lost ... groping
+... in a curious new world of growing emotions leavened with grievous,
+shapeless thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>Strange involuntary rhythms swung through my spirit and body. Fantastic
+imaginations took possession of me.</p>
+
+<p>And I prayed at night, kneeling, great waves of religious emotion going
+over me. And when my father saw me praying by the bedside, I felt
+awkwardly, shamefully happy that he saw me. And I took to posing a
+childishness, an innocence toward him.</p>
+
+<p>Jenkins, the little stringy feed merchant, had two daughters, one
+thirteen, Alva, and another Silvia, who was fifteen or sixteen.. and a
+son, Jimmy, about seven....</p>
+
+<p>It was over Alva and Silvia that my father and Jenkins used to come
+together, teasing me. And, though the girls drew me with an enchanting
+curiosity, I would protest that I didn't like girls ... that when I
+became full-grown I would never marry, but would study books and mind my
+business, single....</p>
+
+<p>After this close, crafty, lascivious joking between them, my father
+would end proudly with&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie's a strange boy, he really doesn't care about such things. All
+he cares about is books.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>So I succeeded in completely fooling my father as to the changes going
+on within me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Though I had not an atom of belief left in orthodox Christianity (or
+thought I had not) I still possessed this all-pervasive need to pray to
+God. A need as strong as physical hunger.</p>
+
+<p>Torn with these curious, new, sweet tumults, I turned to Him. And I
+prayed to be pure ... like Sir Galahad, or any of the old knights who
+wore their lady's favour in chastity, a male maiden,&mdash;and yet achieved
+great quests and were manly in their deeds....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The crying and singing of the multitudinous life of insects and animals
+in the spring marshes under the stars almost made me weep, as I roamed
+about, distracted yet exalted, alone, at night.</p>
+
+<p>I was studying the stars, locating the constellations with a little book
+of star-maps I possessed.</p>
+
+<p>I wanted, was in search of, something ... something ... maybe other
+worlds could give this something to me ... what vistas of infinite
+imagination I saw about me in the wide-stretching, star-sprinkled sky!</p>
+
+<p>Dreaming of other worlds swinging around other suns, seething with
+strange millions of inhabitants, through all space, I took to reading
+books on astronomy ... Newcomb ... Proctor's <i>Other Worlds</i> ... Camille
+Flammarion ... Garret Serviss as he wrote in the daily papers ... and
+novels and romances dealing with life on the moon, on Mars, on Venus....</p>
+
+<p>During my night-rovings I lay down in dark hollows, sometimes, and
+prayed to God as fervently as if the next moment I might expect His
+shining face to look down at me out of the velvet, far-reaching
+blackness of night:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;O God, make me pure, and wonderful ... let me do great things for
+humanity ... make me handsome, too, O God, so that girls and women will
+love me, and wonder at me, in awe, while I pass by unperturbed&mdash;till one
+day, having kept myself wholly for <i>her</i> as she has kept herself for
+me,&mdash;give me then the one wonderful and beautiful white maiden who will
+be mine ... mine ... all and alone and altogether, as I shall be all and
+alone and altogether hers. And let me do things to be wondered at by
+watching multitudes, while bands play and people applaud.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Such was my mad, adolescent prayer, while the stars seemed to answer in
+sympathetic silence. And I would both laugh and weep, thrilled to the
+core with ineffable, enormous joy because of things I could not
+understand ... and I would want to shout and dance extravagantly.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The Jenkins girls were curious about me, and while they, together with
+the rest of the feed merchant's family, thought me slightly &quot;touched,&quot;
+still they liked the unusual things I said about the stars ... and about
+great men whose biographies I was reading ... and about Steele's Zoology
+I was studying, committing all the Latin nomenclature of classification
+to heart, with a curious hunger for even the husks and impedimenta of
+learning....</p>
+
+<p>Silvia was a rose, half-opened ... an exquisite young creature. Alva was
+gawky and younger. She was callow and moulting, flat-footed and
+long-shanked. Her face was sallow and full of freckles.</p>
+
+<p>In the long Winter evenings we sat together by the warmth of the kitchen
+stove, alone, studying our lessons,&mdash;the place given over entirely to us
+for our school work.</p>
+
+<p>A touch of the hand with either of them, but with Silvia especially, was
+a superb intoxication, an ecstasy I have never since known. When all my
+power of feeling fluttered into my fingers ... and when we kissed, each
+night, good-night (the girls kissed me because I pretended to be
+embarrassed, to object to it) our homework somehow done,&mdash;the thought of
+their kisses was a memory to lie and roll in, for hours, after going to
+bed.</p>
+
+<p>I would pull away as far as I could from my father, and think
+luxuriously, awake sometimes till dawn.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I hated school so that I ran away. For the first time in my life, but by
+no means my last, I hopped a freight.</p>
+
+<p>I was absent several weeks.</p>
+
+<p>When I returned, weary, and dirty from riding in coal cars, my father
+was so glad to see me he didn't whip me. He was, in fact, a little proud
+of me. For he was always boastful of the many miles he had travelled
+through the various states, as salesman, not many years before. And
+after I had bathed, and had put on the new suit which he bought me, I
+grew talkative about my adventures, too.</p>
+
+<p>I now informed my father that I wanted to go to work. Which I didn't so
+very much. But anything, if only it was not going to school. He was not
+averse to my getting a job. He took out papers for me, and gave me work
+under him, in the drying department of the Composite Works. My wage was
+three dollars a week. My task, to hang the thin sheets of composite, cut
+from three to fifteen hundredths of an inch in thickness, on metal clips
+to dry.</p>
+
+<p>In the Composite Works I discovered a new world&mdash;the world of factory
+life.</p>
+
+<p>I liked to be sent to the other departments on errands. There were
+whirling wheels and steadily recurring, ever-lapsing belts ... and men
+and women working and working in thin fine dust, or among a strong smell
+as of rubbed amber&mdash;the characteristic smell of composite when subjected
+to friction....</p>
+
+<p>And these men and women were continually joking and jesting and making
+horse-play at one another's expense, as rough people in their social
+unease do.</p>
+
+<p>They seemed part and adjunct to the machines, the workers! Strong,
+sturdy, bared forearms flashed regularly like moving, rhythmic shafts
+... deft hands clasped and reached, making only necessary movements.</p>
+
+<p>Each department housed a different kind of worker. In the grinding,
+squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with
+women.</p>
+
+<p>They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness
+and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade. Always they
+were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone. And, if the trick
+were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed it,
+laughing grimly with the &quot;boys.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Once I was sent to the machine shop for &quot;strap oil.&quot; I was thrown over a
+greasy bench and was given it&mdash;the laying on of a heavy strap not at all
+gently! I ran away, outraged, to tell my father; as I left, the men
+seemed more attentive to their work than ever. They smiled quietly to
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>In the comb department the throwing of chunks of composite was the
+workers' chief diversion. And if you were strange there, you were sure
+to be hit as you passed through.</p>
+
+<p>The acid house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards
+around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of
+some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company
+could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of
+America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,&mdash;who on
+week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the
+pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each
+man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But
+many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness,
+dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they
+dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was
+not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy
+Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young
+girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked,
+jaundice-coloured death's-heads. They went about, soon, with eyes that
+had grey gaunt hollows about them&mdash;pits already cavernous like the
+eye-pits of a skull.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Well, they don't <i>have</i> to work in there unless they want to, do they?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ah, they're only a lot of foreigners anyhow.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Three dollars a week was a lot of money for me ... a fortune, because I
+had never owned anything higher than nickles and dimes before.</p>
+
+<p>And my father, for the first few weeks, allowed me to have all I earned,
+to do with as I wished. Later on he made me save two dollars a week.</p>
+
+<p>Each Saturday I went down to Newark and bought books ... very cheap,
+second hand ones, at Breasted's book store.</p>
+
+<p>Every decisive influence in life has been a book, every vital change in
+my life, I might say, has been brought about by a book.</p>
+
+<p>My father owned a copy of Lord Byron in one volume. It was the only book
+he cared for, outside of Shakespeare's <i>Hamlet</i>, together with, of
+course, his own various books on Free Masonry and other secret
+societies.</p>
+
+<p>At first, oddly enough, it was my instinct for pedantry and linguistic
+learning that drew me to Byron. I became enamoured of the Latin and
+Greek quotations with which he headed his lyrics in <i>Hours of Idleness</i>,
+and laboriously I copied them, lying on my belly on the floor, under the
+lamp light. And under these quotations I indited boyish rhymes of my
+own.</p>
+
+<p>Then I began to read&mdash;<i>Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus&mdash;the
+Deformed Transformed ... The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The
+Prisoner of Chillon</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The frontispiece to the book was a portrait of Byron with flowing tie
+and open shirt. Much as a devout Catholic wears a gold cross around his
+neck to signify his belief, with a like devoutness I took to wearing my
+shirt open at the neck, and a loose, flowing black tie. And I ruffled my
+hair in the Byronic style.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I see you're discovering Byron,&quot; my father laughed.</p>
+
+<p>Then he slyly intimated that the best of the poet's works I had
+evidently overlooked, <i>Childe Harold</i> and <i>Don Juan</i>. And he quoted me
+the passage about the lifted skirt above the peeking ankle. And he
+reinforced his observation by grinning salaciously.</p>
+
+<p>From that time on I searched with all the fever of adolescence through
+Byron for every passage which bore on sex, the mystery of which was
+beginning to devour my days.</p>
+
+<p>I read and pondered, shaking with eagerness, the stories of Haidee, of
+Antonia and Julia&mdash;the tale of the dream of Dudu. I dwelt in a
+musk-scented room of imagination. Silver fountains played about me.
+Light forms flowed and undulated in white draperies over mosaiced
+pavements ... flashing dark eyes shone mysteriously and amorously,
+starry through curtains and veils.</p>
+
+<p>My every thought was alert with na&iuml;ve, speculative curiosity concerning
+the mystery of woman.</p>
+
+<p>Through Byron I learned about Moore. I procured the latter's <i>Lalla
+Rookh</i>, his odes of Anacreon.</p>
+
+<p>From Byron and Moore I built up an adolescent ideal of
+woman,&mdash;exquisitely sensual and sexual, and yet an angel, superior to
+men: an ideal of a fellow creature who was both a living, breathing
+mystery and a walking sweetmeat ... a white creation moved and actuated
+by instinct and intuition&mdash;a perpetually inexplicable ecstasy and
+madness to man.</p>
+
+<p>I drew more and more apart to myself. Always looked upon as queer by the
+good, bourgeois families that surrounded us, I was now considered madder
+still.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>How wonderful it would be to become a hermit on some far mountain side,
+wearing a grey robe, clear-browed and calmly speculative under the
+stars&mdash;or, maybe,&mdash;more wonderful: a singer for men, a travelling
+minstrel&mdash;in each case, whether minstrel or hermit, whether teaching
+great doctrines or singing great songs for all the world&mdash;to have come
+to me, as a pilgrim seeking enlightenment, the most beautiful maiden in
+the world, one who was innocent of what man meant. And together we would
+learn the mystery of life, and live in mutual purity and innocence.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The strangeness of my physical person lured me. I marvelled at,
+scrutinised intimately the wonder of myself. I was insatiable in my
+curiosities.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My discovery of my body, and my books, held me in equal bondage. I
+neglected my work in the drying room. My father was vexed. He'd hunt me
+out of the obscure corners back of the hanging sheets of composite where
+I hid, absorbed in myself and the book I held, and would run me back to
+work.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One day, in the factory, two other boys on an errand from another
+department, came back where I sat, in a hidden nook, reading Thompson's
+<i>Seasons</i>. One of them spit over my shoulder, between the leaves. I
+leaped to my feet, infuriated, and a fight began. The desecration of my
+beloved poetry gave me such angry strength that I struck out lustily and
+dropped both of them....</p>
+
+<p>Rushing in on the uproar and blaming me for it, my father seized me by
+the collar. He booted the other boys off, who were by this time on their
+feet again, took me up into the water-tower, and beat me with one of the
+heavy sticks, with metal clips on it, that was used for hanging the
+composite on.</p>
+
+<p>Still trembling with the fight, I shook with a superadded ague of fear.
+My father's chastisement brought back to me with a chill the remembrance
+of the beatings Uncle Landon had given me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;By God, Johnnie, this is the only thing there's left to do with you.&quot;
+He flung me aside. I lay there sobbing.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Tell me, my boy, what <i>is</i> the matter with you?&quot; he asked, softening.
+Unlike Landon, he was usually gentle with me. He seldom treated me
+harshly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Father, I don't want to work any more.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't want to work?... but you quit school just to <i>go</i> to work, at
+your own wish!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to go back to school!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Back to school?... you'll be behind the rest by now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've been studying a lot by myself,&quot; I replied, forgetting the feel of
+the stick already and absorbed in the new idea.</p>
+
+<p>By this time we were down the stairs again, and I was sitting by my
+father's desk. He took up the unlighted cigar he always carried in his
+mouth (for smoking was not allowed among such inflammable material as
+composite). He sucked at it thoughtfully from habit, as if he were
+smoking.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look here, my son, what <i>is</i> the matter with you ... won't you tell
+your daddy?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nothing's the matter with me, Pop!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're getting thin as a shadow ... are you feeling sick?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, Pop!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're a queer little duck.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There was a long silence.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're always reading ... good books too ... yet you're no more good in
+school than you are at work ... I can't make you out, by the living God,
+I can't ... what is it you want to be?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't know, only I want to go back to school again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But what did you leave for?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I hated arithmetic.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What do you want to study, then?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Languages.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Would you like a special course in the high school?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Principal Balling of the Keeley Heights High School might be able to
+work you in. He is a brother Mason of mine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I know some Latin and Greek and Ancient History already. I have been
+teaching myself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, you <i>are</i> a queer fish ... there never was anyone like you in the
+family, except your mother. She used to read and read, and read. And
+once or twice she wrote a short story ... had one accepted, even, by the
+<i>Youth's Companion</i> once, but never printed.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Though it was some months off till the Fall term began, on the strength
+of my desire to return to school my father let me throw up my job....</p>
+
+<p>But we soon found out that, brother in the bond, or not, Principal
+Balling could not get me into high school because I was not well enough
+prepared. My studying and reading by myself, though it had been quite
+wide, had also been too desultory. The principal advised a winter in the
+night school where men and boys who had been delayed in their education
+went to learn.</p>
+
+<p>I ran about that summer, with a gang of fellow adolescents; our
+headquarters, strange to say, being the front room and outside steps of
+an undertaker's establishment. This was because our leader was the
+undertaker's boy-of-all-work. Harry Mitchell was his name. Harry, a sort
+of young tramp, fat and pimply-faced, had jaunted into our town one day
+from New York, and had found work with the undertaker. Harry had watery
+blue eyes and a round, moon face. He was a whirlwind fighter but he
+never fought with us. It was only with the leaders of other gangs or
+with strangers that he fought.</p>
+
+<p>Harry continued our education in the secrets and mysteries of life, in
+the stable-boy and gutter way,&mdash;by passing about among us books from a
+sort of underground library ... vile things, fluently conceived and made
+even more vivid and animal with obscene and unimaginable illustrations.
+And our minds were trailed black with slime.</p>
+
+<p>And whole afternoons we stood about on the sidewalk jeering and
+fleering, jigging and singing, talking loud, horse-laughing, and
+hungrily eyeing the girls and women that passed by, who tried hard to
+seem, as they went, not self-conscious and stiff-stepping because of our
+observation ... and sometimes we whistled after them or called out to
+them in falsetto voices.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As a child my play had been strenuous and absorbing, like work that one
+is happy at, so that at night I fell asleep with all the pleasant
+fatigue of a labourer.</p>
+
+<p>It is the adolescent who loafs and dawdles on street corners. For the
+cruel and fearful urge of sex stirs so powerfully in him, that he hardly
+knows what to do, and all his days and nights he writhes in the grip of
+terrible instincts.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Yet, in the midst of the turbidness of adolescence, I was still two
+distinct personalities. With my underground library of filth hidden
+away where my father could not find it, at the same time I kept and
+read my other books. The first were for the moments of madness and
+curious ecstasy I had learned how to induce.</p>
+
+<p>But my better self periodically revolted. And I took oath that I would
+never again spew a filthy expression from my mouth or do an ill thing. I
+suffered all the agonies of the damned in hell. I believe hell to be the
+invention of adolescence.</p>
+
+<p>Always, inevitably, I returned to my wallow and the gang.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We were not always loafing in front of the undertaker's shop. Sometimes
+we were quite active. Many windows and street lamps were smashed. And we
+derived great joy from being pursued by the &quot;cops&quot;&mdash;especially by a
+certain fat one, for whom we made life a continual burden.</p>
+
+<p>Once we went in a body to the outskirts of the town and stoned a
+greenhouse. Its owner chased us across ploughed fields. We flung stones
+back at him. One hit him with a dull thud and made him cry out with
+pain, and he left off pursuing us. It was so dark we could not be
+identified.</p>
+
+<p>One of our favourite diversions was to follow mature lovers as they
+strolled a-field, hoping to catch them in the midst of intimate
+endearments.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My father received a raise of a few dollars in salary. As it was they
+paid him too little, because he was easy-going. The additional weekly
+money warranted our leaving the Jenkinses and renting four rooms all our
+own, over the main street. This meant that I was to have a whole room to
+myself, and I was glad ... a whole room where I could stand a small
+writing desk and set up my books in rows. With an extreme effort I
+burned my underground books.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>All the women liked my father. He dressed neatly and well. His trousers
+were never without their fresh crease. He was very vain of his neat
+appearance, even to the wearing of a fresh-cut flower in his buttonhole.
+This vanity made him also wear his derby indoors and out, because of his
+entirely bald head.</p>
+
+<p>Every time he could devise an excuse for going to the departments where
+the women worked, he would do so, and flirt with them. He, for this
+reason I am sure, made special friends with Schlegel, foreman of the
+collar department. I never saw a man derive a keener pleasure out of
+just standing and talking with women.</p>
+
+<p>Though, like most men, he enjoyed a smutty story, yet I never heard him
+say a really gross thing about any woman. And his language was always in
+good English, with few curses and oaths in it.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Our new place was a bit of heaven to me. I procured a copy of Whitman's
+<i>Leaves of Grass</i>, of Darwin's <i>Origin of Species</i> and <i>Descent of Man</i>.
+Laboriously I delved through these last two books, my knowledge of
+elementary zoology helping me to the explication of their meaning.</p>
+
+<p>The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I
+knew it all, before,&mdash;as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought
+out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life,
+exactly to the Darwinian conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>Whitman's <i>Leaves of Grass</i> became my Bible.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been
+working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a
+daily paper.</p>
+
+<p>And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly
+discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the
+victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would
+follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and
+degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner
+still. I fell into a hacking cough.</p>
+
+<p>And, at the same time, I became more perverse in my affectation of
+innocence and purity&mdash;saying always to my father that I never could care
+for girls, and that what people married for was beyond my comprehension.
+Thus I threw his alarmed inquisitiveness off the track....</p>
+
+<p>I procured books about sexual life. My most cherished volume was an old
+family medical book with charred covers, smelling of smoke and water,
+that I had dug out of the ruins of a neighbouring fire.</p>
+
+<p>In the book was a picture of a nude woman, entitled <i>The Female Form
+Divine</i>. I tore this from the body of the book and kept it under my
+pillow.</p>
+
+<p>I would draw it forth, press it against myself, speak soft words of
+affection to it, caress and kiss it, fix my mind on it as if it were a
+living presence. Often the grey light of dawn would put its ashen hand
+across my sunken cheeks before dead-heavy, exhausted sleep proved kind
+to me....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Again: my imagination grew to be all graveyards, sepulchral urns,
+skeletons. How beautiful it would be to die young and a poet, to die
+like the young English poet, Henry Kirke White, whose works I was so
+enamoured of. The wan consumptive glamour of his career led me, as he
+had done, to stay up all night, night after night, studying....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>After the surging and mounting of that in me which I could not resist,
+several hours of strange, abnormal calm would ensue and for that space I
+would swing calm and detached from myself, like a luminous, disembodied
+entity. And then it was that I would write and write. The verses would
+come rushing from my pen. I must hurry with them before my early death
+overtook me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There were two visions I saw continually in my sleep:</p>
+
+<p>One was of myself walking with a proud step down a vast hall, the usual
+wreath of fame on my head. I wore a sort of toga. And of course a great
+concourse of people stood apart in silent reverence on either side,
+gazing at me admiringly. With the thunder of their hand-clapping I would
+wake.</p>
+
+<p>The other dream was of being buried alive.</p>
+
+<p>I lay there, smelling the dark earth, and not being able to stir so much
+as the last joint of my little finger. Yet every nerve of me ached with
+sentience.. and I woke gasping, my face bathed with tears and the
+moisture of terror.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>From head to foot hot flushes swept over me. And I was stung with the
+pricking of a million needles, going in sharply at every pore!... was
+bathed in cold sweats. And I hoped I was dying.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, what are you doing to yourself?&quot; And my father fixed his eyes
+on me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nothing, Father!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If you weren't such a good boy, I'd&mdash;&quot; and he halted, to continue,
+&quot;as it is, you're a clean boy, and I'm proud of you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I struggled hard to speak with him, to make a confidant of him, but I
+could not.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I wonder,&quot; he added with alarm in his voice, &quot;I wonder if you're
+catching consumption, the disease your mother died of ... you must be
+careful of yourself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I told him I would be careful....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I think I'll send you back home to visit the folks this fall.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There was a restaurant just around the corner from where we lived in our
+second story flat&mdash;a restaurant which bore the legend stuck up in the
+window, &quot;Home Cooking.&quot; The sign itself was of a dull, dirty,
+fly-specked white which ought to have been a sufficient warning to the
+nice palate.</p>
+
+<p>The place was run by a family of three ... there was Mister Brown, the
+man, a huge-built, blotch-faced, retired stone-mason, his meagre little
+wife, Mrs. Brown, and their grass-widow daughter, Flora.... Flora did
+but little work, except to lean familiarly and with an air of unspoken
+intimacy, over the tables of the men, as she slouched up with their food
+... and she liked to sit outside in the back yard when there was
+sunshine ... in the hammock for more comfort ... shelling peas or
+languidly peeling potatoes.</p>
+
+<p>Flora's vibrant, little, wasplike mother whose nose was so sharp and red
+that it made me think of Paul's ferret&mdash;she bustled and buzzed about,
+doing most of the work.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Looking out from our back window, I could see Flora lolling, and I would
+read or write a little and then the unrest would become too strong and I
+would go down to her. Soon two potato knives would be working.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come and sit by me in the hammock.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I liked that invitation ... she was plump to heaviness and sitting in
+the hammock crushed us pleasantly together.</p>
+
+<p>This almost daily propinquity goaded my adolescent hunger into an
+infatuation for her,&mdash;I thought I was in love with her,&mdash;though I never
+quite reconciled myself to the cowlikeness with which she chewed gum.</p>
+
+<p>She was as free and frank of herself as I was curious and timid.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, what small feet and little hands you have ... you're a
+regular aristocrat.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>A pause.</p>
+
+<p>I give her a poem written to her. She reads it, letting her knife stick
+in a half-peeled potato. She looks up at me out of heavy-lidded eyes.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I believe you're falling in love with me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I trembled, answered nothing, was silent.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Kiss me!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Seeing me so a-tremble, she obeyed her own injunction. With slow
+deliberation she crushed her lips, full and voluptuous, into mine. The
+warmth of them seemed to catch hold of something deep down in me, and,
+with exquisite painfulness, draw it out. Blinded with emotion, I
+clutched close to her. She laughed. I put one hand over her full breast
+as infants do. She pushed me back.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There, that's enough for one day&mdash;a promise of sweets to come!&quot; and she
+laughed again, with a hearty purr like a cat that has a mouse at its
+mercy.</p>
+
+<p>She rose and carried in the pan of potatoes we had just finished
+peeling. And I saw her sturdy, but not unshapely ankles going from me as
+she went up the steps from the yard, her legs gleaming white through her
+half-silk hose (that were always coming down, and that she was always
+twisting up, just under her knees, before my abashed eyes). She wore
+shoes much too little for her plump feet ... and, when not abroad, let
+them yawn open unbuttoned. And her plump body was alive and bursting
+through her careless, half-fastened clothes.</p>
+
+<p>She sang with a deep sultriness of voice as she walked away with the pan
+of potatoes.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;You ought to see my Florrie read books!&quot; exclaimed the mother.</p>
+
+<p>Flora did read a lot ... but chiefly the erotic near-society novels that
+Belford used to print....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, she's a smart girl, she is.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And the father....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I won't work till the unions get better conditions for a man. I won't
+be no slave to no man.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One sultry afternoon I went into the restaurant and found Flora away.
+Poignantly disappointed, I asked where she was.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;Gone on a trip!&quot; her mother explained, without explaining.</p>
+
+<p>From time to time Flora went on &quot;trips.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>And one morning, several mornings, Flora was not there to serve at the
+breakfast table ... and I was hurt when I learned that she had gone back
+to Newark to live, and had left no word for me. Her father told me she
+&quot;had gone back to George,&quot; meaning her never-seen husband from whom she
+evidently enjoyed intervals of separation and grass-widowhood.</p>
+
+<p>I was puzzled and hurt indeed, because she had not even said good-bye to
+me. But soon came this brief note from her:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>&quot;Dearest Boy:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Do come up to Newark and see me some afternoon. And come
+more than once. Bring your Tennyson that you was reading aloud
+to me. I love to hear you read poetry. I think you are a dear and
+want to see more of you. But I suppose you have already forgotten</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Your loving</p>
+
+<p class='right'>FLORA.&quot;</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>In the absurd and pitiful folly of youth I lifted the letter to my lips
+and kissed it. I trembled with eagerness till the paper rattled as I
+read it again and again. It seemed like some precious holy script.</p>
+
+<p>I bolted my lunch nervously and it stuck half way down in a hard lump. I
+would go to her that very afternoon.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The car on which I rode was subject to too frequent stoppage for me. I
+leaped out and walked along with brisk strides. But the car sailed forth
+ahead of me now on a long stretch of roadway and I ran after it to catch
+it again. The conductor looked back at me in derisive scorn and made a
+significant whirling motion near his temple with his index finger,
+indicating that I had wheels there....</p>
+
+<p>At last I found the street where Flora lived. I trailed from door to
+door till the number she had given me met my eye. It made my heart jump
+and my knees give in, to be so near the quarry. For the first time I was
+to be alone with a woman I desired.</p>
+
+<p>At the bell, it took me a long time to gain courage to pull. But at last
+I reached out my hand. I had to stand my ground. I couldn't run away
+now. The bell made a tinkling sound far within.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The door opened cautiously. A head of touseled black hair crept out.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, dear! <i>You</i>!... you <i>are</i> a surprise!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Did I really detect an echo of disappointment in her deep, contralto
+voice?</p>
+
+<p>Frightened in my heart like a trapped animal, I went in. Down a long,
+dusk, musty-smelling corridor and into a back-apartment on the first
+floor; she led me into a room which was bed-and-sitting room combined.
+In one part of it stood several upholstered chairs with covers on,
+cluttered about a plain table. In the other part stood a bureau heaped
+with promiscuous toilette articles, and a huge, brass-knobbed bed with a
+spread of lace over its great, semi-upright pillows.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Shall I let in a little more light, dear?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>For the blinds were two-thirds down.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I like to sit and think in the dark,&quot; she explained, and her one dimple
+broke in a rich, brown-faced animal smile.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, but I&mdash;I want to see your lovely face,&quot; I stuttered, with much
+effort at gallantry....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;He's not at home ... he's off at Wilmington, on a job&quot; (meaning her
+husband, though I had not asked about him). &quot;But what made you come so
+soon? You must of just got my letter!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I&mdash;I wanted you,&quot; I blurted ... in the next moment I was at her feet in
+approved romantic fashion, following up my declaration of desire. Calmly
+she let me kneel there ... I put my arms about her plump legs ... I was
+almost fainting....</p>
+
+<p>After a while she took me by the hair with both hands. She slowly bent
+my head back as I knelt. Leaning over, she kissed deliberately, deeply
+into my mouth ... then, gazing into my eyes with a puzzled expression,
+as I relaxed to her&mdash;almost like something inanimate....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, you dear boy, I believe you're innocent like a child. And yet you
+know so much about books ... and you're so wise, too!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As she spoke she pushed back my mad hands from their clutching and
+reaching. She held both of them in hers, and closed them in against her
+half-uncovered, full breasts, pressing them there.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do you mean to tell me that you've never gone out with the boys for a
+good time?... how old are you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I told her I was just sixteen.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do you think I'm ... I'm too young?&quot; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I feel as if I was your mother ... and I'm not much over twenty ... but
+do sit up on a chair, dear!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She stood on her feet, shook out her dress, smiled curiously, and
+started out of the room. I was up and after her, my arms around her
+waist, desperate. She slid around in my arms, laughing quietly to
+herself till the back of her head was against my mouth. I kissed and
+kissed the top of her head. Then she turned slowly to face me, pressing
+all the contours of her body into me ... she crushed her bosom to mine.
+Already I was quite tall; and she was stocky and short ... she lifted
+her face up to me, a curious kindling light in her eyes ... of a
+phosphorescent, greenish lustre, like those chance gleams in a cat's
+eyes you catch at night....</p>
+
+<p>She took my little finger and deliberately bit it ... then she leaned
+away from my seeking mouth, my convulsive arms....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You want too much, all at once,&quot; she said, and, whirling about broke
+away....</p>
+
+<p>With the table between me and her....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wouldn't you like a little beer, and some sandwiches? I have some in
+the ice box.... <i>Do</i> let's have some beer and sandwiches.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I assented, though hating the bitter taste of beer, and hungry for her
+instead of sandwiches. And soon we were sitting down calmly at the
+table, or rather, she was sitting down calmly ... baffled, I pretended
+to be calm.</p>
+
+<p>As she rose for something or other, I sprang around the table and caught
+her close to me once more, marvelling, at the same time, at my loss of
+shyness, my new-found audacity. Again she snuggled in close to me, her
+flesh like a warm, palpitating cushion.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Flora, my darling ... help me!&quot; I cried, half-sobbing.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What do you mean?&quot; laughing.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I love you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I know all <i>you</i> want!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I do love you ... see....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And I prostrated myself, in a frenzy, at her feet.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say, you're the queerest kid I've ever known.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And she walked out of the room abruptly, while I rose to my feet and sat
+in a chair, dejected. She came in again, a twinkle in her eye.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't torture me, Flora!&quot; I pleaded, &quot;either send me away, or&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Stop pestering me ... let's talk ... read me some of that Tennyson you
+gave me....&quot; and I began reading aloud, for there was nothing else she
+would for the moment, have me do....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;You're a poet,&quot; whimsically, &quot;I want you to write some letters to me
+because I know you must write beautiful.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;if you will only let me love you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, ain't I lettin' you love me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A perverse look came into her face, a thought, an idea that pleased
+her&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've lots and lots of letters from men,&quot; she began, &quot;men that have been
+in love with me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh!&quot; I exclaimed weakly ... she had just expressed a desire to add some
+of mine to the pack ... the next thing that she followed up with gave me
+a start&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Your father&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My father?&mdash;&quot; I echoed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He's written me the best letters of all ... wait a minute ... I'll read
+a little here and there to you.&quot; And, gloating and triumphant, and
+either not seeing or, in her vulgarity, not caring what effect the
+reading of my father's love letters would have on me, she began reading
+ardent passages aloud. &quot;See!&quot; She showed me a page to prove that it was
+in his handwriting. The letters told a tale easy to understand. She was
+so eager in her vanity that she read on and on without seeing in my
+face what, seen, would have made her stop.</p>
+
+<p>A frightful trembling seized me, a loathing, a horror. This was my
+father's woman ... and ... I!...</p>
+
+<p>I sat on, dumbfounded, paralysed. I remembered his stories of trips to
+T&mdash;&mdash; and other places on supposed lodge business ... unluckily, I also
+remembered that several times Flora had been off on trips at the same
+time.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Just listen to this, will you!&quot; and she began at another passage.</p>
+
+<p>She was so absorbed in her reading that she did not see how I was on my
+feet ... had seized my hat ... was going.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm sorry, Flora, but I've got to go!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What?&quot; looking up and surprised, &quot;&mdash;got to go?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes ... Yes ... I must&mdash;must go!&quot; my lips trembled.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, we're just getting acquainted ... I didn't mean for you to go
+yet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She rose, dropping the letters all in a heap.</p>
+
+<p>She was the aggressive one now. She drew me to her quickly, &quot;Stay ...
+and I'll promise to be good to you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I pushed back, loathing ... loathing her and myself, but myself more,
+because in spite of all my disgust, my pulses leaped quick again to
+hers.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sit down again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I did not listen, but stood.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I was thinking that you would stay for supper and then we could go to
+some show and after come back here and I would give you a good time.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I staggered out, shocked beyond belief, the last animal flush had died
+out of me. All my body was ice-cold.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Promise me you'll come again this day next week,&quot; she called after me
+persistently.</p>
+
+<p>She drew the door softly shut and left me reeling down the dark
+corridor.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I could hardly speak to my father that night. I avoided him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At the creeping edge of dawn I woke from a dream with a jerk as I slid
+down an endless black abyss. The abyss was my bed's edge and I found
+myself on the floor. When I went to rise again, I had to clutch things
+to stand up. I was so weak I sat on the bed breathing heavily. I tumbled
+backward into bed again and lay in a daze during which dream-objects
+mixed with reality and my room walked full of people from all the books
+I had read&mdash;all to evaporate as my father's face grew, from a cluster of
+white foreheads and myriads of eyes, into <i>him</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, wake up ... are you sick?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Please go away from me and let me alone.&quot; I turned my face to the wall
+in loathing.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll call a doctor.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The doctor came. He felt my pulse. Put something under my tongue.
+Whispered my father in a room, apart. Left.</p>
+
+<p>My father returned, dejected, yet trying to act light and merry.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What did the doctor say?&quot; I forced myself to ask of him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To be frank, Johnnie ... you're old enough to learn the truth ... he
+thinks you're taken down with consumption.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's what my mother died of.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My father shuddered and put his face down in his hands. I felt a little
+sorry for him, then.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well you've got to go West now ... and work on a farm ... or
+something.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I began to get ready for my trip West. Surely enough, I had consumption,
+if symptoms counted ... pains under the shoulder blades ... spitting of
+blood ... night-sweats....</p>
+
+<p>But my mind was quickened: I read Morley's <i>History of English
+Literature</i> ... Chaucer all through ... Spenser ... even Gower's
+<i>Confessio Amantis</i> and Lydgate's ballads ... my recent discovery of
+Chatterton having made me Old English-mad.</p>
+
+<p>As I read the life of young Chatterton I envied him, his fame and his
+early death and more than ever, I too desired to die young.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The week before I was to set out my father calmly discovered to me that
+he intended I should work on a farm as a hand for the next four years,
+when I reached Ohio ... was even willing to pay the farmer something to
+employ me. This is what the doctor had prescribed as the only thing that
+would save my life&mdash;work in the open air. My father had written Uncle
+Beck to see that this program was inaugurated.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I won't become a clod-hopper,&quot; I exclaimed, seeing the dreary, endless
+monotony of such a life.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But it will do you good. It will be a fine experience for you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If it's such a fine experience why don't you go and do it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I won't stand any nonsense.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'd rather die.... I'm going to die anyhow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, if you don't do what I tell you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I won't.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We'll see.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Very well, father, we <i>will</i> see.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If you weren't such a sick kid I'd trounce you.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>You could approach Antonville by surrey, buggy or foot ... along a
+winding length of dusty road ... or muddy ... according to rain or
+shine.</p>
+
+<p>My Uncle Beck drove me out in a buggy.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Alice, so patient-faced and pretty and sweet-eyed in her neat
+poverty&mdash;greeted me with a warm kiss.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, you'll soon be well now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I won't work on a farm.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Never mind, dear ... don't worry about that just yet.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>That afternoon I sat with Aunt Alice in the kitchen, watching her make
+bread. Everyone else was out: Uncle Beck, on a case ... Cousin Anders,
+over helping with the harvest on a neighbouring farm ... Cousin Anna was
+also with the harvesters, helping cook for the hands ... for the
+Doctor's family needed all the outside money they could earn.</p>
+
+<p>For Uncle Beck was a dreamer. He thought more of his variorum
+Shakespeare than he did of his medical practice. And he was slow-going
+and slow-speaking and so conscientious that he told patients the truth
+... all which did not help him toward success and solid emolument. He
+would take eggs in payment for his visits ... or jars of preserves ...
+or fresh meat, if the farmer happened to be slaughtering.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Where's Granma?&quot; I asked Aunt Alice, as she shoved a batch of bread in
+the oven.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She's out Halton way ... she'll go crazy with joy when she gets word
+you're back home. She'll start for here right off as soon as she hears
+the news. She's visiting with Lan and his folks.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When I heard Lan mentioned I couldn't help giving a savage look.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Alice misinterpreted.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What, Johnnie&mdash;won't you be glad to see her!... you ought to ... she's
+said over and over again that she loved you more than she did any of her
+own children.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It isn't that&mdash;I hate Landon. I wish he was dead or someone would kill
+him for me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, you ought to forgive and forget. It ain't Christian.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't care. I'm not a Christian.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;O Johnnie!&quot; shocked ... then, after a pause of reproach which I
+enjoyed&mdash;&quot;your Uncle Lan's toned down a lot since then ... married ...
+has four children ... one every year.&quot; And Alice laughed whimsically.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;and he's stopped gambling and drinking, and he's got a good job as
+master-mechanic in a factory....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He was young ... he was only a boy in the days when he whipped you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, and I suppose I was old?... I tell you, Aunt Alice, it's something
+I can't forget ... the dirty coward,&quot; and I swore violently, forgetting
+myself.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment Uncle Beck appeared suddenly at the door, back from a
+case.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here, here, that won't do! I don't allow that kind of language in my
+household.&quot; And he gave me a severe and admonishing look before going
+off on another and more urgent call that waited him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;And how's Granma been getting on?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;aging rapidly ... &quot; a pause, &quot; ... hasn't got either of the two
+houses on Mansion Avenue now ... sold them and divided the money among
+her children ... gave us some ... and Millie ... and Lan ... wouldn't
+hear of 'no' ... &quot; parenthetically, &quot;Uncle Joe didn't need any; he's
+always prospered since the early days, you know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And what's Granma up to these days?&quot; For she was always doing sweet,
+ignorant, childish, impractical things.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;spirit-rapping is it? or palmistry? or magnetic healing? or what?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You'll laugh!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Tell me!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She's got a beau.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What? a beau? and she eighty if a day!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, we&mdash;all her children&mdash;think it's absurd. And we're all trying to
+advise her against it ... but she vows she's going to get married to him
+anyhow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And who is her 'fellow'&quot;?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;a one-legged Civil War veteran ... a Pennsylvania Dutchman named
+Snyder ... owns a house near Beaver Falls ... draws a pension ... he's a
+jolly old apple-cheeked fellow ... there's no doubt they love each other
+... only&mdash;only it seems rather horrible for two people as old as they
+are to go and get married like two young things ... and really fall in
+love, too!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was silent ... amused ... interested ... then&mdash;&quot;well, Granma'll tell
+me all about it when she comes ... and I can judge for myself, and,&quot; I
+added whimsically, &quot;I suppose if they love each other it ought to be all
+right.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And we both laughed.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>When Granma heard I was West she couldn't reach Antonville fast enough.
+She was the same dear childlike woman, only incredibly older-looking.
+Age seemed to have fallen on her like an invading army, all at once. Her
+hair was, every shred of it, not only grey, but almost white. There
+shone the same patient, sweet, ignorant, too-trusting eyes ... there was
+the blue burst of vein on her lower lip.</p>
+
+<p>After she had kissed and kissed me, stroked and stroked my head and face
+in speechless love, I looked at her intently and lied to please her:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Granma, you don't look a day older.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I am, Johnnie, I am. I've been working hard since you left.&quot; As if
+she had not worked hard <i>before</i> I left ... she informed me that, giving
+away to her children what she had received for the sale of her two
+houses (that never brought her anything because of her simplicity, while
+they were in her possession) she had grown tired of &quot;being a burden to
+them,&quot; as she phrased it, and had hired herself out here and there as
+scrubwoman, washerwoman, housekeeper, and what not....</p>
+
+<p>Later I learned that nothing could be done with her, she was so
+obstinate. She had broken away despite the solicitude of all her
+children&mdash;who all loved her and wanted her to stay with them.</p>
+
+<p>At last she had answered an advertisement for a housekeeper ... that
+appeared in a farm journal ... and so she had met her old cork-legged
+veteran, whom she now had her mind set on marrying.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But Granma, to get married at your age?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'd like to ask why not?&quot; she answered sweetly, &quot;I feel as young as
+ever when it comes to men ... and the man ... you wait till you see him
+... you'll like him ... he's such a good provider, Johnnie; he draws a
+steady pension of sixty dollars a month from the Government, and he'll
+give me a good home.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But any of my aunts and uncles would do the same.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Johnnie, but it ain't the same as having a man of your own around
+... there's nothing like that, Johnnie, for a woman.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But your own children welcome you and treat you well?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, yes, Johnnie, my little boy, but in spite of that, I feel in the
+way. And, no matter how much they love me, it's better for me to have a
+home of my own and a man of my own.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Besides, Billy loves me so much,&quot; she continued, wistfully, &quot;and even
+though he's seventy whereas I'm eighty past, he says his being younger
+don't make no difference ... and he's always so jolly ... always
+laughing and joking.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;We must begin to allow for Granma,&quot; Aunt Alice told me, &quot;she's coming
+into her second childhood.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Granma believed thoroughly in my aspirations to become a poet. With
+great delight she retailed incidents of my childhood, reminding me of a
+thousand youthful escapades of which she constituted me the hero,
+drawing therefrom auguries of my future greatness.</p>
+
+<p>One of the incidents which alone sticks in my memory:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do you 'mind,'&quot; she would say, &quot;how you used to follow Millie about
+when she papered the pantry shelves with newspapers with scalloped
+edges? and how you would turn the papers and read them, right after her,
+as she laid them down, and make her frantic?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; I would respond, highly gratified with the anecdote, &quot;and you
+would say, Oh, Millie, don't get mad at the little codger, some day he
+might turn out to be a great man!'&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Uncle Beck had a fine collection of American Letters. I found a complete
+set of Hawthorne and straightway became a moody and sombre Puritan ...
+and I wrote in Hawthornian prose, quaint essays and stories. And I lived
+in a world of old lace and lavender, of crinoline and brocade.</p>
+
+<p>And then I discovered my uncle's books on gynecology and obstetrics ...
+full of guilty fevers I waited until he had gone out on a call and then
+slunk into his office to read....</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon my doctor-uncle came suddenly upon me, taking me unaware.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, what are you up to?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;was just reading your medical books.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come over here,&quot; already seated at his desk, on his swivel-chair, he
+motioned me to a seat.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sit down!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I obeyed him in humiliated silence.</p>
+
+<p>He rose and closed the door, hanging the sign &quot;Busy&quot; outside.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At last I learned about myself and about life.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The harvesting over, Anders began to chum with me. We took long walks
+together, talking of many things ... but, chiefly, of course, of those
+things that take up the minds of adolescents ... of the mysteries of
+creation, of life at its source ... of why men and women are so ... and
+I took it for granted, after he confessed that he had fallen into the
+same mistakes as I, suffering similar agonies, that he had been set
+right by his father, the doctor, as I just had. I was surprised to find
+he had not. So I shared with him the recent knowledge I had acquired.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;And you mean to tell me that Uncle Beck has said nothing to you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Not a single word ... never.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But why didn't you ask him then ... him being a doctor?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How can a fellow talk with his father about such things?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's funny to me he didn't inform you, anyhow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I was his son, you see!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Anders had a girl, he told me, confidingly. She was off on a visit to
+Mornington, at present ... a mighty pretty little girl and the best
+there was....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;By the way, Anders, do you know second cousin Phoebe at all?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sure thing I know her ... the last time I heard of her ... which was
+almost a year ago&mdash;she was wilder than ever.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How do you mean, Anders?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Her folks couldn't keep her in of nights ... a gang of boys and girls
+would come and whistle for her, and she'd get out, sooner or later, and
+join them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I tell you what,&quot; I began, in an unpremeditated burst of invention,
+which I straightway believed, it so appealed to my imagination, &quot;I've
+never told anybody before, but all these years I've been desperately in
+love with Phoebe.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Anders scrutinised me quizzically, then the enthusiasm of the actor in
+my face made him believe me....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, no matter how bad she is, she certainly was a beaut, the last
+time I saw her.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm going,&quot; I continued &quot;(you mustn't tell anybody), I'm going down to
+Aunt Rachel's, after I leave here, and <i>get</i> Phoebe.&quot; And eagerly and
+na&iuml;vely we discussed the possibilities as we walked homeward....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>After my talk with Uncle Beck all my morbidity began to melt away, and,
+growing better in mind, my body grew stronger ... he wrote to my father
+that it was not consumption ... so now I was turning my coming West into
+a passing visit, instead of a long enforced sojourn there for the good
+of my health.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I found different household arrangements on revisiting Aunt Rachel and
+her household.</p>
+
+<p>For one thing, the family had moved into town ... Newcastle ... and they
+had a fine house to live in, neat and comfortable. Gone was that
+atmosphere of picturesque, pioneer poverty. Though, to be sure, there
+sat Josh close up against the kitchen stove, as of old. For the first
+sharp days of fall were come ... he was spitting streams of tobacco, as
+usual.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I hate cities,&quot; was his first greeting to me. He squirted a brown
+parabola of tobacco juice, parenthetically, into the wood-box behind the
+stove, right on top of the cat that had some kittens in there.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Rachel caught him at it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Josh, how often have I told you you mustn't spit on that cat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'Scuse me, Ma, I'm kind o' absint-minded.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The incident seemed to me so funny that I laughed hard. Aunt Rachel gave
+me a quiet smile.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Drat the boy, he's allus findin' somethin' funny about things!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This made me laugh more. But I had brought Uncle Josh a big plug of
+tobacco, and he was placated, ripping off a huge chew as soon as he held
+it in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>The great change I have just spoken of came over the family because
+Phoebe's two sisters, Jessie and Mona&mdash;who had been off studying to be
+nurses, now had come back, and, taking cases in town, they were making a
+good living both for themselves and the two old folks....</p>
+
+<p>I had learned from Uncle Beck, as he drove me in to Mornington, that,
+the last he heard of Phoebe, she was working out as a maid to &quot;some
+swells,&quot; in that city.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Damme, ef I don't hate cities an' big towns,&quot; ejaculated Uncle Josh,
+breaking out of a long, meditative silence, &quot;you kain't keep no dogs
+there ... onless they're muzzled ... and no ferrets, neither ... and
+what 'ud be the use if you could?... there ain't nothin' to hunt anyhow
+... wisht we lived back on thet old muddy hilltop agin.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Supper almost ready ... the appetizing smell of frying ham&mdash;there's
+nothing, being cooked, smells better....</p>
+
+<p>Paul came in from work ... was working steady in the mills now, Aunt
+Rachel had informed me.</p>
+
+<p>Paul came in without a word, his face a mask of such empty hopelessness
+that I was moved by it deeply.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Paul, you mustn't take on so. It ain't right nor religious,&quot; said Uncle
+Josh, knocking the ashes out of his pipe ... he smoked and chewed in
+relays. Paul replied nothing.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, folks,&quot; put in Rachel, &quot;supper's ready ... draw your chairs
+up to the table.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We ate our supper under a quiet, grey mood. An air of tragedy seemed to
+hang over us ... for the life of me I couldn't understand what had
+become of Paul's good-natured, rude jocosity. Why he had grown into a
+silent, sorrowful man....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;You kin bunk up with Paul to-night, Johnnie,&quot; announced Rachel, when it
+came bedtime.</p>
+
+<p>Paul had already slunk off to bed right after supper. It was dark in the
+room when I got there.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Paul, where's the light?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;put it out ... like to lie in the dark an' think,&quot; answered a deep,
+sepulchral voice.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Whatever <i>is</i> the matter with you, Paul?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ain't you heered? Ain't Ma told you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Paul struck a match and lit the lamp. I sat on the side of the bed and
+talked with him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ain't you heered how I been married?&quot; he began.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So that's it, is it?&quot; I anticipated prematurely, &quot;and you weren't happy
+... and she went off and left you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, she's left me all right, Johnnie, but not that way ... she's
+dead!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And Paul stopped with a sob in his throat. I didn't know what to say to
+his sudden declaration, so I just repeated foolishly, &quot;why, I never knew
+you got married!&quot; twice.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Christ, Johnnie, she was the best little woman in the world&mdash;such a
+little creature, Johnnie ... her head didn't more'n come up to under my
+armpits.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There followed a long silence, to me an awkward one; I didn't know what
+to do or say. Then I perceived the best thing was to let him ease his
+hurt by just talking on ... and he talked ... on and on ... in his slow,
+drawling monotone ... and ever so often came the refrain, &quot;Christ, but
+she was a good woman, Johnnie ... I wish you'd 'a' knowed her.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>At last I ventured, &quot;and how&mdash;how did she come to die?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;baby killed her, she was that small ... she was like a little girl
+... she oughtn't to of had no baby at all, doctor said....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I killed her, Johnnie,&quot; he cried in agony, &quot;and that's the God's truth
+of it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Another long silence.</p>
+
+<p>The lamp guttered but didn't go out. A moth had flown down its chimney,
+was sizzling, charring, inside ... Paul lifted off the globe. Burnt his
+hands, but said nothing ... flicked the wingless, blackened body to the
+floor....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But the baby?&mdash;it lived?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, it lived ... a girl ... if it hadn't of lived ... if it had gone,
+too, I wouldn't of wanted to live, either!...&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's why I'm workin' so hard, these days, with no lay-offs fer
+huntin' or fishin' or anything.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The next day I learned more from Rachel of how Paul had agonized over
+the death of his tiny wife ... &quot;'she was that small you had a'most to
+shake out the sheets to find her,' as Josh useter say,&quot; said Rachel
+gravely and unhumorously ... and she told how the bereaved husband
+savagely fought off all his womenfolk and insisted on mothering, for a
+year, the baby whose birth had killed its mother.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;At last he's gittin' a little cheer in his face. But every so often the
+gloomy fit comes over him like it did last night at supper. I keep
+tellin' him it ain't Christian, with her dead two years a'ready&mdash;but he
+won't listen ... he's got to have his fit out each time.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As if this had not been enough of the tragic, the next day when I asked
+about Phoebe, Aunt Rachel started crying.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Phoebe's gone, too,&quot; she sobbed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;O, Aunt Rachel, I'm so sorry ... but I didn't know ... nobody told me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's all right, Johnnie. Somehow it relieves me to talk about
+Phoebe.&quot; She rose from her rocker, laid down her darning, and went to a
+dresser in the next room. She came out again, holding forth to me a
+picture ... Phoebe's picture....</p>
+
+<p>A shy, small, oval, half-wild face like that of a dryad's. Her chin
+lifted as if she were some wood-creature listening to the approaching
+tread of the hunter and ready on the instant to spring forth and run
+along the wind....</p>
+
+<p>An outdoor picture, a mere snapshot, but an accidental work of art.</p>
+
+<p>Voluminous leafage blew behind and above her head, splashed with the
+white of sunlight and the gloom of swaying shadow.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, she's&mdash;she's beautiful!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes&mdash;got prettier and prettier every time you looked at her....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But,&quot; and Aunt Rachel sighed, &quot;I couldn't do nothin' with her at all.
+An' scoldin' an' whippin' done no good, neither. Josh useter whip her
+till he was blue in the face, an' she wouldn't budge. Only made her more
+sot and stubborner....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;guess she was born the way she was ... she never could stay still a
+minute ... always fidgettin' ... when she was a little girl, even&mdash;I
+used to say, 'Now, look here, Phoebe,' I'd say, 'your ma 'ull give you a
+whole dime all at once if you'll set still jest for five minutes in that
+chair.' An' she'd try ... and, before sixty seconds was ticked off she'd
+be on her feet, sayin', 'Ma, I guess you kin keep that dime.'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;When she took to runnin' out at nights,&quot; my great-aunt continued, in a
+low voice, &quot;yes, an' swearin' back at her pa when he gave her a bit of
+his mind, it nigh broke my heart ... and sometimes she'd see me cryin',
+and that would make her feel bad an' she'd quiet down fer a few days ...
+an' she'd say, 'Ma, I'm goin' to be a good girl now,' an' fer maybe two
+or three nights she'd help clean up the supper-things&mdash;an' then&mdash;&quot; with
+a breaking voice, &quot;an' then all at once she'd scare me by clappin' both
+hands to that pretty brown head o' hers, in sech a crazy way, an'
+sayin', 'Honest, Ma, I can't stand it any longer ... this life's too
+slow.... I've gotta go out where there's some life n' fun!'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It was only toward the last that she took to sneakin' out after she
+pretended to go to bed.. gangs of boys an' girls, mixed, would come an'
+whistle soft fer her, under the window ... an' strange men would
+sometimes hang aroun' the house ... till Josh went out an' licked a
+couple.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It drove Josh nigh crazy.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;One evenin', after this had gone on a long time, Josh ups an' says,
+'Ma, Phoebe's run complete out o' hand ... she'll hafta be broke o' this
+right now ... when she comes back to-night I'm going to give her the
+lickin' of her life.'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'Josh, you mustn't whip her. Let's both have a long talk with her. (I
+knowed Josh 'ud hurt her bad if he whipped her. He has a bad temper when
+he is het up.) Maybe goin' down on our knees with her an' prayin' might
+do some good.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'No, Ma, talkin' nor prayin' won't do no good ... the only thing left's
+a good whippin' to straighten her out.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;O Aunt Rachel,&quot; I cried, all my desire of Phoebe breaking but into
+tenderness. I looked at the lovely face, crossed with sunlight, full of
+such quick intelligence, such mischievousness....</p>
+
+<p>You can catch a wild animal in a trap, but to whip it would be sacrilege
+... that might do for domesticated animals.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Josh never laid a hand on her, though, that night ... she never came
+home ... men are so awful in their pride, Johnnie ... don't you be like
+that when you grow to be a man....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then Aunt Rachel said no more, as Paul came in at that moment. Nor did
+she resume the subject.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Next morning I packed away to visit Uncle Lan. I might as well go, even
+if I hated him. It would be too noticeable, not to go.</p>
+
+<p>He was at the train, waiting for me. He proffered me his hand. To my
+surprise, I took it. He seized my grip from me, put his other hand
+affectionately on my shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've often wondered whether you'd ever forgive me for the way I beat
+you.... I've learned better since.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Before I knew it my voice played me the trick of saying yes, I forgave
+him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's a good boy!&quot; and Lan gave my hand such a squeeze that it almost
+made me cry out with the pain of it.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Lan,&quot; as we walked along, &quot;can you tell me more about Phoebe.... Aunt
+Rachel told me some, but&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, she ended up by running away with a drummer ... she hadn't been
+gone long when her ma got word from her asking her to forgive her ...
+that she'd run off with a man she loved, and was to be married to him
+pretty soon.... Phoebe gave no address, but the letter had a Pittsburgh
+postmark....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A month ... six months went by. Then a letter came in a strange hand.
+The girl that wrote it said that she was Phoebe's 'Roommate.'&quot; Lan
+paused here, and gave me a significant look, then resumed:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Paul went down to bring the body home, and found she'd been buried
+already. They were too poor to have it dug up and brought home.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It seems that the man that took Phoebe off was nothing but a pimp!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Suicide: early one Sunday morning; early, for girls of their profession,
+the two girls, Phoebe and her roommate were sitting in their bedrooms in
+kimonos.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What a nice Sunday,&quot; Phoebe had said, looking out at the window.
+&quot;Jenny,&quot; she continued to her roommate, &quot;I have a feeling I'd like to go
+to church this morning....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Jenny had thought <i>that</i> was rather a queer thing for Phoebe to say....</p>
+
+<p>Jenny went out to go to the delicatessen around the corner, to buy a
+snack for them to eat, private, away from the rest of the girls, it
+being Sunday morning. She'd bring in a Sunday paper, too.</p>
+
+<p>When she returned, Phoebe didn't seem to be in the room. Jenny felt that
+something was wrong, had felt it all along, anyhow....</p>
+
+<p>She heard a sort of gasping and gurgling....</p>
+
+<p>She found Phoebe on the floor, two-thirds under the bed. Her eyes were
+rolled back to the whites from agony. A creamy froth was on her mouth.
+And all her mouth and chin and pretty white neck were burned brown with
+the carbolic acid she had drunk.. a whole damn bottle of it.</p>
+
+<p>Jenny dropped on her knees by Phoebe and called out her name&mdash;loud....
+&quot;Phoebe, why don't you speak to me!&quot; Took her head in her lap and it
+only lolled. Then she began screaming, did Jenny, and brought the whole
+house up. And the madame had shouted:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Shut up, you bitch, do you want people to think someone's gettin'
+killed? Ain't we in bad enough already?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So Phoebe came to a bad end,&quot; commented Lan, &quot;as we always thought she
+would.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The nearest I came to having my long-cherished revenge on Landon:</p>
+
+<p>Once, in the night, during my week's stay with him, I stepped from bed,
+sleep-walking, moving toward the room where he and Aunt Emily lay.
+Imagining I held a knife in my left hand (I am left-handed) to stick him
+through the heart with.</p>
+
+<p>But I bumped terrifically into a door half ajar, and received such a
+crash between the eyes that it not only brought me broad awake, but gave
+me a bump as big as a hen's egg, into the bargain.</p>
+
+<p>The dream of my revenge had been so strong in my brain that still I
+could feel the butcher-knife in my hand ... and I looked into the empty
+palm to verify the sensation, still there, of clasping the handle.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;that you, Johnnie?&quot; called my uncle.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yep!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the matter? can't you sleep?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No!&mdash;got up to take a drink of water.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You'll find a bucketful on the kitchen table, and the dipper floating
+in it ... and there's matches on the stand by your bed.&quot; A pause. He
+continued: &quot;You must of run into something. I heard a bang.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I did. I bumped my head into the door.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I visited Aunt Millie last.</p>
+
+<p>I found her a giantess of a woman, not fat, but raw-boned and tall. Her
+cheeks were still as pitted with hollows, her breath as catarrhal as
+ever. But she had become a different woman since she had married.</p>
+
+<p>Her husband was a widower with three children already before he took her
+in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the
+yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile
+... with a deep, hoarse voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man
+had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost
+have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see
+this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted
+virility and strength, and wore his shirt open at the neck, and several
+buttons lower, in order to reveal his full hirsuteness.</p>
+
+<p>Millie had already given birth to two children of her own, by him. And
+she toiled about the house at endless duties, day and night, happy with
+him, and loving his children and hers with an equal love. And being
+adored in turn by them.</p>
+
+<p>It was &quot;Ma!&quot; here and &quot;Ma!&quot; there ... the voices of the children ever
+calling for her.... And she, running about, waiting on the youngsters,
+baking ovensful of bread, sewing, scrubbing, dusting ... and talking,
+talking, talking all the time she flew about at her ceaseless work....</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Dick loved his joke, and the broader the better. As I sat across
+the table from him, at mealtimes, and looked into his amused, small
+twinkling eyes, I thought continually of the Miller in Chaucer's
+<i>Canterbury Tales</i>....</p>
+
+<p>Millie, too, was not slow at having her joke. She was roughly
+affectionate of me, in memory of old days. And she continually asked me,
+with loud, enjoying laughter, if I remembered this, that, and the other
+bad (Rabelaisan) trick I had played on her back in Mornington....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But I was glad to see Haberford and the East again. I was all over my
+desire to die a poet, and young.... Principal Balling had me come to see
+him. He examined me in Latin and in English and History. He found that,
+from study by myself, I had prepared so that I was more than able to
+pass in these subjects. But when it came to mathematics I was no less
+than an idiot. He informed my father that he had been mistaken in me,
+before ... that he had given me a too cursory look-over, judging me
+after the usual run ... he announced that he would admit me as special
+student at the Keeley Heights High School.</p>
+
+<p>The one thing High School gave me&mdash;my Winter there&mdash;was Shelley. In
+English we touched on him briefly, mainly emphasising his <i>Skylark</i>. It
+was his <i>Ode to the West Wind</i> that made me want more of him ... with
+his complete works I made myself a nuisance in class, never paying
+attention to what anyone said or did, but sitting there like a man in a
+trance, and, with Shelley, dreaming beautiful dreams of revolutionising
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>I awoke only for English Composition. But there, inevitably, I
+quarrelled with the teacher over her ideas of the way English prose was
+to be written. She tried to make us write after the Addisonian model. I
+pointed out that the better style was the nervous, short-sentenced,
+modern one&mdash;as Kipling wrote, at his best, in his prose. We had
+altercation after altercation, and the little dumpy woman's eyes raged
+behind her glasses at me&mdash;to the laughter of the rest of the class. Who
+really did not care for anything but a lark, while I was all the while
+convinced with the belief that they sat up nights, dreaming over great
+books as I did.</p>
+
+<p>Even yet, though now I know better, I cannot accept the fact that the
+vast majority find their only poetry in a good bellyful of food, as I do
+in the <i>Ode to the Nightingale</i> and in the <i>Epipsychidion</i>....</p>
+
+<p>Dissatisfied and disillusioned, it was again a book that lifted me out
+of the stupidity in which I found myself enmeshed. Josiah Flynt's
+<i>Tramping With Tramps</i>,&mdash;and one other&mdash;<i>Two Years Before the Mast</i>, by
+Dana. And I lay back, mixing my dreams of humanity's liberation, with
+visions of big American cities, fields of wheat and corn, forests,
+little towns on river-bends.</p>
+
+<p>A tramp or sailor&mdash;which?</p>
+
+<p>First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and
+back again?</p>
+
+<p>Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my
+favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett
+and Fielding?</p>
+
+<p>It took me days of talk with the gang&mdash;boasting&mdash;and nights of dreaming,
+to screw myself up to the right pitch.</p>
+
+<p>Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the
+English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New
+York waterfront that same afternoon....</p>
+
+<p>I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to
+go to sea, and that he needn't try to find me in order to fetch me home
+again. I wished him good luck and good-bye.</p>
+
+<p>Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books: my C&aelig;sar and
+Vergil in the Latin, Young's <i>Night Thoughts</i>, and Shelley.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>South Street ... here were ships ... great tall fellows, their masts
+dizzy things to look up at.</p>
+
+<p>I came to a pier where two three-masted barks lay, one on either side.
+First I turned to the one on the right because I saw two men up aloft.
+And there was a boy passing down the deck, carrying a pot of coffee aft.
+I could smell the good aroma of that coffee. Ever since, the smell of
+coffee makes me wish to set out on a trip somewhere.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hey, Jimmy,&quot; I shouted to the boy.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hey, yourself!&quot; he replied, coming belligerently to the side. Then,
+&quot;what do ye want?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To go to sea. Do you need anybody aboard for the voyage?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He looked scornfully at me, as I stood there, skinny, shadow-thin.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You go to hell!&quot; he cried. Then he resumed his way to the cabin,
+whistling.</p>
+
+<p>The ship opposite, I inspected her next. It was grand with the
+figurehead of a long, wooden lady leaning out obliquely with
+ever-staring eyes, her hands crossed over her breasts.</p>
+
+<p>Aboard I went, down the solitude of the deck. I stopped at the cook's
+galley. I had gone there because I had seen smoke coming out of the
+little crooked pipe that stood akimbo.</p>
+
+<p>I looked in at the door. A dim figure developed within, moving about
+among pots and pans. It was the cook, I could tell by the white cap he
+wore ... an old, very old man. He wore a sleeveless shirt. His long
+skinny, hairy arms were bare. His long silvery-grey beard gave him an
+appearance like an ancient prophet. But where the beard left off there
+was the anomaly of an almost smooth, ruddy face, and very young,
+straight-seeing, blue eyes.</p>
+
+<p>When I told the old cook what I wanted, he invited me in to the galley
+and reached me a stool to sit on.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The captain isn't up yet. He was ashore on a jamboree last night.
+You'll see him walking up and down the poop when he's hopped out of his
+bunk and eaten his breakfast.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The cook talked about himself, while I waited there. I helped him peel a
+pail of potatoes....</p>
+
+<p>Though I heard much of strange lands and far-away ports, he talked
+mostly of the women who had been in love with him ... slews of them ...
+&quot;and even yet, sixty-five years old, I can make a good impression when I
+want to ... I had a girl not yet twenty down in Buenos Ayres. She was
+crazy about me ... that was only two years ago.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He showed me pictures of the various women, in all parts of the world,
+that had &quot;gone mad about him&quot; ... obviously, they were all prostitutes.
+He brought out a batch of obscene photographs, chuckling over them.</p>
+
+<p>It was a German ship&mdash;the <i>Valkyrie</i>. But the cook spoke excellent
+English, as did, I later found out, the captain, both the mates, and all
+but one or two of the crew.</p>
+
+<p>Before the captain came up from below the cook changed the subject from
+women to history. In senile fashion, to show off, he recited the names
+of the Roman emperors, in chronological sequence. And, drawing a curtain
+aside from a shelf he himself had built over his bunk, he showed me
+Momsen's complete history of Rome, in a row of formidable volumes.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;There's the captain now!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A great hulk of a man was lounging over the rail of the poop-deck,
+looking down over the dock.</p>
+
+<p>I started aft.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hist!&quot; the cook motioned me back mysteriously. &quot;Be sure you say 'Sir'
+to him frequently.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Beg pardon, sir. But are you Captain Schantze, sir?&quot; (the cook had told
+me the captain's name).</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes. What do you want?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've heard you needed a cabin boy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Are you of German descent?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, sir.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What nationality are you, then?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;American, sir.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That means nothing, what were your people?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Straight English on my mother's side ... Pennsylvania Dutch on my
+father's.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What a mixture!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He began walking up and down in seaman fashion. After spending several
+minutes in silence I ventured to speak to him again.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do you think you could use me, sir?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He swung on me abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In what capacity?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;As anything ... I'm willing to go as able seaman before the mast, if
+necessary.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He stopped and looked me over and laughed explosively.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Able seaman! you're so thin you have to stand twice in one place to
+make a shadow ... you've got the romantic boy's idea of the sea ...
+but, are you willing to do hard work from four o'clock in the morning
+till nine or ten at night?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Anything, to get to sea, sir!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;sure you haven't run away from home?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No-no, sir!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then why in the devil do you want to go to sea? isn't the land good
+enough?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I took a chance and told the captain all about my romantic notions of
+sea-life, travel, and adventure.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You talk just like one of our German poets.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I <i>am</i> a poet,&quot; I ventured further.</p>
+
+<p>The captain gave an amused whistle. But I could see that he liked me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To-morrow morning at four o'clock ... come back, then, and Karl, the
+cabin boy, will start you in at his job. I'll promote him to boy before
+the mast.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I spent the night at Uncle Jim's house ... he was the uncle that had
+come east, years before. He was married ... a head-bookkeeper ... lived
+in a flat in the Bronx.</p>
+
+<p>He thought it was queer that I was over in New York, alone ... when he
+came home from work, that evening....</p>
+
+<p>I could keep my adventure to myself no longer. I told him all about my
+going to sea. But did Duncan (my father) approve of it? Yes, I replied.
+But when I refused to locate the ship I was sailing on, at first Jim
+tried to bully me into telling. I didn't want my father to learn where I
+was, in case he came over to find me ... and went up to Uncle Jim's....</p>
+
+<p>Then he began laughing at me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You've always been known for your big imagination and the things you
+make up ... I suppose this is one of them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Let the boy alone,&quot; my aunt put in, a little dark woman of French and
+English ancestry, &quot;you ought to thank God that he has enough imagination
+to make up stories ... he might be a great writer some day.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Imagination's all right. I'm not quarrelling with Johnnie for that. But
+you can't be all balloon and no ballast.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They made me up a bed on a sofa in the parlour ... among all the
+bizarre chairs and tables that Uncle Jim had made from spools ... Aunt
+Lottie still made dresses now and again ... before she married Jim she
+had run a dressmaking establishment.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jim set a Big Ben alarm clock down on one of the spool tables for
+me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've set the clock for half-past three. That will give you half an hour
+to make your hypothetical ship in ... you'll have to jump up and stop
+the clock, anyhow. It'll keep on ringing till you do.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My first morning on shipboard was spent scrubbing cabin floors, washing
+down the walls, washing dishes, waiting on the captain and mates' mess
+... the afternoon, polishing brass on the poop and officers' bridge,
+under the supervision of Karl, the former cabin boy.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, how do you like it?&quot; asked the cook, as he stirred something in a
+pot, with a big wooden ladle.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Fine! but when are we sailing?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In about three days we drop down to Bayonne for a cargo of White Rose
+oil and then we make a clean jump for Sydney, Australia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Around Cape Horn?&quot; I asked, stirred romantically at the thought.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No. Around the Cape of Good Hope.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Early in the afternoon of the day before we left the dock, as I was
+polishing brass on deck, my father appeared before me, as abruptly as a
+spirit.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, here he is, as big as life!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hello, Pop!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I straightened up to ease a kink in my back.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You had no need to hide this from me, son; I envy you, that's all, I
+wish I wasn't too old to do it, myself ... this beats travelling about
+the country, selling goods as a salesman. It knocks my dream of having a
+chicken farm all hollow, too....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He drew in a deep breath of the good, sunny harbour air. Sailors were up
+aloft, they were singing. The cook was in his galley, singing too. There
+were gulls glinting about in the sun.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course you know I almost made West Point once ... had the
+appointment ... if it hadn't been for a slight touch of rheumatism in
+the joints ...&quot; he trailed off wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We've never really got to know each other, Johnnie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I looked at him. &quot;No, we haven't.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm going to start you out right. Will the captain let you off for a
+while?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The cook's my boss ... as far as my time is concerned. I'm cabin boy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My father gave the cook a couple of big, black cigars. I was allowed
+shore leave till four o'clock that afternoon....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;you need a little outfitting,&quot; explained my father, as we walked
+along the dock to the street....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've saved up a couple of hundred dollars, which I drew out before I
+came over.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But, Father....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You need a lot of things. I'm going to start you off right. While you
+were up in the cabin getting ready to go ashore I had a talk with the
+cook.... I sort o' left you in his charge&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I don't want to be left in anyone's charge.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;found out from him just what you'd need and now we're going to do a
+little shopping.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I accompanied my father to a seamen's outfitting place, and he spent a
+good part of his two hundred buying needful things for me ... shirts of
+strong material ... heavy underwear ... oilskins ... boots ... strong
+thread and needles ... and a dunnage bag to pack it all away in....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We stood together on the after-deck again, my father and I.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now I must be going,&quot; he remarked, trying to be casual. He put a ten
+dollar bill in my hand.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;to give the boys a treat with,&quot; he explained ... &quot;there's nothing
+like standing in good with an outfit you're to travel with ... and
+here,&quot; he was rummaging in his inside pocket ... &quot;put these in your
+pocket and keep them there ... a bunch of Masonic cards of the lodge
+your daddy belongs to ... if you ever get into straits, you'll stand a
+better chance of being helped, as son of a Mason.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, Father,&quot; I replied, seriously and unhumorously, &quot;I can't keep
+them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'd like to know why not?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to belong to the brotherhood of man, not the brotherhood of the
+Masons.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He looked puzzled for a moment, then his countenance cleared.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's all right, Son ... you just keep those cards. They might come in
+handy if you find yourself stranded anywhere.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When my father turned his back, with a thought almost prayerful to the
+spirit of Shelley, I flung the Masonic cards overboard.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>After dusk, the crew poured <i>en masse</i> to the nearest waterfront saloon
+with me. The ten dollars didn't last long.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;His old man has lots of money.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Our last night at the pier was a night of a million stars.</p>
+
+<p>The sailmaker, with whom I had become well acquainted, waddled up to me.
+He was bow-legged. He waddled instead of walked. We sat talking on the
+foreward hatch....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm glad we're getting off to-morrow,&quot; I remarked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;we might not. We lack a man for the crew yet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;thought we had the full number?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We did. But one of the boys in your party strayed away ... went to
+another saloon and had a few more drinks ... and someone stuck him with
+a knife in the short ribs ... he's in the hospital.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But can't Captain Schantze pick up another man right away?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The consulate's closed till ten to-morrow morning. We're to sail at
+five ... so he can't sign on a new sailor before ... of course he might
+shanghai someone ... but the law's too severe these days ... and the
+Sailors' Aid Society is always on the job ... it isn't like it used to
+be.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But in spite of what the sailmaker had told me, the captain decided to
+take his chance, rather than delay the time of putting forth to sea.
+Around ten o'clock, in the full of the moon, a night-hawk cab drew up
+alongside the ship where she lay docked, and out of it jumped the first
+mate and the captain with a lad who was so drunk or drugged, or both,
+that his legs went down under him when they tried to set him on his
+feet.</p>
+
+<p>They tumbled him aboard, where he lay in an insensate heap, drooling
+spit and making incoherent, bubbling noises.</p>
+
+<p>Without lifting an eyebrow in surprise, the sailmaker stepped forward
+and joined the mate in jerking the man to his feet. The captain went aft
+as if it was all in the day's work.</p>
+
+<p>The mate and the sailmaker jerked the shanghaied man forward and bundled
+him into a locker where bits of rope and nautical odds and-ends were
+piled, just forward of the galley.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the sharp but misty dawn we cast our moorings loose. A
+busy little tug nuzzled up to take us in tow for open sea.</p>
+
+<p>We were all intent on putting forth, when a cry came from the port side.
+The shanghaied man had broken out, and came running aft ... he stopped a
+moment, like a trapped animal, to survey the distance between the dock
+and the side ... measuring the possibilities of a successful leap.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the first and second mates were after him, with some of the
+men ... he ran forward again, doubled in his tracks like a schoolboy
+playing tag ... we laughed at that, it was so funny the way he went
+under the mate's arm ... the look of surprise on the mate's face was
+funny ... Then the man who was pursued, in a flash, did a hazardous
+thing ... he flung himself in the air, over the starboard side, and took
+a long headlong tumble into the tugboat....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>He was tied like a hog, and hauled up by a couple of ropes, the
+sailmaker singing a humorous chantey that made the boys laugh, as they
+pulled away.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>This delayed the sailing anyhow. The mist had lifted like magic,
+and we were not far toward Staten Island before we knew a fine,
+blowing, clear day, presided over, in the still, upper spaces, by
+great, leaning cumulus clouds. They toppled huge over the great-clustered
+buildings as we trod outward toward the harbour mouth....</p>
+
+<p>The pilot swung aboard. The voyage was begun.</p>
+
+<p>The coast of America now looked more like a low-lying fringe of
+insubstantial cloud than solid land.</p>
+
+<p>My heart sank. I had committed myself definitely to a three-months'
+sea-trip ... there was no backing out, it was too far to swim ashore.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's wrong, Johann,&quot; asked the captain, &quot;are you sea-sick already?&quot;
+He had noticed my expression as he walked by.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, sir!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If you are, it isn't anything to be ashamed of. I've known old
+sea-captains who got sea-sick every time they put out of port.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There was a running forward. The shanghaied man hove in sight, on the
+rampage again. He came racing aft. &quot;I must speak with the captain.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There was a scuffle. He broke away. Again the two mates were close upon
+him. Suddenly he flung himself down and both the mates tripped over him
+and went headlong.</p>
+
+<p>The captain couldn't help laughing. Then he began to swear ... &quot;that
+fellow's going to give us a lot of trouble,&quot; he prophesied.</p>
+
+<p>Several sailors, grinning, had joined in the chase. They had caught the
+fellow and were dragging him forward by the back and scruff of the neck,
+while he deliberately hung limp and let his feet drag as if paralysed
+from the waist down.</p>
+
+<p>The captain stood over the group, that had come to a halt below. The
+captain was in good humour.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Bring him up here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The shanghaied man stood facing Schantze, with all the deference of a
+sailor, yet subtly defiant.</p>
+
+<p>The captain began to talk in German.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't speak German,&quot; responded the sailor stubbornly.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it was in German that he had called out he must see the captain.</p>
+
+<p>This did not make the captain angry. Instead, like a vain boy, he began
+in French....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't speak French ...&quot; again objected the sailor, still in English.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Very well, we'll speak in English, then ... bring him down into the
+cabin ...&quot; to the men and mates ... To the sailor again, &quot;Come on,
+Englishman! (in derision), and we'll sign you on in the ship's
+articles.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They haled him below. The captain dismissed the sailors. The captain,
+the two mates and I, were alone with the mutineer.... I stepped into the
+pantry, pretending to be busy with the dishes. I didn't want to miss
+anything.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now,&quot; explained the captain, &quot;what's happened has happened ... it's up
+to you to make the best of it ... we had to shanghai you,&quot; and he
+explained the case in full ... and if he would behave and do his share
+of the work with the rest of the crew, he would be treated decently and
+be paid ... and let go, if he wished, when the <i>Valkyrie</i> reached
+Sydney....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now sign,&quot; commanded the mate, &quot;I never heard of a man in your fix ever
+being treated so good before.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I won't sign.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Damme, but you will,&quot; returned Miller, the first mate, who, though
+German, spoke English in real English fashion&mdash;a result, he later told
+me, of fifteen years' service on English boats....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Take hold of him, Stanger,&quot; this to the second mate, a lithe,
+sun-browned, handsome lad who knew English but hated to speak it.</p>
+
+<p>They wrestled about the cabin at a great rate ... finally they succeeded
+in forcing a pen into the mutineer's hand....</p>
+
+<p>Then the man calmed down, apparently whipped.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Very well, where shall I sign?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Da,&quot; pointed the captain triumphantly, pointing the line out, with his
+great, hairy forefinger ... and, with victory near, relapsing into
+German.</p>
+
+<p>But, just as it reached the designated spot, the fellow gave a violent
+swish with the pen. The mates made a grab for his hand, but too late. He
+tore a great, ink-smeared rent through the paper....</p>
+
+<p><i>Whang!</i> Captain Schantze caught him with the full force of his big,
+open right hand on the left side of his face.... <i>Whish!</i> Captain
+Schantze caught him with the full force of his open left, on the other
+cheek!</p>
+
+<p>The shanghaied man stiffened. He trembled violently.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do it a thousand times, my dear captain. I won't sign till you kill
+me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Take him forward. He'll work, and work hard, without signing on.... No,
+wait ... tie him up to the rail on the poop ... twenty-four hours of
+that, my man, since you must speak English&mdash;will make you change your
+mind.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He was tied, with his hands behind him.</p>
+
+<p>The captain paced up and down beside him.</p>
+
+<p>Then Franz (as I afterward learned his name) boldly began chaffing the
+&quot;old man&quot; ... first in English.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't understand,&quot; replied Schantze; he was playful now, as a cat is
+with a mouse ... or rather, like a big boy with a smaller boy whom he
+can bully.</p>
+
+<p>After all, Schantze was only a big, good-natured &quot;kid&quot; of thirty.</p>
+
+<p>Then Franz ran through one language after another ... Spanish, Italian,
+French....</p>
+
+<p>The captain noticed me out of the tail of his eye. His big, broad face
+kindled into a grin.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What are you doing here on deck, you rascal!&quot; He gave me an
+affectionate, rough pull of the ear.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Polishing the brass, sir!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And taking everything in at the same time, eh? so you can write a poem
+about it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His vanity flattered, Schantze began answering Franz back, and, to and
+fro they shuttled their tongues, each showing off to the other&mdash;and to
+me, a mere cabin boy. And Franz, for the moment, seemed to have
+forgotten how he had been dragged aboard ... and the captain&mdash;that Franz
+was a mutineer, tied to the taffrail for insubordination!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Sea-sickness never came near me. Only it was queer to feel the footing
+beneath my feet rhythmically rising and falling ... for that's the way
+it seemed to my land-legs. But then I never was very sturdy on my legs
+... which were then like brittle pipestems.... I sprawled about,
+spreading and sliding, as I went to and from the galley, bringing, in
+the huge basket, the breakfast, dinner and supper for the cabin....</p>
+
+<p>The sailors called me &quot;Albatross&quot; (from the way an albatross acts when
+sprawling on shipdeck). They laughed and poked fun at me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Look here, you Yankee rascal,&quot; said the captain, when I told him I
+never drank ... &quot;I think it would do you good if you got a little smear
+of beer-froth on your mouth once in a while ... you'd stop looking
+leathery like a mummy ... you've already got some wrinkles on your face
+... a few good drinks would plump you out, make a man of you.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In Germany mothers give their babies a sip from their steins before
+they are weaned ... that's what makes us such a great nation.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>If I didn't drink, at least the two mates and the sailmaker made up for
+me ... we had on board many cases of beer stowed away down in the
+afterhold, where the sails were stored. And next to the dining room
+there was the space where provisions were kept&mdash;together with kegs of
+k&uuml;mmel, and French and Rhine wines and claret....</p>
+
+<p>And before we had been to sea three days I detected a conspiracy on the
+part of the first and second mates, the cook, and the sailmaker&mdash;the
+object of the conspiracy being, apparently, to drink half the liquor out
+of each receptacle, then fill the depleted cask with hot water, shaking
+it up thoroughly, and so mixing it.</p>
+
+<p>As far as I could judge, the old, bow-legged sailmaker had taken out a
+monopoly on the cases of beer aft. Never were sails kept in better
+condition. He was always down there, singing and sewing.</p>
+
+<p>Several times I saw him coming up whistling softly with a lush air of
+subdued and happy reminiscence.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Several mornings out ... and I couldn't believe my ears ... I heard a
+sound of music. It sounded like a grind-organ on a city street....</p>
+
+<p><i>The Sunshine of Paradise Alley</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And the captain's voice was booming along with the melody.</p>
+
+<p>I peeked into Schantze's cabin to announce breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>He had a huge music box there. And he was singing to its playing, and
+dancing clumsily about like a happy young mammoth.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Spying on the 'old man,' eh?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He came over and caught me by an ear roughly but playfully.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, Captain, I was only saying breakfast is ready.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're a sly one ... do you like that tune? <i>The Sunshine of Paradise
+Alley?</i> It's my favorite Yankee hymn.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And it must have been; every morning for eighty-nine days the gaudy
+music box faithfully played the tune over and over again.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The ship drifted slowly through the Sargasso Sea&mdash;that dead, sweltering
+area of smooth waters and endless leagues of drifting seaweed.... Or we
+lifted and sank on great, smooth swells ... the last disturbance of a
+storm far off where there were honest winds that blew.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The prickly heat assailed us ... hundreds of little red, biting pimples
+on our bodies ... the cook's fresh-baked bread grew fuzz in twenty-four
+hours after baking ... the forecastle and cabin jangled and snarled
+irritably, like tortured animals....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was with a shout, one day, that we welcomed a good wind, and shot
+clear of this dead sea of vegetable matter.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As we crossed the equator Father Neptune came on board ... a curious
+sea-ceremony that must hark back to the Greeks and Romans....</p>
+
+<p>The bow-legged sailmaker played Neptune.</p>
+
+<p>He combed out a beard of rope, wrapped a sheet around his shoulders,
+procured a trident of wood....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come,&quot; shouted one of the sailors to me, running up like a happy boy,
+&quot;come, see Neptune climbing on board.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The sail-maker pretended to mount up out of the sea, climbing over the
+forecastle head&mdash;just as if he had left his car of enormous,
+pearl-tinted sea-shell, with the spouting dolphins still hitched to it,
+waiting for him, while he paid his respects to our captain.</p>
+
+<p>Captain Schantze, First Mate Miller, Second Mate Stange, stood waiting
+the ceremonial on the officers' bridge, an amused smile playing over
+their faces.</p>
+
+<p>A big, boy-faced sailor named Klaus, and the ship's blacksmith, a
+grey-eyed, sandy-haired fellow named Klumpf, followed the sailmaker
+close behind, as he swept along in his regalia, solemnly and
+majestically. And Klaus beat a triangle. And Klumpf played an accordion.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sailmaker&quot; (the only name he was called by on the ship) made a
+grandiose speech to the Captain.</p>
+
+<p>Schantze replied in the same vein, beginning,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Euer Majest&auml;t&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The sailors marched forward again, to their music, like pleased
+children. For custom was that they should have plum duff this day, and
+plenty of hot grog....</p>
+
+<p>Before I was aware, I was caught up by several arms.</p>
+
+<p>For I had never before crossed the line. So I must be initiated.</p>
+
+<p>They set me on a board, over a great barrel of sea-water.</p>
+
+<p>Klumpf gave me a mock-shave with a vile mixture of tar and soap. He used
+a great wooden razor about three feet long. The officers shouted and
+laughed, looking on from the bridge.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's your name, my boy?&quot; asked Father Neptune.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;John Greg&mdash;&quot; Before I could articulate fully the blacksmith thrust a
+gob of the vile lather into my mouth. As I spluttered and spit everyone
+gave shouts of laughter. One or two sailors rolled on the deck,
+laughing, as savages are said to do when overtaken with humour.</p>
+
+<p>The board on which I sat was jerked from under me. Once, two times,
+three times, I was pushed, almost bent double, far down into the barrel
+of sea-water. It was warm, at least.</p>
+
+<p>Then a hue and cry went up for Franz. He was caught. He swore that he
+had crossed the line before, as doubtless he had. But there was now a
+sort of quiet feud between him and the rest aboard. So in a tumbling
+heap, they at last bore him over. He fought and shrieked. And because he
+did not submit and take the ceremony good-naturedly, he was treated
+rather roughly.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My certificate of initiation was handed me formally and solemnly. It was
+a semi-legal florid document, sealed with a bit of rope and tar. It
+certified that I had crossed the line. The witnesses were &quot;The
+Mainmast,&quot; &quot;The Mizzen Mast,&quot; and other inanimate ship's parts and
+objects....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Keep this,&quot; said Sailmaker, as he handed it to me, &quot;as evidence that
+you have already crossed the line, and you will never be shaved with tar
+and a wooden razor again. You are now a full-fledged son of Neptune.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>On a ship at sea where the work to do never ends, it is a serious matter
+if one of the crew does not know his work, or fails to hold up his end.
+That means that there is so much more work to be done by the others.</p>
+
+<p>Franz deliberately shirked. And, as far as I could see, he purposely
+got in bad with the mates, under whom he had approximately sixty days
+more of pulling and hauling, going up aloft, scrubbing, and chipping to
+do. I was puzzled at the steadfast, deliberate malingering of the man.
+The crew all hated him, too. I have seen the man at the wheel
+deliberately deflect the ship from its course, in order to bring the
+wind against the mutineer's belly, hoping to have him blown overboard
+while he was running aloft....</p>
+
+<p>And one night, in the forecastle, someone hurled a shoe at him. A blow
+so savagely well-aimed, that when he came running aft, howling with pain
+(for, for all his obstinacy, he seemed to lack courage)&mdash;to complain of
+the outrage, to Schantze&mdash;his eye popped out so far that it seemed as if
+leaping out of its socket! It was ghastly and bloody like a butchered
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>Later, I asked the sailors why this had been done to Franz. And Klumpf
+said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We had a scuffle over something. We were all taking it friendly ... and
+Franz bit Klaus through the hand, almost ... then someone threw a shoe
+and hit him in the eye&quot;....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In about a week, after his eye had healed just a little, I drew Franz
+apart. We sat down together on the main hatch. I was worried about him.
+I did not understand him. I was sorry for him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look here, Franz ... don't you know you might get put clean out of
+business if you keep this mutiny of one up much longer? You can't whip a
+whole ship's crew.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't want to whip a whole ship's crew.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The captain had to have another man in a hurry, you know ... but he's
+really willing to give you decent treatment.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Did the captain send you to tell me this?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course not ... only I'm sorry for you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Franz gave me a broad, inexplicable wink. He smiled grotesquely&mdash;from
+swollen lips made more grotesque because of a recent punch in the mouth
+&quot;Sailmaker&quot; had fetched him....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't trouble yourself about me. I know what I'm doing, my boy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What do you mean?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I mean that, as soon as I came out of my drunk, and found myself
+shanghaied, I <i>wanted</i> them to ill-treat me ... there's a Sailors' Aid
+Society at Sydney, you know!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What good will the Sailors' Aid Society do you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You just wait and see what good it will do me!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nonsense, Franz! The captain's willing to pay you off at Sydney.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Pay me off, eh? Yes, and the old boy will pay me handsome damages,
+too!... the sentimental old ladies that have nothing else to do but
+befriend the poor abused sailor, will see to it that I find justice in
+the courts there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You have a good case against the captain as it is, then. Why don't you
+turn to and behave and be treated decently?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; he replied, with a curious note of strength in his voice, &quot;the
+worse I'm treated the more damages I can collect. I'm going to make it a
+real case of brutal treatment before I leave this old tub.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But they&mdash;they'll&mdash;they might kill you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Not much ... those days are about gone ... for a man who knows how to
+handle himself, as I do....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, let us thank God,&quot; he finished, &quot;for the Sailors' Aid Society and
+the dear old maids at Sydney!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I walked off, thinking. Franz had sworn me not to tell. Yet I was
+tempted to. It would get me in right with Captain Schantze.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We shaped to the Cape of Good Hope with great, southern jumps. We were
+striking far south for the strong, steady winds.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;There was a damned English ship, the <i>Lord Summerville</i>, that left New
+York about the same time we did ... she's a sky-sailer ... we mustn't
+let her beat us into Sydney.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why not, Captain?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;An Englishman beat a German!&quot; the captain spat, &quot;fui! We're going to
+beat England yet at everything ... already we're taking their
+world-trade away from them ... and some day we'll beat them at sea and
+on land, both.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In a war, sir?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, in a war ... in a great, big war! It will have to come to that,
+Johann, my boy.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The cook's opinion on the same subject was illuminating.</p>
+
+<p>He told me many anecdotes which tended to prove that even England's
+colonies were growing tired of her arrogance: he related droll stories
+told him by Colonials about the Queen ... obscene and nasty they were,
+too.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Catch a German talking that way about the Kaiserin!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The old cook couldn't realize a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon
+temperament&mdash;that those they rail against and jibe at they love the
+most!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Off the Tristan da Cunha Islands we ran head-on into a terrific storm
+... one that lasted forty-eight hours or more, with rushing, screaming
+winds, and steady, stinging blasts of sleet that came thick in
+successions of driving, grey cloud.</p>
+
+<p>It was then that we lost overboard a fine, handsome young Saxon, one
+Gottlieb Kampke:</p>
+
+<p>Five men aloft ... only four came down ... Kampke was blown overboard
+off the footrope that ran under the yard, as he stood there hauling in
+on the sail. For he was like a young bull in strength; and, scorning, in
+his strength, the tearing wind, he used to heave in with both hands ...
+not holding fast at all, no matter how hard the wind tore.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was all that the ship herself could do, to live. Already two
+lifeboats had been bashed in. And the compass stanchioned on the bridge
+had gone along with a wave, stanchions and all.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There was no use trying to rescue Gottlieb Kampke. Besides, he would be
+dead as soon as he reached the water, in such a boiling sea, the captain
+said to me.</p>
+
+<p>The melancholy cry, &quot;Man overboard!&quot; ...</p>
+
+<p>I took oath that if I ever reached home alive, I would never go to sea
+again. If I just got home, alive, I would be willing even to tie up
+brown parcels in grocery cord, for the rest of my life, to sweep out a
+store day after day, regularly and monotonously, in safety!...</p>
+
+<p>The captain saw me trembling with a nausea of fear. And, with the winds
+booming from all sides, the deck as slippery as the body of a live eel,
+he gave me a shove far out on the slant of the poop. I sped in the grey
+drive of sleet clear to the rail. The ship dipped under as a huge wave
+smashed over, all fury and foam, overwhelming the helmsman and bearing
+down on me....</p>
+
+<p>It was miraculous that I was not swept overboard.</p>
+
+<p>After that, strangely, I no longer feared, but enjoyed a quickening of
+pulse. And I gladly took in the turns in the rope as the men sang and
+heaved away ... waves would heap up over us. We would hold tight till we
+emerged again. Then again we would shout and haul away.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;It's all according to what you grow used to,&quot; commented the captain.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>By the time I was beginning to look into the face of danger as into a
+mother's face, the weather wore down. The ocean was still heavy with
+running seas, but we rode high and dry.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Unlucky Kampke!</p>
+
+<p>His shipmates bore his dunnage aft, for the captain to take in charge.
+And, just as in melodramas and popular novels, a picture of a
+fair-haired girl was found at the bottom of his sea-chest, together with
+one of his mother ... his sweetheart and his mother....</p>
+
+<p>Depositions were taken down from his forecastle mates, as to his going
+overboard, and duly entered into the log ... and the captain wrote a
+letter to his mother, to be mailed to her from Sydney.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>For a day we were sad. An imminent sense of mortality hung over us.</p>
+
+<p>But there broke, the next morning, a clear sky of sunshine and an open
+though still yesty sea&mdash;and we sang, and became thoughtless and gay
+again.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; sighed the cook, &quot;I wish it had been Franz instead of Gottlieb.
+Gottlieb was such a fine fellow, and Franz is such a son of a &mdash;&mdash;.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>... I have left something out.</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of the voyage Captain Schantze housed a flock of two
+dozen chickens in a coop under the forecastle ... in order to insure
+himself of fresh eggs during the voyage....</p>
+
+<p>And for fresh meat, he had a huge sow hauled aboard&mdash;to be killed later
+on....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One morning, when I went forward to fetch the captain's and mates'
+breakfast, I found the cook all white and ghastly....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the matter, Cook?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To-day's the day I've got to butcher the sow,&quot; he complained, &quot;and I'd
+give anything to have someone else do it ... I've made such a pet of her
+during the voyage ... and she's so intelligent and affectionate ...
+she's decenter than lots of human beings I've met.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I kept to the cabin while the butchering was going on.</p>
+
+<p>The cook, the next day, with tears streaming down his face, told me how
+trusting the sow had been to the last moment....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll never forget the look in her eyes when she realised what I had
+done to her when I cut her throat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And I'll never be able to eat any of her. I'd throw it up as fast as it
+went down ... much as I do like good, fresh pork.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The ship-boys, Karl and Albert, always stole the eggs, the captain was
+sure, as soon as they were laid, though he was never able to catch them
+at it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Run,&quot; he would shout hurriedly to me, &quot;there! I hear the hens cackling.
+They've laid an egg.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I'd run. But there'd be no egg. Someone would have reached the nest,
+from the forecastle, before I did.</p>
+
+<p>Because the eggs were always stolen as soon as laid, the captain decreed
+the slaughter of the hens, too ... not a rooster among them ... the hens
+were frankly unhappy, because of this....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The last hen was to be slain. Pursued, she flew far out over the still
+ocean. Further and further she flew, keeping up her heavy body as if by
+an effort of will.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come back! Don't be such a damn fool!&quot; I shouted in my excitement.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody was watching when the chicken would light ... how long it
+could keep up....</p>
+
+<p>As soon as I shouted &quot;come back!&quot; the bird, as if giving heed to my
+exhortation, slowly veered, and turned toward the ship again. Everybody
+had laughed till they nearly sank on deck, at my na&iuml;ve words.</p>
+
+<p>Now a spontaneous cheer went up, as the hen slowly tacked and started
+back....</p>
+
+<p>It was still weather, but the ship was moving ahead....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She won't make it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She will!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Another great shout. She lit astern, right by the wheel. Straightway she
+began running forward, wings spread in genuine triumph.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Catch her!&quot; shouted the mate.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody obeyed him; they stood by laughing and cheering, till the hen
+made safety beneath the forecastle head.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>She was spared for three days.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;If you ever tell the captain on us,&quot; First Mate Miller threatened, as
+he and the second mate stood over a barrel of K&uuml;mmel, mixing hot water
+with it, to fill up for what they had stolen, &quot;if you ever tell, I'll
+see that you go overboard&mdash;by accident ... when we clear for Iqueque,
+after we unload at Sydney.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why should I tell? It's none of my business!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I had come upon them, as they were at work. The cook had sent me into
+the store-room for some potatoes.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Miller, the first mate, was quite fat and bleary-eyed. He used to go
+about sweating clear through his clothes on warm days. At such times I
+could detect the faint reek of alcohol coming through his pores. It's a
+wonder Schantze didn't notice it, as I did.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Sometimes, at meals, the captain would swear and say, sniffing at the
+edge of his glass, &quot;What's the matter with this damned brandy ... it
+tastes more like water than a good drink of liquor.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As he set his glass down in disgust, the mates would solemnly and
+hypocritically go through the same operation, and express their wonder
+with the captain's.</p>
+
+<p>Finally one of the latter would remark sagely, &quot;they always try to palm
+off bad stuff on ships.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In spite of my fear of the mates, I once had to stuff a dirty dish-rag
+down my mouth to keep from laughing outright. The greasy rag made me gag
+and almost vomit.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And what's the matter with you?&quot; inquired Schantze, glaring into the
+pantry at me, while the two mates also glowered, for a different reason.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;You skinny Yankee,&quot; said the captain, taking me by the ear, rather
+painfully, several days after that incident, &quot;I'm sure someone's
+drinking my booze. Could it be you, in spite of all your talk about not
+drinking? You Anglo-Saxons are such dirty hypocrites.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Indeed, no, sir,&mdash;it isn't me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, this cabin's in your care, and so is the storeroom. You keep a
+watch-out and find out for me who it is.... I don't think its Miller or
+the second mate ... it must be either the cook or that old rogue of a
+sailmaker....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Or it might be some of the crew,&quot; he further speculated, &quot;but anyhow,
+it's your job to take care of the cabin, as I said before....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Remember this&mdash;all sailors are thieves, aboard ship, if the chance to
+take anything good to eat or drink comes their way.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I promised to keep a good look-out.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mind you keep your mouth shut ... and don't find things so damned
+funny, neither,&quot; this from the first mate, early one morning, as I
+scrubbed the floors. He stirred my posteriors heavily with a booted
+foot, in emphasis.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The sea kicked backward in long, speedy trails of foam, lacing the
+surface of a grey-green waste of waves....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>When I had any spare time, I used to lie in the net under the bowsprit,
+and read. From there I could look back on the entire ship as it sailed
+ahead, every sail spread, a magnificent sight.</p>
+
+<p>One day, as I lay there, reading Shelley, or was it my Vergil that I was
+puzzling out line by line, with occasional glances at the great ship
+seeming to sail into me&mdash;myself poised outward in space&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>There came a great surge of water. I leaped up in the net, bouncing
+like a circus acrobat. My book fell out of my hand into the sea.</p>
+
+<p>I looked up, and saw fully half the crew grinning down at me. The mate
+stood over me. A bucket that still dripped water in his hand showed me
+where the water had come from.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come up out of there! The captain's been bawling for you for half an
+hour ... we thought you'd gone overboard.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I came along the net, drenched and forlorn.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What in hell were you doing down there?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I&mdash;I was thinking,&quot; I stammered.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He was thinking,&quot; echoed the mate scornfully. &quot;Well, thinking will
+never make a sailor of you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Boisterous laughter.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;After this do your thinking where we can find you when you're wanted.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As I walked aft, the mate went with me pace for pace, poking more fun at
+me. To which I dared not answer, as I was impelled, because he was
+strong and I was very frail ... and always, when on the verge of danger,
+or a physical encounter, the memory of my Uncle Lan's beatings would now
+crash into my memory like an earthquake, and render my resolution and
+sinews all a-tremble and unstrung.</p>
+
+<p>I was of a mind to tell the captain <i>who</i> was drinking his liquor&mdash;but
+here again I feared, and cursed myself for fearing.</p>
+
+<p>When the mate told him of where he had found me, at last&mdash;what he had
+done&mdash;what I had said&mdash;Schantze laughed....</p>
+
+<p>But, later on, he sympathised with me and unexpectedly remarked:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johann, how can you expect a heavy-minded numbskull like Miller to
+understand!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then, laughing, he seized me by the ear&mdash;his usual gesture of fondness
+for me&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Remember me if you ever write a book about this voyage, and don't give
+me too black a name! I'm not so bad, am I, eh?&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The Australian coast had lain blue across the horizon for several days.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Watch me to-morrow!&quot; whispered Franz cryptically to me as he strolled
+lazily by....</p>
+
+<p>Next day, around noon, I heard a big rumpus on the main deck, I hurried
+up from the cabin.</p>
+
+<p>There lay Franz, sprawled on his back like a huge, lazy dog, and the
+mate was shaking his belly with his foot on top of it, just as one plays
+with a dog ... but to show he was not playing, he delivered the
+prostrate form of the sailor a swift succession of kicks in the ribs....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You won't work any longer, you say?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll kick your guts out.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Very well.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Stand on your feet like a man.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What for? You'll only knock me down again!&quot; and Franz grinned comically
+and grotesquely upward, through the gap in his mouth where two of his
+teeth had been punched out earlier in the voyage.</p>
+
+<p>It was easy to see that Franz's curious attitude of non-resistance had
+the mate puzzled what to do next. All the sailors indulged in furtive
+laughter. None of them had a very deep-rooted love for Miller, and, for
+the first time, they rather sympathised with the man who had been
+shanghaied ... some of them even snickered audibly ... and straightway
+grew intent on their work....</p>
+
+<p>Miller turned irritably on them. &quot;And what's the matter with <i>you</i>!&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Bring him up here!&quot; shouted Captain Schantze.</p>
+
+<p>Four sailors picked Franz up and carried him, unresisting, bumping his
+back on the steps as he sagged like a sack half full of flour....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here! I've had about enough of this!&quot; cried the captain, furious, &quot;tie
+him to the rail again!...&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now, we'll leave you there, on bread and water, till you say you'll
+work.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What does it matter what you do,&quot; sauced Franz; &quot;we'll be in port in
+four days ... and then you'll see what I'll do!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;What's that?&quot; cried the captain. Then catching an inkling of Franz's
+scheme, he hit the man a quick, hard blow in the mouth with his clenched
+fist.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Give him another!&quot; urged the mate.</p>
+
+<p>But the captain's rage was over, though Franz sent him a bold, mocking
+laugh, even as the blood trickled down in a tiny red stream from where
+his mouth had, been struck.</p>
+
+<p>I never saw such courage of its kind.</p>
+
+<p>They left him there for ten hours. But he stood without a sign of
+exhaustion or giving in. And they untied him. And let him loose.</p>
+
+<p>And, till we hove to at Dalghety's Wharf, in Sydney Harbour, unnoticed,
+Franz, the Alsace-Lorrainer, roamed the boat at will, like a passenger.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wait till I get on shore ... this little shanghaiing party of the
+captain's will cost him a lot of hard money,&quot; he said, in a low voice,
+to me,&mdash;standing idly by, his hands in his pockets, while I was bending
+over the brass on the bridge railing, polishing away.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But they've nearly killed you, Franz ... will it be worth it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All I can say is I wish they'd use me rougher.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You know, Franz, I'm not a bit sorry for you now ... I was at first.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That so?... I don't need anybody to be sorry for me. In a week or so,
+when I have won my suit against the captain through the Sailors' Aid
+Society, I'll be rolling in money ... then you can be sorry for the
+captain.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Sydney Harbour ... the air alive with sunlight and white flutterings of
+sea gulls a-wing ... alive with pleasure boats that leaned here and yon
+on white sails.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Now that we were safe in harbour, I hesitated whether to run away or
+continue with the ship. For I had signed on to complete the voyage, via
+Iqueque, on the West Coast of South America, to Hamburg ... I hesitated,
+I say, because, on shipboard, you're at least sure of food and a place
+to sleep....</p>
+
+<p>Karl and I had been set to work at giving the cabin a thorough
+overhauling. We fooled away much of our time looking into the captain's
+collections of erotic pictures and photographs ... and his obscene books
+in every language.</p>
+
+<p>And we discovered under the sofa-seat that was built against the side, a
+great quantity of French syrups and soda waters. So we spent quite a
+little of our time in mixing temperance drinks for ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>Cautiously I spoke to the cook about what Karl and I were doing. For he
+knew, of course, that I knew of his marauding ... and of the mates' and
+sailmaker's ... so it was safe to tell him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You'd better be careful,&quot; the cook admonished me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But what could Captain Schantze want with so many bottles of syrup and
+soda water aboard?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The English custom's officer who comes aboard here is an old friend of
+Schantze's, and a teetotaler ... so the captain always treats him to
+soda water.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But Karl and I have drunk it all up already,&quot; I confessed slowly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You'll both catch a good hiding then when he calls for it and finds
+there is none.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The next day the customs man came aboard.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Have a drink, Mr. Wollaston?&quot; Schantze asked him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, but nothing strong,&quot; for probably the tenth occasion came the
+answer.</p>
+
+<p>Then offhandedly, the captain&mdash;as if he had not, perhaps, said the same
+thing for ten previous voyages: &quot;I have some fine French soda water and
+syrup in my private locker, perhaps you'd like some of that, Mr.
+Wollaston?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wollaston, whose face and nose was so ruddy and pimply anyone would
+take him for a toper, answers: &quot;Yes, a little of that Won't do any harm,
+Captain!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Karl!&mdash;Johann!&quot; We had been listening, frightened, to the colloquy. We
+came out, trembling.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look under the cushions in my cabin ... bring out some of the syrup and
+soda water you find there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Very well, sir!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We both hurried in ... stood facing each other, too scared to laugh at
+the situation. The captain had a heavy hand&mdash;and carried a heavy cane
+when he went ashore. He had the cane with him now.</p>
+
+<p>After a long time: &quot;You tell him there is none,&quot; whispered Karl.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, what's wrong in there?&quot; cried Schantze impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We can't find a single bottle, sir!&quot; I repeated, louder.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What? Come out here! Speak louder! What did you say?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We can't find a single bottle, sir!&quot; I murmured, almost inaudibly.</p>
+
+<p>Then Karl, stammering, reinforced me with, &quot;There are a lot of empty
+bottles here, sir!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What does this mean? Every voyage for years I have had soda and French
+syrup in my locker for Mr. Wollaston.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, don't mind me,&quot; deprecated the little customs man, at the same time
+as furious as his host.</p>
+
+<p>Karl had already began to blubber in anticipation of the whipping due.
+The captain laid his heavy cane on everywhere. The boy fell at his feet,
+bawling louder, less from fear than from the knowledge that his
+abjectness would please the captain's vanity and induce him to let up
+sooner.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now <i>you</i> come here!&quot; Schantze beckoned me.</p>
+
+<p>He raised the cane at me. But, to my own surprise, something brave and
+strange entered into me. I would not be humiliated before a countryman
+of my mother's, that was what it was!</p>
+
+<p>I looked the captain straight in the eye.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sir, I did not do it, and I won't be whipped!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wha-at!&quot; ejaculated Schantze, astonished at my novel behaviour.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I didn't touch the syrup.&quot; Karl looked at me, astonished and
+incredulous at my audacity, through his tear-stained face.</p>
+
+<p>The captain stepped back from me.</p>
+
+<p>I must be telling the truth to be behaving so differently.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Get to your bunk then!&quot; he commanded.</p>
+
+<p>I obeyed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Who is he?&quot; ... I heard the little customs man ask the skipper; &quot;he
+doesn't talk like an Englishman.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He isn't. He just a damn-fool Yankee boy I picked up in New York.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>They had rounded Franz up and locked him away. The captain was
+determined to frustrate his little scheme for reimbursement, which he
+had by this time guessed.</p>
+
+<p>I lie. I must tell the truth in these memoirs.</p>
+
+<p>I had told on him.</p>
+
+<p>But my motive was only an itch to see what would then take place. But
+when I saw that the issue would be an obvious one: that he would merely
+be spirited forth to sea again, and this time, <i>forced</i> to work, I felt
+a little sorry for the man. At the same time, I admit I wanted to
+observe the denouement myself, of his case ... and as I now intended to
+desert the ship, it would have to take place in Sydney.</p>
+
+<p>So, on the second night of Franz's incarceration, when nearly everybody
+was away on shore-leave, I took the captain's bunch of keys, and I let
+the shanghaied man, the mutineer, the man from Alsace-Lorraine&mdash;out!</p>
+
+<p>It was not a very dark night. Franz stole along like a rat till he
+reached the centre of the dock. There he gave a great shout of defiance
+... why, I learned later....</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Lord Summerville</i>, which had, after all, beat us in by two days,
+despite Captain Schantze's boast, was lying on the other side of our
+dock. And her mate and several sailors thus became witnesses of what
+happened.</p>
+
+<p>The shout brought, of course, our few men who remained on watch, on
+deck, and over on the dock after Franz ... who allowed himself to be
+caught ... the dock was English ground ... the ship was German ... a
+good point legally, as the canny Franz had foreseen.</p>
+
+<p>His clothes were almost torn from his body.</p>
+
+<p>Miller accidentally showed up, coming back from shore. And he joined in.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come back with us, you verfluchte <i>Alsatz</i>-Lothringer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Englishmen from the <i>Lord Summerville</i> now began calling out, &quot;Let
+him alone!&quot; and &quot;I say, give the lad fair play!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Some of them leaped down on the dock in a trice.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Who the hell let him out?&quot; roared the mate.</p>
+
+<p>I stood on deck, holding my breath, and ready to bolt in case Franz
+betrayed me. But nevertheless my blood was running high and happy over
+the excitement I had caused by unlocking the door.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No one let me out. I picked the lock. Will that suit you?&quot; lied Franz,
+protecting me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the lad been and done?&quot; asked the mate of the <i>Lord
+Summerville</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I was shanghaied in New York,&quot; put in Franz swiftly, &quot;and I demand
+English justice.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And you shall get it, my man!&quot; answered the mate proudly, &quot;for you have
+been assaulted on English ground, as I'll stand witness.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A whistle was blown. Men came running. Soon Franz was outside the
+jurisdiction of Germany.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The next day Captain Schantze stalked about, hardly speaking to Miller.
+He was angry and laid the blame at the latter's door.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Miller, why in the name of God didn't you guard that fellow better? An
+English court ... you know what <i>they'll</i> do to us!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Miller spread his hands outward, shrugged his shoulders expressively,
+remained in silence. The two mates and the captain ate the rest of their
+supper in a silence that bristled.</p>
+
+<p>The ship was detained for ten days more after its cargo had been
+unloaded.</p>
+
+<p>At the trial, during which the &quot;old maids&quot; and The Sailors' Aid Society
+came to the fore, Captain Schantze roared his indignant best&mdash;so much so
+that the judge warned him that he was not on his ship but on English
+ground....</p>
+
+<p>Franz got a handsome verdict in his favour, of course.</p>
+
+<p>And for several days he was seen, rolling drunk about the streets, by
+our boys, who now looked on him as a pretty clever person.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was my time to run away&mdash;if I ever intended to. Within the next day
+or so we were to take on coal for the West Coast. We were to load down
+so heavily, the mate, who had conceived a hatred of me, informed me,
+that even in fair weather the scuppers would be a-wash. Significantly he
+added there would be much danger for a man who was not liked aboard a
+certain ship ... by the mates ... much danger of such a person's being
+washed overboard. For the waves, you know, washed over the deck of so
+heavily loaded a ship at will.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>On the <i>Lord Summerville</i> was a mad Pennsylvania boy who had, like
+myself, gone to sea for the first time ... but he had had no uncle to
+beat timidity into him ... and he had dared ship as able seaman on the
+big sky-sailed lime-juicer, and had gloriously acquitted himself.</p>
+
+<p>He was a tall, rangy young bullock of a lad. He could split any door
+with his fist. He liked to drink and fight. And he liked women in the
+grog-house sense.</p>
+
+<p>One of his chief exploits had been the punching of the second mate in
+the jaw when both were high a-loft. Then he had caught him about the
+waist, and held him till he came to, to keep him from falling. The mate
+had used bad language at him.</p>
+
+<p>Hoppner had worked from the first as if he had been born to the sea.</p>
+
+<p>He and I met in a saloon. The plump little barmaid had made him what she
+called, &quot;A man's drink,&quot; while me she had served contemptuously with a
+ginger ale.</p>
+
+<p>Hoppner boasted of his exploits. I, of mine.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I tell you what, Gregory, since we're both jumping ship here, let's be
+pals for awhile and travel together.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm with you, Hoppner.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And why jump off empty-handed, since we are jumping off?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What is it you're driving at?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There ought to be a lot of loot on two boats!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Suppose we get caught?&quot; I asked cautiously.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Anybody that's worth a damn will take a chance in this world. Aren't
+you game to take a chance?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course I'm game.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, then, you watch your chance and I'll watch mine. I'll hook into
+everything valuable that's liftable on my ship and you tend to yours in
+the same fashion.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We struck hands in partnership, parted, and agreed to meet at the
+wharf-gate the next night, just after dark, he with his loot, I with
+mine.</p>
+
+<p>I spent the morning of the following day prospecting. I had seen the
+captain put the ship's money for the paying of the crew in a drawer, and
+turn the key.</p>
+
+<p>But first, with a curious primitive instinct, I fixed on a small ham and
+a loaf of rye bread as part of the projected booty, in spite of the fact
+that, if I but laid hands on the ship's money, I would have quite a
+large sum.</p>
+
+<p>It was the piquaresque romance of what I was about to do that moved me.
+The romance of the deed, not the possession of the objects stolen, that
+appealed to my imagination. I pictured my comrade and myself going
+overland, our swag on our backs, eluding pursuit ... and joining with
+the natives in some far hinterland. I would be a sort of Jonathan Wilde
+plus a Fran&ccedil;ois Villon.</p>
+
+<p>Before the captain returned I had surveyed everything to my satisfaction
+... after supper the captain and the two mates left for shore again.</p>
+
+<p>Now was the time. I searched the captain's old trousers and found the
+ship's keys there. They were too bulky to carry around with him.</p>
+
+<p>The keys seemed to jangle like thunder as I tried them one after the
+other on the drawer where I had seen him put away the gold.</p>
+
+<p>I heard someone coming. I started to whistle noisily, and to polish the
+captain's <i>carpet slippers!</i> ... it was only someone walking on deck ...
+The last key was, dramatically, the right one. The drawer opened ... but
+it was empty! I had seen the captain&mdash;the captain had also seen me. Now
+I started to take anything I could lay my hands on.</p>
+
+<p>I snatched off the wall two silver-mounted cavalry pistols, a present
+from his brother to Schantze. I added a bottle of k&uuml;mmel to the ham and
+the rye bread. The k&uuml;mmel a present for Hoppner.</p>
+
+<p>Then, before leaving the <i>Valkyrie</i> forever, I sat down to think if
+there were not something I might do to show my contempt for Miller.
+There were many things I could do, I found.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, I took a large sail-needle and some heavy-thread and
+I sewed two pairs of his trousers and two of his coats up the middle of
+the legs and arms, so he couldn't put them on, at least right away. I
+picked up hammer and nails and nailed his shoes and sea-boots securely
+to the middle of his cabin floor. Under his pillow I found a full flask
+of brandy. I emptied half ... when I replaced it, it was full again. But
+I had not resorted to the brandy cask to fill it.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The apprehension that I might be come upon <i>flagrante delictu</i> gave me a
+shiver of apprehension. But it was a pleasurable shiver. I enjoyed the
+malicious wantonness of my acts, and my prospective jump into the
+unknown ... all the South Seas waited for me ... all the world!</p>
+
+<p>But, though every moment's delay brought detection and danger nearer, I
+found time for yet one more stroke. With a laughable vision of Schantze
+smashing Miller all over the cabin, I wrote and left this note pinned on
+the former's pillow:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Dear Captain:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>     By the time you read this letter I will be beyond your reach (then
+     out of the instant's imagination ... I had not considered such a
+     thing hitherto). I am going far into the interior and discover a
+     gold mine. When I am rich I shall repay you for the cavalry pistols
+     which I am compelled to confiscate in lieu of my wages, which I now
+     forfeit by running away, though entitled to them.</p>
+
+<p>     You have been a good captain and I like you.</p>
+
+<p>     As for Miller, he is beneath my contempt. It was he who drank all
+     your wines, brandies, and whiskies ... the sailmaker is to answer
+     for your beer. The second mate has been in on this theft of your
+     liquors, too (I left the cook out because he had been nice to me).</p>
+
+<p>     Good-bye, and good luck.</p>
+
+<p>     Your former cabin boy, and, though you may not believe me, always
+     your well-wisher and friend,</p>
+
+<p class='right'>JOHN GREGORY.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>I left what I had stolen bundled up in my blanket. I walked forward
+nonchalantly to see if anyone was out to observe me. I discovered the
+sandy-haired Blacksmith, Klumpf, sitting on the main hatch. I saw that I
+could not pass him with my bundle without strategy. The strategy I
+employed was simple.</p>
+
+<p>I drew him a bottle of brandy. I gave it to him. After he had drawn a
+long drink I told him I was running away from the ship. He laughed and
+took another drink. I passed him with my bundle. He shouted good-bye to
+me.</p>
+
+<p>Before I had gone by the nose of the old ship, who should I run into but
+Klaus, coming back from a spree. He was pushing along on all fours like
+an animal, he was so drunk ... good, simple Klaus, whom I liked. I laid
+down my bundle, risking capture, while I helped him to the deck. He
+stopped a moment to pat the ship's side affectionately as if it were a
+living friend, or nearer, a mother.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Gute alte <i>Valkyrie!</i>.. gute alte <i>Valkyrie!</i>&quot; he murmured.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Safe so far. At the outside of the dock-gate Hoppner waited my arrival.
+He was interested in the k&uuml;mmel, and in the pistols, which were
+pawnable.</p>
+
+<p>He had been more daring than I. He had tried to pick his captain's
+pocket of a gold watch while the latter slept. But every time he reached
+for it the captain stirred uneasily. He would have snatched it anyhow,
+but just then his first mate stepped into the cabin ... &quot;and I hid till
+the mate went out again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And what then?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I picked up a lot of silverware the captain had for show occasions ...
+that I found, rummaging about.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And him there sleeping?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why not?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I found four revolvers that belonged to the mates and captain. I put
+them all in one bundle and chucked them into a rowboat over the ship's
+side. And now we must go back to your boat&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To my boat?&quot; I asked, amazed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes&quot; (I had told him how nearly I had missed our ship-money).</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To your boat, and ransack the cabin till we locate that coin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's too risky.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hell, take a chance, can't you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>That's what Hoppner was always saying as long as we travelled together:
+&quot;Hell, take a chance.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But when I began telling him with convulsive laughter, of the revenge I
+had taken on the mate ... and also how I had thrown all the keys
+overboard, Hoppner, instead of joining in with my laughter, struck at
+me, not at all playfully, &quot;What kind of damn jackass have I joined up
+with, anyhow,&quot; he exclaimed. &quot;Now it won't be any use going back, you've
+thrown the keys away and we'd make too great a racket, breaking open
+things....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He insisted, however, on going back to his own boat, sliding down to the
+rowboat, and rowing away with the loot he had cast into it. We had no
+sooner reached the prow of the <i>Lord Summerville</i> than we observed
+people bestirring themselves on board her more than was natural.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, <i>now</i> we'll beat it. They're after me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Hoppner had also brought a blanket. We went &quot;humping bluey&quot; as swagmen,
+as the tramp is called in Australia.</p>
+
+<p>The existence of the swagman is the happiest vagrant's life in the
+world. He is usually regarded as a bona fide seeker for work, and food
+is readily given him for the asking. Unlike the American hobo, he is
+given his food raw, and is expected to cook it himself. So he carries
+what he calls a &quot;tucker bag&quot; to hold his provisions; also, almost more
+important&mdash;his &quot;billy can&quot; or tea-pot....</p>
+
+<p>Hoppner and I acquired the tea-habit as badly as the rest of the
+Australian swagmen. Every mile or so the swagman seems to stop, build a
+fire, and brew his draught of tea, which he makes strong enough to take
+the place of the firiest swig of whiskey. I've seen an old swagman boil
+his tea for an actual half-hour, till the resultant concoction was as
+thick and black as New Orleans molasses. With such continual draughts of
+tea, only the crystalline air, and the healthy dryness of the climate
+keeps them from drugging themselves to death.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Tea ain't any good to drink unless you can put a stick straight up in
+it, and it can stand alone there,&quot; joked an old swagman, who had invited
+us to partake of a hospitable &quot;billy-can&quot; with him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We had long, marvellous talks with different swagmen, as we slowly
+sauntered north to Newcastle....</p>
+
+<p>We heard of the snakes of Australia, which workmen dug up in torpid
+writhing knots, in the cold weather ... of native corrobories which one
+old informant told us he had often attended, where he procured native
+women or &quot;gins&quot; as they called them, for a mere drink of whiskey or gin
+... &quot;that's why they calls 'em 'gins'&quot; he explained ... (wrong, for
+&quot;gin&quot; or a word of corresponding sound is the name for &quot;woman&quot; in many
+native languages in the antipodes)....</p>
+
+<p>The azure beauty of those days!... tramping northward with nothing in
+the world to do but swap stories and rest whenever we chose, about
+campfires of resinous, sweetly smelling wood ... drinking and drinking
+that villainous tea.</p>
+
+<p>In Australia the law against stealing rides on freights is strictly
+enforced. The tramp has always to walk&mdash;to the American tramp this is at
+first a hardship, but you soon grow to like it ... you learn to enjoy
+the wine in the air, the fragrance of the strange trees that shed bark
+instead of leaves, the noise of scores of unseen Waterfalls in the hills
+of New South Wales.</p>
+
+<p>The morning that the little sea-port of Newcastle lay before us, I felt
+as if I had been on tour through a strange world. For the first time the
+story-books of my youth had come true.</p>
+
+<p>But Hoppner rose from the camp fire that we'd been sleeping by,
+stretched, and remarked, &quot;now, thank Christ, I'll be able to find a good
+seat in a pub again, just like in Sydney, and all the booze I can drink.
+We can go to some sailors' boarding house here, tell them we want to
+ship out, and they'll furnish us with the proper amount of drinks and
+take care of us, all hunky dory, till they find us a berth on ship ...
+of course they'll be well paid for their trouble ... two months' advance
+pay handed over to them by the skipper ... but that won't bother me a
+bit.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>From the hill on which we lay encamped we saw all the ships in the
+harbour. I no longer feared the sea. Your true adventurer forgets danger
+and perils experienced as a woman forgets the pangs of childbirth.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We met a sailor on the street, who, though at first a stranger, soon
+became our friend and, with the quick hospitality of the sea, steered us
+to a pub known as the Green Emerald, bought us drinks, and introduced us
+to Mother Conarty, the proprietress.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll ship ye out all right, but where's your dunnage?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We confessed that we had run away from our ships down at Sydney.</p>
+
+<p>The old sailor had spoken of Mother Conarty as rough-mannered, but a
+woman with &quot;a good, warm heart.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She proved it by taking us in to board, with no dunnage for her to hold
+as security.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, they're good lads, I'm sure,&quot; vouched our sailor-friend, speaking
+of us as if we had been forecastle mates of his for twenty voyages on
+end ... the way of the sea!</p>
+
+<p>Now Mother Conarty was not stupid. She was a great-bodied, jolly
+Irishwoman, but she possessed razor-keen, hazel eyes that narrowed on us
+a bit when she first saw us. But the woman in her soon hushed her
+passing suspicions. For Hoppner was a frank-faced, handsome lad, with
+wide shoulders and a small waist like a girl's. It was Hoppner's good
+looks took her in. She gave us a room together.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There was a blowsy cheeked bar-maid, Mother Conarty's daughter. She
+knew well how to handle with a few sharp, ironic remarks anyone who
+tried to &quot;get fresh&quot; with her ... and if she couldn't, there were plenty
+of husky sailormen about, hearty in their admiration for the resolute,
+clean girl, and ready with mauling fists.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Mother Conarty's proud o' that kid o' hers, she is.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And well she may be!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I've been thinkin' over you b'yes, an' as ye hain't no dunnage wit' ye,
+I'm thinkin' ye'll be workin' fer yer board an' room.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We're willing enough, mother,&quot; I responded, with a sinking of the
+heart, while Hoppner grimaced to me, behind her back.</p>
+
+<p>We scrubbed out rooms, and the stairs, the bar, behind the bar, the
+rooms back and front, where the sailors drank. We earned our board and
+room ... for a few days.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At the Green Emerald I met my first case of delirium tremens. And it was
+a townsman who had 'em, not a sailor. The townsman was well-dressed and
+well-behaved&mdash;at first ... but there lurked a wild stare in his eye that
+was almost a glaze ... and he hung on the bar and drank and drank and
+drank. It apparently had no effect on him, the liquor that he took.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say, but you're a tough one,&quot; complimented Molly.</p>
+
+<p>But <i>it</i> began in the afternoon. He picked up a stray dog from the floor
+and began kissing it. And the dog slavered back, returning his
+affection. Then he dropped the dog and began picking blue monkeys off
+the wall ... wee things, he explained to us ... that he could hold
+between thumb and forefinger ... only there were so many of them ...
+multitudes of them ... that they rather distressed him ... they carried
+the man away in an ambulance.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Hoppner and I tired of the ceaseless scrubbing. One day we simply walked
+out of the Green Emerald and never showed up again. Hoppner stayed on in
+town.</p>
+
+<p>I found that the <i>Valkyrie</i> had run up from Sydney to coal at Newcastle,
+for the West Coast. I thought that in this case a little knowledge was
+not a dangerous thing, but a good thing, as long as I confined that
+knowledge to myself. I knew that the <i>Valkyrie</i> was there. It was not
+necessary that the officers of the boat should know I was there ...
+which I wasn't, for I turned south, my swag on my back, and made Sydney
+again.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In Sydney and &quot;on the rocks,&quot; that is with nothing to eat and no place
+to sleep but outdoors.</p>
+
+<p>Of course I couldn't keep away from the ships. I arrived at the Circular
+Quay. I ran into the Sailors' Mission. They were serving tea and having
+a prayer-meeting. I wandered in.</p>
+
+<p>A thin, wisplike man, timid, in black, but very gentlemanly, made me
+heartily welcome. Not with that obnoxious, forced heartiness sky-pilots
+think the proper manner to affect in dealing with sailors, but in a
+human way genuinely felt.</p>
+
+<p>After a service of hearty singing, he asked me if he could help me in
+any way.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I suppose you can. I'm on the rocks bad.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He gave me all the cakes to eat which were left over from the tea. And a
+couple of shillings beside.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I wonder if there's anything else I can do?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, I'm a poet,&quot; I ventured, &quot;and I'd like to get Chaucer's
+<i>Canterbury Tales</i> to read again.&quot; I said this as much to startle the
+man as really meaning it. I can go so long without reading certain
+poets, and after that I starve for them as the hungry starve for food. I
+was hungry for Chaucer.</p>
+
+<p>Such a request, coming from a youth almost in rags, impressed the
+sky-pilot so deeply that he insisted on giving me a job pumping the
+organ during services and a little room to sleep in at the mission. What
+is more, he lent me Skeats' edition of Chaucer, complete. And all the
+time I was with him he proved a &quot;good sport.&quot; He didn't take advantage
+of my dependence on him to bother me so very much about God.</p>
+
+<p>He took it for granted that I was a Christian, since I never discussed
+religion with him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It began to grow wearisome, pumping an organ for a living. And I had fed
+myself full on Chaucer.</p>
+
+<p>I began to yawn, behind the organ, over the growing staleness of life in
+a sailors' mission. And also I was being pestered by a tall, frigid old
+maid in purples and blacks, who had fixed her eye on me as a heathen she
+must convert.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;How'd you like a voyage to China?&quot; the sky-pilot asked, one day.</p>
+
+<p>Cathay ... Marco Polo ... Milton's description of the Chinese moving
+their wheelbarrows along the land by means of sails ... many poetic
+visions marched across my mind at the question.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'd like to, right enough.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then here's a chance for you,&quot; and he handed me a copy of the Bulletin,
+pointing out an advertisement for cattlemen on the steamboat, <i>South Sea
+King</i>, about to take a cargo of steers from Queensland to Taku, province
+of Pechi-li, Northern China.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What are they sending cattle away up there for?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Supplies for troops ... The Boxer outbreak, you know ... go down to the
+number given in the advertisement, and I'm sure they'll sign you on as
+cattleman, if you want the job.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All right. I'll go now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; looking me over dubiously, &quot;you'd better not go there or anywhere
+else, in your present rig ... you're too ragged to apply even for such
+work ... hang around till morning, and I'll go home to-night and bring
+you a decent coat, at least. Your coat is worse than your trousers ...
+though <i>they</i> are ravelled at the bottoms and coming through in the left
+knee ... every time you take a step I can see a glint of white through
+the cloth, and,&quot; walking round me in a tour of inspection, &quot;the seat
+might break through at any moment.&quot; All this was said without a glint of
+humour in his eyes.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Next morning the sky-pilot came down very late. It was twelve. But he
+had not forgotten me. &quot;Here's the coat,&quot; and he solemnly unwrapped and
+trailed before my astonished gaze a coat with a long, ministerial tail.
+I put it on. The tail came below the bend of my knees. I laughed. The
+sky-pilot did not.</p>
+
+<p>Finally he stepped back, cracked a solemn smile, and remarked, &quot;You <i>do</i>
+look rather odd!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The intonation of his voice, his solemn almost deprecatory smile, set me
+off and I laughed till the tears ran down my face.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I say, what's so funny?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Me! I am!... in your long-tailed coat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If I was on the rocks like you I wouldn't see anything to laugh
+about.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At the shipping office, the place mentioned in the advertisement, in the
+dimly lit, grey-paned room, there sat one lone, pasty-faced,
+old-youngish clerk on the traditional clerk's high stool. But he proved
+lively beyond his appearance.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My God! do look who's here!&quot; he exclaimed facetiously, and then,
+rapidly, without giving me room for a biting word in return, &quot;no,
+there's no use now, my boy ... we took on all the cattlemen we needed by
+ten o'clock this morning.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I walked away, disconsolate. I bore on my back my swagman's blanket. In
+the blanket I carried a change of shirts the sky-pilot had given me, a
+razor, a toothbrush, a Tennyson, and a Westcott and Hort's Greek New
+Testament with glossary, that I had stolen from a bookstall in Sydney.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I found out where the dock was, nevertheless, where the men were loafing
+about in groups, waiting to be taken out to the <i>South Sea King</i> ...
+which lay in the harbour.</p>
+
+<p>At the entrance to the pier I met a powerful, chunky lad who was called
+&quot;Nippers,&quot; he said. He, too, was going with the <i>South Sea King</i> ... not
+as a cattleman, but as stowaway. He urged me to stow away along with
+him. And he gave me, unimaginatively, my name of &quot;Skinny,&quot; which the
+rest called me during the voyage.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We strolled up to the men and joined them.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hello, kids!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hello, fellows! Are you the cattlemen for the <i>South Sea King</i>?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Right you are, my lad ... we are that!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The men went on with their arguing. They were fighting the Boer War all
+over again with their mouths. Some of them had been in it. Many of them
+had tramped in South Africa. They shouted violently, profanely, at each
+other at the tops of their voices, contending with loud assertions and
+counter-assertions, as if about to engage in an all-round fight.</p>
+
+<p>Several personal altercations sprang up, the points of the debate
+forgotten ... I couldn't discover what it was about, myself ... only
+that one man was a fool ... another, a silly ass ... another, a bloody
+liar!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The launch which was to carry them to the <i>South Sea King</i> at this
+moment started nosing into the dock, on a turbulent zig-zag across the
+harbour; and the men forgot their quarrelling. It brought up at the foot
+of a pile and made fast.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, Skinny,&quot; Nippers urged me aggressively, &quot;it's front seats or
+nothing. Act as if you owned the boat.&quot; We thrust ahead of the others
+and swarmed down the ladder ... heaping, swearing, horse-playing, the
+cattlemen filled the launch from stern to bow.</p>
+
+<p>Nippers had been a professional stowaway since his tenth year. He had
+gone all over the world in that fashion, he had informed me. He was now
+sixteen. I was almost eighteen.</p>
+
+<p>His six years of rough life with rough men had brought him to premature
+manhood, taught him to exhibit a saucy aplomb to everybody, to have at
+his finger-ends all the knockabout resourcefulness and impudence that
+the successful vagrant must acquire in order to live at all as an
+individual....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We were the first on deck.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where are the cattlemen's bunks?&quot; Nippers asked of an oiler who stood,
+nonchalant, somewhat contemptuous, looking over the side at the
+seething, vociferous cattlemen.</p>
+
+<p>Not wasting a word on us, the oiler pointed aft over his shoulder, with
+a grimy thumb.</p>
+
+<p>We found a dark entrance like the mouth to a cave, that led down below.
+In our hurry we lost our footing on the greasy ladder and tumbled all
+the way to the bottom.</p>
+
+<p>We had not time to rub our bruises. We plumped down and under the lower
+tier of bunks ... just in time ... the men came pouring down
+helter-skelter ... the talking, arguing, voluble swearing, and obscenity
+was renewed ... all we could see, from where we lay, was a confusion of
+legs to the knee, moving about....</p>
+
+<p>They settled down on the benches about the table. They slackened their
+talk and began smacking their lips over ship-biscuit, marmalade, and
+tea.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Still we lay in silence. The screw of the propeller had not started
+yet. We dared not come out or we would be put ashore.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We were hungry. We could hear their tin plates clattering and clinking
+as the cattlemen ate supper, and smell the smell of cornbeef and boiled
+potatoes. Our mouths ran from hunger.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;wish I had something to scoff, I'm starvin',&quot; groaned Nippers, &quot;but
+we'll hafta lay low till the bloody tub pulls out or we'll get caught
+an' dumped ashore.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Supper done with, the men were sitting about and smoking. They were
+soon, however, summoned up on deck, by a voice that roared down to them,
+from above, filling their quarters with a gust of sound.</p>
+
+<p>We were alone now, perhaps,&mdash;it was so still.</p>
+
+<p>With an almost imperceptible slowness, Nippers thrust his head out, as
+cautiously as a turtle ... he emerged further.</p>
+
+<p>He made a quick thrust of the arm for a platter of beef and potatoes,
+that stood, untouched, on the table ... someone coughed. We had thought
+we were alone. Nippers jerked back. The tin came down with a clatter,
+first to the bench, then to the floor. A big friendly potato rolled
+under to where we were. We seized on it, divided it, ate it.</p>
+
+<p>Contrary to our conjecture, some of the men must have stayed below.
+Someone jumped out of a bunk.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There's rats down here!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;mighty big rats, if you arsks me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's not rats,&quot; and I could hear a fear in the voice that quavered the
+words forth, &quot;I tell you, buddy, this ship is haunted.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;haunted!&quot; boomed the voice of a man coming down the ladder, &quot;you stop
+this silly nonsense right now ... don't spread such talk as that ...
+it's stowaways!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We saw a pair of legs to the knees again. We lay still, breathless. A
+watch chain dangled down in a parabolic loop. Then followed a round
+face, beef-red with stooping. It looked under apoplectically at us.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ah, me b'yes, c'm on out o' there!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And out we came, dragged by the foot, one after the other, as I myself
+in my childhood have pulled frogs out from a hole in a brook-bank.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've been hearing them for hours, Mister,&quot; spoke up the little,
+shrivelled, leathery-skinned West Indian negro, who spoke English
+without a trace of dialect, &quot;and I was sure the place was haunted.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We stood before the captain, cap deferentially in hand.</p>
+
+<p>But he looked like anything but a man in charge of a ship. He was short.
+In outward appearance, moreover, he was like a wax doll. He had
+waxen-white cheeks with daubs of pink as if they had been put there from
+a rouge pot. His hair was nicely scented, oiled, and patted down. His
+small hands were white and perfectly manicured.</p>
+
+<p>Nippers began to snicker openly at him. But the sharp variety and
+incisiveness of the oaths he vented at us, soon disabused us of any
+opinion we might have held that he was sissified....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's wrong with <i>you</i>, you young &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; you?&quot; began the
+captain. The snicker died slowly from Nipper's lips, and in his face
+dawned an infinite, surprised respect....</p>
+
+<p>Then, after he had subdued us:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So you're stowaways, eh?... and you think you're going to be given a
+free ride to Brisbane and let go ashore, scot free?... not much! You'll
+either go to jail there or sign up here, as cattlemen for the trip to
+China&mdash;even though I can see that your mouths are still wet from your
+mothers' tits!&quot; And he ended with a blasphemous flourish.</p>
+
+<p>Nippers and I looked at each other in astonishment. Of course we wanted
+to sign on as cattlemen. No doubt some of the men hired at Sydney had
+failed to show up at the wharf.</p>
+
+<p>The ship's book was pushed before us.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sign here!&quot; I signed &quot;John Gregory&quot; with satisfaction. Nippers signed
+after, laboriously.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And now get aft with you, you &mdash;&mdash;!&quot; cursed the captain, dismissing us
+with a parting volley that beat about our ears.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Gawd, but the skipper's a <i>right</i> man enough!&quot; worshipped Nippers.</p>
+
+<p>We hurried down the ladder to gobble up what was left of the cornbeef
+and potatoes.... Nippers looked up at me, with a hunk of beef sticking
+from his mouth, which he poked in with the butt-end of his knife....
+&quot;Say, didn't the old man cuss wonderful, and him lookin' like such a
+lady!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There was plenty of work to do in the few days it took to reach
+Brisbane, where the cattle were to be taken aboard. The boat was an
+ordinary tramp steamer, and we had to make an improvised cattleboat out
+of her. Already carpenters had done much to that effect by erecting
+enclosures on the top deck, the main deck, by putting up stalls in the
+hold. Every available foot was to be packed with the living flesh of
+cattle.</p>
+
+<p>We gave the finishing touches to the work, trying to make the boarding
+and scantling more solid&mdash;solid enough to withstand the plunging,
+lurching, and kicking of fear-stricken, wild Queensland steers unused to
+being cooped up on shipboard....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We had made fast to a dock down the Brisbane River, several miles out
+from Brisbane ... nearby stood the stockyards, with no cattle in them
+yet.</p>
+
+<p>In a day's time of lusty heaving and running and hauling we had taken on
+the bales of compressed fodder that were to feed the cattle for the
+twenty-day trip to Taku, China.</p>
+
+<p>Then the little, fiery, doll-like skipper made the tactical error of
+paying each man a couple of bob advance on his forthcoming wages.</p>
+
+<p>In a shouting, singing mob we made for Brisbane, like schoolboys on a
+holiday.</p>
+
+<p>Two shilling apiece wasn't much. But a vagabond can make a little silver
+go far. And there are more friends to be found by men in such a
+condition, more good times to be had&mdash;of a sort&mdash;than a world held by
+more proper standards can imagine.</p>
+
+<p>In both brothel and pub the men found friends. There were other sailors
+ashore, there were many swagmen just in from the bush&mdash;some with
+&quot;stakes&quot; they had earned on the ranches out in the country ... and in
+their good, simple hearts they were not averse to &quot;standing treats.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As if by previous appointment, one by one we drifted together, we
+cattlemen of the <i>South Sea King</i>&mdash;we drifted together and found each
+other in the fine park near the Queensland House of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>We had, all of us, already over-stayed our shore-leave by many hours.
+We grouped together in informal consultation as to what should be
+done&mdash;should we go back to the ship or not?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We might run into a typhoon ... with all them crazy cattle on board!&quot;
+voiced one....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Nevertheless, perhaps because it was, after all, the line of least
+resistance, because there regular meals awaited us, and a secure place
+of sleep, by twos and threes we drifted back, down the long, hot, dusty
+road, to where the <i>South Sea King</i> lay waiting for us ... the mate, the
+captain, and the cattle-boss furious at us for our over-stayed
+shore-leave....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The cattle had been there these many hours, bellowing and moving
+restlessly in their land-pens, the hot sun blazing down upon them.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Our cattle-boss, it seems, knew all about the handling of his animals on
+land. But not on sea. When, the following morning, we started early,
+trying to drive the cattle on board ship, they refused to walk up the
+runway. In vain the boss strewed earth and sod along its course, to make
+it seem a natural passage for them ... they rushed around and around
+their pens, kicking up a vast, white, choking dust,&mdash;snorting,
+bellowing, and throwing their rumps out gaily in sidelong gallopades ...
+all young Queensland steers; wild, but not vicious. Still full of the
+life and strength of the open range....</p>
+
+<p>Then we scattered bits of the broken bales of their prepared food, along
+the runway, to lure them ... a few were led aboard thus. But the captain
+cried with oaths that they didn't have time to make a coaxing-party of
+the job....</p>
+
+<p>At last the donkey-engine was started, forward. A small cable was run
+through a block, and, fastened by their halters around their horns, one
+after the other the steers, now bellowing in great terror, their eyes
+popping for fear&mdash;were hoisted up in the air, poised on high, kicking,
+then swung down, and on deck.</p>
+
+<p>You had to keep well from under each one as he descended, or suffer the
+befouling consequences of his fear ... we had great laughter over
+several men who came within the explosive radius ... till the mate hit
+on the device of tying each beast's tail close before he was jerked up
+into the air.</p>
+
+<p>What a pandemonium ... shouting ... swearing ... whistles blowing
+signals ... the chugging respiration of the labouring donkey-engine ...
+and then the attempted stampede of each trembling, fear-crazy animal as
+soon as he rose four-footed, on deck, after his ride through the sky....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The ship was crammed as full as Noah's ark. In the holds and on the main
+deck stood the steers, in long rows....</p>
+
+<p>On the upper deck, exposed to all the weather, were housed the more
+tractable sheep, who had, without objection, bleated their way aboard
+docilely up the runway&mdash;behind their black ram ... that the cattle-boss
+had to help on a bit, by pulling him the few first yards by his curly
+horns.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As we swam by in the fading day, a pale ghost of a moon was already up.
+Ghostly rows of knee-ing trees stood out like live things in the
+river....</p>
+
+<p>Under the night, off at sea, what with the mooing and baaing through all
+the ship, it seemed like an absurd farmyard that had somehow got on the
+ocean.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There were two quarters for the men ... a place under the forecastle
+head, forward&mdash;as well as the after-quarters. Nippers and I had been
+separated&mdash;he staying aft, while I took up my bunk forward.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But the men on the boat, the few that stick in my memory as distinct
+personages:</p>
+
+<p>There was the bloated, fat Scotch boy, whom we called just Fatty, a
+sheepherder by calling. He had signed on for the trip, to take care of
+the sheep on the upper deck;</p>
+
+<p>There was a weak, pathetic cockney, who died of sun-stroke;</p>
+
+<p>The ex-jockey, a bit of a man with a withered left arm&mdash;made that way
+from an injury received in his last race, when his mount fell on him;</p>
+
+<p>There was the West Indian Negro, a woolly, ebony wisp of a creature, a
+great believer in ghosts (he who thought we stowaways were ghosts when
+we hid under the bunk). The Irish cattle-boss gave him the job of
+night-watchman, &quot;to break him of his superstitious silliness&quot;;</p>
+
+<p>There was the big, black Jamaica cook ... as black as if he was polished
+ebony ... a fine, big, polite chap, whom everyone liked. He had a white
+wife in Southampton (the sailors who had seen her said she was pretty
+... that the cook was true to her ... that she came down to the boat the
+minute the <i>South Sea King</i> reached an English port, they loved each
+other so deeply!) ...</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the giant of an Irishman ... who, working side by side
+with me in the hold, shovelling out cattle-ordure there with me,
+informed me that I looked as if I had consumption ... that I would not
+be able to stand the terrific heat for many days without keeling over
+... but, his prediction came true of himself, not of me.</p>
+
+<p>One morning, not many days out, the little West Indian watchman,
+bringing down the before-daylight coffee and ships-biscuits and rousing
+the men, as was his duty,&mdash;found the big fellow, with whom he used to
+crack cheery jokes, apparently sound asleep. The watchman shook him by
+the foot to rouse him ... found his big friend stiff and cold.</p>
+
+<p>The watchman let out a scream of horror that woke us right and proper,
+for <i>that</i> day....</p>
+
+<p>The next day was Sunday. It was a still, religious afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>We men ranged in two rows aft. The body had been sewn up in coarse
+canvas, the Union Jack draped over it.</p>
+
+<p>The captain, dapper in his gold-braided uniform, stood over the body as
+it lay on the plank from which it was to descend into the sea. In a
+high, clear voice he read that beautiful burial-service for the dead ...
+an upward tilt of the board in the hands of two brown-armed seamen, the
+body flashed over the side, to swing feet-down, laden with shot, for
+interminable days and nights, in the vast tides of the Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>No one reached quickly enough. The Union Jack went off with the body,
+like a floral decoration flung after....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We drank the coffee brought to us before dawn, in grouchy, sleepy,
+monosyllabic silence. Immediately after, the cattle were to water and
+feed ... and a hungry lot they were ... but despite their appetites,
+with each day, because of the excessive heat of the tropics, and the
+confined existence that was theirs&mdash;such an abrupt transition from the
+open range&mdash;they waxed thinner and thinner, acquired more of large-eyed
+mournfulness and an aspect of almost human suffering in their piteous,
+pleading faces....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>If the big chap who succumbed to heart failure that night had lived a
+few days longer, he would have wondered still more at me or anyone else
+surviving a day's work in the hold.</p>
+
+<p>For the thermometer ran up incredibly ... hotter and hotter it grew ...
+and down there in the hold we had to shovel out the excrement every
+morning after breakfast. It was too infernal for even the prudish
+Anglo-Saxon souls of us to wear clothes beyond a breechclout, and shoes,
+to protect our feet from the harder hoof.</p>
+
+<p>Our eyes stung and watered from the reek of the ammonia in the
+cattle-urine. What with the crowding, the bad air (despite the canvas
+ventilators let down) and the sudden change from green pasturage to dry,
+baled food, most of the beasts contracted &quot;the skitters.&quot; This mess was
+what we had to shovel out through the portholes ... an
+offensive-smelling, greenish, fluidic material, that spilled, the half
+of it, always, from the carefully-held scoop of the shovel.</p>
+
+<p>Cursing, with the bitter sweat streaming off our bodies and into our
+eyes, and with an oblique eye to guard from heat-maddened, frantic
+steer-kicks,&mdash;each day, for several hours, we suffered through this hell
+... to emerge panting, like runners after a long race; befouled ... to
+throw ourselves down on the upper deck, under the blue, wind-free sky
+and feel as if we had come into paradise....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I wish I had never come back to this hell-ship, at Brisbane!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I wish I had never come aboard at all at Sydney!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At such times, and at other odd ends of leisure, I brought my Westcott
+and Hort's Greek New Testament from my bunk, and with the nasty smell of
+sheep close-by, but unheeded through custom&mdash;I studied with greater
+pleasure than I ever did before or since.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As I said before, it was not long before these poor steers were
+broken-spirited things.</p>
+
+<p>But there was one among them whose spirit kept its flag in the air,
+&quot;The Black Devil,&quot; as the cook had named him fondly ... a steer, all
+glossy-black, excepting for a white spot in the center of his forehead.
+He behaved, from the first, more like a turbulent little bull than a
+gelding. The cook fed him with tid-bits from the galley.</p>
+
+<p>He had evidently been someone's pet before he had been sold for live
+meat, to be shipped to China.</p>
+
+<p>When we took him on board by the horns he showed no fear as he rode in
+the air. And, once on his feet again, and loose on deck, he showed us
+hell's own fight&mdash;out of sheer indignation&mdash;back there in Brisbane. He
+flashed after us, with the rapid motions of a bullfight in the movies.
+Most of us climbed every available thing to get out of his reach. He
+smashed here and there through wooden supports as if they were of
+cardboard.</p>
+
+<p>The agile little ex-jockey kept running in front of him, hitting him on
+the nose and nimbly escaping&mdash;in spite of his wing-like, wasted arm,
+quicker than his pursuer ... that smashed through, while he ducked and
+turned....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll be God-damned,&quot; yelled the captain from the safe vantage of the
+bridge, &quot;fetch me my pistol,&quot; to the cabin boy, &quot;I'll have to shoot the
+beast!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>All this while the big black Jamaica cook had been calmly looking on,
+leaning fearlessly out over the half-door of the galley ... while the
+infuriated animal rushed back and forth.</p>
+
+<p>The cook said nothing. He disappeared, and reappeared with a bunch of
+carrots which he held out toward &quot;The Black Devil.&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>In immediate transformation, the little beast stopped, forgot his anger,
+stretched forth his moist, black nuzzle, sniffing ... and walked up to
+the cook, accepting the carrots. The cook began to stroke the animal's
+nose....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>You</i> little black devil,&quot; he said, in a soft voice, &quot;you're all right
+... they don't understand you ... but we're going to be pals&mdash;us
+two&mdash;aren't we?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then he came out at the door to where the steer stood, took &quot;The Black
+Devil,&quot; as we henceforth called him, gently by the under-jaw,&mdash;and led
+him into a standing-place right across from the galley.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As we struck further north under vast nights of stars, and days of
+furnace-hot sunshine, the heat, confinement, and dry, baled food told
+hideously on the animals ... the sheep seemed to endure better, partly
+because they were not halted stationary in one spot and could move about
+a little on the top deck.... But they suffered hardships that came of
+changing weather.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Especially the cattle in the lower hold suffered, grew weak and
+emaciated.... We were ever on the watch to keep them from going down ...
+there was danger of their sprawling over each other and breaking legs in
+the scramble. So when one tried to lie down, his tail was twisted till
+the suffering made him rise to his feet ... sometimes a steer would be
+too weak to regain his feet ... in such a case, in a vain effort to make
+the beast rise, I have seen the Irish foreman twist the tail nearly off,
+while the animal at first bellowed, then moaned weakly, with anguish ...
+a final boot at the victim in angry frustration....</p>
+
+<p>Last, a milky glaze would settle over the beast's eyes ... and we would
+drag him out and up by donkey-engine, swing him over and out, and drop
+him, to float, a bobbing tan object, down our receding ocean-path.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The coast of Borneo hovered, far and blue, in the offing, when we struck
+our first, and last, typhoon. The mate avowed it was merely the tail-end
+of a typhoon; if that was the tail-end, it is good that the body of it
+did not strike down on us.</p>
+
+<p>The surface of the ocean was kicked up into high, ridge-running masses.
+The tops of the waves were caught in the wind and whipped into a wide,
+level froth as if a giant egg-beater were at work ... then water, water,
+water came sweeping and mounting and climbing aboard, hill after
+bursting hill.</p>
+
+<p>The deck was swept as by a mountain-torrent ... boards whirled about
+with an uncanny motion in them. They came forward toward you with a
+bound, menacing shin and midriff,&mdash;then on the motion of the ship, they
+paused, and washed in the opposite direction.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there a steer broke loose, which had to be caught and tethered
+again. But in general the animals were too much frightened to do
+anything but stand trembling and moaning ... when they were not
+floundering about....</p>
+
+<p>Down below was a suffocating inferno. For the hatches that were
+ordinarily kept open for more air, had to be battened down till the
+waves subsided.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At the very height of the storm, we heard a screaming of the most abject
+fear.</p>
+
+<p>The jockey had passed, in forgetful excitement, too close to his enemy,
+The Black Devil&mdash;who had not forgotten, and gave him a horn in the side,
+under the withered arm.</p>
+
+<p>Several sailors carried the bleeding man aft to the captain ... who
+dressed his wound with fair skill. The jockey was not so badly injured,
+all things considered. The thrust had slanted and made only a flesh
+wound ... which enabled the fellow to loaf on a sort of sick-leave,
+during the rest of the trip.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The storm over, frantically we tore off the hatches again ... to find
+only ten steers dead below. The rest were gasping piteously for air. It
+was a day's work, heaving the dead stock overboard ... including the two
+more which died of the after-effects....</p>
+
+<p>When we went to look the sheep over, we found that over a third of them
+had been washed overboard. The rest were huddled, in frightened,
+bleating heaps, wondering perhaps what kind of an insane world it was
+that they had been harried into.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The story of this cattleboat unfolds freshly before me again, out of the
+records of memory ... the pitiful suffering of the cattle ... the lives
+and daily doings of the rowdy, likeable men, who were really still
+undeveloped children, and would so go down to the grave ... with their
+boasting and continual vanity of small and trivial things of life.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>All the time I was keeping a diary of my adventures ... in a large,
+brown copybook, with flexible covers. I carried it, tightened away,
+usually, in the lining of my coat, but occasionally I left it under the
+mattress of my bunk.</p>
+
+<p>Nippers observed me writing in it one day.</p>
+
+<p>That night it was gone. I surmised who had taken it.</p>
+
+<p>Seeking Nippers, I came upon him haltingly reading my diary aloud to an
+amused circle of cattlemen, in his quarters aft.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Give me that book back!&quot; I demanded.</p>
+
+<p>He ignored me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Give him a rap in the kisser, Skinny!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I drew back, aiming a blow at Nippers. He flung the book down and was on
+me like the tornado we had just run through ... he was a natural-born
+fighter ... in a twinkling I was on the floor, with a black eye, a
+bleeding mouth.</p>
+
+<p>I flung myself to my feet, full of fury ... then something went in my
+brain like the click of a camera-shutter ... I had an hallucination of
+Uncle Landon, coming at me with a club....</p>
+
+<p>I plumped into a corner, crouching. &quot;Don't hit me any more ... please
+don't, Uncle Lan!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He's gone crazy!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Naw, he's only a bloody, bleedin' coward,&quot; returned another voice, in
+surprise and disgust.</p>
+
+<p>Someone spat on me. I was let up at last.... I staggered forward to my
+bunk. My book had been handed back to me. It's a wonder I didn't throw
+myself into the sea, in disgust over the queer fit that had come over
+me. I lay half the night, puzzling ... was I a coward?</p>
+
+<p>Not unless an unparalleled change had occurred in me. I had fought with
+other children, when a boy ... had whipped two lads at once, when
+working in the Composite factory, that time they spit into my book.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One day a fishing-junk hove into sight, just as if it had sailed out of
+a Maxfield Parrish illustration,&mdash;swinging there in the mouth of a
+blood-red sunset ... then, like magic, appeared another and another and
+another....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Fishing-junks,&quot; ejaculated the mate, &quot;&mdash;pretty far out, too, but a
+Chink'll risk his life for a few bleedin' cash ... and yet he won't
+fight at all ... an' if you do him an injury he's like as not likely to
+up an' commit suicide at your door, to get even!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's a bally orful way to get even with a henemy!&quot; exclaimed a
+stoker, who sat on the edge of the forward hatch.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I should say so, too!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then, far and faint, were heard a crew of Chinese sailors, on the
+nearest junk, singing a curious, falsetto chantey as they hauled on a
+bamboo-braced sail....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A feller wot never travelled wouldn't bloody well believe they was
+such queer people in the world,&quot; further observed the philosophic
+coal-heaver.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Next morning the coast of China lay right against us, on the starboard
+side ... we ran into the thick of a fleet of sampans, boats fashioned
+flat like overgrown rowboats, propelled each by a huge sculling oar,
+from the stern ... they were fishers who manned them ... two or three to
+a boat ... huge, bronze-bodied, fine-muscled, breech-clouted men ... as
+they sculled swiftly to give us sea-room each one looked fit to be a
+sculptor's model.</p>
+
+<p>Their bodies shone in the sun like bronze. Several, fearing we might run
+them down, as we clove straight through their midst, raised their arms
+with a shout full of pleading and fright.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the matter? are they trying to murder some of these poor chaps?&quot;
+I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No ... we're just having a little fun ... what's the life of a Chink
+matter?&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I say, if the Chinks up where the Boxers are fighting are big and
+strong as them duffers, here's one that don't want no shore-leave!&quot;
+commented someone, as we stood ranged by the side.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I always thought Chinamen was runts.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, it's only city Chinks&mdash;mostly from Canton, that come to civilized
+countries to run laundries ... but these are the real Chinamen.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>After the cattle had been unladen, the crew were to be taken down to
+Shanghai and dumped ashore ... as it was an English Treaty port, that
+would be, technically, living up to the ship's articles, which
+guaranteed that the cattlemen aboard would be given passage back to
+English ground....</p>
+
+<p>But I was all excitement over the prospect of making my way ashore to
+where the Allied troops were fighting....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Dawn ... we were anchored in Taku Bay among the warships of the Allied
+nations ... grey warships gleaming in the sun like silver ... the sound
+of bugles ... flags of all nations ... of as many colours as the coat of
+Joseph.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, here we are at last!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Next day the work of unloading the cattle began ... hoisted again by the
+horns from our boat of heavy draught to the hold of a coasting steamer,
+that had English captain and mates, and a Chinese crew.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the steers were so weak that they died on deck ... as they were
+dying, butchers cut their throats so their beef could be called fresh.</p>
+
+<p>The only one who desired to go ashore there, I made my way, when it was
+dark and the last load of steers was being transferred to shore, down
+below to the hold of the coaster. I stood in a corner, behind an iron
+ladder, so that the cattle couldn't crush me during the night ... for
+the Chinese had turned them loose, there, in a mass.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I stumbled ashore at Tongku, a station up a way on the banks of the Pei
+Ho river.</p>
+
+<p>My first night ashore in China was a far cry from the China of my dreams
+... the Cathay of Marco Polo, with its towers of porcelain.... I crept,
+to escape a cold drizzle, under the huge tarpaulin which covered a great
+stack of tinned goods&mdash;army supplies. A soldier on guard over the stack,
+an American soldier, spotted me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come, my lad,&quot; lifting up the tarpaulin, &quot;what are you doing there?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;Trying to keep from the wet!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;run off from one of the transports?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; was as good an answer as any.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're pretty cold ... your teeth are chattering. Here, take a swig o'
+this.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And the sentinel reached me a flask of whiskey from which I drew a nip.
+Unaccustomed as I was to drink, it nearly strangled me. It went all the
+way down like fire. Then it spread with a pleasant warmth all through my
+body....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Stay here to-night ... rather uncomfortable bed, but at least it's dry.
+No one 'ull bother you ... in the morning Captain &mdash;&mdash;, who is in charge
+of the commissariat here, might give you a job.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>That next morning Captain &mdash;&mdash; gave me a job as mate, eighty dollars
+Mex. and a place to sleep, along with others, in a Compound, and find my
+food at my own expense....</p>
+
+<p>Mate, on a supply-launch that went in and out to and from the
+transports, that were continually anchoring in the bay. Our job was to
+keep the officers' mess in supplies....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And, if you stick to your job six months,&quot; I was informed, &quot;you'll be
+entitled to free transportation back to San Francisco.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My captain was a neat, young Englishman, with the merest hint of a
+moustache of fair gold.</p>
+
+<p>Our crew&mdash;two Chinamen who jested about us between themselves in a
+continuous splutter of Chinese. We could tell, by their grimaces and
+gestures ... we rather liked their harmless, human impudence ... as long
+as they did the work, while we lazed about, talking ... while up and
+down the yellow sweep of the Pei-ho the little boat tramped.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;It's too bad you didn't arrive on the present scene a few weeks,
+sooner,&quot; said my young captain ... &quot;it was quite exciting here, at that
+time. I used to have to take the boathook and push off the Chinese
+corpses that caught on the prow of the boat as they floated down, thick
+... they seemed to catch hold of the prow as if still alive. It was
+uncanny!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We slept, rolled up in our blankets, on the floor of a Chinese compound
+... adventurers bound up and down the river, to and from Tien-Tsin and
+Woo-shi-Woo and Pekin ... a sort of caravanserai....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Though it was the fall of the year and the nights were cold enough to
+make two blankets feel good, yet some days the sun blazed down
+intolerably on our boat, on the river....</p>
+
+<p>When we grew thirsty the captain and myself resorted to our jug of
+distilled water. I had been warned against drinking the yellow,
+pea-soup-like water of the Pei-ho....</p>
+
+<p>But one afternoon I found our water had run out.</p>
+
+<p>So I took the gourd used by the Chinese crew, and dipped up, as they
+did, the river water.</p>
+
+<p>The captain clutched me by the wrist.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't drink that water! If you'd seen what I have, floating in it,
+you'd be afraid!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What won't hurt a Chinaman, won't hurt me,&quot; I boasted....</p>
+
+<p>The result of my folly was a mild case of dysentery....</p>
+
+<p>In a few days I was so weak that I went around as if I had no bones left
+in my body. And I wanted to leave the country. And I repaired to Captain
+&mdash;&mdash; who had given me the job, and asked him for my pay and my
+discharge. He lit into me, disgusted, upbraiding me for a worthless
+tramp....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I might have known that you were of that ilk, from the first, just by
+looking at you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He handed me the eighty dollars in Mexican silver, that was coming to
+me.... I repaid the captain the forty I had borrowed, for food.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sick! yes, sick of laziness!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Captain &mdash;&mdash; was partly right. I had an uncontrollable distaste for the
+monotony of daily work, repeated in the same environment, surrounded by
+the same scenery ... but I was also quite weak and sick, and I am
+persuaded, that, if I had stayed on there, I might have died.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I sat on one of the wharves and played host to a crowd of romantic
+thoughts that moved in their pageant through my brain ... now I would go
+on to Pekin and see the great Forbidden City. Now I would dress in
+Chinese clothes and beg my way through the very heart of the Chinese
+Empire ... and write a book, subsequently, about my experiences and
+adventures ... and perhaps win a medal of some famous society for it ...
+and I had a dream of marrying some quaintly beautiful mandarin's
+daughter, of becoming a famous, revered Chinese scholar, bringing
+together with my influence the East and the West....</p>
+
+<p>I reached so far, in the dream, as to buy several novels of the Chinese,
+printed in their characters, of an itinerant vendor....</p>
+
+<p>The everyday world swung into my ken again.</p>
+
+<p>Three junks, laden with American marines, dropping down the river from
+Pekin, cut across my abstracted gaze ... the boys were singing.</p>
+
+<p>They marched off on the dock on which I sat. They were stationed right
+where they deployed from the junks. Men were put in guard over them.</p>
+
+<p>At Tien Tsin they had behaved rather badly, I was told by one of
+them,&mdash;had gone on a Samshu jag ... a Chinese drink, worse than the
+worst American &quot;rot-gut.&quot; ...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wisht I c'd git off the dock an' rustle up another drink somewheres.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They wouldn't let us off this dock fer love nor money,&quot; spoke up a
+lithe, blue-shaven marine to me&mdash;the company's barber, I afterward
+learned him to be....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yah, we got ter stay here all afternoon, an' me t'roat's es dry es
+san'paper.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where are they taking you to, from here?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Manila!... the <i>Indiana's</i> waitin' out in th' bay fer us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;Wish I could get off with you!&quot; I remarked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wot's the matter? On th' bum here?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Immediately the barber and two others, his pals, became intensely,
+suspiciously so, interested in my desire to sail with them....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;Tell you wot,&quot; and the company barber reached into his pocket with a
+surreptitious glance about, &quot;if you'll take these bills an' sneak past
+to that coaster lyin' along the next dock, the Chinese steward 'ull sell
+you three bottles o' whiskey fer these,&quot; and he handed me a bunch of
+bills ... &quot;an' w'en you come back with th' booze, we'll see to it that
+you get took out to the transport with us, all right ... won't we,
+boys?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;betcher boots we will.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;God, but this is like heaven to me,&quot; exclaimed the barber, as he tilted
+up his bottle, while the two others stood about him, to keep him from
+being seen. The three of them drank their bottles of whiskey as if it
+was water.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That saved me life....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;An' mine, too. You go to Manila wit' us, all right,&mdash;kid!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Toward dusk came the sharp command for the men to march aboard the
+coaster that had drawn up for them. The boys kept their word. They
+loaded me down with their accoutrements to carry. I marched up the
+gangway with them, and we were off to the <i>Indiana</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I was the first, almost, to scamper aboard the waiting transport in the
+gathering dusk ... and, to make sure of staying aboard, I hurried down
+one ladder after the other, till I reached the heavy darkness of the
+lowermost hold. Having nothing to do but sleep, I stumbled over some
+oblong boxes, climbed onto one, and composed myself for the night, using
+a coil of rope for a pillow.</p>
+
+<p>I woke to find a grey patch of day streaming down the ladder-way. My
+eyes soon adjusted themselves to the obscurity.</p>
+
+<p>And then it was that I gave a great, scared leap. And with difficulty I
+held myself back from crying out.</p>
+
+<p>Those curious oblong boxes among which I had passed the night&mdash;they were
+hermetically sealed coffins, and there were dead soldiers in them.
+Ridges of terror crept along my flesh. Stifling a panic in me, I forced
+myself to go slow as I climbed the iron rungs to the hold above ...
+where living soldiers lay sleeping in long rows....</p>
+
+<p>Still undetected, I scrambled along an aisle between them and put myself
+away in a sort of life-preserver closet. Not till I had heard the
+familiar throb of the propeller in motion for a long time, did I come
+forth.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>During the voyage of, I believe, eight days, I loafed about, lining up
+for rations with the boys ... no one questioned me. My engineer's
+clothes that I had taken, in lieu of part of my wages, from the
+slop-chest of <i>The South Sea King</i>, caused the officers of the marines
+to think I belonged to the ship's crew ... and the ship-officers must
+have thought I was in some way connected with the marines ... anyhow, I
+was not molested, and I led a life much to my liking ... an easy-going
+and loafing and tale-telling one ... mixing about and talking and
+listening ... and reading back-number magazines.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One day my friend the barber called me aside:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say, kid, I've been delegated to tell you that you've got lice.&quot; I
+flamed indignant.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's a God-damned lie! and whoever told you so is a God-damned liar,
+too! I never had a louse in my life.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Easy! Easy!... no use gittin' huffy ... if it ain't lice you got, wot
+you scratchin' all the time fer? Look in the crotch of yer pants and the
+seams of your shirt, an' see!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I <i>had</i> been scratching a lot ... and wondering what was wrong ... my
+breast was all red ... but I had explained it to myself that I was
+wearing a coarse woolen undershirt next my skin ... that I had picked up
+from the slop-chest, also.</p>
+
+<p>The barber walked jauntily away, leaving me standing sullenly alone.</p>
+
+<p>I sneaked into the toilet, looking to see if anyone was about. I turned
+my shirt back. To my horror, my loathing,&mdash;the soldier's accusation was
+true!... they were so thick, thanks to my ignorant neglect, that I could
+see them moving in battalions ... if I had been the victim of some
+filthy disease, I could scarcely have felt more beyond the pale, more a
+pariah. I had not detected them before, because I was ignorant of the
+thought of having them, and because their grey colour was exactly that
+of the inside of my woolen shirt.</p>
+
+<p>I threw the shirt away, content to shiver for a few days till we had
+steamed to warmer weather ... I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed
+myself.... I had, up to now, had experience with head-lice only ... as a
+child, in school....</p>
+
+<p>I look back with a shudder even yet to that experience. During my
+subsequent tramp-career I never could grow callous to vermin, as a few
+others that I met, did. Once I met a tramp who advised me not to bother
+about 'em ... and you would soon get used to 'em ... and not feel them
+biting at all ... but most tramps &quot;boil up&quot;&mdash;that is, take off their
+clothes, a piece at a time, and boil them&mdash;whenever they find
+opportunity.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Manila. A brief adventure there ... a bum for a few weeks, hanging
+around soldiers' barracks, blacking shoes for free meals ... till
+Provost Marshal General Bell, in an effort to clear the islands of boys
+who were vags and mascots of regiments, gave me and several other rovers
+and stowaways free transportation back to America....</p>
+
+<p>A brief stop at Nagasaki to have a broken propeller shaft mended: a long
+Pacific voyage ... then hilly San Francisco one golden morning....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>All these ocean days I peeled potatoes and helped to dish out rations
+to the lined-up soldiers at meal-times ... one slice of meat, one or two
+potatoes, to a tin plate ...</p>
+
+<p>For long hours I listened to their lying tales and boasting ... then
+lied and boasted, myself....</p>
+
+<p>My most unique adventure aboard the <i>Thomas</i>; making friends with a
+four-times-enlisted soldier named Lang, who liked army life because, he
+said, outside of drills and dress parade, it was lazy and easy ... and
+it gave him leisure to read and re-read his Shakespeare. He was a
+Shakespearean scholar....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's the best life in the world ... no worries or responsibilities
+about food and lodging&mdash;it spoils a fellow for any other kind of life
+... the officers are always decent to a fellow who respects himself as a
+soldier and citizen.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Lang and I became good pals. Day after day I sat listening to him, as,
+to the accompaniment of the rumble and pulse of the great boat a-move,
+he quoted and explained Shakespeare to me, nearly always without the
+book.</p>
+
+<p>His talk was fascinating&mdash;except when he insisted on repeating to me his
+own wretched rhymes ... in which he showed he had learned nothing about
+how to write poetry from his revered Shakespeare ... it was very bad
+Kiplingesque stuff ... much like my own bad verse of that period....</p>
+
+<p>Once Lang recited by heart the whole of <i>King Lear</i> to me, having me
+hold a copy of the play, to prove that he did not fumble a single line
+or miss a single word ... which he did not....</p>
+
+<p>Lang was a prodigious drunkard. At Nagasaki I rescued him from the
+water-butt. Coming back drunk on rice wine, he had stuck his head down
+for a cool drink, as a horse does. And in he had tumbled, head-first. If
+I had not seen his legs wiggling futilely in the air, and drawn him
+forth, dripping, he would have drowned, as the butt was too solid for
+his struggles to dump, and he couldn't make a sound for help.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As we neared San Francisco several of the boys spoke to me of taking up
+a purse for my benefit. Soldiers are always generous and
+warm-hearted&mdash;the best men, individually, in the world.</p>
+
+<p>I said no to them, that they must not take up a collection for me ... I
+did not really feel that way, at heart, but I liked better seeming proud
+and independent, American and self-reliant....</p>
+
+<p>Later on, at the very dock, I acceded ... but now I was punished for my
+hypocrisy. The boys were so eager to be home again, they only threw
+together about five dollars for me ... when, if I hadn't been foolish, I
+might have had enough to loaf with, say a month, at San Francisco, and
+do a lot of reading in the Library, and in books of poetry that I might
+have picked up at second-hand book stores....</p>
+
+<p>However, I gathered together, before I went ashore, two suits of khaki
+and two army blankets, and a pair of good army shoes that afterwards
+seemed never to wear out.</p>
+
+<p>And a young chap named Simmons, who had been sergeant, had joined the
+army by running away from home, took me to an obscure hotel as his valet
+... he wanted to &quot;put on dog,&quot; as the Indians say.</p>
+
+<p>He had parents of wealth, back in Des Moines.</p>
+
+<p>I served him as his valet for the two weeks he stayed at the hotel. He
+had been shot through the left foot so that a tendon was severed, and he
+had to walk with a cane, with a foot that flopped at every step.</p>
+
+<p>He gave me fifteen dollars for wages. After he had departed I rented a
+cheap room for a week.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Standing in front of a store on Kearney Street, one afternoon, dressed
+in my suit of soldier's khaki, looking at the display in the window, I
+got the cue that shaped my subsequent adventures in California....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Poor lad,&quot; I heard one girl say to another, standing close by, &quot;he
+looks so sick and thin, I'm sorry for him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They did not notice that my soldier's uniform had cloth buttons. Simmons
+had made me put cloth buttons on, at the hotel,&mdash;had furnished them to
+me&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't want you going about the other way ... you're such a nut, you
+might get into trouble.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mule-drivers and others in subsidiary service were allowed khaki with
+cloth buttons only ... at that time ... I don't know how it goes now.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The girls' taking me for a sick, discharged soldier made me think. I
+would travel in that guise.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>With a second-hand Shakespeare, in one volume, of wretched print, with a
+much-abused school-copy of C&aelig;sar, in the Latin (of whose idiomatic Latin
+I have never tired), an extra suit of khaki, a razor, tooth-brush, and
+tooth-powder&mdash;and a cake of soap&mdash;all wrapped up in my army blankets, I
+set forth on my peregrinations as blanket-stiff or &quot;bindle-bum.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Where I saw I could escape without awkward questioning, I played the
+convalescent ex-soldier ... I thrived. My shadow-thinness almost turned
+to fatness. It would have, had there been any disposition toward obesity
+in me....</p>
+
+<p>At times I was ashamed of doing nothing ... queer spurts of American
+economic conscience....</p>
+
+<p>Once I worked, plowing ... to drive the horses as far as a tall tree for
+shade, at the end of the third day, sneak back to the house ... and out
+to the highway with my bundle and my belongings, kicking up my heels
+ecstatically, glad to be freed from work.</p>
+
+<p>I plumped down in a fence corner and did not stir till I had read a
+whole play of Shakespeare, and a snatch of my C&aelig;sar.</p>
+
+<p>Once or twice, sheriffs who were bent on arresting me because I had no
+visible means of support, let me go, because it awed them to find a
+tramp reading Shakespeare....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's a shame, a clever lad like you bein' a bum!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Tramps, though anti-social in the larger aspects of society (as, for
+that matter, all special classes are, from millionaires down&mdash;or up),
+are more than usually companionable among themselves. I never lived and
+moved with a better-hearted group of people.</p>
+
+<p>By &quot;jungle&quot; camp-fires&mdash;(&quot;the jungles,&quot; any tramp rendezvous located
+just outside the city limits, to be beyond police jurisdiction), in
+jails, on freights ... I found a feeling of sincere companionship ... a
+companionship that without ostentation and as a matter of course, shared
+the last cent the last meal ... when every cent <i>was</i> the last cent,
+every meal the <i>last</i> meal ... the rest depending on luck and
+Providence....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Tramps often travel in pairs. I picked up a &quot;buddy&quot; ... a short,
+thick-set man of young middle age, of Scandinavian descent ... so blond
+that his eyebrows were white in contrast with his face, which was ruddy
+with work in the sun. He, like me, was a &quot;gaycat&quot; or tramp who is not
+above occasional work (as the word meant then&mdash;now it means a cheap,
+no-account grafter). He had recently been working picking oranges ...
+previous to that, he had been employed in a Washington lumber camp.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Together we drifted along the seacoast south to San Diego ... then back
+again to Santa Barbara ... for no reason but just to drift. Then we
+sauntered over to San Bernardino&mdash;&quot;San Berdu,&quot; as the tramps call it....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It struck chilly, one night. So chilly that we went into the freightyard
+to put up in an empty box-car till the sun of next day rose to warm the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>We found a car. There were many other men already there, which was good;
+the animal heat of their bodies made the interior warmer.</p>
+
+<p>The interior of the car sounded like a Scotch bagpipe a-drone ... what
+with snoring, breaking of wind in various ways, groaning, and muttering
+thickly in dreams ... the air was sickeningly thick and fetid. But to
+open a side door meant to let in the cold.</p>
+
+<p>Softly my buddy and I drew off our shoes, putting them under our heads
+to serve as pillows, and also to keep them from being stolen. (Often a
+tramp comes along with a deft enough touch to untie a man's shoes from
+his feet without waking him. I've heard of its being done.) We wrapped
+our feet in newspapers, then. Our coats we removed, to wrap them about
+us ... one keeps warmer that way than by just wearing the coat....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The door on each side crashed back!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here's another nest full of 'em!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on out, boys!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the matter?&quot; I queried.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'stoo cold out here. We have a nice, warm calaboose waitin' fer ye!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Grunting and grumbling, we dropped to the cinders, one after the other.
+A posse of deputies and citizens, had, for some dark reason, rounded us
+up.</p>
+
+<p>One or two made a break for it, and escaped, followed by a random shot.
+After that, no one else cared to be chased after by a bullet.</p>
+
+<p>They conducted us to what they had termed &quot;the calaboose,&quot; a big,
+ramshackle, one-roomed barn-like structure. Piled in so thick that we
+almost had to stand up, there were so many of us&mdash;we were held there
+till next morning.</p>
+
+<p>But we were served, then, a good breakfast, at the town's expense. The
+owner of the restaurant was a queer little, grey-faced, stringy fellow.
+He fed us all the buckwheat cakes and sausages we could hold, and won
+every hobo's heart, by giving all the coffee we could drink ... we held
+our cups with our hands about them, grateful for the warmth.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say, you're all right, mister!&quot; ventured a tramp to the proprietor, as
+he walked by.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Bet your God-damned life I'm all right!... because I ain't nothin' but
+a bum myself ... yes, an' I'm not ashamed of it, neither ... before I
+struck this burg an' started this &quot;ham-and&quot; and made it pay, I was on
+the road same es all o' you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Kin I have more pancakes, boss, an' another cup of coffee?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You sure can, bo!... es I was sayin', I'm a bum myself, an' proud of it
+... and I think these here damn bulls (policemen ... who were sitting
+nearby, waiting for us to finish) have mighty little to 'tend to,
+roundin' up you boys, now the orange-pickin' season's over with, an'
+puttin' you away like this ... why, if any one of them was half as
+decent as one o' you bums&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sh! fer Christ's sake!&quot; I admonished, &quot;they're hearing you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's jest what I want 'em to do ... I don't owe nothin' to no man,
+an' it's time someone told 'em somethin'.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Breakfast over, we were marched off to the courthouse. We were turned
+loose together in a large room. We felt so good with the sausage, cakes
+and coffee in our bellies, that we pushed each other about, sang,
+jigged, whistled.</p>
+
+<p>As we had walked in, I had asked, of the cop who walked by my side&mdash;who
+seemed affable....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say, mister, after all what's the idea?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We had to make an example,&quot; he returned, frankly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't quite get you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Last week a bunch of bums dropped off here at our town, and they
+almost ran the diggings for about twenty-four hours ... insulted women
+on the streets ... robbed ice-boxes ... even stole the clothes off the
+lines.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In other words, you mean that a bunch of drunken yeggs dropped in on
+the town, gutted it, and then jumped out ... and we poor harmless bums
+are the ones that have to pay.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;guess that's about how it is.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I passed the word along the line. My companion tramps cursed the yegg
+and his ways....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They're always raisin' hell ... an' we git the blame ... when all we
+want is not loot, but hand-outs and a cup o' coffee ... and a piece of
+change now and then.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The yegg, the tiger among tramps&mdash;the criminal tramp&mdash;despises the
+ordinary bum and the &quot;gaycat.&quot; And they in turn fear him for his
+ruthlessness and recklessness.</p>
+
+<p>He joins with them at their camp-fires ... rides with them on the road
+... robs his store or house, or cracks his safe, then flies on, taking
+the blinds or decking on top of a &quot;flyer.&quot; The law, missing the right
+quarry, descends on the slower-moving, harmless bum. And often some poor
+&quot;fall-guy&quot; gets a good &quot;frame-up&quot; for a job he never thought of ... and
+the majesty of the law stands vindicated.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The charge against us was vagrancy. We were tried by twos.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, buddy!... you an' your pal.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My companion and I were led in before, I think, a justice of the peace.
+The latter was kindly-disposed toward me because I was young and looked
+delicate.</p>
+
+<p>When I began my plea for clemency I appropriated the name, career, and
+antecedents of Simmons, the young soldier whose body-servant I had been,
+back in San Francisco. The man on the bench was impressed by my story of
+coming of a wealthy family ... my father was a banker, no less.</p>
+
+<p>The justice waved me aside. He asked my buddy to show his hands. As the
+callouses on the palms gave evidence of recent hard work, he was set
+free along with me. We were the only two who were let off. The rest were
+sent up for three months each, I am told....</p>
+
+<p>And, after all that, what did my buddy do but up and steal my blanket
+roll, with all in it&mdash;including my C&aelig;sar and Shakespeare&mdash;and my extra
+soldier uniform&mdash;the first chance he got!...</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>An American who had married a Mexican girl gave me work sawing and
+chopping wood. I stayed with him long enough to earn a second-hand suit
+of clothes he owned, which was too small for him, but almost fitted me
+... civilian clothes ... my soldier clothes were worn to tatters.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I picked up another pal. A chunky, beefy nondescript. I was meditating a
+jump across &quot;the desert.&quot; The older hoboes had warned me against it,
+saying it was a cruel trip ... the train crews knew no compunction
+against ditching a fellow anywhere out in the desert, where there would
+be nothing but a tank of brackish water....</p>
+
+<p>My new chum, on the other hand, swore, that, to one who knew the ropes,
+it was not so hard to make the jump on the Southern Pacific ... through
+Arizona and New Mexico, to El Paso. He said he would show me how to
+wiggle into the refrigerator box of an orange car ... on either end of
+the orange car is a refrigerator box, if I remember correctly ... access
+to which is gained through the criss-cross bars that hold up a sort of
+trap-door at the top. It was in the cold season, so there was now no ice
+inside. These trap-doors are always officially sealed, when the car is
+loaded. To break a seal is a penitentiary offense.</p>
+
+<p>I stood off and inspected the place I was supposed to go in at. The
+triangular opening seemed too small for a baby to slide through. I
+looked my chunky pal up and down and laughed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;think I can't make it, eh?... well, you watch ... there's an art in
+this kind of thing just like there is in anything.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Inch by inch he squeezed himself in. Then he stood up inside and called
+to me to try ... and he would pull me the rest of the way, if I stuck.
+He was plump and I was skinny. It ought to be easy for me. Nevertheless,
+it was the hardest task I ever set myself ... I stuck half-way. My pal
+pulled my shirt into rags, helping me through,&mdash;I had handed my coat in,
+previously, or he would have ripped that to pieces, too. It seemed that
+all the skin went off my hips, as I shot inside with a bang. And none
+too soon. A &quot;shack&quot; (brakeman) passed over the tops of the cars at
+almost that very moment. We lay still. He would have handed me a
+merciless drubbing if he had caught me, with my nether end hanging
+helplessly on the outside.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We squatted on the floor of the refrigerator box. When we reached Yuma
+my pal rose to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ain't yer goin' ta throw yer feet fer a hand-out?&quot; he asked me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I'm going to stick in here till I reach El Paso, if I can.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the fun bein' a bum, if you're goin' ter punish yerself like
+that!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to find a country where there's growing green things, as soon as
+I can.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So long, then.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So long.. don't you think you'd better stick till we reach Tuscon? Some
+of the boys told me the 'bulls' (officers) here have been 'horstile'
+(had it in for the tramp fraternity) ... ever since a yegg bumped off a
+deputy, a while back.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Naw, I'll take my chances.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As I rode on, alone, I stood up and took in the scenery like a tourist
+... there danced away, and gathered in, the shimmering, sun-flooded
+desert ... an endless flat expanse of silver sage and sentinel cactus. I
+saw bleached bones and a side-cast skull with whitened horns, poking up
+into the sky ... I saw a sick steer straggling alone, exactly like some
+melodramatic painting of Western life ... the kind we see hanging for
+sale in second-rate art stores.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I stuck till Tuscon was reached. There I was all in for lack of food and
+water....</p>
+
+<p>A woman gave me a good &quot;set-down&quot; at her kitchen table. I was as hungry
+for something to read as I was for something to eat. When she walked out
+of the kitchen, leaving me alone for a moment, I caught sight of a
+compact little Bible that lay on the leaf of her sewing machine. Two
+steps, and I had it stowed in my hip pocket, and was back innocently
+eating ... the taking of the Bible was providential. I believe that it
+served as the main instrument, later on, in saving me from ten years in
+the penitentiary.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was glad enough to hop to the cinders at El Paso. But El Paso at that
+time was &quot;unhealthy&quot; for hoboes. They were holding twenty or thirty of
+us in the city jail, and mysterious word had gone down the line in all
+directions, that quick telegraph by word-of-mouth that tramps use among
+themselves, to avoid the town&mdash;that it was &quot;horstile.&quot;...</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Again rolling miles of arid country. But this time, like a soldier on a
+long march, I was prepared: I had begged, from door to door, enough
+&quot;hand-outs&quot; to last a week ... throwing away most of the bread ...
+keeping the cold meats and the pie and cake. I sat in my open box-car,
+on a box that I had flung in with me, reading my Bible and eating my
+&quot;hand-outs&quot; and a millionaire had nothing on me for enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>I was half-way to San Antonio when I fell in with as jolly a bunch of
+bums as I ever hope to see in this world ... just outside a little town,
+in the &quot;jungles.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>These tramps were gathered together on a definite plan, and I was
+invited to join them in it: the plan was, to go, <i>en masse</i>, from town
+to town, and systematically exploit it; one day one man would go to the
+butcher shops, the next, another man would take them, and the first
+would, let's say, beg at the baker's ... and each day a different man
+would take a different section among the houses. Then all the food so
+procured would be put together and shared in common.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, there was among them an individual who held them together&mdash;the
+originator of the idea. He was a fat, ruddy-faced alcoholic ex-cook, who
+had never held a job for long because he loved whiskey so much.</p>
+
+<p>Besides being the presiding genius of the gang, he also did all the
+cooking. He loved to cook. Each day he jumbled all the mixable portions
+of the food together, and, in a big tin wash-boiler which he had rescued
+from &quot;the dump&quot; outside of town, he stewed up quite a palatable mess
+which we called &quot;slum&quot; or &quot;slumgullion,&quot; or, more profanely,
+&quot;son-of-a-b&mdash;&mdash;.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>For plates we used old tomato cans hammered out flat ... for knives and
+forks, our fingers, pocket-knives, and chips of wood.</p>
+
+<p>It was a happy life.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon mysteriously our leader and cook disappeared&mdash;with a broad
+grin on his face. Soon he returned, rolling a whole barrel of beer which
+he had stolen during the night from the back of a saloon ... and had
+hidden it nearby in the bushes till it was time to bring it forth....</p>
+
+<p>We held a roaring party, and had several fights. (&quot;Slopping up&quot; is what
+the tramps call a drinking jamboree.) This was the first time I got
+drunk in my life. It took very little to set me off ... I burned a big
+hole in my coat. I woke lying in the mud near the willows ... and with a
+black eye ... a fellow tramp affectionately showed me his finger that I
+had bitten severely ... for a day we had bad nerves, and lay about
+grumbling....</p>
+
+<p>We kept quite clean. The tramp is as clean as his life permits him to be
+... usually ... the myth about his dirtiness is another of the myths of
+the newspaper and magazine world ... though I have seen ones who were
+extraordinarily filthy....</p>
+
+<p>We &quot;boiled up&quot; regularly ... and hung our shirts and other articles of
+apparel on the near-by willows to dry....</p>
+
+<p>After about ten days of scientific exploitation of them, the &quot;natives&quot;
+of the town on the verge of which we were encamping, began to evidence
+signs of restlessness.</p>
+
+<p>So we moved on to another town by means of a local freight.</p>
+
+<p>Settled there in &quot;the jungles,&quot; we hilariously voted to crown the cook
+our king. We held the ceremony, presenting him with a crown made out of
+an old tin pan, which one of the more expert among us hammered into a
+circlet and scoured bright with sand....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But soon I grew tired of the gang and started on alone.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You'd better beat it on out of the South as quick as you can,&quot; an old
+tramp had warned me, &quot;they're hell on a bum down here, and harder yet on
+a Yankee ... no, they haven't forgot <i>that</i> yet&mdash;not by a damn sight!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was soon to wish that I had listened to the old tramp's wisdom.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the chill grey dip of an early spring dawn I dropped off a freight in
+the yards of the town of Granton.</p>
+
+<p>I drew my threadbare coat closer as I made my way up the track, on the
+look-out for some place to go into and warm myself. Usually, in chilly
+weather, each railroad station throughout the country has a stove a-glow
+in the waiting room ... I found the railroad station, and the stove,
+red-hot, was there ... it was good to be near a fire. In the South it
+can be at times heavily cold. There is a moisture and a rawness in the
+weather, there, that hurts.</p>
+
+<p>I was not alone. Two negro tramps followed me; like myself, seeking
+warmth and shelter. Then came a white tramp.</p>
+
+<p>We stood around the stove, which shone red in the early half-light of
+dawn. We shivered and rubbed our hands. Then we fell into tramps' gossip
+about the country we were in.</p>
+
+<p>The two negroes soon left to catch a freight for Austin. My fellow tramp
+and I stretched ourselves along the benches. He yawned with a loud noise
+like an animal. &quot;I'm worn-out,&quot; he said, &quot;I've been riding the bumpers
+all night.&quot; I noticed immediately that he did not speak tramp argot.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And <i>I</i> tried to sleep on the bare boards of a box car.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We had disposed ourselves comfortably to sleep for the few hours till
+wide day, in the station, when the station master came. He poked the
+fire brighter, shook it down, then turned to us. &quot;Boys,&quot; not unkindly,
+&quot;sorry, but you can't sleep here ... it's the rules.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We shuffled to our feet.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do you mind if we stand about the stove till the sun's high enough to
+take the chill off things?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But, standing, we fell to talking ... comparing notes....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've been through here once before,&quot; remarked my companion, whom I
+never knew otherwise than as &quot;Bud.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There's a cotton seed mill up the tracks a way toward town, and we can
+sleep there, if you want ... to-day's Sunday, and no one will be around,
+working, to disturb us. In the South it's all right for a tramp to sleep
+among cotton seed, provided he doesn't smoke there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, then, let's find a place. I can hardly hold my head up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We slumped along the track. A cinder cut into my foot through the broken
+sole of one shoe. It made me wince and limp.</p>
+
+<p>Soon we came to the cotton seed house and looked it over from the
+outside. It was a four-square building, each side having a door. All the
+doors but one were locked. That one, when pushed against, tottered over.
+We climbed in over the heavy sacks, seemingly full of cement, with which
+the unlocked door had been propped to. It also was unhinged.</p>
+
+<p>It was dark inside. There were no windows.</p>
+
+<p>We struck matches and explored. We found articles of heavier hardware
+scattered and piled about, some sacks of guano, and about a dozen wired
+bales of hay.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I thought this was a cotton seed mill,&quot; commented Bud, &quot;because I saw
+so many niggers working around it, when I passed by, the other time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, and what is it, then?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Evidently a warehouse&mdash;where they store heavier articles of hardware.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What are you going to do?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Twist the wires off a couple of these bales of hay, use it for bedding,
+and have a good sleep anyhow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But&mdash;suppose we're caught in here?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No chance. It's Sunday morning, no one will be here to work to-day, and
+we'll be let alone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>With a little effort we twisted the bales apart and made comfortable
+beds from the hay.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed I had slept but a moment when I was seized by a nightmare. I
+dreamed some monstrous form was bending over me, cursing, breathing
+flames out of its mouth, and boring a hot, sharpened implement into the
+centre of my forehead. I woke, to find, that, in part, my dream was
+true.</p>
+
+<p>There straddled over me an excited man, swearing profusely to keep his
+courage up. He was pressing the cold muzzle-end of a
+&quot;forty-four-seventy&quot; into my forehead.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on! Get up, you &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash;! Come on out of here, or I'll blow
+your &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; brains out, do you hear?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then I caught myself saying, as if from far away, perfectly calm and
+composed, and in English that was almost academic&mdash;&quot;my dear man, put up
+your gun and I will go with you quietly. I am only a tramp and not a
+desperado.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This both puzzled and at the same time reassured my captor ... and made
+him swear all the louder,&mdash;this time, with a note of brave certainty in
+his tone.</p>
+
+<p>His gun poked me in the back to expedite my exit. I stepped out at the
+open door into streaming daylight that at first dazzled my eyes. I saw
+waiting on the track outside a posse of about fifteen citizens.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good work, McAndrews,&quot; commended one of them, deep-voiced. The others
+murmured gruff approval.</p>
+
+<p>McAndrews, from conversation that I gathered, was night-watchman in the
+yards. He had one red-rimmed eye. The other was sightless but had a
+half-closed leer that seemed to express discreet visual powers.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now go on in an' fetch out the other bum,&quot; commanded the deep-voiced
+member of the posse, speaking with authority.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There wasn't but only this 'un,&quot; McAndrews replied, with renewed
+timidity in his voice, scarcely concealed, and jerking his thumb toward
+me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But the little nigger said they was&mdash;ain't that so, nigger?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yassir, boss&mdash;I done seen two o' dem go in dar!&quot; replied a wisp of a
+negro boy, rolling wide eye-whites in fright, and wedged in among the
+hulking posse.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, this 'un's all I seen!&quot; protested the night watchman, &quot;an' you
+betcher I looked about mighty keerful ... wot time did you see 'um break
+in?&quot; turning to the negro child.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jes' at daylight, boss!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;An' wot was you-all a-doin' down hee-ar?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He was a-stealin' coal f'um the coalkiars,&quot; put in one of the posse,
+&quot;in cohse!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>All laughed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Anyhow, I done seed two o' dem,&quot; protested the boy, comically, &quot;wot
+evah else I done!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Everybody was now hilarious.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Whar's yoah buddy?&quot; I was asked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Did unt you-all hev no buddy wit' you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, I did have a buddy with me, but&mdash;&quot; trying to give Bud a chance of
+escape,&mdash;&quot;but he caught a freight West, just a little bit ago.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're a liar,&quot; said the one in authority, who I afterward heard was
+the head-clerk of the company that ran the warehouse. The negro boy had
+run to his house and roused him. He had drawn the posse together....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're a liar! Your buddy's still in there!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I'll sweah they haint nobuddy else,&quot; protested McAndrews.</p>
+
+<p>But prodded by their urging, he climbed in again over the sacks of
+guano, and soon brought out Bud, who had waked, heard the rumpus, and
+had been hiding, burrowed down under the hay as deep as he could go.</p>
+
+<p>There was a burst of laughter as he stood framed in the doorway, in
+which I couldn't help but join. He had such a silly, absurd, surprised
+look in his face ... a look of stupefied incredulity, when he saw all
+the men drawn up to receive him. From a straggled lock of hair that fell
+over one eye hung several long hay-wisps. His face looked stupid and
+moon-fat. He rolled his big, brown eyes in a despairful manner that was
+unconsciously comic. For he was, instinctively, as I was not, instantly
+and fully aware of the seriousness of what might come upon us for our
+innocent few hours' sleep.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, boys. Up with your hands till we go through your pockets.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>On Bud's hip they found a whiskey flask, quarter-full. In my inside
+pocket, a sheaf of poor verse&mdash;I had barely as yet come to grips with my
+art&mdash;and, in an outside pocket, the Bible I had filched from the woman's
+sewing machine in Tuscon.</p>
+
+<p>The finding of the Bible on my person created a speechless pause.</p>
+
+<p>Then&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good Gawd! A bum with a Bible!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Awe and respect held the crowd for a moment.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The march began.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where are you taking us to?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To the calaboose.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Down a long stretch of peaceful, Sunday street we went&mdash;small boys
+following in a curious horde, and Sunday worshippers with their women's
+gloved hands tucked in timidly under their arms as we passed by. They
+gave us prim, askance glances, as if we belonged to a different species
+of the animal kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>Buck negroes with their women stepped out into the street, while, as is
+customary there,&mdash;the white men passed, taking us two tramps to jail. We
+came to a high, newly white-washed board fence. Within it stood a
+two-story building of red brick. On the fence was painted, in big black
+letters the facetious warning, &quot;Keep out if you can.&quot; A passage in
+through the gate, and McAndrews first knocked at, then kicked against
+the door.</p>
+
+<p>The sleepy-faced, small-eyed jailer finally opened to us. The wrinkled
+skin of the old man hung loosely from his neck. It wabbled as he talked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What the hell's the mattah with you folks?&quot; protested McAndrews, the
+night watchman, &quot;slep' late,&quot; yawned the jailer, &quot;it bein' Sunday
+mawhnin'.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>By this time the sheriff, summoned from his house, had joined us. A big
+swashbuckler of a man with a hard face, hard blue eyes with quizzical
+wrinkles around them. They seemed wrinkles of good humour till you
+looked closer.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;s a damn lie ... you 'en Jimmy hev bin a-gamblin' all night,&quot;
+interjected the sheriff, in angry disgust.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>They marched us upstairs. The whole top floor, was given over to a huge
+iron cage which had been built in before the putting on of the roof. A
+narrow free space&mdash;a sort of corridor, ran all around it, on the
+outside.</p>
+
+<p>Eager and interested, the prisoners already in the cage pushed their
+faces against the bars to look at us. But at the sheriff's word of
+command they went into their cells, the latter built in a row within the
+cage itself, and obediently slammed their doors shut while a long iron
+bar was shot across the whole length, from without ... then the big door
+of the cage was opened, and we were thrust in. The bar was drawn back,
+liberating the others, then, from their cells.</p>
+
+<p>The posse left. Our fellow prisoners crowded about us, asking us
+questions ... what had we done?... and how had we been caught?... and
+what part of the country were we from?... etc. etc....</p>
+
+<p>From the North ... yes, Yankee ... well, when a fellow was both a Yank
+and a tramp he was given a short shrift in the South.</p>
+
+<p>They talked much about themselves ... one thing, however, we all held in
+common ... our innocence ... we were all innocent ... every one of us
+was innocent of the crime charged against us ... we were just being
+persecuted.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>That afternoon a negro preacher, short and squat, who, innocent, was yet
+being held for Grand Jury, delivered us a fearful half-chanted sermon on
+the Judgment Day. I never heard so moving, compelling a sermon. I saw
+the sky glowing like a furnace, the star-touching conflagration of the
+End of Things rippling up the east in increasing waves of fire, in place
+of the usual dawn ... I heard the crying of mankind ... of sinners ...
+for mountains to topple over on them and cover them from the wrath of
+the Lord....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;In co'hse I nevah done it,&quot; explained the preacher, &quot;I had some hawgs
+of mah own. Mah hawgs had an under-bit an' an ovah-bit in dere eahs, an'
+de ones I's 'cused o' stealin', dey had only an ovah-bit. But heah dey's
+got me, holdin' me foh de pen.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The little grey-faced pickpocket&mdash;caught at his trade at the Dallas
+Fair, told me how easy it was to add an under-bit to an over-bit to the
+ears of the two hogs stolen, &quot;Sure that sneakin' niggah pahson did it,&quot;
+he averred&mdash;but all the while he likewise averred that <i>he</i> hadn't
+picked the pocket of the man from whom he was accused of stealing a
+wallet....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, I'll admit Ah've done sech things. But this taime they was sure
+wrong. Ef I git framed up,&quot; he added, &quot;I mean tuh study law ... pull foh
+a job in th' prison libery an' read up ... an' take up practice when I
+serve my term.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Beside the hog-stealing parson and the little grey-faced pickpocket
+there were also:</p>
+
+<p>A big negro youth, black as shiny coal, who was being held over on
+appeal. He'd been sentenced to ninety-nine years for rape of a negro
+girl ... if it had been a white girl he would have been burned long ago,
+he said ... as it was, the sheriff's son, who was handling his case,
+would finally procure his release&mdash;and exact, in return, about ten
+years' of serfdom as payment. And there was a young, hard-drinking
+quarrelsome tenant-farmer, who was charged with having sold two bales of
+cotton not belonging to him, to get money for drinking....</p>
+
+<p>There was another negro, hanging-handed, simous-faced, who had, in a fit
+of jealousy, blown two heads off by letting loose both barrels at once
+of his heavily charged shotgun ... the heads were his wife's ... and her
+lover's. He caught them when their faces were close together ... and
+they were kissing. But he seemed a gentle creature, tractable and
+harmless.</p>
+
+<p>On the outside of the cage in which we were cooped like menagerie
+animals, a negro girl had her cot. She slept and lived out there by the
+big stove which heated the place. She was a girl of palish yellow
+colour. She was a trusty. She had been caught watching outside of a
+house while two grown-up negro women went within to rob.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Monday morning &quot;kangaroo court&quot; was called ... that court which
+prisoners hold, mimicking the legal procedure to which they grow so
+accustomed during their lives. We were arraigned for trial&mdash;the charge
+against us, that of &quot;Breaking Into Jail.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The cotton thief served as prosecuting attorney. The negro youth in for
+rape of one of his own colour,&mdash;the sergeant-at-arms; while the negro
+preacher in for hog-stealing defended us ... and he did it so well that
+we were let off with ten blows of the strap a-piece. We had no money to
+be mulcted of, nor were we able to procure from friends, as the custom
+is, funds for the buying of whiskey and tobacco.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In a few days Bud and I had settled down into the routine of jail-life.
+Every morning we swept our cells, and all the prisoners took turns
+sweeping the corridor. The fine for spitting on the floor was ten lashes
+laid on hard. And each day before breakfast we soaked the seams of our
+clothes in vile-smelling creosote to kill off the lice and nits. We had
+no chance to bathe, and were given but little water to wash our face and
+hands.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I wonder what they are going to do with us?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Anything they please,&quot; answered Bud gloomily.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;From thirty to ninety days on the county farm, I suppose?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We'll be lucky if we don't get from four to ten years in the pen.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What for?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Burglary&mdash;didn't we break into that warehouse?&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Our meals were passed in to us through an open space near the level of
+the floor, at the upper end of the cage, where a bar had been removed
+for that purpose. We'd line up and the tin plates would be handed in,
+one after the other ... two meals a day. For breakfast a corn pone of
+coarse, white corn meal, and a bit of fried sow-belly. For dinner, all
+the water we could drink. For supper, breakfast all over again, with
+the addition of a dab of greens. On rare occasions the sheriff's son or
+the jailer went hunting ... and then we'd have rabbit. The sheriff had
+the contract, at so much per head, for feeding the prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>Each morning I used to ask the jailer for the occasional newspaper with
+which he covered the basket in which he brought our food to us. One
+morning my eyes fell upon an interesting item:</p>
+
+<p>The story of how two young desperadoes had been caught in the warehouse
+beside the railroad track, in the act of committing burglary ... the
+tale of our capture was briefly told ... the bravery of the night
+watchman and the posse extolled ... and the further information was
+conveyed, that, having waved preliminary examination (and we had, for
+they told us the justice was continually too drunk to examine us) we
+were being held over for Grand Jury ... on a charge of burglary.</p>
+
+<p>Though he had predicted this, the actuality of it struck Bud all of a
+heap. He paced up and down the cage for the full space of an hour,
+hanging his ungainly head between his shoulders in abandonment to
+despair.</p>
+
+<p>My reaction was a strange one. I wanted to sing ... whistle ... dance
+... I was in the midst of adventure and romance. I was a Count of Monte
+Cristo, a Baron von Trenck. I dreamed of linguistic and philosophic
+studies in the solitude of my cell at the penitentiary till I was master
+of all languages, of all wisdom, or I dreamed of escape and of rising to
+wealth and power, afterwards, so that I would be pardoned and could come
+back and magnanimously shame with my forgiveness the community that had
+sent me up.</p>
+
+<p>Bud stopped his pacing to and fro to stand in our cell-doorway. I was
+sitting on a stool, thinking hard.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We can't do a thing,&quot; said Bud, &quot;we're in for it, good and proper.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;tell you what <i>I'll</i> do,&quot; I responded, &quot;I'll write a letter to the
+owner of the warehouse and appeal to his humanity.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You romantic jack-ass,&quot; yelled Bud, his nerves on edge. He walked away
+angry. He came back calmer.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look here, Gregory, I want you to excuse that outburst&mdash;but you <i>are</i> a
+fool. This is <i>real life</i> we're up against now. You're not reading about
+this in a book.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We'll see what can be done,&quot; I returned.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At the extreme end of the big cage, the end furthest from the entrance
+door, stood two cells not occupied. The last of these I had chosen for
+my study, a la Monte Cristo. The sheriff's son had lent me a dozen of
+Opie Reid's novels, a history of the Civil War from the Southern
+viewpoint, an arithmetic, and an algebra. Here all day long I studied
+and wrote assiduously. And it was here I went to sit on my stool and
+write the letter to the owner of the warehouse ... a certain Mr.
+Womber....</p>
+
+<p>In it I pointed out the enormity of sending to the penitentiary two
+young men, on a merely technical charge of burglary. For if we had gone
+into the place to rob, why had we so foolishly, then, gone to sleep? And
+what, at the final analysis, could we have stolen but bales of hay,
+sacks of guano, and plowshares? All of them too unwieldy to carry away
+unless we had other conveyance than our backs. It was absurd, on the
+face of it.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, I appealed to him, as a Christian, to let us go free ... in
+the name of God, not to wreck our lives by throwing us, for a term of
+years, into contact with criminals of the hardened type&mdash;to give us one
+more chance to become useful citizens of our great and glorious country.</p>
+
+<p>Bud laughed sneeringly when I read the letter aloud to him ... said it
+was a fine effort as a composition in rhetoric, but I might expect
+nothing of it&mdash;if the perpetually drunk jailer really brought it to its
+destination&mdash;except that it would be tossed unread into the
+wastebasket....</p>
+
+<p>I pleaded with the jailer to deliver it for me ... told him how
+important it would be to our lives ... adjured him to consider our
+helpless and penniless state. He promised to deliver it for me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have nothing to give you, now,&quot; I ended, &quot;but, if I ever get free,
+I'll send you twenty-five dollars or so from up home, when I reach the
+North.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>A prisoner's first dream is &quot;escape.&quot; Voices outside on the street, the
+sight of the tops of green trees through bars, dogs barking far away,
+the travels of the sun as shown by moving bands of light on the walls
+and in the cells&mdash;all remind him of the day when he was, as he now sees
+it, happy and free ... he forgets entirely, in the midst of the jail's
+black restraints, the lesser evils of outside, daily life. Even the
+termagant wife is turned into a domestic angel.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Under the smoky prison lamp made of a whiskey bottle filled with oil,
+and a shred of shirt drawn through a cork, we planned to cut out.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The way to do it is easy,&quot; said the little pickpocket, &quot;in the sole of
+every good shoe is a steel spring. I'll take the steel from my shoe.
+There's already one bar removed from the chuck-hole (No use trying to
+reproduce the dialect). If we saw out another bar, that will give us
+enough room for going through. Then it will be easy to dig out the
+mortar between the bricks, in the jail wall. Once out, we can make for
+the river bottoms, and, by wading in the water, even their bloodhounds
+can't track us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And once I get over into Indian Territory or Arkansas, you'll never see
+me in Texas again,&quot; I muttered.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How'll we conceal where we've been sawing?&quot; Bud asked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;By plugging up the grooves with corn bread blackened with soot that we
+can make by holding the wick of this smoky lamp against the
+cage-ceiling.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And how'll we keep folks from hearing the sawing?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;By dancing and singing while Baykins here&quot; (alluding to a &quot;pore white&quot;
+fiddler who had almost killed a man at a dance) &quot;while Baykins here
+plays 'whip the devil.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The very next day we began dancing and singing and taking turns at the
+chuckhole bar.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Whip the Devil&quot; is an interminable tune like the one about the &quot;old
+woman chasing her son round the room with a broom.&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>The mistake was, that in our eagerness we &quot;whipped the devil&quot; too long
+at a time. Naturally, the jailer grew suspicious of such sudden and
+prolonged hilarity. But even at that it took almost a week for them to
+catch on. We knew it was all up when, one morning at breakfast, the
+sheriff came in with the jailer.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Boys, all back into your cells!&quot; he growled.</p>
+
+<p>The long bar was thrown over our closed doors.</p>
+
+<p>The sheriff stooped down and inspected the chuck-hole.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Jesus Christ, they'd of been through in two more nights. It's good
+we caught them in time or they'd of been a hell of a big jail-delivery
+... do you mean to tell me,&quot; turning to the jailer, &quot;you never noticed
+this before?&quot; and with one finger he raked out the blackened corn bread.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You see, I'm a little near-sighted, Mistah Jenkins.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Too damned near-sighted, an' too damned stupid, too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The big iron door of the cage was locked again, the long bar thrown off
+our cell doors.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now, you sons of b&mdash;&mdash; can come out into the cage again; but, mind you,
+if any of you try such a thing again, I'll take you out one by one and
+give you all a rawhiding.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We received the abuse in sullen silence. For three days our rations
+lacked cornpone, for punishment.</p>
+
+<p>We decided among ourselves that the negro preacher, to stand in well
+with the authorities, had given us away....</p>
+
+<p>And if he had not, panic-stricken, pleaded with the sheriff to be taken
+out and put in a separate cell, I believe we would have killed him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There was one more way. It was so simple a way that we had not thought
+of it before. The mulatto girl, who slept by the big stove, on a cot,
+just outside the cage ... a trusty and the jailer's unwilling concubine
+... this slim, yellow creature was much in love with the lusty young
+farmer who had stolen the bales of cotton and sold them for a drunk. And
+it was he who suggested that, through her, we get possession of the
+keys. For, every day, she informed us, she passed them by where they
+hung on a nail, downstairs, as she swept and cleaned house for the
+jailer.</p>
+
+<p>It was not a difficult matter to procure them. She would bring them up
+to us and hand them in through the chuck-hole, which the village
+blacksmith had repaired and once more reinforced with extra bars, &quot;so
+them bastards won't even think of sawing out again,&quot; as the jailer had
+expressed it.</p>
+
+<p>The evening she handed the keys in to us we were so excited we wanted to
+have &quot;Whip the Devil&quot; played again for our singing and dancing. But this
+might have once more awakened suspicion. Before, we had raised such a
+row as to have caused pedestrians to stop and listen in groups,
+wondering what made the men inside so happy....</p>
+
+<p>There were three separate locks on the great cage door. One, two of them
+went back with an easy click. For the third we could find no key. There
+was nothing else to do now but to have recourse to singing and dancing
+again. Baykins started sawing his fiddle furiously while the big negro
+in for rape hammered and hammered on the lock to break it, with one
+prison stool after another, till all were tossed aside, broken as
+kindling wood is broken. It was good that the jailer was either deaf,
+or, like the heathen gods in the Old Testament, away on a journey.
+Finally, we gave up in despair. The big negro collapsed with a wail. The
+first sign of weakness I ever detected in him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now it's shore either ninety-nine yeahs in de pen foh me, or ten yeahs
+for th' sheriff's son foh lawyah fees ... an' the footprints in de
+flowah bed ... of the man what done de rape was two sizes biggah dan
+mine.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The next day the jailer, of course, missed the keys. Panic-stricken, the
+mulatto girl was afraid to slip them back to their accustomed nail, for
+fear she'd be seen at it; or was it out of vindictiveness against the
+jailer that she had now actually hidden them somewhere (for, finding
+them of no use, we had handed them back to her)!</p>
+
+<p>That same afternoon the sheriff, with his son and the little,
+shrivelled, stuttering, half-deaf jailer, came in at the door of the big
+room. It was easy to see what they wanted. They wanted the keys and they
+were going to make the girl confess where they were ... as she was the
+only other person, beside the prison authorities, that was in the way to
+come at them.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Martha, we want them keys! Show us where they is, like a good girl!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'Deed, Ah don' know where dey is a-tall, Marse Sheriff!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, gal, you was the only one downstairs exceptin' Jacklin heah!&quot;
+pointing to the jailer.</p>
+
+<p>The jailer nodded his head asseveratingly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Martha, tell us whar the keys air,&quot; urged the latter, with
+caressing softness and fright in his voice. He didn't want his mistress
+whipped.</p>
+
+
+<p>&quot;If you don't, by God, I'll whup the nigger hide clean off yore back,&quot;
+and the sheriff reached for the braided whip which his son Jimmy handed
+him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I sweah Ah don' know where dey is!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You dirty liah,&quot; taking out a watch; &quot;I'll give you jest five minutes
+t' tell, an' then&mdash;&quot; he menaced with the up-lifted whip.</p>
+
+<p>In stubborn silence the girl waited the five minutes out.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jimmy!... Jacklin!... throw her down an' hold her, rump up, over that
+cot.&quot; They obeyed. With a jerk the sheriff had her dress up and her bare
+buttocks in view.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm a-goin' to whup an' whup till you confess, Martha.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Crack! Crack! Crack! the whip descended, leaving red whelts each time.
+The mulatto girl writhed, but did not cry quits. Beads of perspiration
+glistened on the jailer's face. The girl shook off his lax grip on her
+arms ... the sheriff's son was holding her legs. We were crowded against
+the bars, angry and silent. We admired the girl's hopeless pluck. We saw
+she was holding out just to, somehow, have vengeance on the jailer for
+her being held in unwilling concubinage by him, hoping he would catch it
+hard for having let the keys hang carelessly in open view, and so,
+stolen.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Damn you, Jacklin,&quot; shouted the sheriff, &quot;I believe you're a little
+soft on the gal ... come here ... you swing the whip an' I'll hold her
+arms.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In mute agony Jacklin obeyed ... whipping the woman of whom he was fond.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Harder, Jacklin, harder,&quot; and the sheriff drew his gun on him to
+emphasise the command.</p>
+
+<p>Under such impulsion, a shower of heavy blows fell. The girl screamed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll give up ... Oh, good Lordy, I'll give up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And she dug the keys out from under the mattress across which they had
+whipped her.</p>
+
+<p>After they had gone she lay crying on her face for a long while. When
+night came she still lay crying. Nothing any of us could say would
+console her. Not even the little white cotton thief had power to allay
+her hurt....</p>
+
+<p>At last we began cursing and railing at her. That made her stop, after a
+fashion. But still she occasionally gave vent to a heart-deep, dry,
+racking sob.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Locked in there behind bars and forced to be impotent onlookers, the
+whipping we had witnessed made us as restless as wild animals. That
+night, under the dim flare of our jail-made lamps, the boys gambled as
+usual, for their strips of paper,&mdash;and as eagerly as if it were real
+currency. I, for my part, drew away to the vacant cell at the far end of
+the cage to study and read and dream my dreams....</p>
+
+<p>As I sat there I was soon possessed with a disagreeable feeling that a
+malignant, ill-wishing presence hovered near. I shifted in my seat
+uneasily. I looked up. There stood, in the doorway, the lusty young
+farmer who was in for stealing the bales of cotton. He wore an evil,
+combative leer on his face. He was &quot;spoiling&quot; for a quarrel&mdash;just for
+the mere sake of quarrelling&mdash;that I could see. But I dissembled.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, Jack?&quot; I asked gently.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're a nice one,&quot; he muttered, &quot;you pale-faced Yankee son of a b&mdash;&mdash;
+... think you're better 'n the rest of us, don't ye?... readin' in yore
+books?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nonsense, what are you picking at me for? I'm not harming anybody, am
+I?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, but you're a God damned fool!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look here, what have I ever done to you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nothin', only you're a white-livered stinker, an' I'm jest a-spoilin'
+foh a fight with you-all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I don't want to fight with you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll make you,&quot; he replied, striding in; and fetching me a cuff on the
+ear ... then, in a far-away voice that did not seem myself, I heard
+myself pleading to be let alone ... by this time all the other boys had
+crowded down about the cell to see the fun.</p>
+
+<p>I was humiliated, ashamed ... but, try as I would, the thought and
+vision of my uncle came on me like a palsy.</p>
+
+<p>Bud stepped up. He had always been so meek and placid before that what
+he did then was a surprise to me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>I'll</i> fight!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What! you?&quot; glowered the young farmer, surprised.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, I'll give you all the fighting you want, you dirty cotton thief!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Instantly the farmer made at him. Bud ran in, fetched him two blows in
+the face, and clinched.</p>
+
+<p>It was not going very well for the desperado. From somewhere on his
+person he whipped forth a knife, and, with a series of flashes through
+the air, began stabbing Bud again and again in the back.</p>
+
+<p>I thank God for what came over me then. Too glad of soul to believe it,
+I experienced a warm surge of angry courage rushing through me like an
+electric storm. All the others were panic-stricken for the moment. But I
+burst through the group, rushed back to the toilet, and, with frenzied
+strength, tore loose a length of pipe from the exposed plumbing. I came
+rushing back. I brought down the soft lead-pipe across &quot;Jack's&quot; ear,
+accompanying the blow with a volley of oaths in a roaring voice.</p>
+
+<p>The farmer whipped about to face his new antagonist, letting Bud drop
+back. Bud sank to the iron floor. The farmer was astonished almost to
+powerlessness to find facing him, with a length of swinging pipe in his
+hand, the boy who had a few minutes before been afraid.</p>
+
+<p>But he rapidly recovered and came on at me, gibbering like an incensed
+baboon.</p>
+
+<p>By this time all the humiliations I had suffered in the past, since
+succumbing to the fear-complex that my uncle had beaten into me&mdash;all the
+outrage of them was boiling in me for vengeance. I saw the blood bathing
+the torn ear of my antagonist. It looked beautiful. I was no longer
+afraid of anything. Yelling my uncle's name I came on ... I beat the
+knife out of the other's hand and bloodied his knuckles with the next
+blow. I beat him down with rapid blows, threshing at him, shouting and
+yelling exultantly.</p>
+
+<p>The other men thought me gone crazy. I had, for the time, gone crazy.
+The fellow lay at my feet, inert. I stopped for the moment.</p>
+
+<p>In that moment the gang began to close in on me, half frightened
+themselves. I threatened them back.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;By hell, I've had enough of bullying,&quot; I shouted wildly; &quot;I'm not
+afraid of anything or anybody any more ... if there's anyone else here
+that wants a taste of this pipe, let them step up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We ain't a-tryin' to fight you-all,&quot; called out the big negro who was
+in for rape, &quot;we jest don' want you to kill him an' git hung foh
+murduh.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>At the word &quot;murder&quot; I stepped quickly back.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, don't let him come bothering me or my pal for a fight any more
+when we've done nothing to him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don' worry, he won't no moh!&quot; assured the fiddler....</p>
+
+<p>I threw down the lead pipe. It had seemed to me that all the while it
+was my Uncle Landon who had received the blows.</p>
+
+<p>The rough-neck farmer was in bad shape; he was bloodied all over like a
+stuck pig. The mulatto girl on the outside had for the last five minutes
+been occupied in calling out of the window for help. She managed to
+attract the attention of a passerby-by.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the matter?&quot; was called up to her....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The jailer ain't downstairs ... an' de boys is killin' each other up
+heah!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>By the time the angry-faced sheriff came with his son, the jailer, and a
+couple of doctors, we had quieted down.</p>
+
+<p>Bud and the farmer were taken out; by the side of each a pail of water
+was placed ... they were seated on stools, stripped to the waist. The
+surgeons dressed their wounds as if on a battlefield. &quot;Jack&quot; needed ten
+stitches in his scalp.... Bud had four knife wounds that demanded sewing
+up. Both the boys went pale like ghosts and spewed their bellies empty
+from weakness and loss of blood....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mind you, you chaps in there have raised 'bout enough hell ... ef I
+hear o' any more trouble, I'll take you all out one by one an' treat
+each one o' you-all to a good cowhidin', law or no law!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was let alone after that. My cowardice had gone forever. I was now a
+man among men. I was happy. I saw what an easy thing it is to fight, to
+defend yourself. I saw what an exhilaration, a pleasure, the exchanging
+of righteous blows can be.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Always my dream was of being a big man when I got out&mdash;some day. Always
+I acted as if living a famous prison romance like that of Baron Von
+Trenck's.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I collected from the living voices of my fellow prisoners innumerable
+jail and cocaine songs, and rhymes of the criminal world. I wrote them
+down on pieces of wrapping paper that the jailer occasionally covered
+the food-basket with in lieu of newspaper.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;Oh, coco-Marie, and coco-Marai,</div>
+<div>I'se gon' ta whiff cocaine 'twill I die.</div>
+<div>Ho! (sniff) Ho! (sniff) baby, take a whiff of me!&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>(The sniffing sound indicating the snuffing up into the nostril of the
+&quot;snow,&quot; or &quot;happy dust,&quot; as it is called in the underworld.)</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the song about lice:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;There's a lice in jail</div>
+<div>As big as a rail;</div>
+<div>When you lie down</div>
+<div>They'll tickle your tail&mdash;</div>
+<div>Hard times in jail, poor boy!...&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>And another, more general:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;Along come the jailer</div>
+<div>About 'leven o'clock,</div>
+<div>Bunch o' keys in his right hand,</div>
+<div>The jailhouse do'h was locked....</div>
+<div>'Cheer up, you pris'ners,'</div>
+<div>I heard that jailer say,</div>
+<div>'You got to go to the cane-brakes</div>
+<div>Foh ninety yeahs to stay!'&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>As you can guess, most of these jail songs and ballads of the underworld
+could only be printed in asterisks. I was hoping, in the interests of
+folklore, to preserve them for some learned society's private printing
+press.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>A fresher green came to the stray branches of the trees that crossed our
+barred windows. The world outside seemed to waken with bird-song. It was
+spring, and time for the sitting of the grand jury that was to decide
+whether we were, each of us, to be held over for trial by petty jury ...
+days of fretful eagerness and discontent ... from the windows the yellow
+trusty-girl said she could see lines of buggies driving in to town. It
+was the custom of farmers for miles around to drive in to their county
+seat during the court assizes ... a week or so of holidays like a
+continuous circus for them.</p>
+
+<p>When the sheriff would have occasion to come into the room in which
+stood our big cage, the boys would crowd up to the bars, each one hoping
+for news favourable to his case ... the prevailing atmosphere was one of
+hope.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The negro who had murdered his wife and her sweetheart with a shotgun
+had already had his trial. He was&mdash;and had been&mdash;but waiting the arrival
+of the prison contractor, as the latter went from county jail to county
+jail, gathering in his flock, and taking them away, chained together, to
+the penitentiary and the cane brakes ... &quot;where only a big buck nigger
+can live,&quot; the little pickpocket had told me, with fear in his voice....</p>
+
+<p>He came ... the contractor ... to our jail at midnight. All of us leaped
+from our mattresses to witness the dreary procession of neck-chained and
+be-manacled convicted men. In the light of the swinging lanterns, a
+lurid spectacle. Our man was taken out and chained in with the gang.
+They clanked away down the stairs, leaving us who remained with heavy
+chains on our hope instead of on our necks and hands and legs ...
+because of the sight we had just seen. For the passing day or so we were
+so depressed that we wandered about saying nothing to each other, like
+dumb men.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One after the other the men had true bills found against them, and
+little slips of folded paper were thrust in to them through the bars of
+their cells. And shyster lawyers who fatten on the misfortunes of the
+prison-held being, began to hold whispered conversations (and
+conferences) from without, mainly to find out just how much each
+prisoner could raise for fees for defence....</p>
+
+<p>Bud and I were the only ones left. All the others had had true bills
+found against them.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But there came an afternoon when the big, hulky sheriff, with the cruel,
+quizzical eyes, came to the back bars of our cell and summoned us up
+with a mysterious air....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, boys,&quot; he began, pausing to squirt a long, brown stream of
+tobacco juice, &quot;well, boys&mdash;&quot; and he paused again.</p>
+
+<p>My nerves were so on edge that I controlled with difficulty a mad
+impulse to curse at the sheriff for holding us in such needless
+suspense....</p>
+
+<p>Taking another deliberate chew off his plug, he told us that after
+mature deliberation the grand jury had decided that there was not enough
+grounds for finding a true bill against us, and, as a consequence, we
+were to be let go free.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The following morning I had the satisfaction of hearing from old
+Jacklin, the jailer, that Womber, the owner of the warehouse, had
+himself gone before the grand jury and informed them that he did not
+wish to press the charge of burglary against us....</p>
+
+<p>Womber, Jacklin said, had received my letter and at first had tossed it
+aside ... even thrown it contemptuously into the wastebasket. But his
+wife and daughter had raked it out and read it and had, day and night,
+given him no peace till he had promised to &quot;go easy on the poor boys.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This was my triumph over Bud&mdash;the triumph of romance over realism.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm glad we're getting out, but there's more damn fools in the world
+than I thought,&quot; he remarked, with a sour smile of gratification.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>And now, with new, trembling eagerness, we two began waiting for the
+hour of our release. That very afternoon it would be surely, we thought
+... that night ... then the next morning ... then ... the next day....</p>
+
+<p>But until a week more had flown, the sheriff did not let us go. In order
+to make a little more profit on his feeding contract, averred our
+prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>But on Saturday morning he came to turn us loose. By this time we seemed
+blood brothers to the others in the cage ... negro ... mulatto ... white
+... criminal and vicious ... weak, and victims of circumstance ...
+everything sloughed away. Genuine tears stood in our eyes as with strong
+hand-grips we wished the poor lads good luck!</p>
+
+<p>We stumbled down the jail stairway up which, three months before, we had
+been conducted to our long incarceration in the cage. The light of free
+day stormed in on our prison-inured eyes in a blinding deluge of white
+and gold ... we stepped out into what seemed not an ordinary world, but
+a madness and tumult of birds, a delirious green of trees too beautiful
+for any place outside the garden of Paradise.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on,&quot; said Bud, &quot;let's go on down the main street and thank Womber
+for not pressing the case&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To hell with Womber!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, then, I'm going to thank him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm grateful enough.... I might write him a letter thanking him ...
+but I'm not anxious to linger in this neighbourhood.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>So Bud and I parted company, shaking hands good-bye; he headed west ...
+to China and the East, finally, he said ... I never knew his real name
+... neither of us gave his right name to the town's officials....</p>
+
+<p>As I sought the railroad tracks again, the good air and my unwonted
+freedom made me stagger, so that several negroes laughed at me heartily,
+thinking I was drunk.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I sat down on a railroad tie and tenderly and solicitously took a brown
+package out of my inside pocket&mdash;the brown paper on which I had
+inscribed with enthusiasm the curious songs of jail, cocaine, criminal,
+and prostitute life I had heard during my three months' sojourn behind
+bars.</p>
+
+<p>I looked them over again. With all their smut and filth, they were yet
+full of na&iuml;ve folk-touches and approximations to real balladry. I was as
+tender of the manuscript as a woman would be with her baby.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The sky grew overcast. A rain storm blew up. A heavy wind mixed with
+driving wet ... chilly ... I found shelter under a leaky shed ... was
+soggy and miserable ... even wished, in a weak moment, for the
+comparative comfort of my cell again....</p>
+
+<p>The fast freight I was waiting for came rocking along. I made a run for
+it in the rapidly gathering dusk. I grabbed the bar on one side and made
+a leap for the step, but missed, like a frantic fool, with one
+foot&mdash;luckily caught it with the other, or I might have fallen
+underneath&mdash;and was aboard, my arms almost wrenched from their sockets.</p>
+
+<p>Not till I had climbed in between the cars on the bumpers did I realise
+that my coat had been torn open and my much-valued songs jostled out.</p>
+
+<p>Without hesitation I hurled myself bodily off the train. My one idea to
+regain the MSS. I landed on my shoulders, saw stars, rolled over and
+over. I groped up and down. And tears rained from my eyes when I
+understood those rhymes were lost forever....</p>
+
+<p>It was midnight before I caught another freight. I climbed wearily into
+an empty box car while the freight was standing still. I was seen. A
+brakeman came to the door and lifted up his lantern, glancing within, I
+was crouching, wet and forlorn, in a corner of the car, waiting for the
+freight to be under way.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on out with you! Hit the grit!&quot; commanded the &quot;shack&quot; grimly.</p>
+
+<p>I rose. I came to the door. I hated him in my heart, but quite simply
+and movingly I recited the story of my imprisonment, ending by asking
+him to let me ride, in the name of God.</p>
+
+<p>He crunched away down the path, his lantern bobbing as he went.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>All night long I rode ... bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump! All
+night long my head was a-ferment with dreams of the great things I would
+achieve, now that I was free of the shadow of imprisonment.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>When I walked down the streets of Haberford once more, though I was
+leathery and stronger-looking, my adventures had added no meat to my
+bones. I was amused at myself as I walked along more than usually erect,
+for no other reason than to keep my coat-tail well down in back in order
+not to show the hole in the seat of my trousers. As I came down the
+street on which my father and I had lived, an anticipatory pleasure of
+being recognised as a sort of returned Odysseus beat through my veins
+like a drum. But no one saw me who knew me. It hurt me to come home,
+unheralded.</p>
+
+<p>I came to the house where I had dwelt. I pulled the bell. There was no
+answer. I walked around the corner to the telegraph office. I was
+overjoyed to see lean, lanky Phil, the telegraph operator, half
+sleeping, as usual, over the key of his instrument.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hel-lo, John Gregory!&quot; he shouted, with glad surprise in his voice.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>He telephoned my father ... who came over from the works, running with
+gladness. I was immediately taken home. I took three baths that
+afternoon before I felt civilised again....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My father had returned to the Composite Works. I was alone in my little
+room, with all my cherished books once more. They had been, I could
+plainly observe, kept orderly and free of dust, against cay home-coming.
+I took down my favourite books, kissing each one of them like a
+sweetheart. Then I read here and there in all of them, observing all the
+old passages I had marked. I lay in all attitudes. Sprawling on the
+floor on my back, on my belly ... on my side ... now with my knees
+crossed....</p>
+
+<p>Whitman, Shakespeare, Scott, Shelley, Byron ... Speke, Burton, Stanley
+... my real comrades!... my real world! Rather a world of books than a
+world of actuality!...</p>
+
+<p>I was so glad to be among my books again that for a month I gave no
+thought to the future. I did nothing but read and study ... except at
+those times when I was talking to people prodigiously of my trip and
+what I had seen and been through. And naturally and deftly I wove huge
+strips of imagination and sheer invention into the woof of every tale or
+anecdote....</p>
+
+<p>I captained ships, saw Chinese slaughtered by the thousands, fought
+bandits on the outskirts of Manila, helped loot the palace of the
+empress in the Sacred City at Pekin ... tales of peril and adventure
+that I had heard others relate at camp-fires, in jail, in the
+forecastle, on the transport, I unhesitatingly appropriated as my own
+experiences.</p>
+
+<p>All the papers printed stories about me. And I was proud about it. And I
+became prouder still when I sold a story in two parts to a New York
+Sunday paper ... I liked the notoriety....</p>
+
+<p>But as usual, the yarns I retailed struck in upon my own imagination,
+too ... just as had my earlier stories of killing Indians. Particularly
+the tale I had related of having seen dead Chinamen in heaps with their
+heads lopped off. A nightmare of this imaginary episode began to come to
+me. And another dream I had&mdash;of a huge Boxer, with a cutlass, standing
+over me. And he was about to carve me piecemeal while I lay bound and
+helpless before him. The dream persisted so strongly that, after I
+awoke, I still seemed to see him standing in a corner of my room. And I
+cried aloud. And felt foolish when it brought my father in. So I stopped
+making up adventures, especially the disagreeable ones, because they
+eventually had more effect on me than they did on my auditors.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My father had changed boarding places ... but, as usual, it was not
+better food, but a little, dark widow that attracted him to that
+boarding house.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I now devoted myself exclusively to poetry&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Breasted's book store, down in Newark, was where I was nearly always to
+be found, in the late afternoons.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>Now, here were his complete works, right at hand, in one volume ... a
+damaged but typographically intact copy....</p>
+
+<p>I had, once before, dipped into his <i>Endymion</i> and had been discouraged
+... but this time I began to read him with his very first lines&mdash;his
+dedication to Leigh Hunt, beginning:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Glory and loveliness have passed away.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then I went on to a pastoral piece:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I stood tiptoe upon a little hill.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I forgot where I was. A new world of beauty was opened to me.... I read
+and read....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come, Gregory, it's time to close&quot;&mdash;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 &quot;the perfessor.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You've been standing here as quiet as a crane for three hours.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How much do you want for this book?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A quarter ... for you!&quot; He always affected to make me special
+reductions, as an old customer....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I lit the light in my room. All night I read and re-read, not a whit
+sleepy or tired.</p>
+
+<p>I went for a week in a mad dream, my face shining and glowing with inner
+ecstasy and happiness.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>At that time <i>McFadden's Physical Culture Magazine</i> 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 &quot;wit&quot; as humorous. I can't help it if I am laughed at ... everybody
+would be, if they told the truth about themselves, like this.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;William Moreton.</p>
+
+<p>Around it lay pine forests and, at its feet, the valley of the
+Connecticut River.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;that was when they held the <i>real</i>
+revival,&mdash;and the story of the whipped-up frenzy of that will afford a
+more characteristic flavour.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;especially that of the Civil War period ... and I had studied
+arithmetic and algebra, so that in these subjects I managed to slide
+through.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;my teachers of Latin and Greek&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Dunn made of Vergil a contemporary poet....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>But as I ran, and ran, every afternoon, my mile, the boys stopped
+laughing, and I heard them say among themselves, &quot;Old Gregory, he'll get
+there!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After the exercise there would be the rub-down with fragrant witch hazel
+... then supper!</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>Every night, just before &quot;lights out,&quot; at ten, fifteen minutes was set
+aside, called &quot;silent time&quot;&mdash;and likewise in the morning, just before
+breakfast-bell&mdash;for prayer and religious meditation.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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)&mdash;Jimmy Anderson read his Bible and knelt and
+prayed during both &quot;silent times.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I read the Bible and prayed for the quiet, religious luxury of it. My
+prayer, when I prayed, was just to &quot;God,&quot; not Jehovah ... not to God of
+any sect, religion, creed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Dear God,&quot; ran always my prayer, &quot;Dear God, if you really exist, make
+me a great poet. I ask for nothing else. Only let me become famous.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was so happy in my studies,&mdash;my work, even,&mdash;my wanderings in the
+woods and along the country roads, with the poets under my arms.... I
+read them all, from Layamon's <i>Brut</i> on. For, for me, all that existed
+was poetry. At this stage of my life it was my be-all and end-all.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My father was a most impractical man. He would sit in his office as
+foreman, read the New York <i>Herald</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;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....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There were three dormitory groups on the &quot;hill.&quot; The &quot;villas&quot; were the
+most aristocratic. There the &quot;gentlemen&quot; among the students, and the
+teachers' favourites, dwelt&mdash;with the teachers. Then there was Crosston
+Hall, and Oberly. Crosston was the least desirable of the halls. It was
+there that I lived.</p>
+
+<p>We were hardly settled in our rooms when the usual fall revival
+began....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+medi&aelig;val times, would not have stopped short of the stake and fagot to
+convince sinners of the error of their ways.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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 <i>quid pro quo</i> basis that even God accepted.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Little Principal Stanton stood nearby, his eyes gleaming spectrally
+through his glasses, his teeth shining like those of a miniature
+Roosevelt.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We will begin,&quot; he snapped decisively, &quot;with John Moreton's favourite
+hymn, when he was with us in this world.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We rose and sang, &quot;There is a green hill far away&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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....</p>
+
+<p>And row by row,&mdash;Rask still standing and exhorting,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;O Lamb of God, I come, I come!&quot;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;Just as I am, without one plea,</div>
+<div>But that Thy blood was shed for me!&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Weakening under the pressure, and swung by the power of herd-instinct,
+most of us &quot;came.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;Boys, all together now,&mdash;three cheers for Jesus Christ!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>There were prayer-meetings, prayer-meetings, prayer-meetings ... between
+classes, during study-periods, at every odd minute of time to be
+snatched.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;even to the winning of scholarships there, and, on
+graduation, in the chief colleges of the land.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One day, as I was marching in line from the chapel, a queer thing took
+place....</p>
+
+<p>One of the boys whom I could not identify hissed, &quot;Go on, you
+hypocrite!&quot; at me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the early spring I left school before the term was over, impatient,
+restless, at odds with the faculty ... Stanton termed it &quot;under a
+cloud.&quot; I had my eyes set on another ideal.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;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....</p>
+
+<p>Barton had taken over a great barn-like, abandoned factory building that
+stood on the shore of an artificial lake&mdash;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&mdash;paddling along the winding creek in a canoe to his
+work each morning, his pants rolled up to the knees&mdash;and put in their
+stead a new, nicely creased suit!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>As the laying out of the sites and the streets progressed, dwellers came
+to join with us ... fanatics ... &quot;nuts&quot; of every description ... the
+sick....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She had a disagreement with Barton&mdash;and left to consult regular doctors.
+She turned over all rights to her tent and to the site to me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And mind you, Mr. Gregory,&quot; she admonished, &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I lived religiously on one meal a day&mdash;a mono-diet (mostly) of whole
+wheat grains, soaked in water till they burst open to the white of the
+inside kernel....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Each had his special method of exercising&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>Behind board lean-tos,&mdash;one for the men, the other for the women,&mdash;we
+dressed and undressed....</p>
+
+<p>One Sunday afternoon a Russian Jewess slipped off her clothes, in an
+innocent and inoffensive manner, just as if it was quite the
+thing,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Barton was a strange, strong-minded, ignorant man. Hardly able to
+compose a sentence in correct English, he employed educated, but
+unresourceful assistants who furnished the good grammar, while he
+supplied the initiative and original ideas, and increased the influence
+and circulation of his magazine. Also he lived strenuously up to the
+doctrines he taught; fasting, for instance.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after I reached &quot;Perfection City&quot; he launched on his two weeks'
+annual fast. Up in the big house where he lived, in the next town of
+Andersonville (he himself would have been gladder of a mere shack or
+tent like the rest of us&mdash;but his wife negated any such idea) Mrs.
+Barton used to taunt and insult him by putting out the best food under
+his nose, during this time.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Barton was a terror. She was ever inviting to her house that kind
+of people who know somebody &quot;worth while&quot; or are related to somebody
+who, in their turn, are, perhaps, related to&mdash;somebody else!...</p>
+
+<p>In their presence she would patronise Barton by calling him &quot;Stevie!&quot; in
+her drawling, patronising manner....</p>
+
+<p>When the woman came in among the tents and shacks of our &quot;city&quot; she
+would, in speaking with any of us, imply all sorts of mean, insinuating
+things about her reformer-husband....</p>
+
+<p>Barton, they said, met her while on one of his lecture tours....</p>
+
+<p>Their baby ... a little, red object like a boiled lobster ... the
+anonymous, undistinguished creatures all babies are at that time&mdash;the
+mother used to bring it in among us and coo and coo over it so
+ridiculously that we made her behaviour a joke among us.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Barton's secretary was a beautiful, gentle, large-eyed girl ... wholly
+feminine ... soft-voiced ... as a reaction from the nagging of his wife,
+from her blatancy and utter lack of sympathy with any of his projects,
+he insensibly drifted into a relationship closer and closer, with this
+girl ... they used to take long walks into the pines together ... and be
+observed coming back slowly out of the sunset ... hand in hand ... to
+drop each other's hands, when they considered that the observing line of
+vision had been reached.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Lying under my huge army tent, by the shore of pretty little Lake Emily,
+I dreamed long and often, in the hush of starry midnight, of
+reconstructing the life of the whole world&mdash;especially the love-life
+between men and women.</p>
+
+<p>Shelley was my God, not Christ. Shelley's notes to <i>Queen Mab</i> were my
+creed, as his poetry and Whitman's furnished me my Bible. Through them I
+would reform the world!</p>
+
+<p>I had not realised then (as Shelley did not till his death), the
+terrific inertia of people, their content, even, with the cramping and
+conventional ideas and beliefs that hold them in unconscious slavery....</p>
+
+<p>I think that summer I learned Shelley and Whitman by heart.</p>
+
+<p>And Keats was more than my creed. He comprised my life!</p>
+
+<p>Day by day I took care of my body, gaining in weight, filling out the
+hollows in my face, till I had grown into a presentable young man. For
+the first time in my life I knew the meaning of perfect health. Every
+atom of my blood tingled with natural happiness as I have felt it in
+later days, under the stimulation of good wine.</p>
+
+<p>No coffee, no tea, no beefsteak, no alcohol....</p>
+
+<p>On that summer's ideal living I built the foundation of the health and
+strength, that, long after, I finally acquired as a permanent
+possession.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Stephen Barton and I had many interesting talks together. With the
+cultural background of Europe he might have been a Rousseau or a
+Phalanisterian. As it was, he ran a &quot;natural life&quot; magazine which,
+though crude, benefited hundreds of people. What though it showed
+pictures of stupid men and women revealing, in poses rivalling the
+contortionist, their physical development acquired through his methods.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We would collect many people about us, to serve as a nucleus from which
+the future society of men and women would expand ... we would all live
+together as nearly naked as possible, because that was, after all, the
+only pure thing ... as Art showed, in its painting and sculpture. We
+would make our livings by the manufacture of all sorts of exercising
+apparatus and health-foods....</p>
+
+<p>And so the world would be leavened with the new idea ... and men and
+women and little children would wander forth from the great, unclean,
+insanitary cities and live in clusters of pretty cottages ... naked, in
+good weather,&mdash;in bad, clothed for warmth and comfort, but not for
+shame. And the human body would become holy.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Meanwhile the petty, local fight had started which was to disrupt this
+hope of Barton's, and thwart its fulfillment forever.</p>
+
+<p>The town of Andersonville became jealous of the town of Cottswold
+because the latter handled most of the mail of our city and thereby had
+achieved the position of third or fourth class postoffice&mdash;I don't know
+exactly which.</p>
+
+<p>The struggle commenced when the two lone policemen of Andersonville
+began to arrest us&mdash;men and women&mdash;when we walked into their town for
+provisions, clad in our bathing suits ... later on, we were forbidden to
+run for exercise, in our bathing suits, on the fine, macadamised road
+that passed not far from our dwellings ... it shocked the motorists.</p>
+
+<p>Yet people came from far and near, just to be shocked. That seems to be
+the chief, most delightful, and only lawfully indulged emotion of the
+Puritan.</p>
+
+<p>Barton summoned us to a meeting, one night, and we held a long palaver
+over the situation. We decided to become more cautious, in spite of a
+few hotheads who advised defiance to the hilt....</p>
+
+<p>And the beautiful girl that possessed such fine breasts could no longer
+row about on our little lake, naked to the waist. And we were requested
+to go far in among the trees for our nude sun-baths.</p>
+
+<p>The more radical of us moved entirely into the woods, despite the sand
+flies....</p>
+
+<p>Then the affair simmered down to quietness&mdash;till the New York <i>World</i>
+and the New York <i>Journal</i> sent out their reporters.... After that, what
+with the lurid and insinuating stories printed, the state authorities
+began to look into the matter&mdash;and found no harm in us.</p>
+
+<p>But the Andersonville officials were out for blood. Cottswold was
+growing too fast for their injured civic pride and vanity.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Can't you divide your mail between the two towns, and make them both
+third or fourth class or whatever-it-is postoffice towns?&quot; I asked
+Barton, after he had given me the simple explanation of the whole
+affair.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No&mdash;for if I took anything away from Cottswold and added it to
+Andersonville, then the Cottswold authorities would become my
+adversaries, too ... the only thing I can do,&quot; he added, &quot;is what I
+meant to do all along,&mdash;as soon as our 'city' has grown important
+enough&mdash;have 'Perfection City' made a postoffice.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And then make enemies of both towns at once?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He threw up his hands in despair and walked away.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Having quit work with the gang that was laying out the streets of the
+future city through the pines, I was entirely out of the few dollars my
+several weeks' work had enabled me to save ... though but little was
+needed to exist by, in that community of simple livers ... my procuring
+my tent free had rendered me quite independent....</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon Barton met me on the dam-head.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on in swimming with me ... I have something to talk with you
+about,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p>We swam around and talked, as nonchalantly as two other men would have
+done, sitting in their club.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How would you like to work for me again?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What is it you want me to work at?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I need a cook for my nature restaurant ... can you cook?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I thought. I knew his present cook, MacGregor, the Scot, and I didn't
+want to do him out of a job. Besides, I didn't know how to cook.</p>
+
+<p>The first objection Barton read in my face.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;MacGregor is quitting ... I'm not firing him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All right ... I'll take the job.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Our conference over, we had climbed out to the top of the dam, slid
+over, and were now standing beneath. The water galloped down in a snowy
+cataract of foam, as we topped off our swim with the heavy &quot;shower-bath&quot;
+that was like a massage in its pummelling.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>MacGregor good-naturedly stayed an extra week, saying he'd show me the
+run of things. Secretly he tried to teach me how to cook....</p>
+
+<p>As the cooking was not all of the &quot;nature&quot; order, but involved preparing
+food for a horde of people we called &quot;outsiders&quot; who were employed in
+Barton's publishing plant, I would have to prepare meat and bake bread
+and make tea and coffee....</p>
+
+<p>Barton confessed to me that a food-compromise was distasteful to him.
+But he could not coerce. While lecturing about the country it was often,
+even with him, &quot;eat beefsteaks or starve!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>MacGregor was a professional Scotchman, just as there are professional
+Irishmen, Englishmen and professional Southern Gentlemen ... every
+Scotchman is a professional Scotchman ... but there is always something
+pleasant and poetic about his being so ... it is not as it is with the
+others&mdash;whose &quot;professionalism&quot; generally bears an unpleasant reek.</p>
+
+<p>MacGregor had sandy, scanty hair, a tiny white shadow of a moustache,
+kindly, weak eyes, a forehead prematurely wrinkled with minute,
+horizontal lines. Burns ... of course ... he knew and quoted every line
+to me. And <i>Sentimental Tommy</i> and <i>Tommy and Grizel</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In a week I was left in full possession of the nature restaurant.</p>
+
+<p>Barton had been rendered slightly paring and mean, in matters of
+money,&mdash;by smooth individuals who came to him, glowing with words of
+what they could effect for him, in this or that project&mdash;individuals who
+soon decamped, leaving Barton the poorer, except in experience.</p>
+
+<p>In return he had to retrench. But the retrenchments fell in the place
+where the penny, not the dollar, lay.</p>
+
+<p>He practised economy on me. He gave me only ten dollars a week, board
+and room free, as cook; and also I was to wait on the diners, as well as
+prepare the meals.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless the fault for having two jobs at once thrust on me, rested
+partly with me: when he asked me if I was able to do both, I fell into a
+foolish, boasting mood and said &quot;yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>MacGregor figured out my menu for me a week ahead, the day he left:
+&quot;Anyhow, you'll only last a week,&quot; he joked.</p>
+
+<p>The night before the first breakfast I lay awake all night, worrying ...
+hadn't I better just sneak away with daylight?... no, I must return to
+Mt. Hebron in the fall. Though all I wanted to return for was to show
+the school, that, in spite of my spindly legs, I could win my &quot;H&quot; in
+track athletics.</p>
+
+<p>I must make good at this job, and save ... my grandmother, who had sent
+me money the previous year, I must not call on her again. And I did not
+count on my father ... for he was strenuously in the saddle to a grass
+widow, the one who had lured him to change boarding houses, and she was
+devouring his meagre substance like the Scriptural locust.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>That first breakfast was a nightmare. I &quot;practised breakfast&quot; from three
+o'clock till six ... by six I had started another breakfast, and by
+seven, after having spoiled and burned much food, I was tolerably ready
+for customers ... who seemed, at that hour, to storm the place.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It is not necessary to go into detail. In three days I was through. And
+I had my first fight with Barton.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was back in my army tent once more, free, with my Shelley, my Keats,
+my manuscript....</p>
+
+<p>In despair of ever returning to Hebron, once more I lay under starry
+nights, dreaming poetry and comparing myself to all the Great Dead....</p>
+
+<p>With the top of the tent pulled back to let the stars in, I lay beneath
+the gigantic, marching constellations overhead&mdash;under my mosquito
+netting&mdash;and wrote poems under stress of great inspiration ... at times
+it seemed that Shelley was with me in my tent&mdash;a slight, grey form ...
+and little, valiant, stocky Keats, too.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>After my quarrel with Barton, he tried to oust me from that desirable
+site the Bishop's wife had turned over to me ... indeed, he tried to
+persuade me to leave the colony. But I would not stir.</p>
+
+<p>There was a young fellow in the &quot;City&quot; named Vinton.... Vinton was the
+strong man of the place. He spent three hours every morning exercising,
+in minute detail, every muscle of his body ... and he had developed
+beautiful muscles, each one of which stood out, like a turn in a rope,
+of itself.</p>
+
+<p>Vinton was sent to oust me, by force if need be.</p>
+
+<p>I really was afraid of him when he strode up to me, as I lay there
+reading the <i>Revolt of Islam</i> again.</p>
+
+<p>With a big voice he began to hint, mysteriously, that it would be wise
+for me to clear out. I showed him that I held a clear title and right to
+sojourn there till Christmas, if I chose to, as the bishop's wife had
+paid for the site till that time, and had then transferred the use of
+the location to me. I showed him her letter ... with the Tallahassee
+postmark.</p>
+
+<p>His only answer was, that he knew nothing about that ... that Barton
+wanted the place, and, that if I wouldn't vacate peaceably&mdash;and he
+looked me in the eyes like some great, calm animal.</p>
+
+<p>Though my heart was pounding painfully, against, it seemed, the very
+roof of my mouth, I compelled my eyes not to waver, but to look fiercely
+into his....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Are you going to start packing?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I am not going to start packing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I can break your neck with one twist,&quot; and he illustrated that feat
+with a turn of one large hand in the air.</p>
+
+<p>He came slowly in, head down, as if to pick me up and throw me down.</p>
+
+<p>I waited till he was close, then gave him an upward rip with all my
+might, a blow on the forehead that made the blood flow, and staggered
+him with consternation. To keep myself still at white heat, I showered
+blows on him. To my surprise, he fell back.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wait&mdash;wait,&quot; he protested in a small voice, &quot;I&mdash;I was just fooling.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>After Vinton left, my blood still pouring through my veins in a
+triumphant glow, I sat on the ground by the side of my tent-floor and
+composed a poem....</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon Barton's office boy was sent to me, as an emissary of
+peace.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The boss wants to see you in his office.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Tell your boss that my office is down here. If he wants to see me he
+can come here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The boy scurried away. I was now looked upon as a desperate man.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>And I was happy. I sang at the top of my voice, an old ballad about
+Captain John Smith, so that Barton could hear it through the open window
+of his office....</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;And the little papooses dig holes in the sand ...</div>
+<div><i>Vive le Capitaine John!</i>...&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>I leaped into the lake, without even my gee-string on, and swam far out,
+singing....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Late that evening, Barton came to my tent ... very gently and sweetly
+... he no longer called me John or Johnnie ... I was now Mr. Gregory. He
+asked me, if he rented the plot back from me, would I go in peace? I
+replied, no, I meant to stay there till the middle of September, when
+the fall term opened at Mt. Hebron.</p>
+
+<p>Then he asked me, would I just join forces with him,&mdash;since we must put
+the movement above personalities....</p>
+
+<p>We had a long talk about life and &quot;Nature&quot; ideals. The man showed all
+his soul, all his struggles, to me. And I saw his real greatness and was
+moved greatly. And I informed him I would antagonise him no longer,
+that, though I would not give up the desirable site, otherwise, I would
+help him all I could.</p>
+
+<p>Then he said he would be glad to have me stay, and we shook hands
+warmly, the moisture of feeling shining in our eyes.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As the time for my return to school drew near, I was in fine physical
+condition, better than ever before in my life. I was still somewhat
+thin, but now it could be called slenderness, not thinness. And I was
+surprised at the laughing, healthy, sun-browned look of my face.</p>
+
+<p>I felt a confidence in myself I had never known before....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I had a flirtation with a pretty, freckle-faced girl. She worked in
+Barton's &quot;factory,&quot; and she used to come down to my tent where I sat
+reading, with only my trunks on,&mdash;during the noon hour,&mdash;and ask me to
+read poetry aloud to her. And I read Shelley. She would draw shyly
+closer to me, sending me into a visible tremour that made me ashamed of
+myself.</p>
+
+<p>At times, as we read, her fair, fine hair would brush my cheek and send
+a shiver of fire through me. But I still knew nothing about women. I
+never even offered to kiss her.</p>
+
+<p>But when she was away from me, at night specially, I would go into long,
+luxurious, amorous imaginations over her and the possession of her, and
+I would dream of loving her, and of having a little cottage and
+children....</p>
+
+<p>But words and elegant, burning phrases are never enough for a woman.</p>
+
+<p>In a week I noticed her going by on the arm of a mill-hand.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>And, broke again, I wrote to my grandmother that I must have fifty
+dollars to get back to school on. And, somehow, she scraped it together
+and sent it to me. My first impulse was to be ashamed of myself and
+start to return it. Then I kept it. For, after all, it was for poetry's
+sake.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>On the train to Hebron, as I walked up the car to my seat, health
+shining in my smooth, clear face and skin, the women and girls gave me
+approving, friendly glances, and I was happy.</p>
+
+<p>A summer of control from unhealthy habits had done this for me, a summer
+of life, naked, in the open air, plus exercise. I had learned a great
+lesson. To Barton I owe it that I am still alive, vigorously alive, not
+crawlingly ... but I suffered several slumps before I attained and held
+my present physique. For the world and life afford complications not
+found in &quot;Perfection City.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The school hill lay before my eyes again. From it spread on all sides
+the wonderful Connecticut valley. Up and down the paths to the dining
+hall, the buildings in which classes were held, the Chapel crowning the
+topmost crest, wandered groups of boys in their absurd, postage-stamp
+caps, their peg-top trousers, their wide, floppy raglan coats.</p>
+
+<p>I was a senior now. At first my change in bodily build and bettered
+health rendered me hardly recognisable to my friends.</p>
+
+<p>The very first day I reached Hebron again I was out on the wide, oval
+field, lacing around the track. In a month would come the big track-meet
+and I was determined this time, to win enough points to earn me my &quot;H.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Principal Stanton sent for me, the second day after my arrival.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I wanted to have a long talk with you before you got settled, Gregory.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His steely, blue eyes gleamed through his gold-rimmed eyeglasses.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sit down.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And we had a talk lasting over an hour ... about religion mainly. He was
+surprised to learn that I knew a lot about the early Church fathers, had
+read Newman, and understood the Oxford controversy ... had read many of
+the early English divines....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Gregory,&quot; he cried, putting his hand on my knee, &quot;what a power for God
+you would be, if you would only give over your eccentricities and
+become a Christian ... a chap with your magnetism&mdash;in spite of your
+folly!&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He impressed on me the fact, that, now I was a senior, more would be
+expected of me ... that the younger boys would look up to me, as they
+did to all seniors, and I must be more careful of my deportment before
+them ... my general conduct....</p>
+
+<p>He asked me what I intended making of myself.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A poet!&quot; I exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>He spread his hands outward with a gesture of despair.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course, one can write poetry if necessary ... but what career are
+you choosing?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The writing of poetry.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But, my dear Gregory, one can't make a living by that ... and one must
+live.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why must one live?&quot; I replied fervently, &quot;did Christ ever say 'One must
+live'?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Gregory, you are impossible,&quot; laughed Stanton heartily, &quot;but we're all
+rather fond of you ... and we want you to behave, and try to graduate.
+Though we can't tell just what you might do in after-life ... whether
+you'll turn out a credit to the School or not.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Professor Stanton, I have a favour to ask of you before I go,&quot; I asked,
+standing.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes?&quot; and he raised his eyebrows.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to know if I can have that room alone, over the platform, in
+Recitation Hall.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You'll have to ask Professor Dunn about that ... he has charge of
+room-transfers ... but why can't you room as the other students do?... I
+don't know whether it is good for you, to let you live by yourself ...
+you're already different enough from the other boys ... what you need is
+more human companionship, Gregory, not less.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to do a lot of writing. I want to be alone to think. I plan to
+read Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament all through, again, this
+winter.&quot; ... This was a sop to his religious sentiment. I related how I
+had first read the New Testament in the Greek, while on a cattle-boat,
+in the China Seas....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Gregory, you're quite mad ... but you're a smooth one, too!&quot; his eyes
+gleamed, amused, behind his glasses....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And I want to write a lot of poems drawn from the parables of the New
+Testament&quot;&mdash;though, not till that minute had such an idea entered my
+head....</p>
+
+<p>When I was admitted to the study of Professor Dunn and sat down waiting
+for him among his antique busts and rows of Latin books, I had
+formulated further plans to procure what I desired....</p>
+
+<p>He came in, heavily dignified, like a dark, stocky Roman, grotesque in
+modern dress, lacking the toga.</p>
+
+<p>I told him of my New Testament idea ... and added to it, as an
+afterthought, that I also wanted to prosecute a special study of the
+lyrics of Horace. Though he explained to me that Horace belonged to the
+college curriculum, his heart expanded. Horace was his favourite
+poet&mdash;which, of course, I knew....</p>
+
+<p>I got my room.</p>
+
+<p>I borrowed a wheelbarrow from the barn, and wheeled my trunk down to
+Recitation Hall, singing.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>What a hypocrite I had been! But I had obtained what I sought&mdash;a room
+alone. But now I must, in truth, study the Greek Testament and
+Horace....</p>
+
+<p>I figured out that if I enrolled for several extra Bible courses the
+Faculty would be easier on me with my other studies, and let me cut some
+of them out entirely.</p>
+
+<p>To make myself even more &quot;solid,&quot; I gave out that I had been persuaded
+to Christianity so strongly, of a sudden, that I contemplated studying
+for the ministry. I even wrote my grandmother that this was what I
+intended to do. And her simple, pious letter in return, prayerful with
+thanks to God for my conversion so signal&mdash;in secret cut me to the
+heart....</p>
+
+<p>But it gave me a temporary pleasure, now, to be looked upon as &quot;safe.&quot;
+To be openly welcomed at prayer-meetings ... I acted, how I acted, the
+ardent convert ... and how frightened I was, at myself, to find that, at
+times, I believed that I believed!...</p>
+
+<p>My former back-sliding was forgiven me.</p>
+
+<p>And the passage of Tennyson about &quot;one honest doubt&quot; being more than
+half the creeds, was quoted in my favour.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Field-day!...</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I entered for the two-mile, to be run off in the morning ... for the
+half-mile, the first thing in the afternoon ... the mile, which was to
+be the last event, excepting the hammer-throw. My class, in a body, had
+urged me to enter for all the &quot;events&quot; I could ... when the delegation
+came, I welcomed them, with gratified self-importance, to my solitary
+room. I invited them in, and they sat about ... on my single chair ...
+my bed ... the floor....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You see, Gregory, if you win two of these races, we'll get the banner
+that goes to the class that makes the greatest number of points ... you
+must do it for us ... we have never yet won the banner, and this is our
+last chance.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They left, solemnly shaking my hand, as over a matter of vast
+importance....</p>
+
+<p>Hurrying into my track suit, I went out to the Oval. It was three days
+before the meet.</p>
+
+<p>Dunn was there, with several others, measuring out distances and
+chalking lanes.</p>
+
+<p>With all the delicate joy of an aesthete I took my slim, spiked running
+shoes. I patted them with affection as I pushed my feet into them. I
+removed the corks from the shining spikes....</p>
+
+<p>I struck out with long, low-running, greyhound strides ... around and
+around ... the wind streamed by me....</p>
+
+<p>I knew I was being watched admiringly. I could see it out of the tail of
+my eyes. So I threw forward in a final sprint, that brought me up, my
+eyes stinging with the salt of sweat, my legs aching ... my chest
+heaving....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good boy,&quot; complimented Dunn, coming up to me, and patting me on the
+back ... Gregory, I'm <i>for</i> you. I'm so glad you've come out a clean,
+fine, clear-cut Christian.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>For the two-mile, the half, and the mile, each&mdash;a single athlete was
+training, his heart set on the record. It seemed impossible that I
+should win all three races. Yet I did.</p>
+
+<p>I was all nerves and sinews for the two-mile. The night before I had
+lain awake. I could not sleep so I read a poor translation of the odes
+of Pindar. But behind the bad verbiage of the translator, I fed on the
+shining spirit of the poetry. With Pindar's music in me, I was ready for
+the two-mile.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Tensely we leaned forward, at the scratch. I had my plan of campaign
+evolved. I would leap to the fore, at the crack of the pistol, set a
+terrific pace, sprint the first quarter, and then settle into my long,
+steady stride, and trust to my good lung power ... for I had paid
+special attention to my lung-development, at &quot;Perfection City.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I felt a melting fire of nervousness running through my body, a
+weakness.</p>
+
+<p>I bowed my face in my hands and prayed ... both to Christ and to Apollo
+... in deadly seriousness ... perhaps all the gods really were....</p>
+
+<p>The gun cracked. Off I leapt, in the lead ... in the first lap the field
+fell behind.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Steady, Gregory, steady!&quot; advised Dunn, in a low voice, as I flashed
+into the second....</p>
+
+<p>I thought I had distanced everybody ... but it chilled me to hear the
+soft swish, swish of another runner ... glancing rapidly behind, I saw a
+swarthy lad, a fellow with a mop of wiry, black hair, whom we called
+&quot;The Hick&quot; (for he had never been anywhere but on a farm)&mdash;going stride
+for stride, right in my steps, just avoiding my heels....</p>
+
+<p>Run as I might, I couldn't shake him off....</p>
+
+<p>Every time I swept by, the crowd would set up a shout ... but now they
+were encouraging &quot;The hick&quot; more than me. This made me furious, hurt my
+egotism. My lungs were burning with effort ... I threw out into a longer
+stride. I glanced back again. Still the chap was lumbering along ... but
+easily, so easily ... almost without an effort....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good God, am I going to be beaten?&quot; I sensed a terrific sprinting-power
+in the following, chunky body of my antagonist.</p>
+
+<p>There were only two more laps ... the rest of the field were a lap and a
+half behind, fighting for third place amongst themselves ... jeered at
+by the instinctive cruelty of the onlookers....</p>
+
+<p>My ears perceived a cessation of the following swish, the tread.
+Simultaneously I heard a great shout go up. I dared not look back,
+however, to see what was happening&mdash;I threw myself forward at that
+shout, fearing the worst, and ran myself blind....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Take it easy, you have it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Shut up! he's after the record.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The shrill screaming of the girls who had come over, in a white,
+linen-starched wagon load, from Fairfield, gave me my last spurt.
+Expecting every moment to hear my antagonist grind past me, on the
+cinders, I sped up the home-stretch.</p>
+
+<p>The air was swimming in a gold mist. I felt arms under mine, and I was
+carried off to the senior tent, by my class-mates....</p>
+
+<p>Yet I am convinced that I would have been beaten, if my rival had not
+had the string that held his trunks up, break. He had sunk down on the
+track, when they had fallen, not to show his nakedness ... and, pulling
+them up, and holding them, amid great laughter, he had still won second
+ribbon.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I won the second race&mdash;the half-mile, without the humour of such a
+fateful intervention. It was my winning of the first that won me the
+second. I had just equalled the two-mile record, in the first....</p>
+
+<p>I ran that half, blindly, like a mad man. I was drunk with joy over my
+popularity ... for when I had gone into the big dining room for lunch,
+all the boys had shouted and cheered and roared, and pounded the dishes
+with their knives.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Now, Gregory, you've just got to take the mile away from Learoyd ...
+he's a junior ... you've just <i>got</i> to!... besides, if you don't ...
+there's Flammer has lost the broad jump ... and we won't win the class
+banner after all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Learoyd was a smallish, golden-faced, downy-headed boy ... almost an
+albino.... I had seen him run ... he ran low to the ground, in flashes,
+like some sort of shore-bird.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the class-tent, alone. Dunn had driven my class out, where they had
+been massaging and kneading my legs ... which trembled and tottered
+under me, from the excessive use they had already undergone.</p>
+
+<p>I sat down and put my head between my knees, and groaned. Then I
+straightened out my right leg and rubbed it, because a cramp was
+knotting it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hello, Gregory!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The tent-flap opened. The athletic director poked his head in.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, Gregory, we're waiting for you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wait a minute, Smythe ... I want to pray,&quot; I replied simply. Reverently
+he withdrew ... impressed ... awed....</p>
+
+<p>I flung myself on my face.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look here, God, I'll really believe in you, if you give me this last
+race ... it will be a miracle, God, if you do this for me, and I will
+believe in your Bible, despite my common sense ... despite history ...
+despite Huxley and Voltaire,&quot; then, going as far as I could&mdash;&quot;yes, and
+despite Shelley ... dear God, dear Christ, please do what I have asked.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My hand struck on a bottle of witch hazel as I rose. Impulsively, I
+drank off half the contents. It sent a warmth through me. I straightened
+up, invigorated.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, Gregory ... what's the matter?&quot; it was Dunn, protesting,
+&quot;we'll have to run off the mile without you, if you don't come.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm ready ... I'm coming.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>All that I had in my head, when the pistol cracked, was to <i>run!</i> ...
+all I felt about me was only a pair of mad legs.</p>
+
+<p>I licked out, neither seeing nor caring ... almost feeling my way along
+the rim of the track with my toes, as I ran&mdash;as if I had racing eyes in
+them. There was a continuous roar that rose and fell like the sea. But I
+neither saw nor heeded. I just ran and ran.</p>
+
+<p>On the home-stretch a fellow came breast to breast with me. It was
+Learoyd ... running low like a swallow skimming the ground. But it
+didn't worry me. I was calm, just floating along, it seemed to me.</p>
+
+<p>I saw Dunn throwing his camera into the air, in the forefront of the
+seething crowd. He was crying for me to come on. The camera fell in a
+smashed heap, unregarded.</p>
+
+<p>Barely, with my chest flung out, I took the tape ... trailing off ... I
+ran half a lap more, with my class leaping grotesquely and shouting,
+streaming across field after me&mdash;before I had my senses back again, and
+realised that the race was over.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Did I win? Did I win? Did I win?&quot; I asked again and again.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, you won!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was being carried about on their shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A little more, and we'd have to take you over to the hospital,&quot;
+commented Smythe, as he looked at me, while I lay prone on my back,
+resting, under shelter of the tent.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Who&mdash;who used up all this witch-hazel?&quot; he asked of the rubbers....</p>
+
+<p>I hid my face in the grass, pretending to groan from the strain I had
+just undergone. Instead, I was smothering a laugh at myself ... at the
+school ... at all things....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;God and witch-hazel,&quot; I wanted to shout hysterically, &quot;hurrah for God
+and witch-hazel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then I rose shakily to my feet, and, flinging myself loose from those
+who offered to help me, I ran at a good clip, in my sneakers, dangling
+my running shoes affectionately&mdash;to my solitary room ... with a bearing
+that boasted, &quot;why, I could run all those three races over again, one
+right after the other, right now ... no, I'm not tired ... not the least
+bit tired!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>That night, in the crowded dining hall, the ovation for me was
+tremendous.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll smash life just like those races,&quot; I boasted, in my heart.</p>
+
+<p>But my triumph and eminence were not to last long.</p>
+
+<p>To be looked up to at Mt. Hebron you had to lead a distasteful,
+colourless life of hypocrisy and piety such as I have seldom seen
+anywhere before. Under cover of their primitive Christianity I never
+found more pettiness. First, you prayed and hymn-sung yourself into
+favour, and then indulged in sanctimonious intrigue to keep yourself
+where you had arrived.</p>
+
+<p>I could not stand my half self-hypnotised hypocrisy any longer. A spirit
+of mischief and horseplay awoke in me. I perpetrated a hundred
+misdemeanours, most of them unpunishable elsewhere, but of serious
+import in schools and barracks, where discipline is to be maintained. I
+stayed out of bounds late at night ... I cut classes continually. I
+visited Fairfield ... and a factory town further south, where I lounged
+about the streets all day, talking with people.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Stanton, not to my surprise, sent for me again.</p>
+
+<p>Yet I was amazed at what he knew about me, amazed, too, to discover the
+extent of the school's complicated system of pious espionage that
+checked up the least move of every student.</p>
+
+<p>Stanton brought out a sheet of paper with dates and facts of my
+misbehaviour that could not be controverted....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So we will have to ask you to withdraw from the school, unless you
+right-about-face ... otherwise, we have had enough of you ... in fact,
+if it had not been for your great promise&mdash;your talents!&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I waved the compliment aside rather wearily.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I think that if this school has had enough of me, I have had about
+enough of the school.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I expressed, in plain terms, my opinion of their espionage system.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Your omnipotent God must be hard put to it when He has to rely on the
+help of such sneakiness to keep His Book (and I couldn't help laughing
+at the literary turn I gave to my denunciation) before the public!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Stanton's eyes flamed behind their glasses.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Gregory, I shall have to ask you to leave the Hill as soon as you can
+get your things together,&quot; he shouted.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;which can hardly be soon enough for me,&quot; I replied.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come, my boy,&quot; continued Stanton, as if ashamed at himself for his
+outburst, and putting his hand on my shoulder, &quot;you're a good sort of
+boy, after all ... you have so much in you, so much energy and power ...
+why don't you put it to right uses?... after your father has made such
+sacrifices for you, I hate to see you run off to a ravelled edge like
+this.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Even yet, if you'll only promise to behave and preserve a proper
+dignity in the presence of the other students&mdash;even yet we would be glad
+to have you stay and graduate ... and we might be able to procure you a
+scholarship at Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Brown. Lang says you put
+yourself into the spirit of Homer like an old Greek, always doing more
+work than the requirements,&mdash;and Dunn says, that you show him things in
+Vergil that he never saw before.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Moved, I shook my head sadly. I hated myself for liking these people.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If you mean that I should be like other people ... I just can't ...
+it's neither pose nor affectation.&quot; (He had intimated that some of the
+professors alleged that as the core of the trouble.) &quot;I guess I don't
+belong here ... yes, it would be better for me to go away!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>That night, unobserved, I stole into the chapel that stood on the Crest
+of the hill, against the infinite stars.</p>
+
+<p>I spent nearly all the night in the chapel, alone. The place was full of
+things. I felt there all the gods that ever were worshipped ... and all
+the great spirits of mankind. And I perceived fully how silly, weak,
+grotesque, and vain I was; and yet, how big and wonderful, it would be
+to swim counter, as I meant, to the huge, swollen, successful currents
+of the commercial, bourgeois practicality of present-day America.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I pinned up a sign on the bulletin board in the hall, in rhyme,
+announcing, that, that afternoon, at four o'clock, John Gregory would
+hold an auction of his books of poetry.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My room was crowded with amused students. I mounted the table, like an
+auctioneer, while they sat on my cot and on the floor, and crowded the
+door.</p>
+
+<p>At first the boys jeered and pushed. But when I started selling my copy
+of Byron and telling about his life, they fell into a quiet, and
+listened. After I had made that talk, they clapped me. Byron went for a
+dollar, fetching the largest price. I sold my Shelley, my Blake, my
+Herrick, my Marvell, my Milton ... all....</p>
+
+<p>My Keats I could not bring myself to sell. I kept that like a treasure.
+What I could not sell I gave away.</p>
+
+<p>My entire capital was ten dollars ... one suit of clothes ... a change
+of underwear ... two shirts. I discarded my trunk and crammed what
+little I owned into my battered suitcase.</p>
+
+<p>That night, the story of my dismissal from school having travelled about
+from mouth to mouth, and the tale of my poets' auction&mdash;the boys
+cheered me, as I came into the dining hall&mdash;cheered me partly
+affectionately, partly derisively.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the morning mail I received a letter from the New York <i>Independent</i>,
+a weekly literary magazine. Dr. Ward, the editor, informed me that I
+possessed genuine poetic promise, and he was taking two of the poems I
+had recently submitted to him, for publication in his magazine.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Like the vagrant I was, I considered myself indefinitely fixed, with
+that ten dollars. I went to Boston ... hung about the library and the
+waterfront ... stayed in cheap lodging houses for a few days&mdash;and found
+myself on the tramp again.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I freighted it to New York, where I landed, grimy and full of coal-dust.
+And I sought out my uncle who lived in the Bronx.</p>
+
+<p>I appeared, opportunely, around supper time. I asked him if he was not
+glad to see me. He grimaced a yes, but wished that I would stop tramping
+about and fit in, in life, somewhere.... He observed that my shirt was
+filthy and that I must take a bath immediately and put on a clean one of
+his.</p>
+
+<p>In Boston I had ditched everything but the clothes I wore ... and my
+suit was wrecked with hard usage.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Get work at anything,&quot; advised my Uncle Jim, &quot;and save up till you can
+rig yourself out new. You'll never accomplish anything looking the way
+you do. Your editor at the <i>Independent</i> will not be impressed and think
+it romantic, if you go to see him the way you are ... ragged poets are
+out of date.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At &quot;Perfection City&quot; I had made the acquaintance of a boy, whom,
+curiously enough, I have left out of that part of the narrative that has
+to deal with the Nature Colony. He was a millionaire's son: his father,
+a friend of Barton's, had sent him out to &quot;Perfection City&quot; with a
+tutor. His name was Milton Saunders. He was a fine, generous lad, but
+open as the weather to every influence ... especially to any which was
+not for his good.</p>
+
+<p>One morning I saw him actually remove his own shoes and give them to a
+passing tramp who needed them worse than he.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's nothing, dad's money will be sufficient to buy me a new pair,&quot;
+he explained, going back to his tent, in his bare feet, his socks in his
+hand&mdash;to put on his sneakers while he hastened to the shoe store in
+Andersonville.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Milton had urged me to be sure to come and see him if I chanced to be in
+New York.</p>
+
+<p>I now called him on the telephone and was cordially invited to visit
+him, and that, immediately.</p>
+
+<p>The servants eyed me suspiciously and sent me up by the tradesmen's
+elevator. Milton flew into a fury over it. His friend was his friend, no
+matter how he was dressed&mdash;he wanted them to remember that, in the
+future!</p>
+
+<p>He brought out a bottle of wine, had a fine luncheon set before me. I
+went for the food, but pushed the wine aside. He drank the bottle
+himself. I was still, for my part, clinging to shreds of what I had
+learned at &quot;Perfection City.&quot; ...</p>
+
+<p>He rushed me to his tailor. I had told him of my first poems' being
+accepted.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course, you must be better dressed when you go to see the editor.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The tailor looked me over, in whimsical astonishment. He vowed that he
+could not have a suit ready for me by ten the next morning, as Milton
+was ordering.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then you have a suit here for me about ready.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It is ready now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Alter it immediately to fit Mr. Gregory ... we're about the same
+height.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The tailor said <i>that</i> could be done.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest of the day Milton and I peregrinated from one saloon
+back-room to another ... in each of which the boy seemed to be well
+known. He drank liquor while I imbibed soft drinks ... the result was
+better for him than for me. I soon had the stomach-ache, while he only
+seemed a little over-exhilarated.</p>
+
+<p>At his door-step he shoved a ten dollar bill into my hand. I demurred,
+but accepted it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'd hand you more,&quot; he apologised, &quot;but the Old Man never lets me have
+any more than just so much at a time ... says I waste it anyhow ... but
+I manage to do a lot of charging,&quot; he chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Have you a place to stay to-night?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes ... I have an uncle who lives uptown.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>When I showed up at my uncle's, that night, I showed him my new rig-out,
+and explained to him how I came into possession of it. But he did not
+accept my explanation. Instead, he shook his head in mournful
+dubiousness ... indicating that he doubted my story, and insinuating
+that I had not come by my suit honestly; as well as by the new dress
+suitcase Saunders had presented me with, and the shirts and
+underclothing.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;God knows where you'll end up, Johnny.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After supper Uncle Jim grew restive again, and he came out frankly with
+the declaration that he did not want me to stay overnight in the house,
+but to pack on out to Haberford to my father ... or, since I must stay
+in town to see my editor (again that faint, dubious smile), I might stay
+the night at a Mills Hotel ... since my rich friend had given me money,
+too ... besides my aunt was not so very strong and I put a strain on
+her.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At the Mills Hotel I was perched in a cell-like corner room, high up.
+The room smelt antiseptic. Nearby, Broadway roared and spread in
+wavering blazons of theatric gold. I looked down upon it, dreaming of my
+future fame, my great poetic and literary career ... my plays that would
+some day be announced down there, in great shining sign-letters.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The sound of an employ&eacute;e's beating with a heavy stick, from door to iron
+door, to wake up all the Mills Hotel patrons, bestirred me at an early
+hour.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I meditated my next move, and now resolved on another try at community
+life.... The Eos Artwork Studios, founded in the little New York State
+town of Eos, by the celebrated eccentric author and lecturer, Roderick
+Spalton.</p>
+
+<p>I was in such impatience to reach Eos that I did not cross over to
+Haberford, to drop in on my father. I feared also that my leaving school
+the second time, &quot;under a cloud,&quot; would not win me an enthusiastic
+welcome from him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>By nightfall I was well on my way to Eos, sitting in an empty box-car. I
+had with me my new clothes&mdash;which I wore&mdash;and my suitcase, a foolish way
+to tramp. But I thought I might as well appear before Roderick Spalton
+with a little more &quot;presence&quot; than usual. For I intended spending some
+time in his community.</p>
+
+<p>Characteristically, I had gone to the office of the <i>Independent</i>, had
+not found the editor in, that morning, and had chafed at the idea of
+waiting till the afternoon, when I might have had a fruitful talk with a
+man who was interested in the one real thing in my life&mdash;my poetry.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I reached Rochester safely. It was on the stretch to Buffalo that I paid
+dearly for being well-dressed and carrying a suitcase ... as I lay
+asleep on the floor of the box-car I was set upon by three tramps, who
+pinioned my arms and legs before I was even fully awake. I was forced to
+strip off my clothes, after wrestling and fighting as hard as I could. I
+floated off into the stars from a blow on the head....</p>
+
+<p>When I came to, I was trembling violently both with cold and from the
+nervous shock. My assailants had made off with my suitcase ... I was in
+nothing but my B.V.D.'s and shirt. Even my Keats had been stolen. But
+beside me I found the ragged, cast-off suit of one of the tramps ... and
+my razor, which had dropped out of my coat pocket, while the tramp had
+changed clothes, and not been noticed. Gingerly, I put on the ragged
+suit....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I stood in front of the Eos Artwork Studios.</p>
+
+<p>I saw a boy coming down the path from one of the buildings.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Would you tell me please where I can find the Master?&quot; I asked,
+reverently.</p>
+
+<p>The boy gave me a long stare.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, you mean Mr. Spalton?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's him ... there ... choppin' wood.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There was a young man and an older one, both chopping wood, in the back
+of a building, but in fairly open view.</p>
+
+<p>I walked to where they worked with both inward and outward trepidation,
+for, to me, Spalton was one of the world's great men.</p>
+
+<p>Just as I reached the spot, the younger of the two threw down his axe.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So long, Dad! now I'll go into the shop and tend to those letters.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I stood in the presence of the great Roderick Spalton himself, the man
+who, in his <i>Brief Visits to the Homes of Famous Folk</i>, had written more
+meatily and wisely than any American author since Emerson ... the man
+whose magazine called <i>The Dawn</i>, had rendered him an object of almost
+religious veneration and worship to thousands of Americans whose spirits
+reached for something more than the mere piling of dollars one on the
+other....</p>
+
+<p>I stood before him, visibly overwhelmed. It was evident that my silent
+hero-worship was sweet to him. He bespoke me gently and courteously.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So you want to become an Eoite?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; I whispered, bending my gaze humbly before his.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And what is your name, my dear boy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;John Gregory, Master!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What have you brought with you? where is your baggage?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I&mdash;I lost my baggage ... all I have with me is a-a r-razor.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He leaned his head back and laughed joyously. His lambent brown eyes
+glowed with humour. I liked the man.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, we'll give you a job&mdash;Razorre!&quot; he assured me, calling me by the
+nickname which clung to me during my stay....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Take that axe and show me what you can do.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I caught up the axe and fell to with enthusiasm. The gospel of the
+dignity and worth of labour that he preached thrilled in me. It was the
+first time I ever enjoyed working....</p>
+
+<p>As we worked the Master talked ... talked with me as if he had known me
+for years&mdash;as if I, too, were Somebody.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing he did not discuss, in memorable phrase and trenchant,
+clever epigram. For he saw that I believed in him, worshipped
+whole-heartedly at his shrine of genius, and he gave me, in return, of
+his best. For the first time I saw what human language is for. I thought
+of Goethe at Weimar ... Wilde's clever conversation in London....</p>
+
+<p>Never since did I see the real man, Spalton, as I saw him then, the man
+he might always have been, if he had had an old-world environment,
+instead of the environment of modern, commercial America&mdash;the spirit of
+which finally claimed him, as he grew more successful....</p>
+
+<p>Modern, commercial America&mdash;where we proudly make a boast of lack of
+culture, and where artistic and aesthetic feeling, if freely expressed,
+makes one's hearers more likely than not, at once uneasy and restive.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>That night, at supper, I caught my first glimpse of the Eoites in a
+body. The contrast between them and my school-folk was agreeably
+different. I found among them an atmosphere of good-natured greeting and
+raillery, that sped from table to table. And when Spalton strode in,
+with his bold, swinging gait (it seemed that he had just returned from a
+lecture in a distant city early that afternoon), there was cheering and
+clapping.</p>
+
+<p>Guests and workers joined together in the same dining hall, with no
+distinctive division.... I sat next to Spalton's table, and a warm glow
+of pleasure swept through me when he sent me a pleasant nod.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hello, Razorre,&quot; he had greeted me; then he had turned to the group at
+his table and told them about me, I could see by their glances&mdash;but in a
+pleasant way.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The next morning I was at work in the bindery, smearing glue on the
+backs of unbound books. My wage was three dollars a week and &quot;found,&quot; as
+they say in the West. Not much, but what did it matter? There was a fine
+library of the world's classics, including all the liberal and
+revolutionary books that I had heard about, but which I could never
+obtain at the libraries ... and there were, as associates and
+companions, many people, who, if extremely eccentric, were,
+nevertheless, alive and alert and interested in all the beautiful things
+Genius has created in Art and Song....</p>
+
+<p>Derelicts, freaks, &quot;nuts&quot; ... with poses that outnumbered the silver
+eyes in the peacock's tail in multitude ... and yet there was to be
+found in them a sincerity, a fineness, and a genuine feeling for
+humanity that &quot;regular&quot; folks never achieve&mdash;perhaps because of their
+very &quot;regularness.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Here, at last, I had found another environment where I could &quot;let loose&quot;
+to the limit ... which I began to do....</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, there was the matter of clothes. I believed that men
+and women should go as nearly naked as possible ... clothing for warmth
+only ... and, as one grew in strength and health through nude contact
+with living sun and air and water, the body would gradually attain the
+power to keep itself warm from the health and strength that was in it.</p>
+
+<p>So, in the middle of severe winter that now had fallen on us, I went
+about in sandals, without socks. I wore no undershirt, and no coat ...
+and went with my shirt open at the neck. I wore no hat....</p>
+
+<p>Spalton himself often went coatless&mdash;in warm weather. His main sartorial
+eccentricity was the wearing of a broad-brimmed hat. And whenever he
+bought a new Stetson, he cut holes in the top and jumped on it, to make
+it look more interesting and less shop-new ... of course everybody in
+the community wore soft shirts and flowing ties.</p>
+
+<p>We addressed each other by first names and nicknames. Spalton went under
+the appellation of &quot;John.&quot; One day a wealthy visitor had driven up.
+Spalton was out chopping wood.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come here, John, and hold my horses.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Spalton dropped the axe and obeyed.</p>
+
+<p>Afterward he had been dismissed with a fifty cent tip.</p>
+
+<p>He told the story on himself, and the name &quot;John&quot; stuck.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Working in the bindery, I began to find out things about the community
+of Eos that were not as ideal as might be ... most of the illumination
+of the books was done by girls, even by children after school hours. The
+outlines of the letters and objects to be hand-illumined were printed in
+with the text, the girls and children merely coloured them between the
+lines.</p>
+
+<p>In each department, hidden behind gorgeous, flowing curtains, were
+time-clocks, on which employees rang up when they came to work, and when
+they left. Also, each worker was supposed to receive dividends&mdash;which
+dividends consisted in pairs of mittens and thick woolen socks
+distributed by the foremen at Christmas time ... or maybe an extra
+dollar in pay, that week.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Two dollars a week less than a fellow would draw at any other place
+that ran the same sort of business,&quot; grumbled a young bookbinder who was
+by way of being a poet, &quot;and a pair of woolen mittens or socks, or an
+extra dollar, once a year, as dividends!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>However, I think that the artworkers had finer lodgings and board than
+most workers could have supplied for themselves ... and the married
+couples lived in nicer houses ... and they heard the best music, had the
+best books to read, lived truly in the presence of the greatest art and
+thought of the world ... and heard speak in the chapel, from time to
+time, all the distinguished men of the country ... who came, sooner or
+later, to visit Spalton and am? community....</p>
+
+<p>What though the wages were not so big, what though you rang up the time
+of arrival at work and the time of departure from it, on hidden
+time-clocks, what though every piece of statuary, every picture, every
+stick of furniture, had, on the bottom of it, its price label, or,
+depending from it, its tag that told the price at which it might be
+bought!...</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Spalton had begun his active career as a business man, had swung out
+from that, his fertile mind glimpsing what worlds of thought and
+imagination lay beyond it!</p>
+
+<p>But now Big Business was calling him back again, using him for its
+purposes.</p>
+
+<p>Oftener and oftener magnificently written articles by him began to
+appear in his remarkable little magazine, <i>The Dawn</i>. And the Ingersoll
+of Dollar Watch fame crowded out the Ingersoll of brave agnosticism ...
+and when he wrote now of artists and writers, it was their thrifty
+habits, their business traits, that he lauded.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A great man can be practical and businesslike, in fact the greatest of
+them always are,&quot; he defended. &quot;There was Voltaire, the successful
+watchmaker at Ferney ... and there was Shakespeare, who, after his
+success in London, returned to Avon and practically bought up the whole
+town ... he even ran a butcher shop there, you know.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;The people expect startling things ... and, as the winds of genius blow
+where they list&mdash;when they refuse to blow in the direction required,
+divine is the art of buncombe,&quot; he jested.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose this applied to his musician-prodigy, a girl of eight, who
+worked, in the afternoons, in the bindery. And when a visiting party
+swept through that department, it was part of her job to rise as if
+under the impulse of inspiration, leave her work, and go to a nearby
+piano and play ... the implication being that the piano was placed there
+for the use of the workers when melody surged within them....</p>
+
+<p>But she was the only one who played. And she never played except when
+she was tipped the wink. And it was only one thing&mdash;a something of
+Rubenstein's ... which she had practised and practised and practised to
+perfection; and <i>that</i> rendered, with haughty head like a little sibyl,
+she would go back to her work-bench. And if urged to play more, she
+would answer, lifting her great, velvet eyes in a dreamy gaze, &quot;no, no
+more to-day. The inspiration has gone.&quot; And, awed, the visitors would
+depart.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Back of the bindery stood the blacksmith shop, where MacKittrick, the
+historian-blacksmith, plied the bellows and smote the anvil.</p>
+
+<p>MacKittrick took a liking to me. For one day we began talking about
+ancient history, and he perceived that I had a little knowledge of it,
+and a feeling for the colour and motion of its long-ago life.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want you to come and work for me,&quot; he urged, &quot;my work is mostly
+pretty,&quot; he apologised, with blacksmith sturdiness, &quot;&mdash;not making
+horseshoes, but cutting out delicate things, ornamental iron work for
+aesthetic purposes, and all that ... all you'll have to do will be to
+swing the hammer gently, while I direct the blows and cut put the dainty
+filigree the &quot;Master&quot; sells to folk, afterward, as art.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, isn't it art?&quot; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I suppose it is. But I like the strong work of blacksmithing best. You
+see, I was born to be a great historian. But destiny has made me a
+blacksmith,&quot; he continued irrelevantly ... &quot;do come out and work for me.
+I'm hungry for an intelligent helper who can talk history with me while
+we work.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My transfer was effected. And I was immediately glad of it. &quot;Mac,&quot; as we
+called him, was a fine, solid man ... and he did know history. He knew
+it as a lover knows his mistress. He was right. He should have been a
+great historical writer&mdash;great historian he <i>was</i>!</p>
+
+<p>For two glorious months I was with him. And during those two months, I
+learned more about the touch and texture of the historic life of man
+than three times as many years in college could have taught me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mac&quot; talked of C&aelig;sar as if only yesterday he had shaken hands with him
+in the Forum ... and he was shocked over his murder as if it had
+happened right after....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ah, that was a bad day for Rome and the future of the world, when those
+mad fellows struck him down there like a pig!&quot; he cried.</p>
+
+<p>And Mary, Queen of Scots, was &quot;a sweet, soft body of a white thing that
+should have been content with being in love, and never tried to rule!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Can you cook?&quot; asked Spalton of me one day, just as Barton had done at
+&quot;Perfection City.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; I replied honestly, thinking back to that experience.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Fine!&quot; was the unexpected rejoinder, &quot;I'm going to send you put to the
+camp to cook for my lumber-jacks for a few weeks.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I said I couldn't cook.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You know how to turn an egg in the pan? you know enough not to let ham
+and bacon burn?... you know water won't scorch, no matter how long it
+stands over the fire?...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You'll make an excellent cook for lumber-jacks ... so long as it's
+something to eat that's stuck under their noses, they don't give a
+damn!... they're always hungry enough to eat anything ... and can digest
+anything....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Get ready! I'm sending you out on one of the waggons by noon.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Perched on the high seat of the waggon by the side of the driver! The
+latter was bundled up to the chin ... wore a fur cap that came down over
+the ears ... was felt-booted against the cold ... wore heavy gloves.</p>
+
+<p>It was so cold that the breath of the horses went straight up into the
+air like thick, white wool. As we rode by, the passing farmers that were
+driving into town almost fell off their seats, startled, and staring at
+me. For there I perched ... coatless and hatless ... sockless feet in
+sandals ... my shirt flung open, a la Byron, at the neck.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the mind can do anything. I <i>thought</i> myself into being
+composed and comfortable. I did not mind, truly I did not mind it.</p>
+
+<p>The driver had protested, but only once, laconically:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Whar's y'r coat an' hat?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I never wear any,&quot; I explained, beginning a propagandistic harangue on
+the non-essentiality of clothes....</p>
+
+<p>He cut in with the final pronouncement:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Damn fool, you'll git pneumony.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then he fell into obdurate, contemptuous silence.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The snow was deep about our living shanty and cook-shack in one, but
+hard-frozen enough to bear a man's weight without snow-shoes. Over the
+crust had fallen a powdery, white, new snow, about four inches deep.</p>
+
+<p>Every morning, after the &quot;boys&quot; had eaten their breakfast and left for
+the woods, I went through my exercises, stripped, out in the open ... a
+half hour of it, finished by a roll in the snow, that set me tingling
+all over.</p>
+
+<p>One morning I made up my mind to startle the &quot;boys&quot; by running,
+mother-naked, in a circle, whooping, about them, where they were sawing
+up fallen trees and felling others.</p>
+
+<p>It was a half mile to where they worked.</p>
+
+<p>For more bizarre effect, I clapped on a straw hat which I found in the
+rafters&mdash;a relic of the preceding summer....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Gosh a'mighty, what's this a-comin!&quot;....</p>
+
+<p>Everybody stopped working. Two neighbour farmers, who had come over for
+a bit of gossip, stooped, their hands on their knees, bowed with
+astonishment, as if they had beheld an apparition.</p>
+
+<p>One of the &quot;boys&quot; told me the two held silence for a long time&mdash;till I
+was entirely out of sight again, and after.</p>
+
+<p>Then one exclaimed, &quot;air they any more luny fellers like thet, back at
+them Artwork shops?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The incident gave birth to the legend of a crazy man under Spalton's
+care, whose chief insanity was running naked through snowdrifts.</p>
+
+<p>Spalton had three sons. Roderick was the eldest: named after his father.
+Level-headed and businesslike, he followed his father's vagaries because
+he saw the commercial possibilities in them ... though he did so more as
+a practical man with a sense of humour than as a man who was on the
+make. Spalton, who knew men thoroughly and quickly appraised their
+individual natures, had installed Roderick in the managing end of
+things,&mdash;there with the aid of an older head&mdash;one Alfoxden, of whom
+Spalton made too much of a boast, telling everyone he had rescued him
+from a life of crime; Alfoxden, when younger, forged a check and had
+served his term for it. Coming out into the world again, no one would
+trust him because of that one mistake, Spalton, at this juncture, took
+him in and gave him a new chance&mdash;but&mdash;as I said unkindly, in my mind,
+and publicly, he made capital of his generous action.</p>
+
+<p>But Alfoxden was a soul of rare quality. He never seemed to resent
+&quot;John's&quot; action. He was too much of a gentleman and too grateful for the
+real help Spalton had extended to him.</p>
+
+<p>Alfoxden was a slight, Mephistophelian man ... with bushy, red eyebrows.
+And he was totally bald, except for the upper part of his neck, which
+was fiery with red hair. He had a large knowledge of the Rabelaisan in
+literature ... had in his possession several rather wild effusions of
+Mark Twain in the original copy, and a whole MSS. volume of Field's
+smutty casual verse....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But I was in the lumber camp, cooking for the &quot;boys.&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hank,&quot; Spalton's youngest son (there was a second son, whose name I
+forget ... lived with his mother, Spalton's divorced wife, in Syracuse,
+and was the conventional, well-brought-up, correct youth)&mdash;Hank worked
+in the camp, along with the other lumber-jacks.</p>
+
+<p>The boy was barely sixteen, yet he was six feet two in his stocking feet
+... huge-shouldered, stupendous-muscled, a vegetarian, his picture had
+appeared in the magazines as the prodigy who had grown strong on &quot;Best
+o' Wheat,&quot; a prepared breakfast food then popular.</p>
+
+<p>I asked him if the story that he had built his growth and strength on it
+was a fake.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes. I never ate 'Best o' Wheat' in my life, except once or twice,&quot; he
+answered, &quot;I like only natural food ... vegetables ... and lots of milk
+... but I draw the line at prepared, pre-digested stuff and baled
+breakfast foods.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then why did you lend them the use of your name?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, everybody that has any prominence does that ... for a price ... but
+I really didn't want to do it. 'John' made me ... or I wouldn't have.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And now you have your hair cropped close, why is that?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I suppose it's all right to wear your hair long ... but, last summer,
+it got so damned hot with the huge mop I had, that I always had a
+headache ... so one day I went down town to the barber and slipped into
+his chair. 'Hello, Hank,' says he, 'what do you want, a shave?' (joking
+you know&mdash;I didn't have but one or two cat-hairs on my face)....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'No, Jim, I want a hair-cut.' At first he refused ... said 'The
+Master' would bite his head off ... but then he did it&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;John wouldn't speak to me that night, at table ... but the other
+fellows shouted and clapped....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't exactly get dad's idea all the time ... he's a mighty clever
+man, though....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Books? Oh, yes ... the only ones I care about are those on Indians and
+Indian lore ... I have all the Smithsonian Institution books on the
+subject ... and I have a wigwam back of the bindery&mdash;haven't you noticed
+it?&mdash;where I like to go and sit cross-legged and meditate ... no, I
+don't want to study regular things. Dad always makes me give in, in
+fact, whenever I act stubborn, by threatening to send me off to a
+regular school....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I want nothing else but to work with my hands all my life.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But, with all his thinking for himself, &quot;Hank&quot; was also childishly
+vulgar. He gulped loudly as he ate, thinking it an evidence of hearty
+good-fellowship. And he deliberately broke wind at the table ... then
+would rap on wood and laugh....</p>
+
+<p>I, on my dignity as cook, and because the others, rough as they were,
+complained to me in private about this behaviour, but did not openly
+speak against it because &quot;Hank&quot; was their employer's son. I took
+exception to the good-natured &quot;lummox's&quot; behaviour.</p>
+
+<p>One morning he was the last to climb out from over the bench at the
+rough, board table....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hank ... wait. I want to speak to you a minute.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Razorre, what is it?&quot; he asked, waiting....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hank, the boys have delegated me to tell you that you must use better
+manners than you do, at meals.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The hell you say! and what are you going to do if I don't?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I&mdash;why, Hank, I hadn't thought of that ... but, since you bring up the
+question, I'm going to try to stop you, if you won't stop yourself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;think you can?&mdash;think you're strong enough?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I said '<i>try</i>'!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Listen, Razorre,&quot; and he came over to me with lazy, good-natured
+strength, &quot;I'll pick you up, take you out, and roll you in the snow, if
+you don't keep still.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And I'll try my best to give you a good whipping,&quot; replied I, setting
+my teeth hard, and glaring at him.</p>
+
+<p>He started at me, grinning. I put the table between us, and began taking
+deep breaths to thoroughly oxygenate my blood, so it would help me in my
+forthcoming grapple with the big, over-grown giant.</p>
+
+<p>He toppled the table over. We were together. I kept on breathing like a
+hard-working bellows, as I wrestled about with him.</p>
+
+<p>He seized me by the right leg and tried to lift me up, carry me out. I
+pushed his head back by hooking my fingers under his nose, like a prong.</p>
+
+<p>Then I grabbed him by the seat of the britches and heaved. And they
+burst clean up the back like a bean pod....</p>
+
+<p>Unexpectedly Hank flopped on the bench and began to shout with
+laughter....</p>
+
+<p>My heavy, artificial breathing, like a bellows, for the sake of
+oxygenating more strength into my muscles, had struck him as being so
+ludicrous, that he was in high good humour. I joined in the laughter,
+struck in the same way.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I surrender, Razorre, and I'll promise to be decent at the table&mdash;you
+skinny, crazy, old poet!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And he rumbled and thundered again with Brobdingnagian mirth.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Back from the lumber camp. Comparatively milder weather, but still the
+farmers we passed on the road were startled by my summery attire. But by
+this time the lumber-jacks and I were on terms of proven friendship ...
+I had told them yarns, and had listened to their yarns, in turn ... the
+stories of their lives ... and their joys and troubles....</p>
+
+<p>I was reported to Spalton as having been a first-rate cook.</p>
+
+<p>I went to work in the bindery again.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Every day seemed to bring a new &quot;eccentric&quot; to join our colony. I have
+hardly begun to enumerate the prime ones, yet....</p>
+
+<p>But when I returned to the little settlement a curious man had already
+established himself ... one who was called by Spalton, in tender
+ridicule, Gabby Jack ... that was Spalton's nickname for him ... and it
+stuck, because it was so appropriate. Jack was a pilgrim in search of
+Utopia. And he was straightway convinced, wholly and completely, that
+he had found it in Eos. To him Spalton was the one and undoubted prophet
+of God, the high priest of Truth.</p>
+
+<p>Gabby Jack was a &quot;j'iner.&quot; From his huge, ornate, gold watch-chain hung
+three or four bejewelled insignia of secret societies that he was a
+member of. He wore a flowered waistcoat ... an enormous seal-ring,
+together with other rings.</p>
+
+<p>He had laid aside a competence, by working his way from journeyman
+carpenter to an independent builder of frame houses, in some thriving
+town in the Middle West ... where, in his fifty-fifth year, he had
+received the call to go forth in quest of the Ideal, the One Truth.</p>
+
+<p>His English was a marvel of ignorant ornateness, like his vest and his
+watch-chain and rings. He had, apparently, no family ties. Spalton
+became his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, almost his God.
+There was nothing the Master said or did that was not perfect ... he
+would stand with worship and adoration written large on his swarthy,
+great face, listening to Spalton's most trivial words....</p>
+
+<p>Otherwise, he was Gabby Jack ... talking ... talking ... talking ...
+with everybody he met ... enquiring ... questioning ... taking notes in
+a large, crude, misspelling hand ... trying himself to write....</p>
+
+<p>We ran away from him ... Spalton ran away from him ... &quot;this fellow will
+be the death of me,&quot; he remarked to me, one afternoon, with a light of
+pleasure and pride in his eyes, however, at being so worshipped. &quot;Ah,
+Razorre, beware of the ignorant disciple!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing Jack would not do for Spalton. He sought out
+opportunities and occasions for serving him.</p>
+
+<p>And he would guide visitors over the establishment. And, coming to the
+office where Spalton usually sat and worked, he was heard to say once,
+with a wide-spread, reverential sweep of the hand&mdash;&quot;and this, ladies and
+gents, is the (his voice dropping to a reverential whisper) 'Sancta
+Sanctoria.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Jack could not see so well with one eye as he could with the other. A
+cataract was there which gave that eye the appearance of a
+milky-coloured, poached egg....</p>
+
+<p>Coming home from Buffalo one evening, he stepped down on the wrong side
+of the train, in the dusk ... perhaps from his eagerness to sit by his
+prophet at supper again that night&mdash;there being too long a line leaving
+at the station, ahead of him.</p>
+
+<p>A freight was drawing out on the track opposite. And Gabby was so huge
+that he was rolled like a log in a jam, between the two moving trains
+... when the freight had passed, he rose and walked. He took a cab to
+the Artwork Studios.</p>
+
+<p>All in tatters, he hurried to his room and put on another suit. He
+appeared at supper by the side of the Master. He narrated what had
+happened, amid laughter and joking. When Spalton wanted to send for his
+old, frail, white-headed father, the elder Spalton, who was the
+community doctor, Jack waved the idea aside.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, no, Master!&quot; (Master he called Spalton, and never the familiar,
+more democratic John) &quot;Oh, no, I'm all right.&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>The next morning Jack did not show up for breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>At ten o'clock Spalton, solicitous, went up to his room....</p>
+
+<p>He shouted for help. He had found his disciple there, huge and dead,
+like a stranded sea-thing.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In Gabby Jack's will ... for they found one, together with a last word
+and testament for humanity,&mdash;it was asked of Spalton that he should
+conduct the funeral from the Chapel ... and read the funeral oration,
+written by the deceased himself ... and add, if the Master felt moved, a
+few words thereto of his own ... if he considered that so mean a
+disciple deserved it.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>All work was suspended the day of Jack's funeral.</p>
+
+<p>Spalton eloquently read the curious, crude composition of his disciple
+... which had fine flashes, as of lightning in a dark sky, here and
+there, in it.</p>
+
+<p>Then Spalton began adding words of his own, in praise of the deceased&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You all know this dear comrade of ours,&quot; he began, &quot;this dear friend
+whose really fine soul, while in the body&mdash;went under the appellation of
+Gabby Jack&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Here Spalton broke down. He unashamedly dropped into the chair behind
+the reading-desk and wept aloud. He could say no more....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In <i>The Dawn</i> for the ensuing month he put a wonderful and beautiful
+tribute to his disciple ... who had thoroughly loved, and believed in
+him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>On a cold day of blowing snow, &quot;Pete&quot; came tramping in to town ... his
+high boots laced to the knees, a heavy alpaca coat about him ... he had
+come all the way from Philadelphia on foot, to add his portrait to our
+gallery of eccentrics ... but he was not so unusual after all ... there
+was too much of the hungry hardness of youth in him, the cocksureness of
+conceit which he considered genius.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately he put Spalton to question ... and everything and everybody
+to question....</p>
+
+<p>He irritated Spalton most by attacking doctors ... (though Spalton
+himself did so in his magazine) ... Spalton's father was an old family
+practitioner....</p>
+
+<p>But the Master's revenge came.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Pete&quot; fell sick. Spalton sent for his father to doctor him. And made
+the old man use a strong horse-medicine on him ... which he himself
+brought up from the stables....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The boy is such an ass ...&quot; Spalton told me laughingly, &quot;that it's a
+veterinarian he needs, not a doctor.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There was Speedwell, the young naturalist ... a queer, stooping, gentle,
+shy thing, who talked almost as an idiot would talk till he got on his
+favourite topic of bird and beast and flower. In personal appearance he
+was a sort of Emerson gone to weed ... he walked about with a quick,
+perky, deprecative step....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;queer fish,&quot; John remarked of him, &quot;but, Razorre, you ought to come
+on him in the woods ... there he is a different person ... he sits under
+a tree till he seems to become part of the vegetation, the landscape ...
+when I had him out to camp with me last summer he would go off alone and
+stay away till we thought he had got lost, or had walked into a pond, in
+his simpleness, and drowned....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We followed him, and watched him....</p>
+
+<p>There he sat ... in his brown corduroys ... his lock of hair over his
+eyes ... that simple, sweet, idiotic expression, like sick sunshine, on
+his mouth....</p>
+
+<p>And after a while the birds came down to him ... pecked all around him
+... and a squirrel climbed up on his shoulder ... he seemed to have an
+attraction for the wild things ... it wasn't as if they just accepted
+him as a part of the surroundings ... the man sat there like a stump
+till we grew tired watching, and returned to camp....</p>
+
+<p>Each day he spent most of the day, immobile, like that....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say Razorre,&quot; the Master continued, after a thoughtful pause, &quot;you know
+you nuts are teaching me a lot of things....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The trouble with the educated, regular folks is that they lose so much
+by drawing the line ... often everything that is spontaneous and
+fine.... This thing called God, you know, draws the line nowhere....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If 'Crazy' Speedwell fell heir to a large sum of money, his relatives
+could find a commission of physicians anywhere, who would honestly have
+him into custody for lunacy ... yet, in some respects, he is the wisest
+and kindest man I have ever known ... though, in others, he is often
+such a fool as to try my patience very hard, at times.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Most of us who had arrived at &quot;The Studios&quot; from &quot;foreign&quot; parts, slept
+in the common dormitory.</p>
+
+<p>We held frequent &quot;roughhouses&quot; there, the younger of us ... to the
+annoyance of Speedwell. Spalton finally gave him permission to sleep and
+live, alone, in the shed where the fire-truck and hose was stored....</p>
+
+<p>One night, for malicious fun, a beak-nosed young prize-fighter, and
+several others (including myself) sneaked into his abode while he slept
+... thoughtlessly we turned the gas on and tiptoed out again....</p>
+
+<p>Not long after he came staggering forth, half-suffocated....</p>
+
+<p>Everybody laughed at the tale of this ... at first Spalton himself
+laughed, our American spirit of rough joking and horse-play gaining the
+uppermost in him ... but then he recalled to mind the seriousness of our
+practical joke, and burned with anger at us over what we had done. And
+he threatened to &quot;fire&quot; on the spot anyone who ever again molested
+&quot;Crazy&quot; Speedwell....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Old Pfeiler&quot; we called him....</p>
+
+<p>Pfeiler had attended one of Spalton's lectures at Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>Afterward, he had come up front and asked the lecturer if he could make
+a place for him at Eos ... that he was out of a job ... starving ... a
+poor German scholar ... formerly, in better days, a man of much wealth
+and travel....</p>
+
+<p>He had spent his last nickel for admission to Spalton's lecture. Spalton
+brought him back to the Eos Artwork Studios.</p>
+
+<p>There he found that the queer, gentle, old man was as helpless as a
+child ... all he could be trusted to do was to write addresses on
+letters ... which he was set at, not too exactingly....</p>
+
+<p>I never saw so happy a man as Pfeiler was that winter.</p>
+
+<p>He was a Buddhist, not by pose, but by sincere conviction. He thought,
+also, that the Koran was a greater book than the Bible ... and more
+miraculous ... &quot;one man, Mohammed, who left a work of greater beauty
+than the combined efforts of the several hundred who gave us that
+hodge-podge, the Bible.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Pfeiler had been left a fortune by his father, a wealthy German merchant
+... so, like Sir Richard Burton, he had made off to the Near East ...
+where he had lived among the Turks for ten years ... till, what with his
+buying rare manuscripts and Oriental and Turkish art, he had suddenly
+run upon the rocks of bankruptcy ... and had returned from the Levantine
+a ruined, helpless scholar, who had never been taught to be anything
+else but a man of culture and leisure....</p>
+
+<p>By steerage he made his way to America ... to Chicago ... all his works
+of art, his priceless manuscripts sold ... the money gone like water
+through the assiduities of false friends and sycophants....</p>
+
+<p>On the bum in Chicago ... a hotel clerk, discharged as incompetent&mdash;he
+had forgotten to insist that a man and woman register always as man and
+wife ... &quot;because it was such hypocrisy&quot; ... finally a dishwasher, who
+lived in a hall bed-room ... no friends because of his abstractedness,
+his immersion in oriental scholarship ... his only place of refuge, his
+dwelling place, when not washing dishes for a mere existence, the Public
+Library....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Old Pfeiler&quot; drank coffee by the quart, as drunkards drink whiskey. He
+had a nervous affliction which caused him to shake his head continually,
+as if in impatience ... or as a dog shakes his head to dislodge
+something that has crept into his ear....</p>
+
+<p>He was as timid as a girl....</p>
+
+<p>The common dormitory was no place for him ... I am sorry to confess
+that, for a while, I helped to make his life miserable for him ... each
+night the beak-nosed pugilist-lad and I raised a merry roughhouse in the
+place.... Pfeiler was our chief butt. We put things in his bed ... threw
+objects about so they would wake him up. One night I found him crying
+silently ... but somehow not ignobly ... this made me shift about in my
+actions toward him, and see how miserable my conduct had been....</p>
+
+<p>So the next time &quot;Beak-horn,&quot; as I called my plug-ugly friend, started
+to tease the old man, I asked him to stop ... that we had tormented
+Pfeiler long enough. &quot;Beak-horn&quot; replied with a surprised, savage stare
+... and the next moment he was on me, half in jest, half in earnest. I
+boxed with him as hard and swift as I was able ... but a flock of fists
+drove in over me ... and I was thrown prone across the form of the old
+man ... who stuttered with fright and impotent rage, swearing it was all
+a put-up game between us to torment him further, when I protested that I
+had not tried to do it.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The next morning Spalton sent for me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look here, Razorre, if <i>you</i> were not the biggest freak of them all, I
+could understand,&quot; he remarked severely....</p>
+
+<p>I tried to explain how sorry I was for the way I had joined in Pfeiler's
+persecution ... but the master would have none of it ... he told me to
+look better to my conduct or he would have to expel me from the
+community....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Gregory,&quot; he ended, calling me by my name, &quot;somehow I never quite <i>get
+you</i> ... most of the time you are refined and almost over-gentle ... you
+know and love poetry and art and the worthwhile things ... but then
+there's also the hoodlum in you ... the dirty Hooligan&mdash;&quot; his eyes
+blazed with just rebuke.... I trod out silently, sick of myself, at
+heart ... as I have often, often been.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>After that, Pfeiler avoided me. I went up to him in apology. Most
+contritely I said I was sorry.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You are a fraud,&quot; he cried at me, spluttering, almost gnashing his
+teeth in fury, &quot;you go around here, pretending you are a poet, and have
+the soul of a thug, a brute, a coward and bully ... please don't speak
+to me any more as long as I'm here ... you only pretend interest in
+spiritual and intellectual things, always for some brutal reason ...
+even now you are planning something base, some diabolical betrayal of
+the Master, perhaps, or of all of us.... I myself have advised Mr.
+Spalton, for the good of his community to send you back to the tramps
+and jail-birds from whom you come ... you scum! you filthy pestilence!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His head was shaking like an oscillating toy ... his eyes were starting
+from his head through force of his invective ... he was jerking about,
+in his anger, like a dancing mouse....</p>
+
+<p>I hurried out of his word-range, overwhelmed with greater shame than I
+can ever say.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The editor of the <i>Independent</i>, Dr. William Hayes Ward, had, so far,
+not found room in his magazine for the two poems of mine he had bought.
+I was chagrined, and wrote him, rather impetuously, that, if he didn't
+care for the poems he might return them. Which he did, with a rather
+frigid and offended reply. I was rendered unhappy by this.</p>
+
+<p>I spoke to Spalton about it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why Razorre, so you <i>have</i> come that near to being in print?&quot; I showed
+him the poems. &quot;Yes, you have the making of a real poet in you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A day or so after he approached me with&mdash;&quot;I'm writing a brief visit to
+the home of Thoreau ... how would you like to compose a poem for me, on
+him&mdash;for the first page of the work?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I would like it very much,&quot; I said. In a few days I handed him the
+poem. A &quot;sonnet,&quot; the form of which I myself had invented, in fifteen
+lines.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>For days I lived in an intoxication of anticipation ... just to have one
+poem printed, I was certain, would mean my immediate fame ... so
+thoroughly did I believe in my genius. I was sure that instantly all of
+the publishers in the world would contend with each other for the
+privilege of bringing out my books.</p>
+
+<p>Spring had begun to give hints of waking green, when <i>The Brief Visit</i>
+was issued from the press. I rushed to procure a copy before it was
+bound. I was surprised and dumbfounded to find that the Master had used
+the poem without my name attached ... just as if it, with the rest of
+the book, was from his own pen.</p>
+
+<p>My first impulse was to rush into the dining hall, at breakfast, Waving
+the sheets, and calling &quot;John&quot; to account for his theft, before
+everybody ... then I bethought myself that, perhaps, some mistake had
+been made ... that the proofreader might have left my name out.</p>
+
+<p>Spalton looked up quickly as I passed by his table. He read in my face
+that I had already discovered what he had done. He blushed. I nodded him
+a stiff greeting. I ate in silence&mdash;at the furthest table.</p>
+
+<p>In a few minutes he did me an honour he had never shown me before. He
+came over to where I sat. &quot;Razorre,&quot; he invited, &quot;how would you like to
+take a hike with me into the country, this morning?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I gave him a swift glance. &quot;I would like it very much.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then as soon as you are through, meet me in the library.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I drank a second cup of coffee with studied deliberation&mdash;in spite of
+myself, I was thrilled with the notice that had been shown me before all
+the others. Already my anger had somewhat lessened.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Never had the master been so eloquent, so much his better self, since
+that first day, at the wood-pile. He strove to throw the magic of his
+spirit over me with all his power. For hours we walked, the light, pale
+green of the renewing year about us. But through it all I saw what he
+was trying to effect ... to impress me so deeply that I would not only
+forgive him for having stolen my poem, but actually thank him, for
+having used it&mdash;even consider it a mark of honour ... which his
+eloquence almost persuaded me to do.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed I saw the true greatness in &quot;John&quot; ... but I also saw and
+resented the petty, cruel pilferer&mdash;stealing helpless, unknown, youthful
+genius for his own&mdash;resented it even more because the resources of the
+man's nature did not require it of him to descend to such pitiful
+expedients. He was rich enough in himself for his own fame and glory.</p>
+
+<p>And why should he rob a young poet of his first fame, of the exquisite
+pleasure of seeing his name for the first time in print? ... than which
+there is no pleasure more exquisite ... not even the first possession of
+a loved woman!...</p>
+
+<p>We had almost returned to the &quot;Artworks&quot; before I tried to let loose on
+him ... but even then I could not. Gently I asked him why he had not
+affixed my name to my poem.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at me with well-simulated amazement.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Razorre, I never even thought of it ... we are all a part of one
+community of endeavour here ... and we all give our efforts as a
+contribution to the Eos Idea ... I have paid you a higher compliment
+than merely giving you credit ... instead, I have incorporated your
+verse into the very body of our thought and life.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His effrontery struck me silent. I told him sadly that I must now go
+away.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nonsense,&quot; he replied, &quot;this is as good a place in which to develop
+your poetic genius as any place in the world. I may say, better. Here
+you will find congenial environment, ready appreciation .. come, let us
+walk a little further,&quot; and we turned aside from the steps of the dining
+room and struck down the main street of the town.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I mean bigger things for you, Razorre, than you can guess.... I will
+make you the Eos Poet&mdash;look at Gresham, he is the Eos Artist, and, as
+such, his fame is continent-wide ... just as yours will become ... and I
+will bring out a book of your poetry ... and advertise it in <i>The Dawn</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His eloquence on art and life, genius and literature, had enthralled and
+placated me ... his personal wheedling irritated and angered.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A book of my poems ... without my name on the title page, perhaps,&quot; I
+cried, impassioned, looking him deep in the eyes. He shifted his glance
+from me&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I threw my few belongings together.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody, in saying good-bye, gave me a warm hand-clasp of friendship
+(excepting Pfeiler), including Spalton, who assured me&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Razorre, you'll be back again ... despite its faults, they all come
+back to Eos.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; I responded, sweeping him off his feet by the unexpectedness of
+my reply, &quot;yes, in spite of all, Eos is a wonderful place ... it has
+given me something ... in my heart ... in my soul ... which no other
+place in the world could have given ... and at the time I needed it most
+... a feeling for beauty, a fellowship&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Razorre,&quot; he cut in, moved, &quot;we all have our faults,&mdash;God knows <i>you</i>
+have&mdash;mutual forgiveness&mdash;&quot; he murmured, pressing my hand warmly again;
+his great, brown eyes humid with emotion ... whether he was acting, or
+genuine ... or both ... I could not tell. I didn't care. I departed
+with the warmth of his benediction over my going.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>This time I did not freight it. I paid my fare to New York.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My father ... I must pay him a visit, before lifting my nose in the air
+like a migrating bird. Where I would go or what I would do that spring
+and summer, I hadn't the vaguest idea....</p>
+
+<p>It seemed but the day before that I had left Haberford. The fat
+policeman who leaned against the iron railing of the small park near the
+station was there in the same place. The same young rowdies pushed each
+other about, and spat, and swore, near the undertaker shop and the
+telegraph office.</p>
+
+<p>But as I walked past the Hartman express office&mdash;the private concern
+which Hartman, the thin, wiry shock-haired Swede, had built up through
+arduous struggle, beginning with one wagon&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Hartman saw me through the window, and beckoned vigorously for me to
+step in....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;just got home from another hobo-trip, Johnny?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're almost right, Mr. Hartman.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A pause....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;been to see your father yet?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, sir, I'm on the way there now ... just arrived this minute, on the
+train from New York.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm glad I caught sight of you, then, to prepare you.&quot; A longer pause
+... mysteriously embarrassing, on his part.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have something to tell you about him ...&mdash;guess you're old enough to
+stand plain talk ... sit down!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I took a chair.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You see, it's this way,&quot; and he leaned forward and put his hand on my
+knee.. &quot;it's women&mdash;a woman&quot; ... he paused, I nodded to him to go on,
+feeling very dramatic and important....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's Mrs. Jenkins, the widow, that has her hooks in him ... around
+where he boards ... and, to be frank with you, he's going it so strong
+with her that he's sick and rundown ... and not so right, at times, <i>up
+here</i>!&quot; and Hartman tapped his forehead with his forefinger
+significantly....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now, you're the nearest one to him around here,&quot; he went on, &quot;and I'll
+tell you what we were going to do ... his lodge, of which I'm a member,
+was going to give him a trip, to separate him from her, and cure him ...
+you come back just pat....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Has your daddy any relatives that can afford to entertain him, out in
+the West, where you came from?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, one of my uncles, his brother, is very well off, and would be glad
+to take him in ... in fact any of the folks back home would,&quot; my voice
+sounded hollow and far off as I answered.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're a pretty smart lad ... do you want to go back with him when he
+goes?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, Mr. Hartman.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, we can tip the porter to take care of him ... but why don't you
+want to go with him, we will foot your expenses?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have other things to do,&quot; I answered vaguely.</p>
+
+<p>He gave a gesture of impatience....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There was a hush in the house, as I stepped softly up the stairs. The
+catch of the front door was back....</p>
+
+<p>First I went to my room and found all my books intact ... in better
+condition even, than when I was home with them ... there was not a speck
+of dust anywhere. Evidently my father was not too sick to keep the place
+clean ... but then, I meditated he would attend to that, with his last
+effort.</p>
+
+<p>My books were my parents, my relatives. I had been born of them, not of
+my own father and mother. My being born in the flesh was a mere accident
+of nature. My father and mother happened to be the vehicle.</p>
+
+<p>But the place was so quiet it perturbed me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Pop!&quot; I called, going toward his bed-room.</p>
+
+<p>The door leading into it slowly opened. The little, dark widow was in
+there with him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hush! your father is asleep.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A hatred of both him and her shot up quick in my heart. I sensed their
+abandonment to the sheerly physical, till it took in their whole
+horizon. It was utterly ignoble. I had a vision of all humanity, living,
+for the most part, merely for food and sex, letting art and poetry and
+beauty and adventure pass by, content if they only achieved the bare
+opportunity of daily wallowing in their mire.</p>
+
+<p>I was bad and mean enough, but the conception of a single poem in my
+brain, till it found birth on paper, was, I swore, bigger and finer
+than all this world-mess at its best. Also there was in me somewhat the
+thwarted, sinister hatred of the celibate....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;You mustn't bother your father now,&quot; little Mrs. Jenkins interposed, as
+I started in, &quot;you must let him rest for awhile, and not wake him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Through the door, half open, I caught a glimpse of a hollow, wax-white
+face ... he looked as if all the blood had been let out of his body,
+little by little. The little, pretty, dark woman looked like a crafty
+animal ... there was a beady shine of triumph, which she could not
+conceal, in her eyes, as she opposed my entering. I smelt the pungent
+smell of her physical womanhood. There was a plumpness about her body, a
+ruddiness to her lips, that gave me the phantasy that, perhaps, the
+moment before, she had drunk of my father's blood, and that she was
+preventing me from going in to where he lay till a certain tiny, red
+puncture over his jugular vein had closed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You forget, Mrs. Jenkins, that he is my father.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You shan't go in ... please, Johnnie ... let him sleep just a little
+longer ... as soon as he wakes he asks for another drink!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And who put him in this state?&quot; I charged directly, vividly remembering
+what Hartman had said....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What, you don't mean to insinuate?&quot;&mdash;she gasped.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I mean nothing, only that I have come home to take care of my father,
+till his lodge takes charge of him, and that, for the present, I want
+you to please leave me alone with him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Her small, black pupils dilated angrily. But she did not press the point
+of her staying. She had put her hand on my arm cajolingly, but I had
+shook it off with such evident disgust&mdash;founded partly and secretly on a
+horror of physical attraction for her&mdash;that drew my morbid, starved
+nature&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Very well!... but I'll be back this afternoon, early. When he wakes up
+and asks for a drink of whiskey ... starts out to get one ... draw him a
+glass of water from the faucet, and take your oath that it's whiskey ...
+he'll believe you and drink it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And she departed, an odor of strong perfume in her wake.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Had this planet of earth been populated from without?... there were
+evidently two races on it&mdash;the race of men&mdash;the race of women&mdash;men had
+voyaged in from some other world in space women had done the like from
+their world ... to this world, alien to both of them. And here a
+monstrous thing had brought them together like an interlocking
+fungus&mdash;their sex-union ... a function that monstrously held together
+two different species of animals that should not even be on meeting
+terms.</p>
+
+<p>Thus my morbid fancy ran, as I entered slowly my father's room.</p>
+
+<p>He slept.</p>
+
+<p>On a chair by his bed lay a copy of <i>Hamlet</i>, his favourite
+Shakespearean play. I picked it up, read in it, waiting for him to wake,
+while he breathed laboriously.</p>
+
+<p>I became absorbed in the play ... I must write a poem, some time, called
+&quot;Hamlet's Last Soliliquy.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My father was awake.</p>
+
+<p>I did not know how long he had been so, for his breathing had not
+changed and the only difference from his sleeping state was that his
+eyes stared, wide and glassy, at the ceiling, as if they comprehended
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>A feeling of horror crept over my body. This was more than I had counted
+on.. my father, helpless on his back and his wits off gathering wool....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Father!&quot; I put my hand on a talon of his.</p>
+
+<p>He turned his head slightly. Smiled vacuously.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Father!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A perturbation clouded his eyes ... that painful struggle toward
+comprehension observed in an infant's face.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Who are you? What do you want?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm your son&mdash;Johnnie!... and I've come back to take care of you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie is away ... far off ... on the sea ... in a ship.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And he sighed and turned his face to the wall as if the thought troubled
+him, and he wished to dismiss it. Then, in a moment, he whirled about,
+changed and furious. He rose to a sitting posture ... swung his legs
+out, bringing the bed-clothes a-wry with him....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You are an impostor ... you are not my son ... I tell you again, he is
+away ... has been away for years ... as long as I can remember ...
+perhaps he is dead ... you are an impostor.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He leaped up, full of madness, and seized hold of me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Stop, Father, what are you trying to do?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As I grappled with him, trying to keep him from hurting me&mdash;and he was
+quite strong, for all his emaciation&mdash;the horror of my situation made me
+sick at the stomach, quite sick ... and my mind went ridiculously back
+to the times when my father and I had eaten oyster-fries together ...
+&quot;that is the only thing you and this man have in common ...
+oyster-fries,&quot; remarked my mind to me. All the while I was pinning his
+wrists in my grasp ... re-pinning them as he frantically wrested them
+loose ... swearing and heaping obscenities on my head ... all the while,
+I thought of those oyster-fries ... we had saved up a lard-tin full of
+bacon grease to fry them in ... and fry after fry had been sizzled to a
+rich, cracker-powdered brown in that grease ... a peculiar smell waxed
+in the kitchen, however ... which we could never trace to its source ...
+&quot;a dead rat somewhere, maybe,&quot; suggested my father.</p>
+
+<p>When we had used a third of the bacon grease, the dead rat's foot stood
+up ... out of that can.</p>
+
+<p>We discharged the contents of our stomachs in the sink.</p>
+
+<p>This was the ridiculous incident that possessed my imagination while I
+struggled with my father.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I had my father over on the bed. He fought to a sitting posture again
+... got his finger in my eye and made me see a whorl of dancing sparks.
+With irritation and a curse ... then both laughing hysterically and
+sobbing ... I bore him back to his pillow....</p>
+
+<p>The strength had gone entirely out of him ... now it came into his mind
+that I was there trying to rob or kill him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Spare me, spare me!&quot; he pleaded, &quot;you can have everything in the house
+... only don't kill me! My God!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good Christ!&quot; I groaned, as he beat upward, fighting again.</p>
+
+<p>I let him rise, almost palsied with horror.</p>
+
+<p>He perched on the edge of the bed, exhausted,&mdash;began groping with one
+hand, in the air, idly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What is it? What do you want?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Give me my pants! I don't trust you. I want to go to the corner and get
+a drink ... give me my pants!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Pop, look at me ... stop this nonsense ... you're safe ... I'm your
+son, Johnnie!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's all very well,&quot; he assented with an air of reserved cunning.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Please believe me,&quot; I pleaded.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All right ... you are my son ... only don't kill me,&quot; he responded
+craftily.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Father!... good God!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He perceived by the emotion of my last exclamation, that at least I was
+not ill-disposed toward him.</p>
+
+<p>He clutched at the advantage.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Promise to take care of me till Johnnie comes&mdash;he's just around the
+corner,&quot; slyly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Pop, what is it you want? What can I do for you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A curious greed flickered in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Get me a drink!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All right! I'll get it for you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Let me think! There's none in the house ... none left, Emily said.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I brought some with me ... wait a minute.&quot; I went into the kitchen,
+turned on the tap softly, filled a glass half full of water, brought it
+back to him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here it is.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't like the colour of it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, it has a nice, rich colour.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What is it?&mdash;Scotch?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He sipped of it. Made a rueful face. &quot;I don't like the taste of it ...
+it tastes too much like water,&quot; he commented, with a quiet, grave,
+matter-of-fact grimace that set me laughing, in spite of myself....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Drink it down! I swear it's all right.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He tossed off the water.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Give me my pants. I want to get out of here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, wasn't that whiskey that I just gave you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, yes ... but not very good stuff. I know where I can get better.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Humouring him, I helped him into his trousers ... painfully he put on
+his shirt, neatly tied his tie, while I steadied him. This manual
+function seemed to better his condition straightway. He startled me by
+turning to me with a look of amused recognition in his eyes. He was no
+longer off his head, just a very sick man.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, Johnnie, so you're back again?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Pop&mdash;back again!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What are you going to do next?&quot; he queried wearily, seating himself
+laboriously in an armchair.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Stay, and take care of you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That will be unnecessary. I have had a rather severe attack of malaria
+... that is all ... left me rather weak ... but now I'm getting over it
+... had to take a lot of whiskey and quinine, though, to break it up!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Malaria comes on me, every spring, you know ... harder than usual, this
+spring, though ... it's made me dotty ... made me say things, at times,
+I'm afraid!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We sat silent.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;need any money?&quot; he was reaching into his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I don't want a cent!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then take this five dollar bill and go around to the corner saloon and
+buy me a pint ... what I had is all used up, and the chills are not
+quite out of me yet.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>On the way to the saloon I stopped at Hartman's express office ...
+related the foregoing story....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;H'm! yes!... I see!&quot; ... Hartman braced his thumbs together
+meditatively, &quot;&mdash;from what you say it's pretty serious ... something
+will have to be done this very day....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, go and get the pint ... let him have a drink of it. And&mdash;and keep
+close to him all the time ... don't,&quot; he added significantly, &quot;leave the
+lady in question in the room alone with him for a single moment.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Have you got the pint, Son?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Father. Here it is ... but just a little!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I know what I'm doing!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He took most of it down at a gulp.</p>
+
+<p>Noticing the anxious look in my eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't worry about me, Johnnie. I can take it or leave it alone ...
+&mdash;always could!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Before Mrs. Jenkins could come back, Hartman anticipated her with a
+nurse and a doctor. As Mrs. Jenkins came in, chagrin and indignation
+showed on her face. But she bowed perforce to the situation. She was too
+wise not to.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;His lodge-brothers are taking care of Mr. Gregory now, Mrs. Jenkins,&quot;
+explained Mr. Hartman suavely, warning her off, at the same time, with a
+severe, understanding look in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She dropped her eyelashes&mdash;though with a bit of instinctive coquetry in
+them&mdash;under his straight-thrusting glance.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, I suppose professional care <i>would</i> be better than anything I
+could do for him ... but,&quot; sweetly, &quot;I'll drop in from time to time to
+see if there's any little thing I can do.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Deprived of the loving care of Emily Jenkins, though he called for her
+many times, my father mended his condition rapidly. And, after a long,
+mysterious conference with Hartman and other members of his fraternal
+order, he consented to allow himself to be sent West on a visit. But not
+till they had promised to keep his job as foreman in the Composite
+Works, open for him, till he was well enough to come back.</p>
+
+<p>After I had seen my father off, I stayed in the silent rooms only long
+enough to pack up my books, which I left in care of Hartman.</p>
+
+<p>I had at last arrived at a definite plan of action.</p>
+
+<p>My grandfather was transacting some sort of business in Washington, as
+my uncle, Jim, had informed me. There he was living in affluence,
+married again, in his old age ... just like his former wife.</p>
+
+<p>I had evolved a scheme which seemed to me both clever and feasible, by
+which to extract from him a few hundred or a thousand dollars with which
+to prosecute my studies further, and enter, eventually, say, Princeton
+or Harvard ... perhaps Oxford.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I found my grandfather holding forth in a swell suite of offices in the
+business district of Washington.</p>
+
+<p>Near his great desk, with a little table and typewriter, sat a girl,
+very pretty&mdash;he would see to that!... evidently his stenographer and
+private secretary.</p>
+
+<p>As I stood by the railing, she observed me coldly once or twice, looking
+me over, before she thrust her pencil in her abundant hair and sauntered
+haughtily over to see what I was after.</p>
+
+<p>Despite the fact that I informed her who I was, with eyes impersonal as
+the dawn she replied that she would see if Mr. Gregory could see me ...
+that at present he was busy with a conference in the adjoining room.</p>
+
+<p>I sat and waited ... dusty and derelict, in the spick-and-span office,
+where hung the old-fashioned steel engravings on the wall, of Civil War
+battles, of generals and officers seated about tables on camp
+stools,&mdash;bushy-bearded and baggy-trousered.</p>
+
+<p>Finally my grandfather Gregory walked briskly forth. He looked about,
+first, as if to find me. His eyes, after hovering hawklike, settled, in
+a grey, level, impersonal glance, on me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come in here,&quot; he bade, not even calling me by name.</p>
+
+<p>I stepped inside, trying hard to be bold. But his precision and
+appearance of keen prosperity and sufficiency made me act, in spite of
+myself, deprecative. So I sat there by him, in his private room, keying
+my voice shrill and voluble and high, as I always do, when I am not sure
+of my case. And, worse, he let me do the talking ... watching me keenly,
+the while.</p>
+
+<p>I put to him my proposition of having my life insured in his name, that
+I might borrow a thousand or so of him, on the policy, to go to college
+with....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ah, if he only lets me have what I ask,&quot; I was dreaming, as I pleaded,
+&quot;I'll go to England ... to some college with cool, grey mediaeval
+buildings ... and there spend a long time in the quiet study of poetry
+... thinking of nothing, caring for nothing else.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No! how absurd!&quot; he was snapping decisively. I came to from my vision.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My dear Johnnie, your proposition is both absurd and&mdash;&quot; as if that were
+the last enormity&mdash;&quot;very unbusinesslike!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I will then become a great poet! On my word of honour, I will! and
+I will be a great honour to the Gregory family!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head. He rose, standing erect and slender, like a small
+flagpole. As I rose I towered high over the little-bodied, trim man.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come, you haven't eaten yet?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Well, he had a sort of a heart, after all ... some family feeling.</p>
+
+<p>Walking slightly ahead, so as not to seem to be in my company, old
+Grandfather Gregory took me to a&mdash;lunch counter ... bowing to numerous
+friends and acquaintances on the way ... once he stepped aside to a
+hurried conference, leaving me standing forlorn and solitary, like a
+scarecrow in a field.</p>
+
+<p>I grew so angry at him I could hardly bridle my anger in.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;like oyster sandwiches?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>He didn't even wait to let me choose my own food.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Two oyster sandwiches and&mdash;a cup of coffee,&quot; he barked.</p>
+
+<p>While I ate he stepped outside and talked with another friend.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye,&quot; he was bidding me, extending a tiny hand, the back of it
+covered with steel-coloured hairs, &quot;you'd better go back up to
+Jersey&mdash;just heard your daddy is very sick there ... he might need your
+help.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I thought cautiously. Evidently he knew nothing of my father's having
+been sent home by his lodge. I affected to be perturbed....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In that case&mdash;could you&mdash;advance me my fare to Haberford?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I'd wangle a <i>few</i> dollars out of him.</p>
+
+<p>My grandfather's answer was a silent, granite smile.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;just want to see what you can cajole out of the old man, eh? No,
+Johnnie&mdash;I'll leave you to make your way back in the same way you've
+made your way to Washington ... from all accounts railroad fare is the
+least of your troubles.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My whole hatred of him, so carefully concealed while I thought there was
+some hopes of putting through my educational scheme, now broke out&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>You&quot;</i>&mdash;I began, cursing....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I knew that's the way you felt all along ... better run along now, or
+I'll say I don't know you, and have you taken up for soliciting alms.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Before nightfall I was well on my way to Philadelphia. For a while I
+resigned myself to the life of a tramp. I hooked up with another gang of
+hoboes, in the outskirts of that city, and taught them the plan of the
+ex-cook that we'd crowned king down in Texas....</p>
+
+<p>I kept myself in reading matter by filching the complete works of
+Sterne (in one volume) and the poetry of Milton&mdash;from an outside stand
+of a second hand book store....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&mdash;left that gang, and started forth alone again. I became a walking bum,
+if a few miles a day constitutes taking that appellation. I walked ahead
+a few miles, then sat down and studied my Milton, or dug deep into
+<i>Tristram Shandy</i>. Hungry, I went up to farmhouse or backdoor of city
+dwelling, and asked for food....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I found myself in the outskirts of Newark again.</p>
+
+<p>I took my Sterne and Milton to Breasted's, hoping to trade them for
+other books. I stood before the outside books, on the stand, hesitating.
+I was, for the moment, ashamed to show myself to &quot;the perfesser,&quot;
+because of the raggedness that I had fallen into.</p>
+
+<p>While I was hesitating, a voice at my elbow&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Any books I can show you?&mdash;any special book you're looking for?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The voice was the voice of the tradesman, warning off the man unlikely
+to buy&mdash;but it was the familiar voice of my friend, &quot;the perfesser,&quot;
+just the same. I turned and smiled into his face, happy in greeting him,
+losing the trepidation my rags gave me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Johnnie Gregory!&quot; he shook my hand warmly as if I were a prince. I
+was enchanted.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to exchange two books if I can&mdash;for others!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come right into the back. Breasted, the boss, is out for the day....
+I'm having my lunch sent in, won't you have some with me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He acted just as if he hadn't noticed my dilapidation.</p>
+
+<p>I said I'd gladly share his lunch.</p>
+
+<p>He drew my story out of me,&mdash;the story of my life, in fact, before the
+afternoon wore to dusk.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Do you think I'm crazy?&quot; I asked him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No ... far from it ... &quot; adding gently, with a smile, &quot;sometimes an
+awful fool, though, Johnnie&mdash;if I may say it.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Won't you stay overnight?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, thanks just the same, 'Perfesser.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have room enough ... better hang around a few days and look for a job
+here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's too near Haberford.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I know you'd take a couple of fresh books, if I gave them to you,
+now wouldn't you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My eyes lit up as with hunger.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This Milton and Sterne are too used-up to be worth a nickel a-piece.
+Maybe, if I'd keep them, they might be worth something, some day, when
+you're famous,&quot; he joked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If you want to give me a couple of books ... how about this Keats and
+this Ossian? I want the Keats for myself. It will renew my courage.
+And&mdash;the Ossian&mdash;will you mail that book on for me, to Eos, to old
+Pfeiler?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I had told him, in the course of my talking, about them both.</p>
+
+<p>Pfeiler used often to talk of the greatness of Ossian's poetry ... and
+how he'd like to possess a volume of it again ... that is, before he
+grew to hate me.</p>
+
+<p>Maybe if I sent him the book, with a letter, he would think less harshly
+of me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I tramped through New England. My whole life had settled back into
+tramping ... only my Keats remained. I read and re-read his poems, not
+caring to write a line myself.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I worked as a dish-washer or pearl-diver for several weeks in Boston,
+and bought a very cheap second-hand suit.</p>
+
+<p>I shifted my mind like a weather vane and decided against shipping to
+England, with the forlorn hope of, somehow attending Oxford or
+Cambridge, and studying English literature there. My old ideal of being
+a great adventurer and traveller had vanished, and, in its stead, came
+the desire to live a quiet life, devoted entirely to writing poetry, as
+the poet Gray lived his.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I drifted inland to Concord, a-foot, as a pilgrim to the town where
+Emerson and Thoreau had lived. I was happy in loitering about the haunts
+of Thoreau; in sitting, full of thought, by the unhewn granite tombstone
+of Emerson, near the quiet of his grave.</p>
+
+<p>Toward evening I realised that I had gone without food all day....</p>
+
+<p>On a hill mounting up toward the West, outside of Concord, I stopped at
+the house of a market-gardener and asked for something to eat. A
+tottering old man leaned forward through the half-open door. He asked me
+in, and set before me a plate of lukewarm beans and a piece of jelly
+roll. But he delighted the tramp in me by setting before me, also, a cup
+of excellent, hot, strong coffee.</p>
+
+<p>Afterward when he asked me if I wanted a job, I said yes.</p>
+
+<p>The old man lit my way upstairs to a bed in the attic.</p>
+
+<p>It was hardly dawn when he woke me....</p>
+
+<p>A breakfast of soggy pancakes and more beans, which his equally aged
+wife had prepared. And we were out in the fields, at work. And soon his
+wife was with us, working, too.</p>
+
+<p>When Sowerby, this market gardener, told me that he was almost ninety I
+could believe him. He might have added a few more years, with credence.</p>
+
+<p>He went actively about his toil, but yet shaky like a bicycle till it
+fully starts, when it runs the steadier the more it is speeded. It was
+work that kept him on his feet, work that sustained life in him. His
+whole life and pleasure was senseless work.</p>
+
+<p>And yet he was not a bookless man. He possessed many books, mostly the
+old religious classics. Fox's <i>Book of Martyrs</i>, Baxter's <i>Saint's
+Rest</i>, Blair, <i>On the Grave</i> ... Jeremy Taylor's <i>Holy Living</i> and <i>Holy
+Dying</i>, that gave me a shock almost of painful remembrance&mdash;Keats had
+read the latter when he was dying in Rome ... and there were the New
+England Divines, the somber Jonathan Edwards whose sermon on the day of
+doom and the tortures of hell made his auditors faint ... I thought back
+to the terrifying sermon of the illiterate negro preacher in the Texas
+jail.</p>
+
+<p>But now old Sowerby read nothing. &quot;I have no time left for a book.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I never met the old man's equal for parsimony. &quot;The last man&mdash;the man
+who worked for me before you came&mdash;he was a Pole, who could hardly speak
+English. He left because he didn't like the food ... yes, that was what
+he had the impudence to announce ... and you can see that I am not so
+bad ... don't I give you a slice of jelly roll with your beans, every
+other night?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I assented to what the old man said. He had been the milkman to the
+Emerson and Thoreau families, and, in that capacity, had known both the
+great men. And I was more eager to hear what he had to say about them,
+than to draw wages for my work.</p>
+
+<p>But he had little to say about them, except that they were as great
+fools as the outside world esteemed them great men.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They talked a lot about work and a man's being independent, earning his
+living with his own hands, from the soil, but,&mdash;did they follow their
+teachings?... that's the test....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And I saw them, often, strolling out a-field together, talking and
+talking a lot of nonsense about philosophy, and going on, regardless,
+across their neighbours' crops.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And that was the only information I could get of these famous men from
+their milkman.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Sowerby kept pigs under the barn.... For economy's sake the cows' dung
+was shovelled down to them. And over them the outhouse was also built,
+so that our human efforts might not be wasted....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One night, despite a hard day's work, I could not sleep. So I went out
+on the hillside to enjoy the moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>On my way back to the attic I observed a light in the barn. I stopped in
+to see who was there. It was Sowerby, cleaning out the stable, to the
+plain disgust of the horses and cows.</p>
+
+<p>I asked him if anything was the matter. I learned that he had risen in
+the middle of the night and gone to work ... because that was his
+happiness, his only happiness.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Driven by an impulse of distaste for him and his house and market
+garden, I started to leave in secret. What money was coming to me for my
+two weeks' work I did not care about&mdash;in the face of the curious
+satisfaction it would give me just to quit, and to have the old man call
+up to me and find me missing....</p>
+
+<p>I heard him pottering back to his bedroom again.... I waited till he was
+quiet and back to sleep&mdash;then I stole forth in the quiet moonlight near
+dawn.</p>
+
+<p>It gave me a pleasure to vanish like smoke. I thought of the time when I
+had that job plowing in Southern California; that time I had driven the
+horses to the further end of the field, and left them standing there
+under the shade of a tree and then made off, wishing to shout and sing
+for the sheer happiness of freedom from responsibility and regular work.</p>
+
+<p>Each time I have made off that way, from a multitude of varying
+employments, it has not been, surely, to the detriment of my successive
+employers. I have always decamped with wages still owing me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I swung a scythe for a week for another Yankee farmer, on a marsh where
+the machine couldn't be driven in&mdash;which I was informed was King
+Phillip's battle ground.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I visited the inn where Longfellow was supposed to have gotten his
+inspiration for <i>Tales of a Wayside Inn</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I must see all the literary landmarks, even those where I considered the
+authors that had caused the places to be celebrated, as dull and third
+rate....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>With gathering power in me grew my desire to attend college. I would
+tramp, as I was doing, through the country, and end up at some western
+university for the fall term.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The art workers' community lay in my way at Eos.</p>
+
+<p>I dropped off a freight, one morning, in the Eos yards....</p>
+
+<p>The gladdest to see me again was the Buddhist, Pfeiler. He rushed up to
+me, in the dining hall, that night, and took both my hands in his ...
+thanking me for my kind thought of him in sending him my Ossian ...
+avowing that he had made a mistake in his opinion of me and asking my
+indulgence ... for he was old and a failure ... and I was young and
+could still look forward to success.</p>
+
+<p>My unexpected dropping-in at Eos created quite a stir.</p>
+
+<p>Spalton welcomed me back, and stood, that evening, before the fire in
+the sitting room, with his arm about my shoulder ... even as he did so I
+remembered the picture taken of him and the celebrated poet L'Estrange,
+together ... their arms about each other's shoulders ... and the current
+Eos proverb, that Spalton always quarrelled not long after with anyone
+about whose shoulder he first cast his arm.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Already a change was manifest in the little community. Tabled off by
+themselves sat the workers and the folk of the studios, that night.
+While the guests who stayed at the inn occupied separate tables.</p>
+
+<p>And there were many secret complaints about a woman they referred to as
+&quot;Dorothy&quot; ... Dorothy had done this ... Dorothy had done that ...
+Dorothy would be the ruination of &quot;the shop&quot; ... it would have been
+better if she had never shown up at the Eos Studios....</p>
+
+<p>I asked who was Dorothy....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't you know ... we thought you did ... Spalton's new wife ... the
+one his first wife got a divorce from him for?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And I heard the story, part of which I knew, but not the final details.</p>
+
+<p>Spalton's first wife had been an easy-going, amiable creature ... fair
+and pretty in a soft, female way ... a teacher in the local Sunday
+school ... one who accepted all the conventions as they were ... who
+could not understand anyone not conforming to them ... life was easier
+and more comfortable that way....</p>
+
+<p>Spalton's originality and genius would in the end have of itself
+produced a rupture between them ... few women are at home with genius,
+much as they clasp their hands in ecstasy over it, as viewed on the
+lecture and concert platform....</p>
+
+<p>But the wedge that drove them apart was entered when his first wife,
+Anne, brought into their married life, Dorothy, a fellow teacher, a
+visiting friend.</p>
+
+<p>Dorothy was so thin as to be stringy of body. She had a sharp
+hatchet-face, eyes with the colour of ice in them ... a cold, blue-grey.</p>
+
+<p>She was a woman of culture, yet at the same time she was possessed of a
+great instinct for organisation and business enterprise&mdash;just what was
+needed for the kind of thing Spalton was trying to inaugurate at Eos.
+She fell in readily with the Master's schemes ... even with his
+price-tags on objects of art, his egregious overvaluation of hand
+illumined books ... which his wife, with old-fashioned honesty, rebuked
+him for.</p>
+
+<p>An affinity of like-mindedness grew up between Spalton and this intense,
+homely woman, Dorothy ... whose face, like that of all clever, homely
+women, grew to a beauty in his eyes, that mere beauty which plastic form
+can never attain.</p>
+
+<p>There was a local busybody of a minister, and it was he who first
+intimated to the then Mrs. Spalton that her dear and intimate friend,
+was betraying her....</p>
+
+<p>There followed the usual spying and publicity ... Mrs. Spalton won her
+divorce....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But this was after several years. Long before the divorce was granted
+John and Dorothy were aware of a tangible fruit of their love.... I had
+often wondered why the Master so ardently, so often, wrote eloquently in
+defense of the superior qualities of illegitimate children....</p>
+
+<p>Dorothy bore their child ... a girl ... and went away to teach in a
+smart school somewhere in the East, under an assumed name....</p>
+
+<p>Now, after many years, Spalton and she married.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I saw in the sitting room a wonderful girl. She had shining, abundant
+hair, and a face rendered superlatively beautiful by the glowing of
+vivacity, understanding, feminine vitality behind it and through it,
+like a lamp held up within. She was absorbed in the new exhibit of
+Gresham's that hung on the walls of the guest room ... she wore a short,
+bouncing, riding skirt, and carried a quirt in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>I walked up to her, fascinated. Without letting her know who I was I
+quoted Poe's <i>To Helen</i> to her. She stood, smiling sweetly, as if it
+were the most usual thing in the world, to have a lean, wild-faced
+stranger address her with a poem.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's the way I feel about you!&quot; I ended.</p>
+
+<p>She gave a lovely laugh ... held out both her hands, dropping the quirt
+on the floor ... took my hands and leaned back gaily, like a child.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, I know who you are ... you're Razorre ... father wrote me a lot
+about you ... when I lived East ... you were one of his pet 'nuts'!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We sat there and conversed a long time. She talked of Socrates and Plato
+as if she had broken bread with them ... she discussed science, history,
+art as if wisdom and understanding were nearer her desire than anything
+else....</p>
+
+<p>She was the child of &quot;John&quot; and Dorothy.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Again Spalton asked me to stay, &quot;we need a poet for Eos!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But I insisted that I must go on and acquire a college education ...
+which he maintained would be a hindrance, not a help&mdash;&quot;they will iron
+you out, and make you a decent member of society&mdash;and then, Razorre, God
+help the poet in you ... poets and artists should never be decent ...
+only the true son of Ishmael can ever write or paint,&quot; he waved.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There came to the artworkers one day a young Southern woman, a six
+months' widow ... she was gentle and lily-coloured and lovely. She had
+great, swimming, blue eyes, a sensitive red bow of a mouth ... and the
+lashes of her eyes lay far down on her cheeks. She was the first woman I
+had met who approximated my poet's ideal of what a woman should be.</p>
+
+<p>I was working for Spalton during my stay, which I meant to make a brief
+one. I was shovelling coal for him, and firing a furnace.</p>
+
+<p>Wash as I might, I could not remove a faint blackness that clung to the
+edges of my eyes. This made my eyes glow and seem larger than they were.
+On such an extraneous and whimsical exterior circumstance hinged the
+young widow's interest in me.</p>
+
+<p>And I decided that I'd stay a little longer at the Eos Studios ... all
+winter, if she stayed all winter. And I no longer asked for an easier
+job. For I wanted my eyes to remain large-seeming, since, half in jest,
+she admired their present appearance.</p>
+
+<p>She manifested a close and affectionate friendship for me, and all day
+long all I thought of, as I kept the furnace going, was the evening
+after dinner, when I could sit close by her reading poetry in a low
+voice to her.</p>
+
+<p>I leaned over her on every pretext to smell her hair,&mdash;her body, through
+her low-necked dress&mdash;to breathe in giddily that delicate fragrance that
+emanates from the bodies of beautiful women, as perfume from flowers.</p>
+
+<p>Once, in spite of my timidity, I dared place my arm about her shoulders,
+there in the dark. There was a lecture on over in the &quot;chapel&quot; and
+mostly everybody had gone to it. Spalton, in passing through where we
+sat together, asked her if she was coming. &quot;No, she was too tired.&quot; She
+remained sitting by me. Spalton shot me a glance of scarcely concealed
+resentment and went on. We were left alone.</p>
+
+<p>She began telling me of her deceased husband ... of their devotion to
+each other ... she applied a dainty thing of lace to her eyes, pausing a
+moment....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;John? may I call you by your name, not by the odious name they have for
+you here?...&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She leaned her head against my shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, you are a fine, sensitive soul, and I know you'll be a great
+poet some day ... but why don't these people take you more seriously?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I think it must be your childlikeness ... and your spirit of
+horse-play, that breaks through at the most inopportune moments, that
+encourages these fools to treat you with levity.&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Dear woman,&quot; I began, &quot;dearest woman,&quot; and my throat bunched queerly so
+that I could not speak further.</p>
+
+<p>She stroked my hair....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How old are you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Twenty-three.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am just a year younger.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;May I kiss you?&quot; I asked, stumblingly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Johnnie, you may kiss me&quot;....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, you dear child, you ... you kiss just like a small boy ...&quot; in a
+lower voice, &quot;can it be possible that you, with all your tramping, your
+knowledge of life in books, of people?&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I bent my head, ashamed, silently acknowledging my inexperience of
+women.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, it's nothing to be ashamed of, dearest boy ... I think you are a
+fine man&mdash;to have gone through what you have&mdash;and still&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Her voice trailed off. She put her arm around my neck, drew me to her,
+and kissed me!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As we sat close together, a brooding silence. Then, with a transition of
+thought to the practical, she remarked....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm angry with these people ... they over-charge for everything.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Just think of it&mdash;I&mdash;I feel I may speak of it to you ... we seem to
+have come so near to each other to-night&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They brought my laundry back yesterday, and for one piece of silk
+lingerie I was charged&mdash;guess?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I couldn't imagine how much.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Seventy-five cents&mdash;think of that!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As the Eoites came tramping back from the lecture, they found us still
+seated there. At the first footstep we had swiftly moved apart.</p>
+
+<p>I had been half-reclining, my head in her lap, strangely soothed and
+happy as she ran her fingers through my hair. For a long time neither of
+us had said a word.</p>
+
+<p>Now I sat apart from her, awkward and wooden.</p>
+
+<p>Spalton did not speak, inclined his head icily, as he strode by.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He's mad because I didn't come to his talk,&quot; she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I see my finish,&quot; I replied.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Now, Spalton was as much in love with Dorothy, his second wife, as I
+have ever known a man to be in love with a woman. But that could not
+entirely exclude his jealousy over my sympathetic relation with the
+&quot;Southern Lady,&quot; as the artworkers termed her. And he feared for her on
+another score. She was, to use a constantly recurring phrase of the
+Master's, whenever he wished to describe anyone as being wealthy, &quot;lousy
+with money,&quot; and he suspected, not without good cause, that I would warn
+her against paying exorbitant prices for books and objects of art....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One night I was the cause of an accident which gave him a handle to
+seize on.</p>
+
+<p>We were having a musicale. A new musician had come to Eos. The former
+Eos musician, Von Hammer, the father of the prodigy who played the
+piano, had quarrelled with the Master and had retired to Buffalo. Where,
+after a brief struggle as teacher of music, he had turned to playing for
+the movies. It must have nearly slain the man, for he was a sincere
+artist, a lover of classical music ... and now compelled to play ragtime
+and popular melodies for a living.</p>
+
+<p>All that I held of him, despite myself, was an unkind remembrance&mdash;his
+breath had been charnel-foul, and always, when discussing anything, he
+insisted on taking the lapel of his listener's coat and talking directly
+into his nose....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But his successor was playing at an introductory musicale....</p>
+
+<p>A tall, alert, dark young man ... Italian-dark ... his eyes shone behind
+his gold-rimmed glasses, swimming large and distorted under the
+magnification of the lenses ... his lips were full and red, his
+moustache of a heavy, bristly black that made them look redder and
+fuller still, almost negroid.</p>
+
+<p>He played the piano with violent, expert energy ... his favourite work
+was the &quot;Turkish Patrol,&quot; which, Spalton exclaimed, as he applauded
+vigorously, he would now adopt as the Eos anthem.</p>
+
+<p>The drawing-room was crowded ... a few visiting celebrities ... Eoites,
+too, but only the quasi-celebrities among them. The mass of the workers
+was as rigidly excluded now, under the new r&eacute;gime, as ordinary retainers
+ever are.</p>
+
+<p>I stood by my &quot;Southern Lady.&quot; She was in evening dress ... wore a
+lorgnette ... I trembled as I leaned over her, for I could see the firm,
+white-orbed upper parts of her breasts ... I was trying to be lightly
+playful, and was clumsy at it. I took up her lorgnette and toyed with
+it. I sat on the edge of a table ... and where I sat stood a supposed
+Greek vase of great antiquity and value.</p>
+
+<p>It is a law that prevails in three-dimensional space that two objects
+cannot occupy the same place at one time. I dislodged the vase. It came
+to the floor in a crash ... which stopped the music ... which stopped
+everything. There fell a dead silence. I looked down at the fragments,
+hardly knowing what to do....</p>
+
+<p>Spalton came over to me ... intensely ... his eyes blazing.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Razorre, come out into the lobby ... I want to speak to you.&quot; I
+willingly followed him ... he wheeled on me when he had me alone.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do you know why we have these paintings of Gresham's hung high up there
+on the wall?&quot; he asked rhetorically, with an eloquent, upward sweep of
+his arm, &quot;it's so bums like you ... dirty tramps ... can't wipe their
+feet on them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am so sorry, so very sorry,&quot; I murmured, contrite.</p>
+
+<p>Thinking my contrition meekness, and possibly fear of him, he went to
+take me by the shoulders. I knocked his hands away promptly and quickly
+stepped back, on the defensive ... all my reverence for him swallowed up
+in indignation, rising at last, against his vulgar chiding.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment, my widow, Mrs. Tighe, arrived ... she was weeping....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't be hard on the poor boy,&quot; she pleaded ... &quot;anyhow, it was all my
+fault ... and I want to pay you for your vase ... whatever it cost.&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>A momentary flicker of greed lighted the Master's eyes. But he
+perceived as instantly how unmagnanimous he would appear if he accepted
+a cash settlement.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am not thinking of my financial loss ... beauty cannot be valued that
+way!&quot; he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then you must not blame the boy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He is clumsy ... he is a terrible fool ... he is always doing the wrong
+thing. Oh, my beautiful vase!&quot; and he wrung his hands, lost in the pose.
+Out he strode through the front door.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The musicale had been broken up.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My poor, dear Johnnie, I am so sorry,&quot; murmured the young woman. I was
+sitting in the large armchair where she had sat the memorable night of
+the lecture that neither of us attended. She had seated herself on one
+of the arms.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You mustn't be despondent!&quot; She was patting my hand.</p>
+
+<p>She mistook my rage at the gratuitous insults Spalton had heaped on me
+as despondency. She leaned closer against me ... quickly I caught her
+into my arms, drew her into my lap ... held her little, quiet, amazed
+face in my hands firmly, as I kissed and kissed her.... I knew how to
+kiss now....</p>
+
+<p>She rose presently. I stood up and caught her in my arms. Slowly and
+firmly she disengaged herself ... silently she slid away. She stopped in
+the shadow a moment before going up the long, winding stairs.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good night, my dear poet,&quot; she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>She had no sooner disappeared than I started out, my heart beating like
+a drum to a charge in me. Spalton frequently wrote till late, in his
+office. I would go over there and, if he was there, call him to account
+for his insults. There was a light lit within, and I could see him
+through the window at his desk.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come in!&quot; in answer to my knock. &quot;Oh, it's you, Razorre!&quot; and his eyes
+snapped with fresh resentment. &quot;What do you want? Don't you know that
+I'm busy on <i>A Brief Visit</i>?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You know why I'm here!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well?&quot; challengingly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've come for two reasons. I want to apologise to you for breaking that
+vase ... and I demand an equal apology from you, in turn, for the way
+you insulted me in Mrs. Tighe's presence.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You deserved everything I said to you,&quot; he replied, rising quietly
+from his chair.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I may have deserved it ... but that doesn't alter in the least my
+intention of smashing your face flat for the way you spoke to me, unless
+you tell me you're sorry for it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My dear Gregory, don't be a fool.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A fool?&quot; I replied, inflamed further by the appellation applied to
+quiet me in such a superior tone, &quot;if you'll come on out into the street
+and away from your own property, I'll show you who's a fool ... you'll
+find you can't treat me like a dog, and get away with it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Razorre ... my dear, dear boy,&quot; calling me by my nickname and
+taking another tack ... he laid his hand gently on my shoulder and gave
+me a deep, burning look of compassionate rebuke ... though I saw fear
+flickering back of it all....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look here, John,&quot; I burst out, never able to hold my wrath long, &quot;I
+like you ... think you're a great man&mdash;but you humiliated me before
+other people ... and I've come to such a pass in my life that I wouldn't
+let God Himself get away with a thing like that!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then I apologise ... most humbly!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That was all I wanted. Good-night!&quot; But I could not bring myself to
+leave so abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;John,&quot; I wavered, &quot;you <i>are</i> a great man ... a much greater man than
+you allow yourself to be ... I'm&mdash;I'm going away from here forever, this
+time ... and I&mdash;I want you to know how I reverence and love the bigness
+in you, in spite of our&mdash;our differences.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He was pleased.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And so you're going to college somewhere?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I had talked much of college being my next aim.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Either the University of Chicago, or further west.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I can give you commutation as far as Chicago.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I cannot accept it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You must, Razorre.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>A week from then I left.</p>
+
+<p>I went up to Mrs. Tighe's room to say good-bye. Awkwardly and with the
+bearlike roughness of excessive timidity I put my arms about her, drew
+her to me tentatively.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Be careful, poet dear, or you'll hurt me,&quot; she warned, giving me a look
+of fondness. Her left arm was in a sling. She had fallen on the steps a
+few days before and had broken a small bone in the wrist. &quot;My sweet
+poet!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The bandaged arm being in the way, I put my head down in her lap again,
+as she sat there on the edge of the great, white bed.</p>
+
+<p>She leaned over, turned my face up with her free hand, kissed me full in
+the mouth....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My sweet poet,&quot; she repeated, &quot;good-bye!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>While at Mt. Hebron I had chosen German as my modern language. And it
+was a Professor Langworth's grammar and exercise book that we used as a
+text-book. Langworth, I learned from the title page, was professor of
+Germanic languages in Laurel University, at Laurel, Kansas.</p>
+
+<p>And now I bethought me that it would be much better to go to college in
+Kansas than attend the University at Chicago, where, I felt, education
+was made an industry, just like pork-packing and the hundred other big
+concerns in that city. Kansas would encourage individuality more, be
+less appallingly machine-like.</p>
+
+<p>The great, roaring city bewildered me, and the buildings of the
+University of Chicago (for I got so far as to ask for the registrar's
+office) overwhelmed me with their number. And I fled. With the exception
+of a few days I put in washing dishes in a restaurant there, I stayed no
+longer, but freighted it southwest to Kansas City ... from whence I rode
+a freight further to Laurel.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the evening twilight I climbed out of a box car in the railroad yards
+at Laurel....</p>
+
+<p>I enquired my way to the university.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Up on the hill.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I veered off from the main street of the town ... a length of marching
+telegraph poles and flat-roofed Western houses. I struck across lots in
+the cold and dark. I floundered through half-hardened puddles of mud,
+over vacant lots that afterward seemed to have been conjured up for my
+impediment by some devil of piquaresque romance....</p>
+
+<p>The hill, the very top of it, I had laboriously attained. On all sides
+the college buildings gloomed in dusky whiteness of architecture.</p>
+
+<p>One of them was lit inside with the mellow glow of electric lights. As I
+stepped into the vestibule timidly, to enquire my way to Professor
+Langworth's house (for it was his I decided to seek out first), a group
+of fragrant, white-clad girls herded together in astonished tittering
+when they saw me. And I surely looked the tramp, dusty and soiled from
+my long ride.</p>
+
+<p>I asked them the direction to Langworth's house, but they ignored me,
+and scattered. Turning in confusion, I ran into a man-student bodily ...
+excused myself ... the girls, standing further off, tittered again.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Can you direct me to Professor Gustav Langworth's house?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The student looked me over curiously. But he was of the right sort.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Certainly. Come with me. I'm going that way. I'll show you where it
+is....&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In silence we descended the hill....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That house, in there a bit, under the trees ... that is where the
+professor lives.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My knock set a dog barking inside ... the quick, insistent bark of a
+collie that romped against me, putting up its paws on me when the door
+was opened by a slim-bodied man of middle height. The man was dressed in
+a grey suit ... he had a kindly, smooth-shaven face except for a
+close-cropped pepper-and-salt moustache ... and grey-blue, quizzical,
+but kindly eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here, Laddie, come here!&quot; called the voice of a frail, little woman
+whose hair was white like wool, and like wool in texture. She sat
+crumpled up by an open gas fire of imitation logs. She Was wry-backed,
+her right shoulder thrust out into a discernible hunch.</p>
+
+<p>She flung her arm tenderly about the dog, when it came to her. She was,
+I figured, the professor's mother.... He held a hurried, whispered
+consultation with her&mdash;after I had told him that studying his German
+book at Mt. Hebron had impelled me to come to Laurel. Which story I
+could see pleased and flattered him.</p>
+
+<p>I was waiting in the storm porch.</p>
+
+<p>He returned. He thrust his hand into his pocket and fetched forth a
+two-dollar bill.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Go downtown to one of the restaurants you will find on the main street.
+You can get a square meal in one of them for a quarter or, at the most,
+fifty cents ... a bed for the same price ... climb the hill again in the
+morning, say about ten o'clock, and ask for me at the German Department
+... I am sorry I can't invite you to stay here for the night ... but we
+have no room ...&quot; and he glanced timidly at the woman whom I had taken
+to be his mother, but who, I afterward learned, was his wife.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I found a restaurant-hotel, as he had directed me, and procured my
+supper for a quarter ... fried potatoes and a cold slab of steak ... and
+a big Westerner who wore a sombrero and had a stupid, kindly, boyish
+face, showed me to a bed ... which also cost but a quarter for the night
+... with a scattered ambuscade of bedbugs thrown in for good measure.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning, fried pork chops, pancakes and two cups of coffee&mdash;and I
+set out for the hill.</p>
+
+<p>The place buzzed with activity. The fall term was already in full swing,
+and students poured in lines up and down both sides of the steep street
+that led to the college ... girls and boys both, for it was
+co-educational. They were well dressed and jolly, as they moved in the
+keen windy sun of autumn.</p>
+
+<p>I was not a part of this. I felt like an outcast, but I bore myself with
+assumed independence and indifference. I thought everybody was looking
+at me. Most of them were.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Langworth enrolled me as a special student. He himself paid my tuition
+fee, which was a nominal one. I enrolled in Philosophy, Economics,
+German, Latin.</p>
+
+<p>My patron, furthermore, slipped a ten-dollar bill into my hand. &quot;For the
+books you will need.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He directed me to the Y.M.C.A. employment bureau. &quot;They will see that
+you get work at something, so you can be sure of board and room ... in
+the early days we did not have things so well arranged. I worked my way
+through college, too. I nearly perished, my first year. After you
+settle somewhere, come and see me once in a while and let me hear how
+you're getting on.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My first job was milking a cow and taking care of a horse, for board and
+room.... The man for whom I worked was an old, retired farmer.</p>
+
+<p>The disagreeable part of taking care of horses and cows is the smell. My
+clothes, my room, even the skin of my body, soon reeked with the faint
+yet penetrating odour of stable and barn.</p>
+
+<p>But I was happy. Many great men had done as I was doing. Always trust me
+to dramatise every situation!</p>
+
+<p>I arranged my meagre row of text-books on the shelf in my attic. I set
+Keats apart in a sacred nook by himself.</p>
+
+<p>I sat humming softly to myself, studying my first lessons.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Look,&quot; cried a girl, her voice vibrating with the hard sarcasm of
+youth, &quot;look, there goes Abe Lincoln,&quot; to another girl and two boys, who
+lolled with her on the porch of the house next mine.</p>
+
+<p>I was stabbed with a bitter pang of resentment. For my face was thin and
+weather-beaten ... my sharp, bent knees never straightened as I walked
+along, like a man going through snow drifts. Yet I held my head erect,
+ridiculously erect ... and my chest was enormous through
+over-development, as my arms and legs were thin.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My first few days at Laurel University brought me that beginning of
+newspaper notoriety that has since followed me everywhere as a shadow
+goes with a moving object. And then originated the appellation which has
+since clung to me, that of &quot;The Vagabond Poet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>One morning, when I was hardly awake, there came a knock at my door.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Just a moment,&quot; I called, getting into my shirt and trousers, &quot;who is
+it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A reporter to interview you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I opened the door to admit a pale, young chap, who expertly flirted the
+ashes off a cigarette as he said, leaning his head sidewise, that he
+represented the Kansas City <i>Star</i>. As he spoke his keen grey eyes
+looked me over impartially, but with intelligent, friendly interest.
+Though he was dressed in the student's conventional style, even to the
+curiously nicked and clipped soft hat then predominant, there was still
+about him an off-handedness, an impudent at-homeness that bespoke a
+wider knowledge, or assumed knowledge, of the world, than the average
+student possesses.</p>
+
+<p>The interview appeared the next afternoon.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>&quot;VAGABOND POET ARRIVES.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>LAUREL ENROLLS BOX-CAR STUDENT.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It made me a nine days' wonder with the students. I caught the men
+staring at me, the girls shyly observing me, as I strode from class room
+to class room....</p>
+
+<p>But the reek of the stable. It went with me like a ghost everywhere.
+Maybe it was because I had no change of suits ... I saw that it was
+noticeable to others, and I sat 'way back, in a seat apart, by myself.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Langworth watched my progress narrowly the first few weeks.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon as I was passing his house he beckoned me in.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're making good, and I'm glad of it ... because they're looking on
+you as my prot&eacute;g&eacute; ... holding me responsible for you. Munday, in the
+Schiller class, tells me you sometimes bring in your daily lesson in
+<i>Wilhelm Tell</i>, translated into blank verse ... and good stuff, too....
+And King says he turns over the most difficult lines in Horace in class
+for you to translate and construe.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Langworth had only half the truth from King.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever the latter came upon a passage a little off colour, he put me
+on it, chuckling to himself ... he knew I would go right through with it
+without hesitation.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>About this time I received a letter from William Hayes Ward, editor of
+the New York <i>Independent</i>. He informed me that he had taken a poem of
+mine. And, as indubitable proof, he enclosed a check for five dollars.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Langworth was himself a poet of no mean ability: he was
+pleased to hear that I had sold a poem to the <i>Independent</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was sick of being shunned because I carried stable smells about with
+me wherever I went.</p>
+
+<p>Also, sanguinely, with the sale of my first poem, I was sure that my
+literary career had begun, and that from now on I would be enabled to
+earn my living by my pen, and pay my way as a student, too. So I threw
+up the job that made me smell so unpleasantly.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The city of Laurel had been, in the early days, in the memory of
+settlers yet living a hale life, a pioneer outpost. Through it flowed a
+great, muddy river. The flat roofs of its main street still preserved a
+frontier appearance. It was surrounded by high, wind-swept bluffs.</p>
+
+<p>They still talked of the Quantrell raid and repeated the story of it ...
+and of how the six men were lynched under the bridge that swung over the
+dam....</p>
+
+<p>At the time of the slavery agitation its citizens had encouraged the
+negroes to escape, had petted them, idealised them as no human beings of
+any race should be idealised ... had run schools specially for them
+where it was considered an honour for the women of the settlers to
+teach.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the great negro population, at first so encouraged, was crowded
+into a festering multitude of dilapidated buildings that stood on the
+flats close by the region where the river coiled through level acres of
+low-lying country. This place was known as the &quot;Bottoms.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I am trying to give you the flavour of the town.</p>
+
+<p>They had prohibition there, too ... long before it won nation-wide power
+... consequently the negroes drove a vast trade in bootlegging ... and a
+concomitant prostitution of coloured women and girls throve. One or two
+students on the hill had, to my knowledge, negro mistresses of whom they
+were fond....</p>
+
+<p>The drug stores did a thriving business in the sale of spiritus
+frumenti&mdash;for &quot;snake bite&quot; and &quot;stomach trouble,&quot; which seemed to be
+prevalent and epidemic throughout the community.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Saturday was market day for the farmers who lived in the adjoining
+countryside ... and the livery stables where they put up their horses
+were also resorts for gambling and the selling of &quot;bootleg&quot; booze....</p>
+
+<p>These farmers were a wild lot ... something like European peasants in
+their smacking of the soil and the country to which they belonged, but
+with a verve and dash of their own distinctly American.</p>
+
+<p>There were three or four cheap restaurants that catered solely to their
+trade ... &quot;a square meal for a quarter&quot; ... and a square meal they
+served ... multitudes of fried stuff ... beefsteak, potatoes, boiled
+ham, cabbage, heaps of white bread constantly replenished as it was
+voraciously devoured ... always plenty of hot, steaming coffee. Where
+these restaurants profited I could never see ... unless by a little
+bootlegging on the side.</p>
+
+<p>It was to one of them that I repaired when I left my malodorous job. The
+same one where I had spent my first night in town.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Langworth sent for me one day.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have heard wild tales about you, Johnnie. I don't usually listen to
+gossip, but these tales are so recurrent and persistent ... about your
+going about with the degraded people who live in the Bottoms, that I
+considered I ought to see you about it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I confessed that, though I did not drink their bootleg booze, I did have
+a wide acquaintanceship with the folk of the Bottoms, and that I knew
+all the rowdies among the farmers ... that I passed a lot of time about
+the livery stables talking with them. That I often rode out to their
+farms in the hills and spent Saturdays and Sundays there. I avowed that
+there people were more interesting to me than the carefully tailored
+professors and students.</p>
+
+<p>My schoolmates had met me on the streets in company with these
+wild-looking yokels, sometimes taking them to their waggons when they
+were too drunk to pilot themselves effectively. And they had applied to
+me the proverb of &quot;birds of a feather.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Before I left, Langworth drew from me the admission that I was away
+behind in my board bill at the Farmers' Restaurant. My hopes of making
+immediate money as a writer of poems for the magazines had so far been
+barren of fruit.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sh! sit down a minute and wait.&quot; His wife was coming downstairs,
+querulously, waveringly; her eyes red from weeping.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Laddie has just died.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The shepherd dog?&quot; I enquired; for she had spoken as of a human demise.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, the dog ... but he was human, if anyone was.&quot; There was an
+acidulous resentment in the tone of her answer that indicated that she
+wanted her husband to send me away.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She wants you to go,&quot; whispered Langworth, humouring his wife like a
+sick child. He escorted me into the storm porch. &quot;You have no idea,&quot; he
+apologised defensively, &quot;how human a dog can be, or how fond of one you
+can become....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's this?&quot; I asked, taken aback. He had thrust a check into my hand
+as he shook hands good-bye.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's a check I've just endorsed over to you. Royalties on a recent
+text-book. Please do take it.&quot; I had intimated that I would probably be
+compelled to quit college and go on the tramp again ... confessing
+frankly, also, that a stationary life got on my nerves at times.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want you to keep on, not go back to the tramp life ... we'll make
+something of you yet,&quot; he jested, diffidently, steering me off when he
+noticed that I was about to heap profuse thanks on him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How can I ever thank you&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;By studying hard and making good. By becoming the great poet I wanted
+to be.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But how can I pay this back? It will take a long time&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;When you arrive at the place where you can afford to pay me back, pass
+it on to someone else who is struggling as you are now, and as I myself
+have struggled.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Always, always I wrote my poetry and kept studying in my own fashion ...
+marks of proficiency, attendance at class went by the board. My studying
+was rather browsing among the multitudes of books in the college
+library. I passed hours, back in the stacks, forgetting day and night
+... recitations ... meals....</p>
+
+<p>I was soon in trouble with my professors ... I was always up, and even
+ahead, with my studies, but I was a disrupting influence for the other
+students, because of my irregularity.</p>
+
+<p>I discovered wonderful books back there in the &quot;stack&quot; ... the works of
+Paracelsus, who whispered me that wisdom was to be found more in the
+vagabond bye-ways of life than in the ordered and regulated highways.
+That the true knowledge was to be garnered from knocking about with
+vagrants, gipsies, carriers ... from corners in wayside inns where
+travellers discoursed....</p>
+
+<p>And there was Boehmen, the inspired German shoemaker, who was visited
+by an angel, or some sort of divine stranger, and given his first
+illumination outside his shop ... and later walked a-field and heard
+what the flowers were saying to each other, seeing through all creation
+at one glance, crystal-clear.</p>
+
+<p>And there were the unusual poets ... old Matthew Prior, who wrote
+besides his poems, the Treaty, was it, of Utrecht?... hobnobbed with the
+big people of the land ... yet refused all marks of honour ... the best
+Latinist of the day ... at a time when Latin was the diplomatic language
+of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>When he wasn't hobnobbing with the aristocracy or writing treaties he
+was sitting in inns and drinking with teamsters ... had a long love
+affair with a cobbler's wife, and married the lady after the cobbler
+died....</p>
+
+<p>There was Skelton and his rough-running, irregular rhythmic rather than
+strictly metrical verses ... mad and ribald ... often tedious ... but
+with wild flashes of beauty interwoven through his poems ... the poem
+about his mistress's sparrow ... the elegy on its death ... where he
+prayed God to give it the little wren of the Virgin Mary, as a wife, in
+heaven&mdash;&quot;to tread, for <i>solas</i>!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And Gay, the author of many delightful fables ... who must wait still
+longer for his proper niche, because he showed gross levity on the
+subject of death and life ... he who wrote for his own epitaph:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;Life is a jest, and all things show it;</div>
+<div>I thought so once, but now I know it.&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>For all those who would not keep step, who romped out of the regular
+procedure and wantoned by the way, picking what flowers they chose, I
+held feeling and sympathy.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The <i>Annual</i>, a book published by the seniors each spring, now
+advertised a prize for the best poem submitted by any student ... a
+prize of twenty-five dollars. I had no doubt but that the prize was mine
+already. Not that I had become as yet the poet I desired, but that the
+average level of human endeavour in any art is so low that I knew my
+assiduity and application and fair amount of inspiration would win.</p>
+
+<p>I wrote my poem&mdash;<i>A Day in a Japanese Garden</i>, ... only two lines I
+remember:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;And black cranes trailed their long legs as they flew</div>
+<div>Down to it, somewhere out of Heaven's blue,&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>descriptive of a little lake ... oh, yes, and two more I remember,
+descriptive of sunset:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;And Fujiyama's far and sacred top</div>
+<div>Became a jewel shining in the sun.&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The poem was an over-laquered, metaphor-cloyed thing ... much like the
+bulk of our free verse of to-day ... but it was superior to all the rest
+of the contributions.</p>
+
+<p>The prize was declared off. After an evening's serious discussion the
+committee decided that, though my effort was far and away the best, it
+would not do to let me have the prize, because I was so wild-appearing
+... because I was known as having been a tramp. And because seniors and
+students of correct standing at the university had tried. And it would
+not be good for the school morale to let me have what I had won.</p>
+
+<p>They compromised by declaring the prize off.</p>
+
+<p>A year after, Professor Black, assistant professor in English
+literature, who served on the judging board, told me confidentially of
+this ... though he declared that he had fought for me, alleging how I
+needed the money, and how I had honestly won the award.</p>
+
+<p>I thought of the couplet of Gay:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;He who would without malice pass his days</div>
+<div>Must live obscure and never merit praise.&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Outwardly I maintained a bold and courageous rudeness. Inwardly a panic
+had swept over me ... not the panic of deep solitude when a man is alone
+at night in a boundless forest ... I have known that, too, but it is
+nothing to that which comes to a man who knows all society, by its very
+structure, arrayed against him and his dreams.</p>
+
+<p>When the ancient Egyptians had finished the building of a pyramid, they
+began polishing it at the top, proceeding downward. And it has been said
+that on the finished, hard, smooth exterior even a fly would slip....</p>
+
+<p>Huge, granite, towering, the regularised life appeared to me, the life
+that bulked on all sides ... I saw that it was the object of education,
+not to liberate the soul and mind and heart, but to reduce everything to
+dead and commonplace formulae.</p>
+
+<p>On all sides, so to speak, I saw Christ and Socrates and Shelley valeted
+by society ... dress suits laid out for them ... carefully pressed and
+creased ... which,&mdash;now dead,&mdash;it was pretended their spirits took up
+and wore ... had, in fact, always worn....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>And my mind went back to those happy days at Eos ... happy despite the
+fly in the ointment....</p>
+
+<p>I thought of my Southern widow, Mrs. Tighe.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Poet,&quot; she had once said, &quot;come to my place in the South. I have a
+bungalow back of my house that you may live in ... write your poems
+unmolested ... I won't be going there for awhile yet, but I will give
+you a letter to the caretaker, and you can use the place. And my pantry
+and ice box will be at your service ... so you'll need do nothing but
+write.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Now, fed full of rebuffs, I wished I had accepted her offer. And I wrote
+her, care of the Eos Artworks ... an ingenuous letter, burning with
+na&iuml;ve love....</p>
+
+<p>She had once told me how she had scandalised the neighbours by painting
+a little boy, in the nude, in that same bungalow ... the story being
+carried about by the servants ... and if it had not been for her social
+prestige!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>I thought there could be nothing pleasanter than living in her place,
+perhaps becoming her lover....</p>
+
+<p>I imagined myself posing, nude, for her canvases....</p>
+
+<p>But my brief hope fell to earth. A curt note from a married sister of
+hers ... who first apologised for having read my letter.... But Mrs.
+Tighe was abroad, painting in Spain.</p>
+
+<p>The shock of having someone else, indubitably with a hostile eye, read
+my letter, in which I had poured forth all my heart, made me almost
+sick. I was chagrined inexpressibly.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The truth was, spring was coming on. Spring affects me as it does
+migratory fowls. With its first effort of meadow and bough toward
+renewed flowers and greenness, the instinct for change and adventure
+stirs anew in me.</p>
+
+<p>The school year was not yet up, but I didn't want to graduate.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At that time I had a passion for meeting well-known people.</p>
+
+<p>It was then my only avenue of literary publication, so to speak. The
+magazines were steadily returning my deluge of poems&mdash;I sent at least
+three a week to them ... but to those who had established themselves I
+could show my work, and get their advice and notice....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Walking along the main street, I ran into Jack Travers, the young
+reporter who had dubbed me the &quot;Vagabond Poet,&quot; the &quot;Box-car Bard.&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, what are you up to now, Gregory?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nothing, only I'm thinking of a trip south to Osageville to pay a visit
+to Mackworth, the Kansas novelist.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's the stuff ... I need another good story for the <i>Era</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm going to make it a sort of pilgrimage a-foot.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Great! 'Vagabond Poet' Pilgrims to Home of Celebrated Kansan. It's only
+ninety miles to Osageville from here ... still rather cold of nights ...
+but you'll find plenty of shelter by the way ... start to-day and I can
+get the story in in time for this Sunday's <i>Era</i>....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Travers got a camera from a fraternity brother.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, we'll walk up an alley and I'll snap you just as if you were
+on the way....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I won't do that!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;won't do what?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;won't fake it ... if you want a picture of me on the way, it will
+have to be on the way!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of all the fools! Ain't the alleys muddy enough to be like the gumbo
+you'll have to plough through?&quot; he teased. But I wouldn't allow him to
+take a fraudulent picture. He had to come with me, through the mud,
+grumbling, to the edge of town.</p>
+
+<p>There, on the country road that led in the direction of Osageville, my
+feet rooted in gumbo, a sort of thick composite of clay and mud that
+clings to the feet in huge lumps, I had my photograph taken ... actually
+on the march toward my destination ... no hat on ... a copy of Keats in
+my hand.</p>
+
+<p>Travers waved me good-bye. &quot;You'll see the story in the <i>Era</i> Sunday
+sure,&quot; he shouted, in a tone half affection, half irony. I was nettled
+at the irony. I wanted it to be looked on as a quest entirely heroic.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It began to rain. Far off, like a high, great ship riding on the
+horizon, rode the hill, with its cluster of university buildings.</p>
+
+<p>My first impulse was to turn back, to quit. That is always my first
+impulse. The instincts of my bourgeois ancestry against the unusual, the
+impractical,&mdash;the safe-and-sane conservatism of the farmers and clerks
+and small business men bred in my people for generations!...</p>
+
+<p>I pushed on through the clinging, maddening gumbo, slithering and
+sliding. Fortunately, I wore an overcoat, which, after it had reached
+the saturation point, shed most of the steady, oblique-driving rain that
+came for miles over the plains in a succession of grey, windy sheets.
+But my wrists and hands were aching, wet, and my thin, plying legs, to
+my knees. And the &quot;squash-squish!&quot; of my soaked feet in the mud plodded
+a steady refrain of misery.</p>
+
+<p>My Keats, at least, was dry. I kept the volume under my belt and against
+my naked belly.</p>
+
+<p>And I was happy and buoyed up by the thought, which lessened my
+discomfiture, that Sunday morning thousands of readers in comfortable
+homes would be reading about me, would gaze upon my photograph.</p>
+
+<p>People looked out of their farmhouse windows at me as if an insane man
+were stalking by.</p>
+
+<p>It darkened rapidly.</p>
+
+<p>My first night's shelter was in a leaky outhouse. The farmstead to which
+it belonged had burned down. I might have been taken in at any number of
+places, but my access of timidity was too great ... it might on the
+following dawn be followed by as great an effrontery. My year in college
+had disorganized me, pulled me out of my tramp character. It was no more
+a usual thing to beg or ask for shelter.</p>
+
+<p>I could not sleep. My muscles were already overstrained from the
+excessive effort of struggling along in the tenacious mud, like a fly
+escaping from the edge of spilled molasses.</p>
+
+<p>I had brought a box of small candles for just such an emergency. I lit
+one after the other, sat on the seat, and read Keats all night ... in
+an ecstasy, forgetting my surroundings, my pitiful poverty, my
+pilgrimage that would seem ridiculous to most.</p>
+
+<p>The rain increased. Outside it drummed and drummed. Inside it dripped
+and dripped.</p>
+
+<p>And as I sat there, upright, to escape the drip from the leaks, I
+climbed to a high, crystal-clear state of spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Again I burned through Keats' life as if remembering that it was what I
+had myself suffered ... as if suddenly I awoke to the realisation that
+<i>I</i> was Keats, re-born in America, a tramp-student in Kansas....</p>
+
+<p>And now Severn, my true, faithful friend, was with me.... Severn, who
+had given up his career as painter to be near me in my last days ... we
+were on the <i>Maria Crowther</i> ... we were still off the coast of England,
+and I had gone ashore for the last touching of my foot on English
+soil....</p>
+
+<p>There hung the great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment
+of twilight, before any other of the stars had come forth....</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art&mdash;</div>
+<div>Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,</div>
+<div>And watching, with eternal lids apart,</div>
+<div>Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,</div>
+<div>The moving waters at their priestlike task</div>
+<div>Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,...&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The evening star made me dream of immortality and love&mdash;my love for
+Fanny Brawne....</p>
+
+<p>Now we, Severn and I, were journeying across the country to Rome ...
+voyaging, rather, through fields of flowers ... like my procession of
+Bacchus in <i>Endymion</i> ... that was a big poem, after all....</p>
+
+<p>Now the fountain played under the window ... where I was to die....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Severn, I feel the daisies growing over me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Severn, I&mdash;I&mdash;Severn ... I am dying ... Severn, lift me up&mdash;I&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here lies one whose fame was writ in water.&quot; (How they cruelly laughed
+at that&mdash;for a time!)</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I gave a start, almost a scream of agony ... the candle, somehow, had
+served me a ghastly trick ... it had cast my shadow backward on the wall,
+like that shadow cast by the head of the dying poet, as Severn had
+sketched it.... I ran my hand over my face ... it was hollow and
+tight-drawn like the face of a consumptive.</p>
+
+<p>The mass of resistance I had to face, for poetry's sake, was too
+enormous ... my country's motto was not &quot;beauty is truth, truth beauty,&quot;
+but &quot;blessed be that man who can make two hills of corn grow where one
+bank of violets grew before,&quot; ... and my pilgrimage, in that hour of
+vision, it disgusted me ... for I was making it not to some grand poet
+like L'Estrange, but to the home of the chief exponent of the
+&quot;Honest-to-God, No-Nonsense-About-Me Hick School of Literature&quot; ... and
+associated with him was the syndicate poet, William Struthers, called
+familiarly Uncle Bill, whose daily jingles run together as prose, were
+now making him a fortune.</p>
+
+<p>With the coming of dawn the day cleared, the sun glistened on a thousand
+puddles, making them silver and gold....</p>
+
+<p>By walking carefully on the side of the road, I made progress less
+muddy. I was used to the squashing of the water in my shoes. The weather
+turned warmer.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I found myself on the usual long one-street called Main Street, in the
+prosperous little city of Osageville. It was Sunday. A corner loiterer
+directed me to Jarvis Alexander Mackworth's house.</p>
+
+<p>A habitation of sequestered quiet ... as I stood before the door I heard
+the sunrise song of Rossini's <i>Wilhelm Tell</i> ... a Red Seal record ...
+accompanied by the slow, dreamy following of a piano's tinkle ... like
+harp sounds or remote, flowing water.</p>
+
+<p>I halted, under a charm. I waited till the melody was at an end before I
+knocked. A small, pale-faced, pretty little woman answered.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Does Mr. Jarvis Mackworth live here?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes. Come in. We have been expecting you. You are the poet, aren't
+you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, I am the poet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're a good walker ... we didn't expect you before Monday or
+Tuesday.... Jarvis, here's the poet-boy from the university.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My host, unseen within, turned off another Red Seal record he had just
+started, again to the accompaniment of the piano.... Kreisler's <i>Caprice
+Viennoise</i>....</p>
+
+<p>Jarvis Alexander Mackworth came forth like a leisurely duck, waddling.
+He was very, very fat. He extended me a plump, white hand ... a slack
+hand-shake ... but not an unhearty one, rather a grip of easy welcome.</p>
+
+<p>A kind, rubicund, moon-round face, full of large blue eyes smiling a
+gentle and kindly welcome ... if the face of Shelley's father, plump and
+methodic-oracular, could have been joined to the wild, shining ecstasy
+of Shelley's countenance itself&mdash;you would have had Mackworth's face
+before its time. I never beheld such spirituality in a fat man. His
+stoutness was not unpleasing.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My boy ... come in ... my God, you're all wet ... you look frail, too.&quot;
+A pity shone in his eyes. &quot;Minnie, call up Ally Merton ...&quot; turning to
+me, &quot;I have, as you can see, no clothes to fit you ... but Ally might
+have ... he's about your size, but he carries a trifle more meat on his
+bones....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come in and dry yourself before the fire till he gets over.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We sat before the gas-fire of artificial logs.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Minnie, will you make a cup of tea for this&mdash;poor boy,&quot; and he lowered
+his voice at the last two words, realising that I was hearing, too.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Jarv!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I sat at the table in the dining room. Jarvis Alexander Mackworth sat on
+the piano-stool, again playing the piano in rhythm rather than in
+accompaniment with the records ... it was Caruso now....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A glorious voice, isn't it, young man?&quot; Mackworth asked, as I ate
+voraciously of the cold roast set before me ... of the delicious white
+bread and fresh dairy butter, just from the churn of some neighbouring
+farmer.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I know nothing much about music,&quot; he continued, &quot;&mdash;just appreciate it
+...&mdash;seems to me that's what we need now, more than anything else ...
+appreciation of the arts.... I like to sit here and pick out the
+melodies on the piano as the tune runs on. It inspires me. The precious
+people, the aesthetic upstarts, make fun of Edison and his 'canned
+music,' as they call it ... but I say Edison is one of the great forces
+for culture in America to-day. Everybody can't go to New York, London,
+Paris, Bayreuth ... not to Chicago even....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Beauty must come to Osageville, since Osageville cannot come to
+Beauty.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was charmed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mr. Mackworth, you are a great man,&quot; I said.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>A ring at the bell. Ally Merton....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ally, this is Mr. John Gregory, poet at large, Villon of American
+Literature ... let us hope, some day a little more of the Whittier ...
+Ally&mdash;&quot; and the speaker turned to me, &quot;Ally Merton is my right hand man
+... my best reporter....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He took Merton aside, in private talk.... Ally looked me over with a
+keen, swift glance that appraised me from head to foot instantly ...
+sharply but not hostilely ... as one who takes in a situation in a
+comprehensive instant.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Mr. Mackworth, I can do it easily ... if they'll fit him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There was an impersonality, however, about Merton's cryptic words that
+annoyed me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You are going home with Ally, John,&quot; Mackworth said to me, using my
+familiar name for the first time, &quot;and borrow a suit of his clothes ...
+and you are coming back with him to dinner ... where you'll meet a very
+famous person&mdash;Miss Clara Martin.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Ally's blue serge suit was too short in the legs and arms for me ...
+otherwise it fitted. His gentleness and unobtrusive quietness entered
+into me, along with the putting on of his apparel. He led me upstairs in
+his house.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mr. Mackworth has asked me to put you up while you are in town ...
+because his own house is full at present, otherwise he would accommodate
+you there ... I guess we can make shift to entertain you properly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here is the bathroom ... if you don't mind my saying it, when you throw
+the toilet seat up, let the water run from the tap over the wash basin
+... my mother and sisters!&quot; he trailed off in inaudible, deprecative
+urge of the proprieties.</p>
+
+<p>Ally was anything but a small-town product. Suave, socially adroit, an
+instinctive creature of Good Form....</p>
+
+<p>He came into the room he had given me to stay in. I looked like a
+different man, togged out in his clothes. Ally was surprised that I
+could wear his shoes ... he had such small feet ... I informed him
+proudly that I, too, had small feet....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, no, that is not the way to tie a tie ... let me show you ... you
+must make both ends meet exactly ... there, that's it!&quot; and he stepped
+back, a look of satisfaction on his face ... he handed me a pearl stick
+pin.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This is a loan, not a gift,&quot; he murmured.</p>
+
+<p>I returned a quick, angry look.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't want your pin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No offence meant,&quot; he deprecated, &quot;and you must wear it&quot; (for I was
+putting it aside) &quot;Mr. Mackworth and I both want you to look your best
+when you meet Miss Martin at dinner to-night&quot;.... I angrily almost
+decided to take his pin with me when I left, just to fulfill his
+pre-supposition.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, that's not the place to stick it ... let me show you ... not in the
+body of the tie, but further down,&quot; and he deftly placed the pin in the
+right spot. Then he stepped back like an artist who is proud of having
+made a good job of bad materials....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You look almost like a gentleman.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was about to lick into Merton and lend him a sample of a few strong
+objurgations of road and jail, when I saw myself in the glass. I stood
+transfixed. He had not meant to be ironic. The transformation was
+startling....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If you would only keep yourself tidy all the time that way!... it's
+easy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Not for me ... everything material that I touch seems to fall apart....
+I lose my shirts inexplicably ... my socks ... holes appear overnight in
+my clothes. Books are the only things I can keep. I am always cluttered
+up with them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Appearances mean everything ... then, if you have the rest, the goods
+to deliver, there is no place a man might not go nor attain.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I looked the small town reporter over in surprise. I studied him closely
+for the first time. He belonged to the world, not to Osageville ... the
+world of fashion, of smartness ... a world I despised. My world and his
+would always be like separate planets. He would consort with people for
+the mere pleasure of social life with them. The one thing I did not like
+about him was his small mouth ... but then I did not like my own mouth
+... it was large, sensual, loose and cruel.</p>
+
+<p>And his walk ... it was almost dainty mincing. But then my walk was a
+loose, bent-kneed method of progression....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Miss Martin, the celebrated exposer of corrupt millionaires and captains
+of industry, was dark and tall. She had been good-looking in girlhood.
+She had fine eyes in a devastated face.</p>
+
+<p>I found myself petted, mothered by her. As soon as she saw me she
+removed a thread that hung to my coatsleeve.</p>
+
+<p>At supper I was told of a new project. A group of writers, especially of
+writers who were in revolt against big business and the corruption of
+the trusts, were about to effect a combination and start what was to be
+called the <i>National Magazine</i>; for it was to be no less than that, a
+magazine embracing all America, to serve as a re-invigorant and
+re-corroborant for new national ideals ... really only a tilting against
+the evils of big combinations, in favour of the earlier and more
+impossible ideals of small business units&mdash;the ideal of a bourgeois
+commercial honesty and individual effort that could no more be
+re-established than could the big shoe factory be broken up and returned
+to the shanty of the village shoemaker.... Bryan's dream ... the last
+effort of the middle classes to escape their surely destined
+strangulation ... which gave birth to the abortive progressive party.</p>
+
+<p>I was assured by Miss Martin and Mackworth that a poet who could sing
+American ideals and dreams was needed by them.... Ray Stannard Baker,
+Peter Finley Dunne, Upton Sinclair, were all to write for them....</p>
+
+<p>I saw clearly that their revolution was a backward-working one. That the
+country's business could never again be broken up into a multitude of
+small shops and individual competitors.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, I was at that time a Socialist of the violent, fiery
+type&mdash;with a strong cast toward the anarchism of Emma Goldman.</p>
+
+<p>But it flattered me to be taken, as it were, into the inner councils of
+such great folk....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Send us some of your poetry, with the right American ring to it,
+Johnnie,&quot; suggested Miss Martin, &quot;and we will make you the poet of the
+group.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I think that Ally Merton's clothes on me, and his correct tie, made my
+good impression, as much as my after-talk around the fireplace, where I
+spun yarns of my strange life and adventures.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;You made a hit,&quot; commented Ally, as he conducted me back to his house,
+&quot;it's a great opening for you. Follow it up!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I will!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>That night I could not sleep. My blood made a tumult through my body.
+Before dawn I had written two poems on national themes; didactic verses,
+each with a moral of democracy tagged to it, and much about the worth of
+simplicity in it, and the dignity of honest labour.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, I would be their poet. And America's poet....</p>
+
+<p>And visions of a comfortable, bourgeois success took me ... interminable
+Chautauquas, with rows of women listening to my inspiring verses ...
+visits as honoured guest to the homes of great popular leaders like
+Roosevelt ... dignity and rides in parlour cars, instead of dusty, dirty
+box cars ... interviews of weight and speeches of consequence ... and
+the newspapers would drop their undercurrent of levity when I was
+written about in them, and treat me with consideration.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, I would possess a home like Mackworth's, set back amid shade
+trees, a house not too large, not too small ... a cook and maid ... a
+pretty, unobtrusive wife devoted to me....</p>
+
+<p>And I would wear white linen collars every day, tie the ends of my tie
+even ... and each year would see a new book of mine out, published by
+some bookseller of repute ... and I could afford Red Seal records ...
+and have my largest room for a library....</p>
+
+<p>Middle-class comfort was upon me ... good plumbing ... electric light
+... laundry sent out ... no more washing of my one shirt overnight and
+hanging it up to dry on the back of a chair, while I slept ... and
+putting it on, next morning, crinkly and still damp.</p>
+
+<p>I was already seduced, if there hadn't been that something in me which I
+myself could not control!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was when I caught Mackworth on the streets of his town and in his
+newspaper office that I discovered the man himself.</p>
+
+<p>In our country, especially in the Middle West, everybody watches
+everybody else for the least lapse in the democratic spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Though he was truly democratic at heart, Mackworth laid it on in
+theatric outward appearance, in true line with the Kansas tradition of a
+sockless Jerry Simpson, who went without socks, as the adjective
+implies, and made Congress on that one platform of his sartorial lack
+... of William Roscoe Stubbs, who rode into the office of governor
+partly on the fact that his daughter could make salt-rising bread ... a
+form of bread-making cultivated by the hardy pioneers of the state, and
+now no longer necessary.</p>
+
+<p>Mackworth was &quot;in-legged&quot; ... that is, his legs on the insides rubbed
+together from the crotch to the knees ... and he wore old patches,
+hanging there actually in strips ... and, I think, had his trouser-seat
+patched, too ... and though he could have afforded a car, he drove
+about, he and his family, in a rickety old two-seated rig, deliberately
+kept, it seemed, in ill-repair ... and it was such an old ex-plow horse
+that dragged it about!</p>
+
+<p>His fellow townsmen laughed, but they liked it. &quot;Jarv's all right! No
+nonsense about Jarv, even ef he is one o' them lit'rary fellers!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To call everybody by the first name&mdash;that was the last word in honest,
+democratic fellowship.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Whether this exterior appearance of Mackworth was sincere or affected in
+him I never could quite tell. I am almost inclined to believe it was not
+done for effect,&mdash;but out of an Assisian simplicity of heart, as a sign
+manual of Bourgeois integrity.</p>
+
+<p>If it was an affectation, his personal attitude toward the people with
+whom he came into contact was not ... in his office everybody loved him,
+and worked for him with that easy efficiency that comes of good will and
+respect....</p>
+
+<p>Unostentatiously and affectionately he went about helping people.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We've got a wonderful town here ... very little vice, except that which
+always will be in every community because it is inherent in human nature
+... we have a fine college of our own ... a fine electric plant ...
+everybody's lawn is well-kept ... nobody in this town need be out of a
+job ... for miles around us the land is rich in real wealth of waving
+corn and wheat....</p>
+
+<p>Kansas will be the centre, the Athens, of our civilisation, one day....</p>
+
+<p>We have a fine Harvey Eating House at our railway station, managed by a
+hustler ... you must have Ally take you there for dinner before you go
+back to Laurel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The idealisation of small comfort ... in a case like Mackworth's, fairly
+unobjectionable ... but in most cases insufferably stodgy ... the
+dry-rot of art, literature, life ... leading to a smug conceit that in
+turn ends in that school of &quot;two hills of corn where one cluster of
+violets grew before.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>No wonder that the <i>National Magazine</i>, starting with a splendid
+flourish of knight-errantry, degenerated into the mere,
+&quot;let-well-enough-alone&quot; thrift-crier it is.... &quot;'How I Became an Expert
+Tombstone Salesman' ... 'How I collected Tin Foil After Work-Hours and
+Added Three Hundred a Year Extra to My Salary as Stenographer.'...&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Rather, far rather, the Rockefeller, that shrewd manipulator of
+businesses ... with all his parsimony in personal economics ... his diet
+of bread and milk ... and his giving away of millions to missions and
+scientific institutions....</p>
+
+<p>Rather the big Morgan, who knew the old masters as well as he knew the
+weaknesses of men ... who hobnobbed, not as a democrat, but as
+aristocratic as the best of them, with princes, kings, emperors, in his
+grim, forbidding dignity.</p>
+
+<p>This at least presented bigness and romance!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Want to meet Uncle Bill?&quot; and Mackworth led me into a close-shut room
+blue-thick with smoke....</p>
+
+<p>I coughed and choked. A fire extinguisher should have preceded our
+entry.</p>
+
+<p>There sat&mdash;the lumbering trot of his typewriter heard long before he
+assumed visible, hazy outline&mdash;William Struthers, known to the newspaper
+world as &quot;Old Uncle Bill,&quot; the writer of daily prose-verse squibs on the
+homely virtues, the exalter of the commonplaces of life, the deifier of
+the ordinary.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Bill's head of strong, black hair stood upright like thick wire.
+His thick, stubby fingers trotted like cart horses on and on. He stopped
+and drew up a chair for me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course I ain't calling my stuff poetry,&quot; he began deprecatingly,
+&quot;but I do a lot of good for folks ... folks read my stuff when they
+ain't got time to read the real poets.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Instead of flattering him, I gave him, frankly but gently, my opinion
+of the cornfed school of literature, easing the sting by inferring that
+he without doubt had bigger things up his sleeve than his so-called
+prose poems.</p>
+
+<p>What I said struck the right chord.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course a fellow has to make a living first.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>(But, in my heart, I thought&mdash;it is just as vile for a man to send his
+wife out as a street-walker, and allege the excuse about having to live,
+as it is for a poet to prostitute his Muse.)</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Nevertheless, Mackworth, Uncle Bill and I stood together, in the sunny
+street outside, posing for the photographer. And I swelled with
+inordinate pride. Though I knew I was bigger than both of them put
+together, yet, in the eyes of the world, these men were big men&mdash;and
+having my photograph taken with them was an indication to me, that I was
+beginning to come into my own.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps our picture would be reproduced in some Eastern paper or
+magazine ... perhaps even in the <i>Bookman</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Uncle Bill Struthers is an example of what Kansas can do for a man....&quot;
+said Mackworth, when we were alone. &quot;Bill, in the old days, was a sort
+of tramp printer ... clever, but with all his ability in him unexpressed
+... he was always down and out ... and drink! It verged on dipsomania.
+He never held a job long ... though he was a good compositor, he was
+always on the move from place to place....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then he came to Kansas where we have prohibition ... and it has panned
+out in Uncle Bill's case pretty fine.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He came to work for me ... fell by chance into his prose-poetry vein.
+It took; was instantly copied in all the newspapers ... of course, I
+could do it as well, or anyone else with a rhyming turn ... but he was
+the originator ... and people liked his sturdy common sense, his
+wholesome optimism.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now Bill is happy; his stuff's syndicated&mdash;in thousands of households
+wherever English is spoken his name is a familiar word. He gives whole
+communities strength to go on with the common duties of life.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And his drinking?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He has conquered that entirely ... once every so often the fit comes
+over him&mdash;the craving for it&mdash;then, when Uncle Bill turns up missing, as
+the Irishman puts it, none of us worries....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We all know he has hitched up his horse and buggy and is off, driving
+and driving and driving across country, to work the fit out ... no, he
+never touches anything stronger than tobacco and coffee now....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In a few days he comes back ... no one says a word ... we all know ...
+and love and respect him....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He's happy now, is Uncle Bill ... married a young wife ... has a home
+all his own ... money piling up in the bank.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Ally Merton smiled quizzically when I spoke of Uncle Bill to him....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Uncle Bill's a fine, quaint old chap ... whenever he has a tiff
+with his wife&mdash;of course, never anything serious&mdash;he locks himself in
+the kitchen ... closes all the windows ... smokes up terrifically with
+his corncob ... and plays and plays for hours on end ... his Red Seal
+records of classical music of which he is so fond.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This behaviour of his is a well-known joke among us, a joke with his
+wife, to!&quot; ... the speaker paused, to continue&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He has a good library and quite a large knowledge of the English
+poets.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That makes it all the more terrible,&quot; I replied, &quot;for if he wrote his
+verse-prose out of ignorance, he might be somewhat forgiven ... but he
+knows better.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I gave a lecture on Keats to a woman's club. They paid me thirty dollars
+for the lecture....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, you surely made a killing ... those old birds will worship you
+for life,&quot; sniggered Ally.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Mackworth and I had a farewell talk before I returned to Laurel. We
+stood again in front of his office, on the sunny street ... he had come
+out to bid me good-bye.</p>
+
+
+<p>We talked of the folk poetry of America.... Mackworth recited to me
+several of the songs and ballads which I have since seen in Lomax's book
+of Cowboy Songs.... I repeated the tale of how I had collected the
+jail-songs that I subsequently lost while jumping a freight....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There's lots of poetry in American life ... Stephen Foster Collins
+scratched the surface of it ... but he was a song writer....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There's poetry on farm, ranch, in small town, big city, all waiting for
+the transmuting touch of the true singer ... not newspaper rhymes ...
+neither the stock effusions on Night, Love, Death and Immortality
+inserted as tail-piece to stories and articles in magazines....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There's the negro mind ...&mdash;ought to hear them sing, making up songs as
+they load and unload boats along the Mississippi ... nobody's ever dug
+back into the black mind yet&mdash;why don't you do these things?&quot;...</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye, Mister Mackworth&mdash;I've had a fine time!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye, my boy ... be a good boy ... God bless you!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At the Harvey Eating House the manager brought me out a cardboard box
+neatly packed, full of all manner of good things to eat....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye, Ally! thanks for your hospitality, Ally! thank your folks for
+me again!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I will. See you up at Laurel some day soon!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>For Merton was coming to study there, in the fall.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Back in Laurel I resumed my studies again in my intense though haphazard
+way. Doctors' degrees and graduation certificates did not interest me. I
+meditated no career in which such credentials would stand me in stead.
+But the meat and substance of what the world had achieved, written,
+thought&mdash;it was this that I sought to learn and know.</p>
+
+<p>Already the professors were beginning to row about me and report me for
+cutting recitations. On the score of my scholarship and my knowing my
+subject they had no complaint. It was that I disrupted their classes and
+made for lax discipline.</p>
+
+<p>But I seldom cut class deliberately.... I would find myself lost in a
+book back in the &quot;stack&quot; as the big room that housed the tiers of books
+was called. The day would be dusking, the lights of evening glimmering
+below in town, to my bewildered eyes! The day gone, when I had stepped
+back among the books at nine o'clock, intending to while away a half
+hour between classes! (Once it was Sidney's Arcadia that entranced me
+so).</p>
+
+<p>Or I would set out for class ... hatless ... my hair tousled and long
+... in my sandals that were mocked at by my colleagues ... my books
+under arm ... and fall into a reverie that would fetch me up, two miles
+or so away, a-stray up a by-road flanked with a farmhouse and young
+cornfields.</p>
+
+<p>Then it would be too late for my schoolday, and I would make a day of it
+... would perhaps get acquainted with some farmer and his family, have
+dinner and supper at his house, and swap yarns with him and the rest of
+his people.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Jack Travers was as proud of my foot-trip to Osageville as if he had
+accomplished it himself.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The boys out at the Sig-Kappa house expect three or four kegs of beer
+in from Kansas City ... come on out and help us to celebrate.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I don't drink.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Go on! you've told me about the time you did what you called 'slopping
+up' down in Texas!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That was only once ... and since then I've become a physical
+culturist.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, come and join the party anyhow ... it won't hurt you to look on.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My curiosity impelled me to accept the invitation to the &quot;keg party&quot; as
+such a jamboree was known among the students.</p>
+
+<p>The kegs of beer waited us at the station ... disguised with misleading
+labels ... &quot;chemicals, handle with care.&quot; Tenderly we loaded them on the
+waggon that had been hired. The driver sat smiling as the solicitious
+students heaved them up and secured them firmly....</p>
+
+<p>We sat dignified and quiet, till the outskirts of the town were reached
+... then the whip was brought down and away we whooped, bouncing along
+the country road....</p>
+
+<p>We whipped off down the road into the open country with a roar of
+singing and shouting. We sat on the kegs to keep them from jumping out,
+as we urged the driver to ply the whip.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There was a corner in a cornfield that bent inward, hidden from the
+casual passer-by by a grove of Osage orange trees. Here we drew up,
+jumped out, tenderly conveyed the kegs forth ... the ground we had
+chosen, in the corner of the field, was too rocky for planting. It was
+sultry early afternoon, of a late spring day.</p>
+
+<p>The driver was offered a drink.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nope,&quot; he shook his head, grinning wisely, &quot;I'm a teetotaler.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Be back for us at dark,&quot; we shouted, as he jee-d about, heading toward
+town again.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here's to old Gregory and his first drunk!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Tin cups had been produced, and the bung of one of the barrels started
+... the boys lifted their full, foaming cups in unison.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Bottoms up!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I joined in the drinking, despite my previous protestation that I would
+not....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where's the old boy that runs this farm?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All the family's probably in town, this being Saturday afternoon.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Let's whoop 'er up, then!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We sang and shouted at the top of our voices.</p>
+
+<p>The cups had been four times filled.</p>
+
+<p>Though I had poured half of mine on the ground, I already felt dizzy.
+But also a pleasant tingling, a warmth, was slowly increasing in my
+nerves and veins and body ... an increased sense of well-being permeated
+me. I stopped spilling my beer on the ground and drank it eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>Someone proposed races up and down the cornfield. We rolled up our
+trousers, to make it more hilarious, and ran, smashing through the
+tender spring growth ... yelling and shouting....</p>
+
+<p>Then the game unaccountably shifted into seeing who could pull up the
+most corn stalks, beginning at an equal marked-off space out in each row
+and rushing back with torn-up handfuls....</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon dropped toward twilight and everybody was as mellow as the
+departing day&mdash;which went down in a riot of gold....</p>
+
+<p>A great area of the field looked as if it had fallen in the track of a
+victorious army, or had been fallen upon by a cloud of locusts.</p>
+
+<p>A chill came in with twilight, and we built a fire, and danced about it.</p>
+
+<p>I danced and danced ... we all danced and howled in Indian disharmony
+... wailing ... screeching ... falling ... getting up again ... when I
+danced and leaped the world resumed its order ... when I stood still or
+sat down plump, the trees took up the gyrations where I had left off,
+and went about in solemn, ringing circles ... green and graceful minuets
+of nature....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here's to good old Gregory, drink 'er down, drink 'er down!&quot; I heard
+the boys, led by Jack Travers, bray discordantly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Want 'a hear some songs?&quot; I quavered, interrogating.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What kind o' songs?&quot; asked a big, hulking boy that we called 'Black
+Jim,' because of his dark complexion.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Real songs,&quot; I replied, &quot;jail songs, tramp songs, coacaine songs!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>All those Rabelaisan folk-things I had lost while hopping the freight,
+came surging back, each not in fragments, but entire. Drunk, I did then
+what my brain since, intoxicated or sober, cannot do ... I rendered them
+all, one after the other, just as I had copied them down....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;And more! Gregory, more!&quot; the boys kept shouting.</p>
+
+<p>I sat down and began to cry because I had lost the script. It had all
+gone out of my head again as quickly as it had come, so that I could not
+even repeat one they'd asked for.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hell, he's got a crying drunk the first thing!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Cheer up, old scout ... here's another cupful.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No ... I don't want any more ... I'm never going to drink again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And I knocked the cup out of Travers' hand with a violent drunken sweep
+of negation.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No use getting huffy about it,&quot; someone put in belligerently.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If anybody wants to fight,&quot; it was Black Jim, huge and menacing and
+morose, advancing....</p>
+
+<p>Fight! knives! jails!...</p>
+
+<p>Ah, yes, I was still in jail ... and Bud and the burly cotton thief were
+at it....</p>
+
+<p>I staggered to my feet.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wait a minute, Bud ... I'm coming.&quot; I gave a run toward a barrel, sent
+it a violent kick, a succession of kicks....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wait a minute! I'm coming!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So am I!&quot; grinned Black Jim belligerently, thinking I meant him and
+advancing slowly and surely.</p>
+
+<p>The barrel burst asunder, the beer sumped and gurgled about my ankles as
+I stooped and picked up a stave.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The damn fool's ruined a whole keg.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was going to lick everybody in the jail, if I must.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Put that stave down Gregory! put it down, for Christ's sake!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good God! Grab Jim, someone!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't be a fool ... hold Gregory ... he's got the stave!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He'll kill Jim!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Or Jim'll kill him!&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>Then came a shout from nearby.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll heve the law on ye, I will! destroyin' a man's cornfield like a
+lot o' heathens!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Yelling and menacing, the farmer and his big, raw-boned son were upon
+us. They evidently thought that we were all in such a drunken condition
+that they could kick us about as they choose. They had just driven home
+from market-day in Laurel.</p>
+
+<p>Everything was mixed up in my head ... but one thing out-stood: I must
+do my duty by my barrel stave ... as the farmer leaped into the circle
+he did not notice me staggering on the outskirts. I rushed up and let
+him have the barrel stave full across the head.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time Black Jim had turned his attention to the rangy boy,
+felling him at a blow. The boy leaped to his feet and ran away to a safe
+distance.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Paw!&quot; he called out, 'I'll run back to th' house an' 'phone th'
+p'lice.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, boys, we'd better dig out!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We straggled along in silent, rolling clusters, like bees smoked out,
+down the road ... we heard the rumble of a waggon ... when we recognised
+that it was our teetotaler coming back for us....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;God, if my old man hears of this I'm done for at Laurel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So'm I!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If we only lay low and don't go spouting off about it, things will be
+all O.K.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We'll send Travers back with a little collection, to fix it up with the
+farmer, and blarney him out of taking any action.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the morning I had a roaring headache ... as long as I lay quiet there
+was only the slow, deep regular pulse of pain driving through my head,
+but when I made an effort to get up, my eyeballs throbbed with such
+torment that they seemed to be starting out of my head....</p>
+
+<p>I fell asleep in the broad day again, waking to find Jack Travers
+standing by my bed, pale and cynical, dusting off the ashes from the end
+of his eternal cigarette.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How are you feeling this morning?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Rotten,&quot; I answered. I sat up and triphammers of pain renewed their
+pounding inside my racked head.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;thought you would, so's soon as I got up, I came down to see you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;lot of good that'll do.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He whipped a flask out of his hip pocket. &quot;Take a nip of this and it
+will set you right in a jiffy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I'll never drink another drop.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't be a fool. Just a swallow and you'll be on your feet again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I took a big swallow and it braced me up instantly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now, come on with me, Johnnie, I'm taking you in tow for to-day! A
+fellow who's not used to getting drunk always mopes around after a good
+time like we had.... I'm seeing you through <i>the day after</i> ... you're
+going to lunch with me at the frat-house and this afternoon there's a
+sacred concert on in Aeolian Hall that I have two tickets for.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll never drink another drop as long as I live.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's what they all say.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At the Sig Kappas I met Black Jim, the first one, at the door. He shook
+hands shyly, laughingly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You sure fetched that rube a wallop ... he let one croak out of him and
+flopped flat ... it would have made a good comic picture.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Lunch is ready, boys!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was made into a sort of hero&mdash;&quot;a real, honest-to-God guy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You'll have to come to some of our frat jamborees ... Jack'll bring you
+up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We and the Sigma Deltas are Southern fraternities ... we have a hell of
+a sight more fun than the others ... there's the Sigma Pis&mdash;though they
+have some live birds, they're mostly dead ... and the Phi Nus put on too
+much side ... the Beta Omicrons are right there with the goods, though.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I see.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A little freshman made an off-colour remark.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You'd better go and see Jennie!&quot; advised a genial young senior, who,
+for all his youth, was entirely bald.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jennie, who's Jennie?&quot; I asked, curious.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Our frat woman!&quot; answered Travers casually.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Frat woman?&quot; I was groping for further information, puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, often a fraternity keeps a woman for the use of its members ...
+when a kid comes to us so innocent he's annoying, we turn him over to
+Jennie to be made a man of.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This innocence-stuff is over-rated. It's better to send a kid to a
+nice, clean girl that we club in together and keep, and let him learn
+what life is, once and for all, than to have him going off somewhere and
+getting something, or, even worse, horning around and jeopardizing
+decent girls, as he's bound to otherwise.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There were signs of failure at the Farmers' Restaurant. The curious
+farmer-family that ran it were giving it up and moving back into the
+country again. I was soon to have no place to board, where I could
+obtain credit.</p>
+
+<p>But it was summer by now, and I didn't care. I meditated working in the
+wheat harvest.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The editors of the <i>National Magazine</i> had given a new impulsion to my
+song&mdash;and a damned bad one. Already they had accepted and printed
+several of my effusions.</p>
+
+<p>I was to sing for them the life of present-day America, the dignity of
+labour, the worth of the daily, obscure endeavour of the world around
+me.....</p>
+
+<p>In other words, instead of flattering one man of influence and power
+with a dedication, as was done by the poets of the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries, I was to install Demos as my patron, must warp the
+very tissue of my thought to inform the ordinary man that the very fact
+that he wore overalls, acquired callouses on his hands, and was ignorant
+and contemptuous of culture&mdash;somehow made him a demigod! I was
+continually to glorify the stupidity of the people, and always append a
+moral.</p>
+
+<p>For a time I even succeeded in working myself up into a lathering
+frenzy of belief in what I was doing.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The bedrock of life in the Middle West is the wheat harvest.</p>
+
+<p>There was a man named Carl Bonton who owned a threshing machine. I heard
+he was in need of hands for the season.</p>
+
+<p>I nailed my few books up in a drygoods box and left them in care of
+Professor Langworth's housekeeper, the former having gone away to
+Colorado for the summer. As for clothes, tramp-life had taught me the
+superfluity of more than a change of shirts and b.v.d's.</p>
+
+<p>Bonton looked me over.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You don't look strong enough ... the work is mighty hard.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm pretty wiry. Try me out, that is all I ask. If I buckle in, I won't
+mind walking back to town.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Bonton's buckboard carried us the matter of five miles to where his
+machine, separator and cook-shack stood ... lurking behind a grove of
+Osage orange trees.</p>
+
+<p>Bonton had brought two other men besides me, as accessories to his gang.
+We found the gang just tumbling forth from the cook waggon, a small,
+oblong sort of house on wheels ... a long table in it, with benches ...
+much like the lunch waggons seen standing about the streets in cities.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hello, boys, is it dry enough to begin loadin' yet?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Naw; the dew's still as heavy as rain on the bundles.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We'd best wait a little longer, then.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Though it seemed that half the day had wheeled by already, by seven
+o'clock we rode a-field, and the less experienced of us were hard at it,
+tossing up bundles to the loaders, who placed them swiftly here and
+there till the waggons were packed tight and piled high.</p>
+
+<p>I pitched up bundles from below, to an old man of sixty, who wore a
+fringe of grey beard, like a Mennonite.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't see why Bonton ever hired you,&quot; he remarked unsympathetically,
+peering over the top at me from his high-piled load. Several times I had
+missed the top and the bundle of wheat had tumbled back to me again....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I can't be reaching out all the time to catch your forkfuls.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Just give me time till I learn the hang of it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was better with the next load. The waggons came and went one after
+the other ... there was a light space of rest between waggons. It was
+like the rest between the rounds of a prizefight.</p>
+
+<p>From the cloudless sky the sun's heat poured down in floods. A
+monotonous locust was chirr-chirr-chirring from a nearby cottonwood ...
+and in the long hedge of Osage oranges moaned wood doves....</p>
+
+<p>By noon I had achieved a mechanical swing that helped relieve the
+physical strain, a swinging rhythm of the hips and back muscles which
+took the burden off my aching and weaker arms.</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon, late, when the old man drove his waggon up to me for the
+hundredth time it seemed, he smiled quizzically.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, here you are still, but you're too skinny to stand it another day
+... better draw your two bucks from the boss and strike out for Laurel
+again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;that so, Daddy!&quot; and I caught three bundles at once on the tines of
+my fork and flung them clear to the top, and over. They caught the old
+man in the midriff.... I heard a sliding about and swearing ... the next
+moment he was in a heap, on the ground ... on the other side of the
+waggon.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What th' hell did ye do that for?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I looked innocent. &quot;Do what?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;soak me in the guts with three bundles to onct an' knock me off'n the
+top of the load?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ever since morning you've been kidding me and telling me I went too
+slow for you.... I thought I'd speed up a bit.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After surveying me scornfully for a minute, he mutely reascended the
+load, and we finished the job in silence together....</p>
+
+<p>We laboured on after sunset till the full moon swung over the tree-tops.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Usually they did not use the cook-shack much ... it was used while on
+the road from one wheat farm to another. Usually the farmers' wives and
+daughters in the valleys and on the hillsides vied with each other as to
+heaping food before the threshers ... every morning saw mountains of
+pancakes ... bacon ... eggs ... ham ... beefsteak ... we laboured like
+giants, ate like hogs, slept like senseless stocks.</p>
+
+<p>I climbed to my bed in the haymow that first night. It was chill enough
+for the use of my blanket.</p>
+
+<p>I drowsed off, to wake with a jump of all my body from a dream that a
+giant was pressing down on me, that he had my legs doubled up over me
+and was breaking them into my breast....</p>
+
+<p>The cramps....</p>
+
+<p>I stood up and rubbed my legs till the taut tendons softened and
+stretched ... but when I dared bend them the littlest, the tautening and
+drawing twisted them again. And so I suffered half the night through,
+till, in wrathful agony, I stumbled to the watering trough and stood
+naked-white in the flood of the full moon, rubbing the icy water over my
+body....</p>
+
+<p>The dutiful house dogs ... barking furiously, the two of them rushed at
+my apparition as I stood up in the trough and splashed. They embayed me
+as a quarry. I jumped out of the trough and threw stones at them. They
+backed from my attack and bit at the stones. I stepped back in the water
+and rubbed myself more. The dogs squatted on their haunches at a safe
+distance and bayed lugubriously at me and the moon in common.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of the night I lay preternaturally awake, hearing the snoring
+and murmuring of my fellows in the mow ... hearing the horses as they
+crunched and whickered ... all the noises of the outside night came in
+at the open door of the mow. Even the hay began to annoy me as it
+continually rustled in my ear.</p>
+
+<p>I took my blanket and went to lie on the hard ground, under the water
+waggon. There I heard the multitudinous insects of the night, and the
+whippoorwill.</p>
+
+<p>Ordinarily I do not have an appetite for breakfast. That morning I
+thought I would eat little, but I ended by devouring six eggs, two dozen
+pancakes, drinking three cups of coffee ... all of which immediately lay
+like a lump of rock in me....</p>
+
+<p>No, I could not keep it up! It was too much of an effort, such frightful
+labour, for sixteen hours of the day. But I thought of the old man who
+had jeered at me, and I trudged a-field with the rest, my fork slung
+over my shoulder ... sore ... I ached in every muscle ... muscles I
+never knew existed before talked to me with their little voices of
+complaint.</p>
+
+<p>But after the first load I began to be better....</p>
+
+<p>And by noon I was singing and whistling irrepressibly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You'll do ... but you'll have to put a hat on or you'll drop with
+sun-stroke,&quot; Bonton remarked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I never wear a hat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All right. It's your funeral, not mine,&quot; and the boss walked away.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Have a nip and fortify yourself against the sun ... that's the way to
+do,&quot; suggested the old driver. He proffered his whiskey flask.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nope ... I've plenty of water to drink.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The water boy kept trailing about with his brown jug. I tipped it up to
+my mouth and drank and drank ... I drank and drank and worked and worked
+and sweated and sweated ... the top of my head perspired so that it felt
+cool in the highest welter of heat.</p>
+
+<p>In the hot early afternoon I saw the old man lying under a tree.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the matter?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;too hot!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where's your whiskey now?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;'tain't the whiskey. <i>That</i> keeps a fellow up ... it's because I'm
+old, not young, like you,&quot; he contested stubbornly.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>These men that I worked with were unimaginably ignorant. One night we
+held a heated argument as to whether the stars were other worlds and
+suns, or merely lights set in the sky to light the world of men by ...
+which latter, the old man maintained, was the truth, solemnly asserting
+that the Bible said so, and that all other belief was infidelity and
+blasphemy. So it was that, each evening, despite the herculean labour of
+the day, we drew together and debated on every imaginable subject....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>On the third day of my employment by him, Bonton put me at the mouth of
+the separator, where the canvas ran rapidly in, carrying the bundles
+down into the maw of the machine. My job was feeding the bundles to it
+... up in the air in the back the threshed straw was kicked high, and
+the chaff whirled in dusty clouds ... from a spout in the side of the
+separator the threshed grain poured in an unending stream....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was difficult to keep the horses from the straw stacks that the daily
+threshing built up.</p>
+
+<p>Also Bonton speeded so terrifically that much of the grain was shot out
+into the straw....</p>
+
+<p>One night three of the horses made their way to the straw and ate and
+gorged ... in the morning one of them was dead and the other two were
+foundered....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The cramps bothered me no more.</p>
+
+<p>The boss came up to me and slapped me on the back.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;thought you'd sag under,&quot; but, putting his hand on my back, &quot;you've
+got powerful back muscles, though your arms and legs are like beanpoles
+... a fellow never can tell about a man, till he's tried out.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>After nearly a month of the work, Bonton began acting glum toward me....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Gregory, I'm going to pay you off to-day!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;pay me off to-day?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the matter? ain't I working hard enough?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've no fault to find with your work ... you're a better worker than
+most of the men ... in fact they complain that you set too hard a pace
+at the separator....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But you argue too much ... keep the men up o' nights debating about
+things they never even considered before. And it upsets them so, what
+with the arguing and the sleep they lose, that they ain't up to the
+notch, next day.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, that's the only fault I have to find in you,&quot; he continued, as he
+counted out sixty dollars into my hand ... &quot;but,&quot; and he walked with me,
+disquieted to the road, &quot;but if you'll wait around till this afternoon,
+I'll drive you back to town.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No. It's not over ten miles. I'll walk.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was glad to be paid off. I was missing my books and my leisure,
+longing for the cool alcoves of books in the university &quot;stack.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You understand me, I hope ... business is business and work is work.
+I've found it doesn't do to argue ... only stirs up trouble....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I hope you don't think all this debating will end after you're gone?...
+Oh, no,&mdash;for the next week or so the boys will continue shooting their
+mouths off ... the Baptist will fight the Methodist, and both will join
+against the Seventh Day Adventist ... and the one Catholic will be
+assailed by all hands....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Before you came, no one knew what the other fellow believed, and no
+one cared ... but now you've started something.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm sorry, Mr. Bonton.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It can't be helped now ... don't fail to let me know in what magazines
+your poems on threshing and the harvest will appear.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I trudged townward, light-hearted ... a poem began to come to me before
+I had gone a mile ... at intervals I sat down and wrote a few lines....</p>
+
+<p>That fall the <i>National Magazine</i> printed <i>The Threshers</i> and <i>The
+Harvest</i> and <i>The Cook-Shack</i>, three poems, the fruit of that work. All
+three written on the road as I walked back to town ... and all three
+didactic and ridiculous in their praise of the worker.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Frank Randall, tinsmith and plumber, who ran his shop on the main
+street, rented me a back room over his store, for two dollars a week. It
+had been occupied by big Sam, the negro shoemaker, and it was neither in
+order, nor did it smell very sweet. But I cleaned and aired it, and
+sprinkled disinfectant about that I had bought at the drug store.</p>
+
+<p>Then I fetched my books down from Langworth's in a wheelbarrow, and I
+set them up in several neat rows.</p>
+
+<p>I lay back on my cot and looked at them in satisfaction and happiness. I
+had enough for food and lodging for nearly three months, if I cooked for
+myself. Two dollars a week for food and two for rent, and I'd do my own
+washing ... say five a week at the most! that would mean twelve weeks of
+doing nothing but reading and writing and studying.</p>
+
+<p>The first day of my sojourn over the tinsmith's shop, Sunday, I drew
+down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks
+I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive
+study of just how Heine had &quot;swung&quot; the lyric form to such conciseness,
+such effectiveness of epigrammatic expression.</p>
+
+<p>I opened the <i>Buch der Lieder</i> at the poem in his preface&mdash;the song of
+the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the
+poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his
+soul with kisses. And the nightingale was singing....</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;O, sh&ouml;ne Sphinx, O l&ouml;se mir</div>
+<div>Das R&auml;tsel, das wunderbare!</div>
+<div>Ich hab' dar&uuml;ber nachgedacht</div>
+<div>Schon manche tausand Yahre.&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Monday morning ... by six or seven o'clock a rustling below, in the
+shop, by eight, the day's work in full blast ... a terrific pounding and
+hammering on sheets of tin and pieces of pipe. The uproar threw my mind
+off my poetry.</p>
+
+<p>I went down to speak with Randall about it....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Frank, I can't stand this, I must leave.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nonsense; stay; you'll get used to it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I must go if the noise keeps up continually like this.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, it won't ... we have a special job to finish ... tin-roofing ...
+but if you want a place to stay where it is quiet, I have a camp, not
+far out, on the Ossawatomie, where I go for week-ends....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where is it? That would be fine. I'd like to stay there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You know where old Farmer Brown lives, by the abandoned church, just
+outside of Perthville?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes. That's seven miles out on the Osageville road.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Take the first turn to the right from his house, going west. It's an
+unused bye-road and it runs plumb into my cabin. There's a frying pan
+there ... and some flour ... and bacon ... tell you what ... it's been
+broken into several times. I'll consider it worth while if you go and
+live there, and I get no rent from you for it nor the room upstairs ...
+you'll be alone, God knows&mdash;excepting Saturdays and Sundays.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I packed my Heine in a bundle ... with my Bible and my Josephus in the
+Greek, along with Whiston's English version ... and I included a bundle
+of books on New Testament times that made me groan under their weight.
+For I planned to begin a four-act play on Judas, and must study for
+writing that, as well as learn the &quot;how&quot; of the lyric....</p>
+
+<p>The stupendousness of the silence of absolute solitude! At first the
+thoughts run on with a tangle and jangle, a turmoil almost of madness
+... then they quiet down into the peace that only a hermitage gives and
+the objects of life are seen in their true relativity and perspective.</p>
+
+<p>My diet was one of sow-belly, bread, and coffee, and what fish I caught
+in the sluggish, muddy stream....</p>
+
+<p>Saturday, toward sunset, I heard a whooping in the woods. It was Randall
+coming with a few friends for his week-end, as he had warned. With him,
+his wild brother, Jack; and Bill, his assistant plumber and
+man-about-shop.</p>
+
+<p>The drinking had begun before they were in sight of the shack. And it
+was kept up till late Sunday night ... around a big fire in a cleared
+space they sang and gambled and drank.</p>
+
+<p>Randall served great hilarity to the party by trying to breed his gelded
+horse to his mare ... the mare kicked and squealed, indignant at the
+cheat, looking back, flattening her ears, and showing the vicious whites
+of her eyes. Several times the infuriated beast's heels whished an inch
+or so from Randall's head, as he forced the gelding to advance and
+mount. We rolled on the grass, laughing ... myself included.</p>
+
+<p>Then all stripped to the buff for a swim in the stream ... a treacherous
+place where the bottom was at times but two or three feet from the
+surface, and the mud, soft and semi-liquid for five feet more. And there
+were snags, and broken beer and whiskey bottles all over the bottom
+where it was decent and gravelly.</p>
+
+<p>Bill, with his solemn dundreary whiskers, leaped high in the air like a
+frog, kicking his legs and yelling drunkenly as he took off.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look out, Bill,&quot; I shouted, &quot;it's nothing but mud there!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But Bill didn't heed me. He hit with a swish and a thud instead of a
+splash, and didn't come up.</p>
+
+<p>We put out in our rickety boat.</p>
+
+<p>By that luck that favours the drunkard and fool, we laid hold on Bill's
+feet sticking out, just under the water. We tugged mightily and brought
+him forth, turned into a black man by the ooze ... otherwise, unharmed.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was not till two hours after midnight that they whisked away townward
+and left me alone, so that the graciousness of silence could enfold me
+again. I looked forward to a week's peace, before they descended on the
+camp again. But I had a premonition that there was to be no peace for me
+there. For Randall had said to me before he drove away....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You know Pete Willets? Well, he's liable to come here for a few days,
+during the week ... a nice quiet fellow though ... won't disturb you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The thought of another visitor did disturb me. Though I knew Pete
+Willets as a quiet, gentle shoemaker in whom seemed no guile, I wanted
+to be alone to think and read and write.</p>
+
+<p>Wednesday noon Pete Willets drove up, accompanied by a grubby Woman whom
+at first glance I did not relish.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hello, Johnnie, Frank said we could use the shack for a day or two.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Forever, as far as I'm concerned,&quot; I answered, beginning to tie up my
+books in a huge bundle as big as a peddler's pack, and as heavy.</p>
+
+<p>Impatiently tying the horse to a post, they were in the shack and
+immediately prone on my bunk.</p>
+
+<p>As I shouldered my load their murmuring voices full of amorous desire
+stung me like a gadfly. I hurried off toward Laurel, angry at life.</p>
+
+<p>I explained to Randall why I had left his camp so soon. He was gravely
+concerned.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I didn't tell Willets he could have my shack to take Gracie there. This
+is a bit too thick.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Who's Gracie?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;a bad lot ... a girl that's been on the turf since she was in knee
+skirts&mdash;as long as I've known her. He loves her. She can twist him
+around her little finger. She's going to get him into something bad some
+day. He'll do anything she wants. And she's capable of putting him up to
+anything.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Willets is weak, when it comes to women ... don't drink much ... a hard
+worker ... everybody likes him....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Did you ever notice his limp ... only slight ... scarcely noticeable,
+isn't it?... he's a corking mechanic as well as shoemaker ... mighty
+clever ... now for instance, you wouldn't ever have known, unless I told
+you, that his left leg is made of wood?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I wouldn't even suspect it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;lost his left leg when he was a brakeman ... made that wooden leg for
+himself ... it works so smoothly that he's thinking of taking out a
+patent on it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why does a woman take to a man with a wooden leg?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;makes good money ... and he has a way about him with the girls ...
+he goes about so quietly. He's so gentle and considerate ... acts, but
+doesn't say much, you know! that's what they like!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;damned sorry for his wife and two kids, though; when Willets comes to
+town again I'm not going to let him have my shack any more ... might be
+some trouble ... divorce or something.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There was trouble and very shortly. In a month Willets had poisoned his
+wife ... with rough-on-rats ... and the quiet little shoemaker went to
+the penitentiary for life ... a life-time of shoe-making.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I rented a tent and pitched it on an island in the middle of the Kaw, or
+Kansas River. There I was alone. I rented a boat to take out my
+possessions.</p>
+
+<p>I lived naked till I grew brown all over. I studied and read and wrote
+to my full desire, there in the grateful silence of trees and waters&mdash;a
+solitude broken only by an occasional train streaming its white trail of
+smoke as it whistled and raced round the curve of shining track toward
+Laurel.</p>
+
+<p>I read Josephus entirely through, haltingly, line by line, in the Greek.
+I read all the books the &quot;stack&quot; at the university could afford me on
+New Testament life and times, in preparation for my play on Judas.</p>
+
+<p>My only companions were a flock of tiny mud-hens with their dainty proud
+little rooster. I heard them talking in bird-language, saw them paddling
+with diminutive gravity up and down in the mud, on the island mud-bank
+just beneath the high place on which my tent was pitched.</p>
+
+<p>When I grew lonesome for company, human company, I swam ashore, my
+clothes tied on top of my head to keep them dry, and, dressing, walked
+into Laurel. Where I lounged about for the day on the streets, or in the
+stores, or in the livery stables ... I knew everybody and everybody knew
+me, and we had some fine times, talking.</p>
+
+<p>I had access to the local Carnegie Library as well as to the university
+&quot;stack&quot;.</p>
+
+<p>My food did not cost me above a dollar a week. For I went on a whole
+wheat diet, and threw my frying pan away.</p>
+
+<p>I was the tramp, as ever, only I was stationary.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The opening days of the fall term came round again. Summer weather, hot
+and belated, lingered on. I was now more native to the river than to
+life in a four-walled room and on street pavements.</p>
+
+<p>I debated seriously whether I should return to classes, or just keep on
+studying as I was, staying in my tent, and taking books out at the two
+libraries. I knew that they'd allow me to continue drawing out books at
+the university, even though I attended classes no longer&mdash;Professor
+Langworth would see to that.</p>
+
+<p>Also, most of the professors would whisper &quot;good riddance&quot; to
+themselves. I camped at their gates too closely with questions. I never
+accepted anything as granted. The &quot;good sports&quot; among them welcomed this
+attitude of mine, especially the younger bunch of them&mdash;who several
+times invited me to affairs of theirs, behind closed blinds, where good
+wine was poured, and we enjoyed fine times together....</p>
+
+<p>I was invited on condition that I would not let the student-body know of
+these <i>sub rosa fiestas</i>. Which were dignified and unblameworthy ...
+only, wine and beer went around till a human mellowness and
+conversational glow was reached.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>A trifling incident renewed my resolve to continue as a student
+regularly enrolled....</p>
+
+<p>Though considered a freak and nut, I was generally liked among the
+students, and liked most of them in turn....</p>
+
+<p>They used frequently to say&mdash;&quot;'s too bad Johnnie Gregory won't act like
+the rest of the world, he's such a likeable chap....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As the boys came back to school I went about renewing acquaintances.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon of the day of the &quot;trifling incident&quot; I was returning from
+a long visit to Jack Travers and the Sig-Kappas.</p>
+
+<p>It was about ten o'clock when I reached the river-bank opposite my
+island. There was a brilliant moon up. If daylight could be
+silver-coloured it was day.</p>
+
+<p>I stood naked on the water's edge, ready to wade out for my swim back to
+my island. My clothes were trussed securely, for dryness, on my head.</p>
+
+<p>A rustling, a slight clearing of the throat, halted me.</p>
+
+<p>I glanced through a vista of bushes.</p>
+
+<p>There sat a girl in the full moonlight. She had a light easel before
+her. She was trying to paint, evidently, the effects of the moon on the
+landscape and the river. Painters have since told me that it is
+impossible to do that. It is too dark to see the colours. Nevertheless
+the girl was trying.</p>
+
+<p>I stopped statue-still to find if I had been seen. When assured that I
+had not, I slowly squatted down, and, naked as I was, crept closer,
+hiding behind a screen of bushes. And I fastened my eyes on her, and
+forgot who I was. For the moon made her appear almost as plain as day.
+And she was very beautiful. And I was caught in a sudden trap of love
+again.</p>
+
+<p>Here, I held no doubt, was my Ideal. I could not distinguish the colour
+of her hair. But she was maiden and slenderly wonderful.</p>
+
+<p>I lay flat, hoping that she would not hear my breath as she calmly
+painted. My heart beat so hard it seemed to shake the ground beneath me.</p>
+
+<p>She, too, was original, what the world would call &quot;eccentric&quot; ... out
+here, three miles from town, with the hours verging toward midnight ...
+seated on the river bank, trying to capture the glory of the moon on
+canvas.</p>
+
+<p>But, unusual as her action was, there was nothing mad about her mode of
+dressing ... her white middy blouse, edged with blue ... her flowing tie
+... her dainty, blue serge skirt and dainty shoes.</p>
+
+<p>I lay there, happy in being near her, the unknown.</p>
+
+<p>After a long time she rose ... gave a sigh ... brushed her hand over her
+hair.</p>
+
+<p>Fascination held me close as she stooped over ... began leisurely to
+untie her shoes ... set them, removed, aside, toe to toe and heel to
+heel, equal, as if for mathematical exactness ... paused a moment ...
+lifted her skirts, drew off her garters with a circular downward sweep
+... drew down her stockings....</p>
+
+<p>She sat with her stockings off, stuffed into her shoes,&mdash;her skirt up to
+her hips, gazing meditatively at her naked legs held straight before
+her.</p>
+
+<p>I was close enough to hear her breathing&mdash;or so keen in my aroused
+senses that I thought I heard it. She wiggled her toes to herself as she
+meditated.</p>
+
+<p>She paused as if hesitating to go on with her undressing. A twig
+snapped. She came to her knees and looked about, startled, then
+subsided again, tranquil and sure of her solitude.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>She stood in the moonlight, naked. My gaze grew fat with pleasure as it
+fed on her nakedness....</p>
+
+<p>She stepped down to the water's edge, dabbling her outstretched toes in
+the flow.</p>
+
+<p>Ankle-deep, she stood and stooped. She scooped up water and dashed it
+over her breasts. She rose erect a moment and gazed idly about.</p>
+
+<p>Then, binding her hair in a careful knot, she went in with a plunge and
+I saw that she could swim well.</p>
+
+<p>My heart shook and thundered so that its pulse pervaded all my body with
+its violence. I held in curb a mad, almost irresistible impulse to rush
+in after her, crying out that I was a poet ... that this was the true
+romance ... that we must throw aside the conventions ... that no one
+would ever know.</p>
+
+<p>Then I thought of my skinniness and ugliness in comparison with her
+slight but perfect beauty. And I knew that it would repel her. And I
+held still in utter shame, not being good-looking enough to join her in
+the river.</p>
+
+<p>I lay prone, almost fainting, dizzy, not having the strength to creep
+away, as I now considered I must do.</p>
+
+<p>I saw her return and watched her as she slowly resumed her clothes,
+piece by leisurely piece. She folded her camp stool, packed her small
+easel in a case and started off toward town.</p>
+
+<p>Shouldn't I now intercept her, explain who I was, and offer to escort
+her along the tracks back to town? For it was surely dangerous for her
+to come so far into the night, alone. There were tramps ... and the
+stray criminal negro from the Bottoms ... God knows what else, in her
+path!</p>
+
+<p>But my timidity let her pass on alone.</p>
+
+<p>I needed the coolness of the water about me, as I swam out to my tent. I
+forgot my clothes on my head and they soused in the water as I swam. All
+night I tossed, sleepless. I lay delirious with remembrance of her ...
+imagined myself with her as I lay there, and whispered terms of love and
+endearment into the dark.</p>
+
+<p>Who was she? One thing I knew&mdash;she must be a student, and an art
+student under Professor Grant in the Fine Arts Department.</p>
+
+<p>This was the incident that decided me to enroll again as regular
+student, and to fold my tent, leave my solitary island, and return to
+town ... where I sought out Frank Randall, and he again offered me the
+room I had given up. And he gave me work as his bookkeeper, several
+hours of the day ... which work I undertook to perform in return for my
+room. In addition he gave me two dollars a week extra.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One afternoon soon after my enrollment, I met Ally Merton coming down
+hill.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, here I am, as I said I'd be,&quot; said he.</p>
+
+<p>He was, as usual, dressed to perfection&mdash;not a minute ahead of the
+style, not a minute behind ... gentle-voiced and deferential, learning
+to be everywhere without being noticed anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I see you're still eccentric in dress ... sandals ... shirt open at the
+neck ... denim too ... cheap brown socks ... corduroys....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, but look,&quot; I jested in reply, &quot;I wear a tie ... and the ends pull
+exactly even. That's the one thing you taught me about correct dressing
+that I'll never forget.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If I could only persuade you, Johnnie, of the importance of little
+things, of putting one's best foot forward ... of personal appearance
+... why create an initial prejudice in the minds of people you meet,
+that you'll afterward have to waste valuable time in trying to remove?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where are you putting up, Ally?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;At the Phi Nus&quot; (the bunch that went in the most for style and society)
+&quot;I'm a Phi Nu, keep in touch with me, Johnnie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Keep in touch with me,&quot; was Merton's stock phrase....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mr. Mackworth asked me particularly to look you up, and 'take care of'
+you ... you made a hit with him ... but he's very much concerned about
+you&mdash;thinks you're too wild and erratic.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The tinshop was a noisy place, as I have said before. It was as
+uproarious as a boiler factory. All day long there was hammering,
+banging, and pounding below ... but I was growing used to it ... as you
+do to everything which must be.</p>
+
+<p>Keeping Randall's books occupied a couple of hours each morning or
+afternoon, whenever I chose. All the rest of the day I had free....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I had almost come to the conclusion that the girl I had seen in the
+moonlight had been an apparition conjured up by my own imagination, when
+I glimpsed her, one afternoon, walking toward Hewitt Hall, where the art
+classes held session, in the upper rooms. I followed the girl, a long
+way behind. I saw her go in through the door to a class where already a
+group of students sat about with easels, painting from a girl-model ...
+fully clothed ... for painting from the nude was not allowed. They had
+threshed that proposition out long before, Professor Grant explained to
+me, once,&mdash;and the faculty had decided, in solemn conclave, that the
+farmers throughout the state were not yet prepared for that step....</p>
+
+<p>I sought Grant's friendship. He had studied in the Julian Academy at
+Paris, in his youth. He invited me to his house for tea, often; where I
+met many of his students, but never, as I had hoped, the girl of the
+moonlight....</p>
+
+<p>But by careful and guarded inquiry I found out who she was ... a girl
+from the central portion of the state, named Vanna Andrews.</p>
+
+<p>When Grant asked me to pose for his class, sandals, open shirt,
+corduroys, and all ... I agreed ... almost too eagerly ... he would pay
+me twenty-five cents an hour.</p>
+
+<p>My first day Vanna was not there. On the second, she came ... late ...
+her tiny, white face, crowned with its dark head of hair ... &quot;a star in
+a jet-black cloud,&quot; I phrased, to myself. She sailed straight in like a
+ship.</p>
+
+<p>When she had settled herself,&mdash;beginning to draw, she appraised me
+coolly, impartially, for a moment ... took my dimensions for her paper,
+pencil held at arm's length....</p>
+
+<p>Slowly, though I fought it back, a red wave of confusion surged over my
+face and neck. I turned as red as ochre. I grew warm with perspiration
+of embarrassment. I gazed fixedly out through the window....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're getting out of position,&quot; warned Professor Grant.</p>
+
+<p>Vanna still observed me with steadfast, large, blue eyes. She started
+her sketch with a few, first, swift lines.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Excuse me,&quot; I rose, &quot;I feel rather ill.&quot; I posed, &quot;I've been up all
+night drinking strong coffee and writing poems,&quot; I continued, my voice
+rising in insincere, noisy falsetto.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Step down a minute and rest, then, Mr. Gregory,&quot; advised Professor
+Grant, puzzled, a grimace of distaste on his face.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Isn't he silly,&quot; I overheard a girl student whisper to a loud-dressed
+boy, whose easiness of manner with the female students I hated and
+envied him for....</p>
+
+<p>I resumed my pose. I blushed no more. I endured the cool, level,
+impersonal glances of the girl I had fallen in love with....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The model's a little wooden, don't you think, professor?&quot; she observed,
+to tease me, perhaps. She could not help but sense the cause of my
+agitation. But then she was used to creating a stir among men. Her
+beauty perturbed almost the entire male student body.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I noticed that her particular chum was a very homely girl. I straightway
+found charms in this girl that no one had ever found before. And Alice
+and I became friends. And, while posing, I came before the time, because
+she, I discovered, was always beforehand, touching up her work.</p>
+
+<p>Alice was a stupid, clumsy girl, but she adored Vanna and liked nothing
+better than to talk about her chum and room-mate. She took care of Vanna
+as one would take care of a helpless baby.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Vanna is a genius, if there ever was one ... she doesn't know her hands
+from her feet in practical affairs ... but she's wonderful ... all the
+boys,&quot; and Alice sighed with as much envy as her nature would
+allow&mdash;&quot;all the boys are just crazy about her ... but she isn't in love
+with any of them!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My heart gave a great bound of hope at these last words.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Professor Grant's students&mdash;about two-thirds of them&mdash;have enrolled in
+his classes, because she's there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And then I went cold with jealousy and with despair ... one so popular
+could never <i>see</i> me ... if it were only later, when my fame as a poet
+had come!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Vanna has to be waited on hand and foot. I don't mind though,&quot;
+continued Alice, &quot;I hang up her clothes for her ... make her bed ...
+sweep and dust our rooms ... it makes me happy to wait on anything so
+beautiful!&quot; and the face of the homely girl glowed with joy....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was poor and miserable. I bent my head forward, forgetful of my
+determination to walk erect and proud, with a pride I did not possess.</p>
+
+<p>Langworth was coming behind me. He slapped me on the back. I whirled,
+full of resentment. But changed the look to a smile when I perceived who
+it was....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Johnnie, what's the matter? you're walking like an old man. Brace
+up. Is anything wrong?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I was just thinking.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The first cold blasts of winter howled down upon us. No snow yet, but
+winds that rushed about the buildings on the hill, full of icy rain, and
+with a pushing strength like the shoulders of invisible giants out of
+the fourth dimension ... we men kept on the sidewalks when we could ...
+but the winds blew the girls off into the half-hardened mud, and, at
+times, were so violent, that the girls could not extricate themselves,
+but they stood still, waiting for help, their skirts whirling up into
+their very faces.</p>
+
+<p>It was what the boys called &quot;a sight for sore eyes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They stood in droves, in the sheltered entrances of the halls, and
+occasionally darted out by ones and twos and threes to rescue distressed
+co-eds.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Down in the room over the tin and plumbing shop in which I lived, I
+found it cold indeed. I could afford no heat ... and, believing in
+windows open, knew every searching drop in the barometer.</p>
+
+<p>But never in my life was I happier, despite my secretly cherished love
+for Vanna. For I assured myself in my heart of certain future fame, the
+fame I had dreamed of since childhood. And I wore every hardship as an
+adornment, conscious of the greatness of my cause.</p>
+
+<p>Isolation; half-starvation; cold; inadequate clothing;&mdash;all counted for
+the glory of poetry, as martyrs had accepted persecution and suffering
+for the glory of God.</p>
+
+<p>My two hours of daily work irked me. I wanted the time for my writing
+and studying ... but I still continued living above the din of the shop
+that I had grown accustomed to, by this time.</p>
+
+<p>Rarely, when the nights were so subarctic as to be almost unbearable,
+did I slip down through the skylight and seek out the comparative warmth
+of the shop ... and there, on the platform where the desk stood so that
+it could overlook all the store, I wrote and studied.</p>
+
+<p>But Randall said this worried the night watchman too much, my appearing
+and disappearing, all hours of the night. He didn't relish coming every
+time to see if the store was being burglarised.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The outside world was beginning to notice me. My poems, two of which I
+had sold to the <i>Century</i>, two to <i>Everybody's</i>, and a score to the
+<i>Independent</i>, were, as soon as they appeared in those magazines,
+immediately copied by the Kansas newspapers. And the Kansas City <i>Star</i>
+featured a story of me at Laurel, playing up my freaks and oddities ...
+but accompanied by a flattering picture that &quot;Con&quot; Cummins, our college
+photographer, had taken.</p>
+
+<p>Also I was receiving occasional letters from strangers who had read my
+poems. But they were mostly letters from cranks ... or from girls very,
+very young and sentimental, or on the verge of old-maidhood, who were
+casting about for some escape from the narrow daily life that environed
+them....</p>
+
+<p>But one morning a letter came to me so scrawlingly addressed that I
+marvelled at the ability of the postal authorities in deciphering it.
+The writer of it hailed me as a poet of great achievement already, but
+of much greater future promise.... Mr. Lephil, editor of the <i>National
+Magazine</i>, for whom he was writing a serial, had showed him some of my
+verse, and he must hasten to encourage me ... I puzzled long over the
+writer's signature.... It could not be possible! but it seemed to be
+inscribed with the name of a novelist famous for his investigations of
+capitalistic abuses of the people ... the author of the sensational
+novel, <i>The Slaughter House</i>, which was said to out-Zola Zola&mdash;Penton
+Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>I hurried downstairs from my attic, to intercept some friend who would
+confirm me in my interpretation of the signature.</p>
+
+<p>It was Travers I ran into. I showed the letter to him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;By Jove! It <i>is</i> Baxter!&quot; he cried.</p>
+
+<p>He was as overwhelmed as I had been.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say, Johnnie, you must really amount to something, with all these
+people back East paying such attention to you ... come on into Kuhlman's
+and have a &quot;coke&quot; with me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In Kuhlman's, the college foregathering place, the ice cream and
+refreshment parlour of the town, we joined with Jimmy Thompson, our
+famous football quarterback. The room was full of students eating ice
+cream and drinking coco-cola and ice cream sodas.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say, let me print this.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, but you may put an item in the <i>Laurelian</i>, if you want to.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I must write a story for the <i>Star</i> about it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It would have pleased my vanity to have had Jack put the story in the
+papers, but I was afraid of offending Baxter ... afterward I learned
+that it would not have offended him ... he had the vanity of a child, as
+well as I.</p>
+
+<p>I answered his letter promptly, in terms of what might have seemed, to
+the outside eye, excessive adulation. But Penton Baxter was to me a
+great genius ... and nothing I could have written in his praise would
+have overweighed the debt I owed him for that fine letter of
+encouragement.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>So at last I was reaping the fruits of my years of struggle for the
+poetic ideal&mdash;my years of poverty and suffering.</p>
+
+<p>A belated student at college, twenty-five years of age ... a tramp for
+the sake of my art ... as I sat in my cold room ... propped up by my one
+overturned chair ... in bed ... betaking myself there to keep from
+freezing while I wrote and dreamed and read and studied,&mdash;I burst out
+singing some of my own verses, making the tune to the lines as I went
+along.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;John Gregory, you are a great man, and some day all the world shall
+know and acknowledge it!&quot; I said over and over again to myself....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And now, Vanna, my love, my darling,&quot; I cried aloud, so that if anyone
+overheard, the auditor would think I was going mad, &quot;now, Vanna, you
+shall see ... in a year I shall have my first book of poetry out ... and
+fame and money for royalties will be mine ... then I will dare speak to
+you boldly of my love for you ... and you will be glad and proud of it
+... and be happy to marry me and be my wife!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the meantime Vanna Andrews was daily seen driving down the streets
+with Billy Conway, whose father was Governor of a Western State ... as I
+saw her going by in her fragile beauty, I bowed my head to her, and in
+return came a slight nod of mere, passing acquaintanceship.</p>
+
+<p>I made friends with Billy, as I had done with Vanna's homely room-mate
+... who thought I was becoming interested in her&mdash;because I often spoke
+in Vanna's dispraise, to throw her off the track, and to encourage her
+to speak at greater length of the woman I loved and worshipped from
+a-far.</p>
+
+<p>Now I sought through Billy Conway a nearer opportunity for her favour.
+He approached me one day while we were out on the football field,
+practicing formations. I was on the scrub team&mdash;whose duty it was to
+help knock the big team into shape.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, you know Vanna, don't you?... Vanna Andrews, the art student.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Slightly,&quot; I concealed, thanking God I hadn't blushed straightway at
+the mention of her name ... &quot;&mdash;met her when I posed for Professor
+Grant's classes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She's a beaut, ain't she?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Everybody thinks so.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She'd be perfect, if she weren't so thin,&quot; I answered, almost
+smothering from the thumping of my heart.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've often wondered what makes you so cold toward the girls ... when
+you write poetry ... poets are supposed to be romantic.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We have a good imagination.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;wish you'd exercise your imagination a little for me ... I'd pay you
+for it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For what?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;writing poems on Vanna, for me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My heart gave a wild jump of joy at the opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll think it over. But if I do so, I won't take anything for it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Billy shook my hand fervently.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're all right, Gregory ... it'll help me a lot ... I've got a case
+on her, I'll admit.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on!&quot; roared Coach Shaughnessy, &quot;get on the job.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He began calling letters and numbers for a play.</p>
+
+<p>And just for a joke, he took &quot;Barrel&quot; Way, the two hundred pound
+fullback, aside, and &quot;Rock-crusher&quot; Morton ... he whispered them, I
+afterward learned, to give me rough stuff, go through me with a bang....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Rock-crusher&quot; took the ball, with &quot;Barrel&quot; for interference ... they
+came flashing my way.</p>
+
+<p>I was so frenzied with joy over the prospect of getting my poems through
+to Vanna, even if it was in another man's behalf, that I flung myself
+forward and brought both stars down with only a yard gained.</p>
+
+<p>Shaughnessy gave a whoop of joyous amazement and the other boys shouted,
+and kidded &quot;Barrel&quot; and &quot;Rock-crusher,&quot; the latter of whom won his
+nickname from the gentle way he had of hitting his antagonists with his
+hard knees as he ran into them, and bowling them over ... he was a
+recruit from the hurdles, who ran &quot;high.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Shaughnessy came over to me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Gregory, I want to say right here, I wish you took enough studies, and
+you could make sub on the big team right off. You're skinny, but you've
+got the mettle I wish all my boys had.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>No sooner was I out of my football clothes than I hurried to Kuhlman's,
+drank three coco-colas to stimulate me, and went to my room, to write my
+first poem for Vanna....</p>
+
+<p>Nearly every day Billy received a poem from me. Henceforth, when I
+passed Vanna, I received a gentle, appreciative smile ... but I was too
+timid even to speak to her ... and too self-conscious of my clothes,
+which were worn and frayed....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There were a few negro students at Laurel. One of them, a girl named
+Matty Smith, approached me in the library one day, introduced herself as
+one of the chairmen of the entertainment committee of the First African
+Methodist Church, and asked me if I would come and give them a talk the
+following Saturday night....</p>
+
+<p>The night came ... I found myself on the platform with the preacher by
+my side. They had seated me in the chair of honour.</p>
+
+<p>First the congregation prayed and sang ... such singing, so clear and
+soaring and melodious. It rocked the very church, burst out through the
+windows in great surges of melody.</p>
+
+<p>I was introduced as their friend, as the coloured man's friend.</p>
+
+<p>I spoke. I read my poems simply and unaffectedly.</p>
+
+<p>Afterward I shook hands all round.</p>
+
+<p>Matty Smith, the negro girl, as black as soot, and thoroughly African,
+stood by me as introducer. If I had shut my eyes, her manner of speech
+might not have been told from that of any cultured white woman's. She
+was as refined and sensitive a human being as I have ever met.</p>
+
+<p>As I walked back to my attic over the plumber shop, it was with head
+erect and heaving chest. I deemed myself a champion of the negro race. I
+was almost putting myself alongside of Lincoln and John Brown.</p>
+
+<p>Their reason for inviting me was that I had had a scathing poem printed,
+in the New York <i>Independent</i>, on the lynching of a negro in Lincoln's
+home State of Illinois.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Within two days of my talk at the First Methodist African Church, I met
+simultaneously in front of the library, two women, each going in
+opposite directions....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good afternoon, Mr. Gregory!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It was Matty Smith. She was hesitating for a cue from me. She wished to
+stop and thank me again for my speaking.</p>
+
+<p>But from the other side Vanna Andrews was passing.</p>
+
+<p>I ignored Matty with a face like a stone wall.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good afternoon!&quot; I bowed to Vanna ... who ignored me ... perhaps not
+seeing me.</p>
+
+<p>The fearful, hurt look in the negro girl's eyes made me so ashamed of
+myself that I wanted to run away and hide forever somewhere.</p>
+
+<p>That night I was so covered with shame over what I had done to another
+human soul, a soul perhaps as proud and fine as any in Laurel, that it
+was not till dawn that sleep visited me....</p>
+
+<p>So I was just as rotten, just as snobbish, just as fearful of the herd,
+as were these other human beings whom I made fun of as the bourgeoisie.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Speaking with Riley, one of the English professors, about the mixture of
+colours on the hill....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I must confess,&quot; he admitted sincerely, &quot;that I feel awkward indeed
+when a negro student walks by my side ... even for a few steps....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Coach Shaughnessy declared himself boldly&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll admit frankly to you, Gregory, but don't, of course, repeat what
+I say&mdash;that I'll never let a nigger play on the football team ... when
+they sweat they stink too badly ... no, sir, John Brown's State or not,
+the negro was never meant to mix with the white on terms of equality.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was mainly out of consideration for Langworth, and desire to please
+him, that I now joined the Unitarian Church, of which all the old
+settlers of Laurel were members. This included a testy old gentleman
+named Colonel Saunders, who had been one of John Brown's company, had
+quarrelled with him,&mdash;and who now, every year, maintained, at the annual
+meeting of old settlers, that Brown had been a rogue and murderer ... a
+mad man, going about cutting up whole families with corn knives....</p>
+
+<p>At this juncture in his speech, which was made undeviatingly every year,
+a sentimental woman would rise and cry out&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;John Brown, God bless him, whatever you say, Colonel Saunders, his soul
+still goes marching on&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I grant that, madam&mdash;that his soul still goes marching on&mdash;I <i>never</i>
+contested that&mdash;but <i>where</i> does it go marching on!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then the yearly riot of protests and angry disputation would wake.</p>
+
+<p>And every spring, in anticipation of this m&ecirc;l&eacute;e, reporters from the
+Kansas City papers were sent to cover the story of the proceedings of
+the Old Settlers' Society.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Bob Fitzsimmons stopped off at our town, with his show. Though I
+couldn't afford to attend the performance, I did race down to the
+station, go up to him, and ask the privilege of a handshake.</p>
+
+<p>His huge, freckled ham of a hand closed over mine in a friendly manner
+... which disappeared up to the wrist. He exchanged a few, simple, shy
+words with me from a mouth smashed to shapelessness by many blows. He
+smiled gently, with kind eyes.</p>
+
+<p>I was prouder of this greeting than of all my growing associations with
+well-known literary figures. And I boasted to the boys of meeting &quot;Bob&quot;
+... inventing what I said to &quot;Bob&quot; and what &quot;Bob&quot; said to me, <i>ad
+infinitum</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Though the great athlete shared my admiration with the great writer,
+yet my staying awake at night writing, my but one meal a day,
+usually,&mdash;except when I was invited out to a fraternity house or the
+house of a professor&mdash;and my incessant drinking of coffee and coco-cola
+to keep my ideas whipped up&mdash;all these things incapacitated me from
+attaining any high place in athletic endeavour. I was fair at boxing and
+could play a good scrub game of football. But my running, on which I
+prided myself most&mdash;I entered for the two-mile, one field day, and won
+only third place. I had gone back in form since Hebron days.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Gunning, head of our physical instruction, informed me that,
+exercise as I might, I could never hope to be stronger or put on more
+weight ... &quot;you had too many hardships and privations in your growing
+years ... and you are of too nervous a temperament.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But my love for Vanna had regularised me somewhat. I discarded my
+sandals and bought Oxford ties. And I preserved a crease in my trousers
+by laying them, folded carefully, under my mattress every night. And I
+took to wearing shirts with white linen collars....</p>
+
+<p>And I kept a picture of the girl I adored, secretly, among my
+manuscripts&mdash;it was one I had begged of &quot;Con&quot; Cummins, frankly taking
+him into my confidence as to my state of heart toward Vanna. Which
+confidence &quot;Con&quot; never abused, though it might have afforded endless
+fields of fun.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Con&quot; framed the picture for me.</p>
+
+<p>When alone with it, I often actually knelt to it, as to a holy image.
+And I kissed and kissed it, till it was quite faded away.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Emma Silverman, the great anarchist leader, came to Laurel, with her
+manager, Jack Leitman. I went to the Bellman House, the town's swellest
+hotel, to see her. I had never met her but had long admired her for her
+activities and bravery.</p>
+
+<p>I found her a thick-built woman, after the gladiatorial fashion ... as
+she moved she made me think of a battleship going into action. There was
+something about her face ... a squareness of jaw, a belligerency, that
+reminded me of Roosevelt, whom I had seen twice ... once, at Mt. Hebron,
+when he had made a speech from the chapel platform ... (when I had
+determined not to join in the general applause of one whom I considered
+a mere demagogue&mdash;but, before I knew it, found myself on my feet
+roaring inarticulately as he strode in) and again, after he had returned
+from his African expedition, and had come to Laurel to dedicate a
+fountain set up for the local horses and dogs by the S.P.C.A.</p>
+
+<p>Jack Leitman looked to me like a fat nincompoop. Such a weakling as
+great women must necessarily, it seems, &quot;fall for.&quot; But he was an
+efficient manager. Possessed of a large voice and an insistent manner,
+he sold books by the dozen before and after Emma Silverman's
+lectures....</p>
+
+<p>Miss Silverman already knew of me through Summershire, the wealthy
+socialist editor and owner of <i>Summershire's Magazine</i>, and Penton
+Baxter. It thrilled me when she called me by my first name....</p>
+
+<p>Her first lecture was on Sex. The hall was jammed to the doors by a
+curiosity-moved crowd.</p>
+
+<p>She began by assuming that she was not talking to idiots and cretins,
+but to men and women of mature minds&mdash;so she could speak as she thought
+in a forthright manner. She inveighed against the double standard. When
+someone in the auditorium asked what she meant by the single standard
+she replied, she meant sexual expression and experience for man and
+woman on an equal footing ... the normal living of life without which no
+human being could be really decent&mdash;and that regardless of marriage and
+the conventions!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The situation as it is, is odious ... all men, with but few exceptions,
+have sexual life before marriage, but they insist that their wives come
+to them in that state of absurd ignorance of their own bodily functions
+and consequent lack of exercise of them, which they denominate 'purity.'
+...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I doubt if there is a solitary man in this audience&mdash;a married man&mdash;who
+has not had premarital intercourse with women.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>All the while I kept my eye on Professor Wilton, who sat near me, in the
+row ahead ... he was flushing furiously in angry, puritanic dissent ...
+and I knew him well enough to foresee a forthcoming outburst of protest.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, I think I can safely say that there is not one married man here
+who can honestly claim that he came to his wife with that same physical
+'purity' which he required of her.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Wilton leaped to his feet in a fury ... the good, simple soul. He was
+so indignant that the few white hairs on his head worked up sizzling
+with his emotion....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>Here's one!</i>&quot; he shouted, forgetting in his earnest anger the
+assembled audience, most of whom knew him.</p>
+
+<p>There followed such an uproar of merriment as I have never seen the like
+before nor since. The students, of course, howled with indescribable joy
+... Emma Silverman choked with laughter. Jack Leitman rolled over the
+side table on which he had set the books to sell as the crowd passed
+out&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>After the deafening cries, cat-calls and uproars, Emma grew serious.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't know who you are,&quot; she cried to Professor Wilton, &quot;but I'll
+take chances in telling you that you're a liar!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Again Wilton was on his feet in angry protest.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Shame on you, woman! have you no shame!&quot; he shouted.</p>
+
+<p>This sally brought the house down utterly. The boys hooted and
+cat-called and stamped again....</p>
+
+<p>Emma Silverman laughed till the tears streamed down her face....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>During the four days she remained in Laurel her lectures were crowded.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Walking up the hill one day, I overtook Professor Wilton, under whom I
+had studied botany, and whom I liked, knowing he was sincere and had
+spoken the incredible though absolute truth.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That woman, that anarchist friend of yours, Gregory, is a coarse
+woman!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I rose to Emma's defence ... but he kept repeating ... &quot;no, no ... she
+is nothing but a coarse, depraved woman.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At my instigation, the Sig-Kaps gave an afternoon tea for her. And I was
+proud to act as her introducer. The boys liked her. She was like a good
+gale of wind to the minds and souls of us.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I saw Emma and Jack off at the train. I carried two of her grips for
+her.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Take Johnnie with you!&quot; jovially shouted some of the boys&mdash;a motor car
+full of them&mdash;Phi Alphs&mdash;as we stepped to the station platform....</p>
+
+<p>She answered them with a jolly laugh, a wave of the hand....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I'll leave him here ... you need a few like him with you!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I have something on my conscience,&quot; remarked Miss Silverman to me,
+&quot;Johnnie, do you really think that old professor was speaking the
+truth?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm sure of it, Miss Silverman.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, then, I'm heartily sorry ... and it was rough of me ... and will
+you tell the professor for me that I sincerely apologise for having hurt
+his feelings ... tell him I have so many jackasses attending my lectures
+all over the country, who rise and say foolish and insincere things,
+just to stand in well with the communities they live in&mdash;that sometimes
+it angers me, their hypocrisy&mdash;and then I blaze forth pretty strong and
+lay them flat!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Professor Wilton was a Phi Alph. From that time he was spoken of as &quot;the
+only Phi Alph Virgin.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The periods when I had rested secure in the knowledge of where my next
+meal was coming from, had been few. Life had pressed me close to its
+ragged edge ever since I could remember.</p>
+
+<p>Now I was accorded a temporary relief. Penton Baxter wrote me that he
+had procured me a patron ... Henry Belton, the millionaire Single-Taxer,
+had consented to endow me at fifteen dollars a week, for six months. I
+had informed Baxter, in one of my many letters to him&mdash;for we had
+developed an intimate correspondence&mdash;that I had a unique fairy drama in
+mind, but could not write it because of the harassment of my struggle
+for bread and life.... I had laid aside for the present my projected
+&quot;Judas.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Singing all the time, I packed my books in a large box which the corner
+grocer gave me, and, giving up my noisy room over the tinshop, I was off
+to the Y.M.C.A., where I engaged a room, telling the secretary, who knew
+me well, of my good luck, and enjoining him not to tell anyone else ...
+which I promptly did myself....</p>
+
+<p>I selected one of the best rooms, a corner one, with three windows
+through which floods of light streamed. It was well-furnished. The bed
+was the finest I had ever had to sleep in.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately I went to Locker's, the smart students' clothier, and put
+on a ready-made suit of clothes, of blue serge. And I charged new shirts
+and little white collars ... and several flowing ties. And a fine, new
+pair of shoes.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You sure look nifty,&quot; commented Locker, who himself waited on me.</p>
+
+<p>Then I went to a bookstore and plunged recklessly, purchasing Gosse and
+Garnett's <i>Illustrated History of English Literature</i>, in four volumes,
+an expensive set.</p>
+
+<p>I charged everything on the strength of my endowment, and, of course, in
+order to gain the credit I sought, I showed Baxter's letter, and pledged
+each storekeeper not to spread the story....</p>
+
+<p>Before nightfall practically the whole student body knew of my good
+luck. And Jack Travers had found me, lying back, luxuriously clad in my
+newly acquired, big blue bathrobe, in my morris chair....</p>
+
+<p>He looked me over with keen amusement.</p>
+
+<p>Somehow, for several years, my one dream of luxury and affluence had
+been to own a flowered bathrobe to lounge in, and to wear on the
+athletic field. I had hitherto had to be content with a shabby overcoat.</p>
+
+<p>On my new sectional bookcase stood a statue of the Flying Mercury, that
+my eye might continually drink in my ideal of physical perfection.
+Opposite that, stood my plaster cast of Apollo Belvedere, as indicative
+of the god of song that reigned over my thoughts and life.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Jack, I want you to come and have supper with me!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, you are just like a big baby ... all right, I'll dine with
+you, after I've shot in the story about your endowment to the <i>Star</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hurry up, then,&mdash;it's after five now. I've never had enough money
+before, to treat you ... it's you that have always treated me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where'll we dine?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;At the swellest place in town, the Bellman House ... Walsh will charge
+me.&quot; Walsh Summers was the proprietor.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Big, fat Walsh welcomed me and Travers.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, Johnnie, I won't charge you. Instead, you and Jack are dining as
+guests of the house.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And he would have it no other way.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Ally Merton was right about appearances. To have your shirts laundered
+regularly makes a man a different being. People that only noticed me
+before with a sort of surreptitious mockery now began to treat me with
+surprised respect. Professors invited me even more&mdash;the more
+conservative of them&mdash;to dine at their homes.</p>
+
+<p>And it was delightful to have living quarters where there was both hot
+and cold running water. I took a cold bath, every morning, after my
+exercise, and a hot bath, every night, before going to bed.</p>
+
+<p>The place was well-heated, too. I no longer had to sit up in bed, the
+covers drawn to my chin to keep from freezing, while I read, studied,
+wrote. Nor did I need sit on my hands, in alternation, to keep one warm
+while I rhymed with the other, during those curious spells of
+inspiration, those times of ecstasy&mdash;occurring mostly in the night&mdash;when
+I would write and write so rapidly that morning would find me often not
+able to decipher the greater part of what I had written ... five or ten
+poems in a night ... scrawled madly almost like automatic writing....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>William Jennings Bryan came to talk to us at our school auditorium. His
+lecture, <i>The Prince of Peace</i>, soon degenerated into an old-fashioned
+attack on science and the evolutionary theory.</p>
+
+<p>The professors sat bored and mute on the platform beside him, while he
+evacuated the forty-year-old wheeze of &quot;your
+great-great-great-grandfather might have been a monkey, but, thank God,
+mine was not!&quot; he won the usual great response of handclapping and
+laughter with this....</p>
+
+<p>And then he held out a glass of water, to prove that miracles might
+happen, because God, being omnipotent, could, at will, suspend natural
+laws.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look at this glass of water. I hold it out at arm's length, so. If I
+did not hold it, it would drop to the floor and shatter into pieces.
+Thus I, by a human act, suspend the law of gravitation ... so God!&mdash;&quot;
+There was huzzaing and applause. Several professors uneasily shifted the
+crossing of their knees ... one or two stared diplomatically at the
+ceiling.</p>
+
+<p>I grew angry and sent forth several sharp hisses before I knew what I
+was doing ... the effect was an electric stillness for the moment. Then
+a roar of indignant applause drowned my protest. And I stopped and
+remained quiet, with much craning of necks about me, to look at me.</p>
+
+<p>As the crowd poured out, I ran out into the road, from group to group,
+and, wherever I found a professor walking along, I vociferated my
+protest at our allowing such a back-water performance at the State's
+supposed centre of intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But, Gregory, it makes no difference ... the argument is settled, let
+platform orators like Bryan tilt at windmills all they may.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The hell it doesn't make a difference! if you professors are worth your
+salt, you won't let a Chautauqua man get by with such bunco.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The writing of my fairy drama progressed amain.</p>
+
+<p>I mailed a copy of it to Penton Baxter, who said that it had genuine
+merit. Was not great, but showed great promise.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Belton, from London, wrote me that it was beautiful and fine, but
+too eccentric for production in even the eccentric theatre.</p>
+
+<p>And Belton kept deluging me with Single Tax pamphlets. And I wrote him
+hot letters in reply, villifying the Single Tax theory and upholding
+revolutionary Socialism. And he grew angry with me, and informed me that
+he had meditated keeping me in his patronage longer, but I was so
+obdurate that he would end my remittance with the six months ... as, in
+fact, was all that was originally promised me.</p>
+
+<p>I replied that it made no difference ... that I would be always grateful
+to him. His letters stopped. The money stopped. But I went on living at
+the Y.M.C.A., charging up rent ... said that I was nearing the end of my
+rope again, glad because I had shown to myself that I was capable of
+sustained creative effort.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Many well-known men came to Laurel for lectures to the students.</p>
+
+<p>Lyman Abbott appeared.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The ancient bell-wether of the Standard Oil,&quot; Travers irreverently
+dubbed him.</p>
+
+<p>The College Y.M.C.A. accorded him a reception. I was one of those
+invited to meet him.</p>
+
+<p>After he had delivered a brief talk on God and The Soul, questions were
+invited&mdash;meant only to be politely put, that the speaker might shine.
+But my question was not put for the sake of social amenity ... though
+I'll admit, just a little for the sake of showing off.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Dr. Abbott,&quot; I asked, &quot;it is quite possible that there are other worlds
+in the sky&mdash;that, also, the rest of the planets either are or will be,
+homes for souls, for living beings equal to or higher than our present
+human grade of development?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, yes, that is quite probable.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, then, God, to prove a just God, would have to send his Son to be
+crucified a million times&mdash;once for each world ... for, if He did not,
+then the souls on these worlds would either be damned without a chance
+for salvation, or, if God made an exception in their case, that would be
+an unfair deal&mdash;for us to suffer from a fault other worlds are free of.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Abbott hemmed and hawed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It is not yet proven that there are other inhabited worlds. I an only
+dealing with questions of practical theology,&quot; he answered, with some
+heat and an attempt to be sarcastic.</p>
+
+<p>The members of the Y.M.C.A. were indignant at me for putting a maladroit
+question.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It doesn't do to invite Gregory anywhere. You can't tell what stuff he
+might pull.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A legitimate question&mdash;&quot; egged on Travers at my side, &quot;bump the old boy
+again, Johnnie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But I was not given another chance. After a short but painful silence
+the Secretary rose and put a suave and stereotyped query ... and others
+filled the breach in rapid succession. And the prestige of the great
+theologian was salvaged.</p>
+
+<p>Commencement day approached. There came to deliver the address for the
+day, George Harvey, then editor of <i>Harper's Weekly</i>. Travers was
+assigned to interview Harvey....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The fellow's a pompous big stiff,&quot; complained Jack, &quot;the kind that
+makes a fetish of morning and evening dress ... wears kid gloves ... and
+a top hat ... he has both valet and secretary with him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's no disgrace. Don't you think, Jack, that we Middle-Westerners
+only make fun of such people and their habits for the reason that we're
+either unable to do the same, or do not dare do it because of our
+jealousy of each other&mdash;our so-called hick democratic spirit?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There's a lot of truth in that. But fundamentally I would say that the
+newspaper editors who are here this week, holding a conference and
+tendering Harvey a banquet, <i>mean</i> their plainness of dress and life ...
+and do not hanker after the clubman's way of life as Harvey represents
+it to their eyes ... you just watch for what Ed. Lowe and Billy Dorgan
+do to our Eastern chap at the banquet ... they'll kid him till he's
+sick.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>That banquet will live in the memory of Kansas newspapermen.</p>
+
+<p>Harvey, when he entered the hall where the journalists were already
+seated, first snapped his top hat sidewise to his attending valet. Then
+he sat down grandly.</p>
+
+<p>Billy Dorgan and Ed. Lowe &quot;rode Harvey around,&quot; as Jack phrased it. The
+distinguished editor, with his solemnity, invited thrusts. Besides, most
+of those present were what was denominated as &quot;progressive&quot; ... Jarvis
+Alexander Mackworth was there ... and Alden ... and Tobbs, afterward
+governor.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The next day Travers printed a supposititious interview with Harvey's
+English valet on how it felt to be a valet of a great man. Both the
+valet and Harvey waxed furious, it was said.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Arthur Brisbane visited us. He ran down from Kansas City over night.
+This man was Jack Travers' God ... and we of the Press or Scoop Club&mdash;a
+student newspaper club of which I had recently been made a member&mdash;also
+looked up to him as a sort of deity.</p>
+
+<p>Travers informed me reverentially that Brisbane was so busy he always
+carried his stenographer with him, even when he rode to the Hill in an
+auto ... dictating an editorial as he drove along.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A great man ... a very great man.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I won merit with Travers by reciting an incident of my factory life.
+Every afternoon the men in my father's department would bring in
+Brisbane's latest editorial to me ... and listen to me as I read it
+aloud. To have the common man buy a newspaper for its editorials&mdash;that
+was a triumph.</p>
+
+<p>And Brisbane's editorials frequently touched on matters that the mob are
+supposed not to be interested in ... stories of the lives of poets,
+philosophers, statesmen....</p>
+
+<p>One of the men who could barely read ... who ran his fingers along the
+lines as he read, asked me&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Who was this guy SO-krats?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It was an editorial on Socrates and his life and death that brought
+forth the enquiry ... after I had imparted to him what information I
+possessed:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where can I find more about him, and about that pal of his, Plato?&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was hanging on to my comfortable room at the Y.M.C.A. by bluff. I had
+not let on to the secretary that my Belton subsidy had stopped. Instead,
+I affected to be concerned about its delay. But I did this, not to be
+dishonest, but to gain time ... I was attempting to write tramp stories,
+after the manner of London, and expected to have one of them accepted
+soon, though none ever were....</p>
+
+<p>Decker, the student-proprietor of the restaurant where I ate every day,
+was more astute.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now look here, Gregory, you just can't run your bill up any higher.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I already owed him fifteen dollars.</p>
+
+<p>I compounded with him by handing him over my <i>Illustrated History of
+English Literature</i>. It was like tearing flesh from my side to part with
+these volumes.</p>
+
+<p>And now I had no more credit at the Y.M.C.A.</p>
+
+<p>And I went back to Frank Randall, to apply again for my old room over
+his shop. He was using it now to store old stoves in. But he moved them
+out.</p>
+
+<p>With a sense of despair, compensated by a feeling of sacrifice for my
+poetry, I found myself once more back over the tinshop, the hammers
+sounding and crashing below.</p>
+
+<p>Old Blore, the cancer doctor, lived in a room in the front. All day long
+he sat drinking rum and sugar ... and shipping out his cancer cure, a
+white mixture like powdered sugar. Whether it did any good or not, he
+believed in it himself....</p>
+
+<p>I have not written about him before ... there are so many odd characters
+that I came in contact with that I have not written about ... for this
+book is about myself....</p>
+
+<p>But old Blore ... he came waddling back to me, drunk, as usual, on his
+rum and sugar.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Welcome back, Johnnie ... come on, you and Frank, into my room ...
+we've got to celebrate your return.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Frank and I set down the stove we were moving, dusted our hands off,
+and followed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I won't drink any of your rum, Ed! It's got too much of a kick.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;nonsense ... good Jamaica rum never hurt nobody.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We drank several rounds of rum and water, with sugar. And we jocosely
+joined together in singing the cancer doctor's favourite hymn&mdash;&quot;We're
+drifting down the stream of time, we haven't got long to stay.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then Frank and Ed. retailed to me the practical jokes they had played on
+each other since I had been gone from among them ... on big Sam, the
+chocolate-coloured shoemaker who had his shop next door ... and an
+obscene one on a half-wit named Elmer, who was one of Frank's helpers
+... that, though it was pretty raw, made me choke and gasp with
+merriment ... and they told me how, one night, they had wired the iron
+roof in the back, so that about ten cats that were mewling and
+quarrelling there, received a severe electric shock ... how funny and
+surprised they'd acted.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Most serviceably a check from the <i>National Magazine</i> came, for
+twenty-five dollars ... I had sold them a prophetic poem on airships.
+The check ameliorated my condition. I saw my way clear to a few weeks
+more of regular eating.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Then, on top of that, one day a telegram came....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Am on my way West. Will stop off visit you at Laurel&mdash;Penton.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Travers rushed the story to the Kansas City <i>Star</i>.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>&quot;KANSAS POET HONOURED</p>
+
+<hr class='smallerbreak' />
+
+<p class='center'>AUTHOR OF 'SLAUGHTER HOUSE' TO VISIT HIM&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I waited in a fever of eagerness and impatience for the arrival of this
+man whom I idealised and looked on as a great man ... the man who had
+written the <i>Les Miserables</i> of the American workingman.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Harry Varden, editor of the <i>Cry for Right</i>, had been to Laurel a week
+previously, to address a socialist local, and I had looked him up, at
+the house of the &quot;comrade&quot; where he was passing the night. The comrade
+sent me up to Varden's room, where I found the latter just getting out
+of bed. I shall always think of him in his proletarian grey woollen
+underdrawers and undershirt. In which he had evidently slept. He had the
+bed-habits of the masses. And the room was stale with bad air; like the
+masses, he, too, slept with windows shut.</p>
+
+<p>Varden's monthly magazine <i>The World to Be</i>, had occasionally printed a
+poem of mine ... and I was paid five dollars for each poem.</p>
+
+<p>Varden was a frail, jolly little chap, absolutely fearless and alert and
+possessed of a keen sense of humour which he could turn, on occasion,
+even against himself.</p>
+
+<p>I breakfasted with him. He had good table manners, but, from time to
+time, he forgot himself and smacked his lips keenly. And the egg dripped
+on his chin as he flashed a humorous incident that had happened to him
+on one of his lecture trips....</p>
+
+<p>After breakfast he and I took a long walk together ... we began speaking
+of Penton Baxter ... I spoke in high praise of the great novelist ...
+reverently and with awe.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, yes,&quot; Varden assented, &quot;Penton is all you say, but he has no sense
+of humour ... and he takes himself and his work as seriously as if the
+destiny of the human race depended on it ... which is getting in a bad
+way, for a reformer, you know&mdash;gives a chap's enemies and antagonists so
+many good openings....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;When Penton was writing <i>The Slaughter House</i> and we were running it
+serially, his protagonist, Jarl&mdash;it seemed he didn't know how to dispose
+of him ... and the book was running on and on interminably.... I wired
+him 'for God's sake kill Jarl.' ...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Baxter took my telegram much to heart ... was deeply aggrieved I
+afterward learned ... the dear boy ... he did 'kill Jarl' finally ...
+and absent-mindedly brought him to life again, later on in his book.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And Harry Varden laughed excitedly like a boy, and he leaned sideways
+and smote his half-bent, sharp, skinny knee with his left hand. I could
+perceive that that was a grotesque platform gesture of his, when he
+drove a comic point home.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was waiting at the station ... where I had shaken hands with Bob
+Fitzsimmons, and had seen Emma Silverman off....</p>
+
+<p>Penton Baxter was due on the eleven o'clock train from Kansas City.</p>
+
+<p>I surely must be on the road to becoming somebody, with all these famous
+people taking such an interest in me. I remembered Emerson's dictum
+about waiting in one's own doorway long enough, and all the world would
+come by.</p>
+
+<p>Was I to be disappointed? It did not seem credible that the great man
+would make a special stop-off on his way to the coast, just to pay me a
+visit.</p>
+
+<p>One after another the passengers stepped down and walked and rode away.
+Then a little, boyish-looking man ... smooth-faced, bright-complexioned,
+jumped down, wavered toward me, dropping his baggage ... extended his
+hand ... both hands ... smiling with his eyes, that possessed long
+lashes like a girl's.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Are you Johnnie Gregory?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Penton Baxter?&quot; I asked reverently. He smiled in response and drew my
+arm through his.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This is great, this is certainly great,&quot; he remarked, in a high voice,
+&quot;and I'm more than glad that I stopped off to see you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He expanded in the sun of my youthful hero-worship.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where's the best hotel in town?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Bellman House ... but I've arranged with the Sig-Kappas to put you
+up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Are you a fraternity man?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No&mdash;a barb.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'd rather go to the hotel you named ... but thank the boys for me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I contended with Penton Baxter for the privilege of carrying his two
+grips. They were so heavy that they dragged my shoulders down, but, with
+an effort, I threw my chest out, and walked, straight and proud, beside
+him.</p>
+
+<p>As we walked he questioned and questioned. He had the history of Laurel
+University, the story of my life, out of me, almost, by the time we had
+covered the ten blocks to the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Penton Baxter!&quot; I whispered in a low voice to the proprietor, who, as
+he stood behind the desk, dipped the pen with a flourish, and shoved the
+open register toward his distinguished guest.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Travers, of course, was the first to see the great novelist. He wired an
+interview to the <i>Star</i>, and wrote a story for the Laurel <i>Globe</i> and
+the <i>Laurelian</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Baxter said he would stay over for two days ... that he didn't want to
+do much beside seeing me ... that he would place himself entirely in my
+hands. I was beside myself with happy pride.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This is a glorious country. You must take me for a long walk this
+afternoon. I want to tramp away out to that purple bluff toward the
+South East.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We call it Azure Mound.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Has it any historical interest?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;don't know! It might have. Richard Realf, the poet, camped out about
+here, on the heights with his men, during the Quantrell Raid, And there
+are one or two old settlers in Laurel who were members of John Brown's
+company.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Baxter was a good walker. He made me think of Shelley as he traipsed
+along, indefatigably talking away, his voice high-pitched and shrill ...
+unburdening his mind of all his store of ideas....</p>
+
+<p>His head was much too large for his body ... a strong head ... strong
+Roman nose ... decisive chin, but with too deep a cleft in it. His mouth
+was loose and cruel&mdash;like mine. His face was as smooth as a boy's or
+woman's ... on each cheek a patch here and there of hair, like the hair
+on an old maid's face.</p>
+
+<p>More than a year later his wife confided to me that &quot;Pennie,&quot; as she
+dubbed him affectionately, could not grow a beard ... and she laughed at
+his solemnly shaving once a week, as a matter of ritual, anyhow....</p>
+
+<p>Each of us went with bent knees as we walked, as if wading against a
+rising tide of invisible opposition.</p>
+
+<p>I discoursed of a new religion&mdash;a non-ascetic one based on the
+individual's spiritual duty to enjoy life&mdash;that I meditated inaugurating
+as soon as I left college. He advised me to wait till I was at least
+Christ's age when he began his public ministry, thirty-five or six. His
+face lit with frolic....</p>
+
+<p>Then, in rapid transition, he soberly discoursed on the religion he
+himself had in mind ... instinctively I knew it would not do to make
+sport of his dreams, as he had of mine.</p>
+
+<p>Harry Varden was right. Where he himself was involved in the slightest,
+Baxter absolutely had no sense of humour.</p>
+
+<p>Baxter told me of the great men he had met on intimate terms, in the
+wider world of life and letters I had not yet attained to ... of
+Roosevelt, who invited him to dinner at the White House ... and of how,
+at that dinner attended by many prominent men ... by several Senators
+... Roosevelt had unlimbered his guns of attack on many men in public
+office.... &quot;Senator So-and-so was the biggest crook in American public
+life.... Senator Thing-gumbob was the most sinister force American
+politics had ever seen ... belonged to the Steel Trust from his shoes to
+his hat....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Suppose, Mr. President,&quot; Baxter had put to him, at the same time
+expressing his amazement at the president's open manner of speech before
+men he had never even met before ... men perhaps of antagonistic shades
+of opinion, &quot;suppose I should go out from here and give to the
+newspapers the things you have just said! How would you protect, defend
+yourself?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Young man, if you did&mdash;<i>as you won't</i>&mdash;&quot; smashed Roosevelt, with his
+characteristic of clenched right fist brought down in the open palm of
+the left hand&mdash;&quot;if you did&mdash;I'd simply brand you as a liar ... and shame
+you before the world.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And so it was that Roosevelt expressed himself freely ... and at the
+same time protected himself.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We stood on the top of Azure Mound. Baxter was puffing heavily, for it
+had been a hard climb.</p>
+
+<p>At our feet extended a panorama of what seemed like a whole State.</p>
+
+<p>The wide-spread fields of wheat, of corn, exalted us.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;God, what a glorious country!... no wonder Walt loved America ... in
+spite of the abuses capital has perpetrated in it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Walt Mason?&quot; I enquired, mischievously....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; he responded, seriously, &quot;Walt Whitman.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But our poet laureate to-day is Walt Mason ... and our State
+philosopher, the sage of Potato Hill, Ed Howe, is an honest-to-God
+stand-patter ... that's Kansas to-day for you, in spite of her wide,
+scenic vistas....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nevertheless,&quot; I went on, &quot;Kansas does develop marvellous people ... we
+have Carrie Nation&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And Johnnie Gregory!&quot; put in Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't want just to belong to Kansas.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It was I who was humourless now, &quot;I'm sick of its corn-fed bourgeois
+ideals ... I want to belong to the world&mdash;as&mdash;you do!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We trudged back to town.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What a site for a university!... the men who put those buildings up
+there on the Hill must have dreamed greatly ... look at the sun!... the
+buildings are transfigured into a fairy city!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>My office as social manager for Baxter during his stay I conducted
+badly. I was so excited and flattered by the visit of one whom I
+considered one of the first geniuses of the world, that I hardly knew
+what I was doing. I listened to all he said as if an oracle spoke.</p>
+
+<p>I asked him if he would like to meet some of the professors on the
+Hill.... I hurriedly gathered together a small group of them and Baxter
+gave a talk to them in one of the unoccupied recitation rooms. Nor did
+he fail in telling them that in me Kansas had a great poet in the making
+... the professors who were not invited to my hasty reception considered
+themselves slighted.</p>
+
+<p>When I saw Baxter off at the station we were calling each other by our
+first names.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye, Johnnie!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye, Penton!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't fail to visit me at Warriors' River, this fall, if you can do so
+conveniently.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I assured him that I would not fail.</p>
+
+<p>For I had spoken with him of my determination to ship on the Great Lakes
+for a few months, to see if I couldn't garner some poetic material for
+my poems of modern life that I was writing for the <i>National Magazine</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My wife and I will be at Warriors' River till late in the fall. We're
+staying at Stephen Barton's Health Home. Barton is a good friend of
+mine.... I am helping him out, since he left New Jersey, where he was
+forced, by a series of petty prosecutions, to give up Perfection
+City.... My wife will be glad to see you ... she knows your poetry
+already.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The weather was warm again. My next to my last college year was drawing
+to a close. Not that I was a graduate ... my course was a special one,
+and I had not followed even that closely.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If you'll graduate,&quot; Jarvis Alexander Mackworth urged me, joking in the
+Kansas fashion, &quot;I will present you with a great bouquet of beauty
+roses.... I'd like to see you vindicate Langworth's and my judgment of
+you. For you have many, many professors and people on the Hill who don't
+believe in you, and, frankly,&mdash;say it was a mistake ever to have let you
+in.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mackworth was one of the regents of the school.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In fact, once one of the professors rose, at a meeting, ably reinforced
+by several others, to complain that you were actually crazy, and a
+detriment to the school.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And what did you say, Mr. Mackworth, didn't you defend me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, God pity me, I did,&quot; he jested. &quot;I remembered how I was asked to
+quit here, too. In the days when General Fred Furniss was also looked on
+as an unruly, rather undesirable member of the student body ... we were
+classmates....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I replied that no doubt you were crazy, you starry young tramp, you!...
+but that I wished some of the professors shared a little of your virus
+... it might make them more alive and interesting.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Again I was absolutely starvation-ridden. Several tramp-poems that I
+sold to <i>Everybody's</i> kept me literally in bread and cheese for a month.
+I was still madly in love with Vanna at long distance.</p>
+
+<p>There came an opportunity for me to make a few dollars and to show off
+before her, at the same time.</p>
+
+<p>The Copperwell Street Show came to town. They lined the main street with
+booths, and outside of town, in a large pasture, circus tents were
+pitched, in which the usual one-ringed circus was to be shown ... and
+they had six lions in a cage ... advertised as Nubian lions, the largest
+and fiercest of their kind ... their trainer never going in among them
+except at peril of his life. A gold medal was offered to anyone who
+would go in among the lions alone, and make a speech to the audience
+from the inside of the cage.</p>
+
+<p>I negotiated with the management, but asked for the medal's equivalent
+in money. I was offered twenty-five dollars if I would go in, and repeat
+my speech, each one of the three nights the show would be held.</p>
+
+<p>I was to go in for the first time that very night ... to clinch my
+lagging resolution, the story was printed in the local papers....</p>
+
+<p class='center'>&quot;JOHN GREGORY TIRED OF LIFE</p>
+
+<hr class='smallerbreak' />
+
+<p class='center'>KANSAS POET TO TALK AMONG LIONS,&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Jack Travers was at his facetious best.</p>
+
+<p>Considering myself heroic, and thinking with inner joy how Vanna Andrews
+would be there, I spent the day in committing to memory the salient
+points on the nature and habits of lions, from the Encyclopedia
+Britannica....</p>
+
+<p>People looked at me both with amusement and admiring amazement as they
+saw me about, late that afternoon....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now tell me the honest truth about the lions,&quot; I asked of the trainer.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They're a pretty bad lot.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on. I've made up my mind to go in, and I'm not afraid.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;though lions are not as bad as leopards and tigers ... there's no
+telling when they might jump you ... there's only one chance in a
+thousand that they will ... but you may bring one up from being a cub
+... and, one morning, because of something you can't read in its animal
+mind&mdash;it not liking its breakfast or something&mdash;it may jump you, give
+one crunch, and snuff you out like a candle ... it's that chance that
+you take that makes it seem brave.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Thanks, I'll take the chance.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Are you sure you'll have enough command of yourself to make a speech?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;Certain ... I've committed to memory almost all the Encyclopedia
+Britannica article on lions ... I'm going to give them that....&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Gregory! Gregory!&quot; the crowd was calling, half in derisive jocularity,
+half in uneasy admiration....</p>
+
+<p>The trainer shunted me into the cage, after seating his lions in a
+half-moon on their tubs.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Quick! Step in! We'll be on the outside ready with hot irons in case
+anything goes wrong!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I didn't know whether the trainer was jesting or serious.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't think of them at all. They'll sit still ... you can turn your
+back to them and face the audience. It will be safe. Only don't make any
+unexpected, quick motions.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was in among them. The door clanged behind me.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody jeered now. All was filled with an expectant hush.</p>
+
+<p>Then, as if strange and a-far from myself, I stepped easily into the
+very centre of the half moon of squatting beasts, and made my speech ...
+at the end, there was hardly any applause till I was safely out of the
+cage ... Then there was a tumult. Shouts, cat-calls, whoops, and a great
+noise of hearty hand-clapping.</p>
+
+<p>I stood beside the ropes as the people of Laurel surged by, many of them
+shaking me by the hand ... Vanna came by, with the big football player
+with her, bulking behind her slight loveliness ... lightly she put a
+tiny, gloved hand in mine ... a glove neatly mended at the fingers ...
+congratulating me, half with feeling, half with amusement....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That was reckless and brave, Mr. Gregory.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was speechless with frightened delight over her words, and the
+pressure of her hand.</p>
+
+<p>I turned to the trainer before I went to my room over the tin-shop.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You say the leopards are most dangerous?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For twenty-five dollars a night I will go in with them, alone, and run
+them around with a whip.&quot; As I proposed this, in the background of my
+consciousness was the conviction that by so doing I could win Vanna's
+love....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No ... the leopards are too uncertain.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The papers were full of my deed. And I was not made fun of, but
+commended. And it was announced (for advertising purposes only, of
+course) that the management of the show had approached me with an offer
+to travel as a trainer of wild animals.</p>
+
+<p>The second night I was rather blas&eacute;. I shook my finger playfully in the
+face of one of the seated lions ... to have a sensation of a thousand
+prickles running sharp through each pore, when the lion responded with
+an open, crimson-mouthed, yellow-fanged snarl; I smelt the carrion
+fetor of his breath. I stepped back rather quickly. All the animals grew
+restless and furtive. Little greenish-amber gleams lit and flickered in
+their eyes.</p>
+
+<p>I pulled myself together. Deliberately I turned my back on them.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;So you see plainly, ladies and gentlemen, that a lion is, after all,
+a much misrepresented, gentle beast.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The trainer was piqued when I walked out, that night.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't want you to tell the people that my lions are harmless and
+gentle ... if you do that to-morrow night, I'll see to it that you get
+the medal, and not the money.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon of the following day, while the girl who trained the
+leopards was in the cage of the latter, they jumped on her, and tore her
+back with their claws. Dripping with blood, she whipped them back, inch
+by inch, into their living-cage, that led by a small door into the big
+one used for exhibitions. A shiver ran through me at the news of the
+girl's mishap. I was glad they had not taken me up as regards the
+leopards. And my being among the lions now also seemed less of a joke.
+At least, that last night, I felt it not to be, I delivered a
+constrained discourse and only breathed freely when outside their cage.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>And in a few weeks my unique and single glory was snatched from me. The
+show had moved to Salina, and a barber in that town had shaved their
+keeper in the cage, while the lions sat around.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Before leaving for my projected summer as worker on the boats of the
+Great Lakes, I snatched at a passing adventure: the Kansas City <i>Post</i>
+had me walk from Laurel to Kansas City with the famous walker, Weston.</p>
+
+<p>The man was going across the continent a-foot. When he saw I was
+sticking the fifty miles or so with him, he became friendly and talked
+with me of the athletes of former days ... the great runners, walkers,
+fighters, oarsmen ... and he knew intimately also many well known
+journalists and literary men of whom he discoursed.</p>
+
+<p>Time and again, like a bicycle pedalled too slow, he stepped awry on so
+small an obstacle as a cinder, and toppled over on his face like an
+automaton running down.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, no! Don't touch me. I must get up myself ... that's not in the
+game ...&quot; his rising was a hard, slow effort ... he regained his feet
+with the aid of his metal-tipped cane....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Keep back! Keep back!&quot; to the people, gangs of curious boys mostly, who
+followed close on his heels. And he poked backwards with the sharp
+metallic point of the stick....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;People follow close on me, stupid, like donkeys. If I didn't keep that
+point swinging back, when I slacked my pace or stopped they would walk
+right up on me....&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Dr. Percival Hammond, managing editor of the New York <i>Independent</i>. the
+first magazine to print my poems, came to town ... to lecture on his
+favourite topic of international peace.</p>
+
+<p>It occurred to me strongly that I ought to afford him some witness of my
+gratitude for what his magazine had done for me.</p>
+
+<p>Though broke, I borrowed ten dollars from the owner of a lunch counter
+where I ate.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to give a dinner to Dr. Hammond ... his magazine has helped me
+as a poet ... it is obvious that I can't give the dinner at your lunch
+counter.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Ten dollars was all the lunchcounter man would lend me.</p>
+
+<p>But Walsh Summers of the Bellman House said I could give a luncheon in
+honour of Hammond at fifty cents a plate ... he would allot me two
+tables ... and a separate room ... and I could invite nineteen
+professors ... and he would throw in two extras for Jack Travers and
+myself.</p>
+
+<p>I gave the lunch, inviting the professors I liked best.</p>
+
+<p>After dessert and a few speeches I told them how I had borrowed the
+money. Hammond privately tried to pay me back out of his own pocket, but
+I wouldn't let him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I asked Hammond if he knew Penton Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes; we printed his first article, you know ... just as we gave you
+your start....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Baxter is the most remarkable combination of genius and jackass I have
+ever run into. But don't ever tell him that I said that. He has no sense
+of humour ... everything is of equal import to him ... his toothache is
+as tragic as all the abuses of the capitalist system.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>On the way to the Great Lakes there are several people I must stop and
+see, and show myself to.</p>
+
+<p>I stop at Topeka and visit Dad Rother ... a columnist on a newspaper
+there, of more than local fame ... an obviously honest-to-God bachelor
+... he is afflicted with dandruff and his hair is almost gone. He shows
+me photographs of Mackworth and of Uncle Bill Struthers, each
+autographed with accompanying homely sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>I catch myself pretending an interest in Rother's column, but really
+actuated by a desire to plant myself in his mind, and to have a notice
+in his paper about me ... anything that Dad Rother has in his column is
+copied in all the Kansas papers.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I drop in at a Leavenworth newspaper office, ostensibly to borrow the
+use of a typewriter.</p>
+
+<p>But the stick or so put in the paper about my passing through
+Leavenworth pleases me.</p>
+
+<p>General Fred Furniss is stationed at Fort Leavenworth. I must visit him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>General Furniss walked in rapidly as if executing a military man&oelig;vour,
+both hands held forth in welcome. He was &quot;Napoleonic&quot; in size, and, also
+like Napoleon, he carried too much belly in front of him. He wore a
+closely curling salt-and-pepper beard....</p>
+
+<p>He commented on my &quot;military carriage&quot;&mdash;asked me if I had ever gone to a
+military academy....</p>
+
+<p>I yielded to an instinct for deprecative horse-play, one of my worst
+faults, begot of an inferiority-complex.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I've never gone to a military academy, but I've had a hole in the
+seat of my pants so generally, and I have had to walk erect so much to
+keep my coat tail well down to hide it, that that is where I acquired my
+military carriage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The general's eyes twinkled.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Take a chair. I have heard of you, Mr. Gregory ... I have watched your
+work, too. Roosevelt knows about it ... has spoken of it to me ... has
+remarked: 'there's a young fellow&mdash;your poet-chap in Kansas&mdash;that will
+be worth watching ... why is it, Fred, that every man of any talent
+whatever in Kansas, instantly gets the eye of the nation?... we're
+always expecting something big from William Allen White's State'.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>A week or so of work for a Polish-Catholic farmer ... who locked me out
+of his house, when he and his family went to mass the one Sunday I was
+with him. He asked me if I wanted a book to read. As the only book he
+possessed was Thomas &agrave; Kempis' <i>Imitation of Christ</i>, I took it, and
+learned Christian humility, reading it, in the orchard. Surely this
+farmer was a practical Christian. He believed in his fellow man and at
+the same time gave him no opportunity to abuse his faith in him....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was pleasant, this working for from a few days to a week, then
+sauntering on ... putting up at cheap little country hotels overnight. I
+liked it better than tramping....</p>
+
+<p>I pitched hay, I loaded lumber, I dug, I planted, I reaped.</p>
+
+<p>In lower Minnesota a Swedish emigrant farmer hired me to help him with
+his hay crop. He and I and his lanky son, Julius ... just coming out of
+adolescence ... we worked away from sun-up till moon-rise....</p>
+
+<p>The first day I congratulated myself for working for that particular
+farmer. The meat at table was abundant and fresh.</p>
+
+<p>But before my two weeks were up I had grown weary of the diet. They had
+killed a cow ... and cow-meat was what I found set before me morning,
+noon, and night,&mdash;every day. I complained about it to Julius ... &quot;when
+we kill a cow ain't we got to eat it?&quot; he replied.</p>
+
+<p>Every afternoon we participated in a pleasant Swedish custom. The two
+women of the household, the mother and grandmother, with blue cloth
+rolled about their head for headgear, brought us coffee and cake
+a-field....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Aeftermittagscaffee,&quot; they called it.</p>
+
+<p>It refreshed us; we worked on after that till late supper by lamp,
+driving back to the house by moonlight.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At Duluth I found that a strike prevailed on the Lakes. I was held in
+doubt whether I ought to sail, for I would have to do so as
+strike-breaker, which was against my radical code ... but, then, I had
+come over-land all the way from Laurel, to voyage the Great Lakes for
+the poetry to be found there ... and I must put my muse above such
+things as strikes.</p>
+
+<p>I signed on, on a big ore boat, as porter....</p>
+
+<p>That means, as third cook; my task the washing and scouring of greasy
+pots, pans, and dishes ... and waiting on the firemen and deckhands at
+meals.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>James Eads Howe</i> took on a cargo of rust-coloured iron ore at Twin
+Harbours ... the gigantic machinery grided and crashed all night,
+pouring the ore into the hold, to the dazzling flare of electric
+lights....</p>
+
+<p>Here for the first time I conceived myself to be caught in the great
+industrial turmoil. If I were to derive song from this, it would be song
+for giants, or rather, for machines that had grown to gigantic
+proportions from the insect world ... diminutive men made parts of their
+anatomy as they swung levers and operated cranes....</p>
+
+<p>We kicked outward on the long drop down Lake Superior, the largest of
+the five Great Lakes. It was like an inland ocean. The water of it is
+always so cold that, when a ship is wrecked there, good swimmers who
+might otherwise keep up till rescued, often perish of the cold....</p>
+
+<p>Day and night the horizon was smoky-blue with forest fires ... one
+afternoon our deck was covered with birds that had flown out over the
+water to escape the flames....</p>
+
+<p>And once we saw lifted in the sky three steamboats sailing upside down,
+a mirage ... and, once, a gleaming city in the clouds, that hung there
+spectrally for about five minutes, then imperceptibly faded out....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's a reflection of some real city,&quot; explained the tall
+Canadian-Scotch cook ... &quot;once I recognised Quebec hanging in the sky
+...&mdash;thought I even saw people walking and traffic moving.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Half-way across to the Soo Canal we ran into my first lake-storm.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The sailor on the Great Lakes has a harder time than the ocean sailor.
+He can't make his ship run before a storm. He's got to look out for land
+on every side.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Right over my bunk where I slept, ceaselessly turned and turned the
+propeller shaft. The noise and roar of the engines was ever in my ears,
+and the peculiar ocean-like noise of the stokehold ... and the metallic
+clang of coal as it shot from shovels....</p>
+
+<p>The night of the storm the crashing of the water and the whistling
+impact of wave-weighted winds kept me awake.</p>
+
+<p>I jumped into my clothes and went into the fire-room. Hardly able to
+keep their feet, the firemen toiled away, scattering shovels-full of
+coal evenly over the fires, wielding their slice bars ... greeting with
+oaths and comic curses the awkward coal passer who spilled with his
+laden wheelbarrow into the slightly lower pit where they stood.</p>
+
+<p>I quit the <i>James Eads Howe</i> at Ashtabula, after several round trips in
+her, the length of the Lakes.</p>
+
+<p>I freighted it to Chicago, where I shipped, again as porter, on a
+package freighter.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The captain of the package freighter <i>Overland</i> should have been
+anything but a captain. He was a tall, flabby, dough-faced man, as timid
+as a child just out of the nursery.</p>
+
+<p>We had taken on, as one of our firemen, a Canuck, who, from the first,
+boasted that he was a &quot;bad man&quot;....</p>
+
+<p>He intimidated the cook right off. He punched in a glass partition to
+emphasise a filthy remark he had made to the head engineer. He went
+after me, to bully and domineer me, next.</p>
+
+<p>It looked as if we were in for a hard voyage to the Georgian Bay.</p>
+
+<p>The Canuck, at the very first meal, terrorised the crew that sat down
+with him. I looked him over carefully, and realised that something must
+be done.</p>
+
+<p>He flung a filthy and gratuitous expression my way. Silently I stepped
+back from the mess room, untied my apron, and meant to go in and try to
+face him down. But at that juncture, my courage failed me, and instead
+of inviting the rough-neck out on deck, as I had tried to force myself
+to do, I hurried to the captain's cabin.</p>
+
+<p>The captain said, &quot;Come in!&quot; to my knock. He was sitting, of all things,
+in dirty pajamas, at a desk ... though it was mid-day ... his flabby,
+grey-white belly exuded over his tight pajama waist-string ... the
+jacket of the pajamas hung open, with all but one button off.</p>
+
+<p>I complained to the captain of the bully&mdash;repeated how he had bellowed
+at me to tell the unmentionable skipper he would receive his bumps
+bloody well, too, if the latter did not stick to his own part of the
+ship.</p>
+
+<p>I saw fright in the captain's face....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's up to the chief engineer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Either that fellow goes off this ship or I do. You'll have to hire
+another third cook.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The boat was sailing in an hour.</p>
+
+<p>I walked back for my few effects. But, on the way back, I took hold of
+myself and determined to stick by my guns. I made up my mind that I
+would not leave the boat, and that, at the first hostile move of the
+bully I would oppose him&mdash;besides, what had the fellow done, so far,
+besides chucking a bluff?</p>
+
+<p>My opportunity to live up to my resolve came at mess for supper. There
+was a smoking platter of cabbage set before the boys.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What the hell! Who wants to eat bloody cabbage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And snatching up a handful of the dripping, greasy vegetable, he was
+about to fling it into the face of one of the men opposite, when,
+without giving myself a chance to hesitate, I stepped up quickly and
+grabbed the &quot;bad man's&quot; wrist. The cabbage went high and spattered all
+over the opposite wall.</p>
+
+<p>The bully glared like an enraged bull at me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Quaking in my boots, I made my eyes glare level with his.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Listen to me, bo,&quot; I bluffed, &quot;I ain't much on guff, and I don't want
+specially to fight ... but I'm waiter in this mess room and you don't
+pull anything like this here, unless you do it over my dead body.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's just what I will do ... I'll&mdash;I'll&mdash;&quot; and the chap, pale with
+what seemed insane rage, started to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ah, sit down!&quot; I commanded, marvelling at my nerve, and pushing him
+violently by the shoulders back on the bench ... then, deliberately, I
+turned my back, and walked away, expecting any moment to have him on me
+like a clawing wild cat.</p>
+
+<p>With seeming calm and nonchalance I made the kitchen. With a semblance
+of outward serenity I picked up a rag and returned to wipe off the wall.
+I was vastly relieved to find that the bluff had worked.</p>
+
+<p>The Canuck was finishing his meal in silence.</p>
+
+<p>From that moment till the end of the voyage he was as quiet and
+Unobtrusive as anyone could wish him to be....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I have a curious habit of often waking up in the night from deep
+slumber, and breaking into laughter over some funny incident or other
+that has happened to me a long time ago ... I have chuckled over this
+incident many times ... if that bully only knew how terrorised he really
+had me!...</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It is impossible to describe the Georgian Bay and the beauty of its
+thousands of islands ... as we steamed through them in the dawn, they
+loomed about us through sun-golden violet mists.... Here as small as the
+chine of some swimming animal, there large enough for a small forest of
+trees to grow upon them....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Another storm ... on Lake Huron ... a fair-sized one.</p>
+
+<p>I was walking along the deck, just after dawn, the waves riding and
+running and shattering aboard. I carried the dinner bell, was ringing it
+for breakfast ... when the greatest wave I have ever seen on the Lakes
+came running, high-crested, toward the boat,&mdash;that seemed to know what
+was happening, for it rose to meet it, like a sentient being....</p>
+
+<p>The wave smashed ... hit the galley and washed over the top of it,
+catching me in a cataract as I hugged close. I was driven hard against
+the taut cable wire that made our only railing. For a moment I thought
+the water reaching up from over-side as the vessel lurched would clutch
+me and suck me down.</p>
+
+<p>A close and breathless call. A rending, splintering sound told me damage
+had been done. I looked toward the captain's cabin ... and laughed
+heartily, for all my discomfort and dangerous escape ... for the whole
+side of the cabin had been stove in,&mdash;and, terrified, his eyes sticking
+out, in his dirty underclothes the captain had been hurtled forth, his
+face still stupid from sleep though full of fear.</p>
+
+<p>I rushed up to him. His drawers sagged pitiably with wet.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A close shave, sir!&quot; I remarked.</p>
+
+<p>When I brought him his breakfast he was still trembling.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I left the package freighter <i>Overland</i>. It was almost time for the new
+school year. But Warriors' River lay in my way back to Laurel, and I
+determined to stop off and pay a visit to Baxter, at Barton's Health
+Home....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was disappointed with my summer. In terms of poetic output. I had
+written only three or four poems dealing with life on the Lakes, and
+these were barely publishable in the <i>National Magazine.</i> I realise now
+that poetic material is not to be collected as a hunter goes gunning for
+game. It cannot be deliberately sought and found. It must just happen.</p>
+
+<p>Yet all the things that I had seen and been through, I knew, would live
+in my mind till they were ready of themselves to get birth in words. I
+knew that I had not lost a single dawn nor one night of ample moon. And
+there drifted back into my remembrance that night when the Italian
+coal-passer had come to my bunk and wakened me, that I might come forth
+with him and observe a certain wonderful cloud-effect about the full,
+just-risen moon, over Huron....</p>
+
+<p>I had cursed at him, thought he was trying to make a monkey of me ...
+for I had dropped on deck a letter to me from Lephil of the <i>National</i>,
+and so the crew had learned that I was a poet among them.</p>
+
+<p>But I was not being spoofed ... actual tears of surprise and chagrin
+came into the coal-passer's eyes. Then I had been ashamed of myself ...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course I'll go on deck ... mighty fine of you to wake me!&quot; I slid
+into my pants and went up the ladder&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>To envisage, rapturous, a great, flaming globe of shadowy silver ... and
+across it, in a single straight ebony bar, one band of jet-black cloud
+... and the water, from us to the apparition of beauty, danced, dappled,
+with an ecstasy of quivering silver....</p>
+
+<p>I have met many a man in my wanderings, simple and silent, who felt
+beauty like a poet or an artist, without the poet's or artist's gifts of
+expression,&mdash;with, on the contrary, a queer shame that he was so moved,
+a suspicion that, somehow, it was not manly to be moved by a sunrise or
+sunset.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I found Penton Baxter, his wife Hildreth, and their child, Dan, living
+in two tents, among a grove of trees, near the main building of the
+Health Home. These two tents had, of course, board floors, and there
+was a woman who kept them in condition ... and there was a rack for
+towels, and hot water was supplied by pipes from a nearby building. I
+think the tents were even wired for electric light.</p>
+
+<p>Baxter welcomed me. But I took a room for a week in town, though he
+urged me to stay with him. But when I had the means I liked better to be
+independent. I calculated living a week in Warriors' River for ten or
+twelve dollars. That would leave me thirty dollars over, from what I had
+earned while working on the <i>Overland</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Then, back to the university for my last year of leisurely study and
+reading, in the face of the desolate poverty that would have defeated
+many another man, but to which I was used as a customary condition.
+After that&mdash;Paris or London, or both! Kansas was growing too small for
+me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I have mentioned that Baxter had a head too large for his body. Daniel,
+his son, slight and frail and barely eight years of age, possessed the
+same characteristic....</p>
+
+<p>I footed it out to Baxter's tents, faithfully as to a shrine, each
+afternoon. The mornings he and I both occupied in writing. He, on a
+novel which was the story of the love-life of his wife and himself, and
+of his literary struggles, called <i>Love's Forthfaring</i>; I, on my
+abortive songs of the Great Lakes that all came forth still-born ...
+because I was yet under the vicious literary influence of the <i>National
+Magazine</i>, and was writing my verse, trying to be inspired by the
+concepts of middle-class morality ... or what was even worse, I was
+attempting to glorify the under-dog; who, if he were the demigod
+Socialists portray him, would by no means remain the under-dog.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I found Baxter more a-flame than ever for the utter reformation of
+mankind ... in the way they dressed ... stiff collars hurt the nervous
+system, pressing as they did, on the spine ... in the books they read
+... he wished to start a library that would sell cheaply and bring all
+the world's great thought and poetry into factory, and every worker's
+home ... all conventional ideas of marriage and religion must go by the
+board and freedom in every respect be granted to men and women.</p>
+
+<p>It was good to listen to this sincere, na&iuml;ve man, still young ... who
+would re-make life nearer to the beauty and harmony that Shelley also
+dreamed for mankind. I lived in a state of perpetual reverence toward
+Baxter. This man tried to live his ideals, as well as write about them.</p>
+
+<p>In matters of diet I accepted Baxter's theories but, humanly, did not
+live up to them. He was a vegetarian.</p>
+
+<p>Later I was to learn that he was to himself an experiment station. On
+his own person he directly and practically tried out each idea ... his
+wife was also a convertee, slightly reluctant, to his tests ... and his
+son, perforce. Baxter actually kept a vegetarian dog. &quot;Even carnivorous
+animals thrive better on a vegetarian diet.&quot; But the dog was no
+corroboration of his theory. It lacked gloss and shine to its coat, and
+seldom barked.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon I came upon Dan, Baxter's son, puking in the bushes, not
+far from the tents.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the matter, Dan,&quot; he turned to me, wan, and serious, and with a
+grown-up look on his face.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nothing! Only sometimes the warm milk father has me drink makes me
+throw up. I'm on a milk diet, you know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Does your father know that you can't keep the milk down?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mostly it does stay down ... I guess father's all right,&quot; he defended,
+&quot;maybe the diet will do me good.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do you ever get a beefsteak?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Father says meat is no good ... maybe he's right about killing animals.
+He says it wouldn't be half so bad if everyone killed their own meat,
+instead of making brutes out of men who do the killing for them ... but
+it is kind of hard on the dog, though,&quot; and the little fellow laughed.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I think my boy is going to become an engineer of some sort; he's always
+playing about with machinery,&quot; Penton said to me....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Suppose you let him take a trip with me to town, then? I'm going to
+look through the Best o' Wheat factory this afternoon, and watch how
+Best o' Wheat biscuits are made. Perhaps he'd like to see the machinery
+working!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, I'll trust him with you, if you'll promise me not to meddle
+with his diet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't like people stuffing him full of candy and ice cream. I want
+to bring him up with a good digestion and sound teeth.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Daniel took my hand as we went through the factory from department to
+department. I enjoyed a paternal pride in the handsome, pale,
+preternaturally intelligent little fellow.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look at the young father!&quot; exclaimed one girl softly to another, with a
+touch of pathos in her voice, intimating that perhaps I was a widower.</p>
+
+<p>I blushed with pleasure to the tips of my ears, to be thought the father
+of so prepossessing a child.</p>
+
+<p>It delighted him to look into the huge bake ovens where first the wheat
+was baked in big brown loaves, before it was broken up into biscuit
+form. I thought of Hank Spalton and how he was supposed to have grown
+strong on a diet of Best o' Wheat.</p>
+
+<p>It was customary to serve sight-seers, in a dining room kept for that
+purpose, with Best o' Wheat and cream, and wheat coffee ... free....</p>
+
+<p>With a little reluctance Dan sat down and ate.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hum! that was good; but look here, Buzzer&quot; (that was the nickname he
+had invented for me) you mustn't tell Mubby.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mubby?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's what mother and I call my father.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course I won't tell him ... and now we must go to a restaurant and
+have something real to eat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I can't. I don't dare. But I'll sit and watch you eat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I ordered a steak, and persuaded Dan, finally, to have one too.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If it's not good for people to eat, why does it taste so good?&quot; mooted
+Dan meditatively....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now I'll be in for it,&quot; he added, as we walked out of the door and
+started back to the Health Home.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But your father need never know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;At first I thought it might be all right to fool him just this once.
+But I mustn't. I've promised him I'd never lie to him about what I ate,
+and I must keep my word ... he'll whip me, perhaps.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Does he whip you much?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Not very much ... only when I need it ... and then when I cry, he
+stops&mdash;so it is never very hard!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I laughed at the boy's frank philosophy....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But daddy's so funny ... not at all like other daddies,&quot; wistfully.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I did not grow friendly enough with Mrs. Baxter even to call her by her
+first name of Hildreth ... during that brief visit....</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth Baxter was always moving about leisurely, gracefully, like some
+strange, pretty animal. Not shy, just indifferent, as if processes of
+thought were going on inside of her that made an inner world that
+sufficed, to the exclusion of all exterior happenings.</p>
+
+<p>She had a beautiful small head with heavy dark hair; large, brown,
+thoughtful eyes ... a face so strong as to be handsome rather than
+beautiful. She walked about in bloomers, languidly conscious that her
+legs were graceful and lovely....</p>
+
+<p>To her I was, at that time, merely one of her husband's visiting
+friends....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>After little Daniel had manfully squared himself with his conscience,
+Penton did not whip him. He came to me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I did not punish my boy: because it was you, Johnnie, that tempted
+him,&quot; and he flushed angrily. &quot;I'm sure you didn't consider what you
+were doing. If I thought you did it out of deliberation, I would never
+speak to you again ... you must learn not to tamper with the ideals of
+others, Johnnie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I apologised. I spoke of my reverence and regard for him and his
+greatness. I asked him to forgive me, which he did. And, as I pronounced
+him to be as great at Shelley, the Rousseau of America&mdash;his na&iuml;ve,
+youthful face wreathed with smiles and peace fell between us again.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I am thinking of going to live at Eden, the Single Tax Colony not far
+from Philadelphia ... I want you to come there and visit us in the
+spring. In the meantime don't let them make you bourgeois in Kansas ...
+don't let them smash you into the academic mould.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They haven't so far, have they?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But what in the world are you going back to Kansas for?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Because I have them trained there to accept me. I can do pretty much
+as I choose at the university. But mainly I want to write my four-act
+play in earnest&mdash;my New Testament drama, <i>Judas</i>. And I know of no
+better place to go to.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye, and don't fail to pay me a visit in the spring.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I will ... for a few weeks ... on my way to Paris.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Paris? How are you going to get there?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll take a few cars of cattle east to New York from the Kansas City
+stock yards ... and I'll work my way across on a cattle boat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye! I wish I had your initiative!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye! Mrs. Baxter ... glad to have met you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye, Mr. Gregory,&quot; and she dropped my hand quickly and turned on
+her heel, walking away with easy grace. I admired the back of her legs
+as she disappeared into her tent.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye, Dan!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye, Buzzer!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Daniel,&quot; called Mrs. Baxter from the interior of her tent, &quot;you mustn't
+call Mr. Gregory that!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At Laurel again, I found it still a month before fall session. All
+summer I had lacked my nude sunbaths to which I had become accustomed.
+So again I sought my island.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I rented my room over the tinshop again, and was soon in the thick of
+the fall term. By this time I had my contemporaries on the hill very
+much puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Belton, the Single Tax millionaire, had come to Kansas City. He
+was so diminutive as to be doll-like. He had to stand on a box to be
+seen, when he spoke from the floor, at the banquet tendered him ... and
+I had gone in to Kansas City as his guest, and had been seated on his
+right hand&mdash;I, in my painfully shabby clothes.</p>
+
+<p>The professors and students could not see why I made such a stir with
+prominent people, how I held their friendship despite my eccentricities
+and deep poverty.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I can't help you any more,&quot; observed Belton to me, as we sat in the
+lobby of the Coates House where he was putting up.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Who the hell's asking you to help me?&quot; I replied. &quot;I came down from
+Laurel with no ulterior motive; I came just to pay you a visit, and to
+thank you personally for giving me six months of freedom from economic
+worry while I wrote my fairy drama ... anyhow, please remember that it
+wasn't me you helped, but Poetry!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's too bad you can't be a Single Taxer,&quot; he sighed. &quot;I like you,
+Gregory, and I'd put you on my pension list if you'd only shift some of
+your fanaticism for poetry to the Single Tax cause.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Since then I have been frankly sorry that I did not play the hypocrite
+to Belton, in order to be put on a pension for several years. I might
+have achieved great verse during the leisure so afforded for calm,
+creative work.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I started a poetry club on the Hill.... I determined that it should be
+anarchistic in principle ... we should have no officials ... no dues ...
+not even a secretary to read dull minutes of previous meetings ... we
+should take turns presiding as chairman. And the membership was to be
+divided equally with girls.</p>
+
+<p>But the school year had begun unhappily for me. I did not find Vanna
+there. I went to visit her homely roommate.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Vanna has gone off to Arkansas ... she is teaching school down there
+for the winter.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Thank God she's not married somebody!&quot; I cried, forgetting, and giving
+myself away. Then Vanna Andrews' roommate saw at last that it was not
+she I was interested in. She gave way to invective.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You! a worthless tramp like you! A crazy fool!... to dare even hope
+that Vanna Andrews would ever love <i>you</i>!&quot; In a torrent of tears she
+asked me never to speak to her again.</p>
+
+<p>I was sorry I had not procured Vanna's address before I had betrayed
+myself. But, anyhow, I wrote her a long letter and sent it in care of
+the university registrar.</p>
+
+<p>Flamboyantly I confessed my love ... rehearsed the story of my worship
+of her from afar....</p>
+
+<p>For a month, every day, I sent her a bulky envelope full of mad verse
+and declarations of undying love. As the letters were not being
+returned, she must be receiving them.</p>
+
+<p>One morning, with trembling hands and a pounding heart that nearly bore
+me down, it acted so like a battering ram on the inside, I drew a
+delicately scented envelope from my mailbox ... addressed in a dainty
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>I kissed the letter again and again before I tore it open ... it was
+well that I did it then. I would not have kissed it afterward.</p>
+
+<p>It was filled with stinging rebuke for my presumption ... if I had a
+shred of the gentleman in me I would cease troubling her.... I had
+caused her exceeding annoyance by my deluge and torrent of absurd
+letters ... she did not care for me ... she thought my poetry was bad
+... and why had I behaved so brutally toward her former roommate?...</p>
+
+<p>I saw that the homely girl had not been remiss in writing to Vanna about
+me....</p>
+
+<p>My reply was a very poetic letter.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I will trouble you no more,&quot; I ended; &quot;but do not destroy my letters
+and poems, for, long after your wonderful beauty has become a mere
+handful of oblivious dust blowing about the stones of the world, you
+will be famous because a great poet loved you ... a poet whom you
+unwisely and ignorantly scorned.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Dr. Van Maarden, the Dutch psychiatrist and playwright, author of <i>De
+Kleine Man</i>, was to come to Laurel to deliver his celebrated lectures on
+&quot;The Socialisation of Humanity.&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>Professor Dineen, a flabby, feminine little fellow, one of our
+professors of philosophy, and hated by the dean of his department
+because he was a real philosopher, despite his physical
+ludicrousness,&mdash;and had published a book which the critics were hailing
+as a real contribution to the world of thought&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Dineen had engineered the bringing of the semi-radical Van Maarden to
+Laurel....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For such men are needed here ... to rouse us out of the petty, dogmatic
+ways of our crude pioneers....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Van Maarden is a remarkable man,&quot; continued Dineen; &quot;he writes plays,
+poems, books of economic philosophy, novels ... recently he tried to
+start a co-operative colony for Dutch farmers in South Carolina, but it
+went on the rocks ... and now Van Maarden, for all his genius, is
+practically stranded here in America.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It is, or ought to be, one of the duties of an educational centre like
+Laurel, to aid such men ... men who travel about, disseminating ideas,
+carrying the torch of inspiration ... like Giordano Bruno, in former
+days.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Van Maarden came ... a little, dapper, black-bearded man ... but a very
+boy in his enthusiasm. He advanced many doctrines at variance with even
+the political radicalism of Kansas.</p>
+
+<p>But whether it was his winning way or his foreign reputation, he was
+accepted gravely, and ideas won consideration, enunciated by him, that
+would have been looked on as mad, coming from me....</p>
+
+<p>Again the faculty were nonplussed ... puzzled....</p>
+
+<p>Dineen, Van Maarden and I were together much. And the latter found more
+delight in the time when he could discuss freely and unacademically with
+me than when he was invited to formal teas and dinners by the weightier
+members of the faculty and community.</p>
+
+<p>It was psychic research that we particularly discussed. Van Maarden was
+the greatest scholar in the Mystic, the Occult, the Spiritualistic that
+I have ever met. He claimed to be able to go out of the body at will and
+see what any friend was up to at any time, in any out-of-the-way place
+in the world....</p>
+
+<p>When I jested that such a faculty might sometimes prove embarrassing to
+his friends, he laughed and slapped me on the back.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Dineen was a queer little chap. He roomed de luxe at the Bellman House.</p>
+
+<p>One night, during a cyclone that swept the town and the adjacent
+country, a fragment of roof was lifted off the hostelry in which he
+dwelt. The women-servants and waitresses were thrown into a panic. One,
+who collapsed on a lounge in the upstairs hall, swore that Dineen had
+felt of her leg as she lay there. A scandal was started. I know that
+Dineen, in his European fashion, was free with his hands, when he meant
+no harm. He had merely laid his hand on the girl's leg, in friendly
+fashion, and asked if she was hurt.</p>
+
+<p>But the nasty Puritan mind of the community went to work, and the story
+was hawked about that Professor Dineen, taking advantage of the cyclone,
+had tried to &quot;feel the girl up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This, and the fact that he had been a friend of mine (after my
+forthcoming scandal it counted strongly against him) later effected in
+his being requested to resign from the faculty.</p>
+
+<p>But the real cause of the brilliant, strange man's persecution was the
+jealousy of the dean of the philosophical department of the former's
+real ability.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;We must do more for this man than we have ... he is a genius ... he has
+not enough money to return to Europe on....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He has written a curious, mad play called <i>Iistral</i> ... one dealing
+with psychic phenomena, which we ought to put on....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That way we'll net him three or four hundred dollars.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It was Dineen who spoke.</p>
+
+<p>We chanced to be walking up the Hill together.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The school cheer-leader was tall and statuesque, and his voice was deep
+and resonant ... but, though pleased with his stature and his vocal
+qualifications, Van Maarden decided on me to play the lead in his
+abnormal play.... I did not possess as fine a voice, but I knew the
+mystics almost as well as he did.... I believed in spiritism, and would
+be accordantly sympathetic with the author's ideas....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The rehearsal of the play progressed. Van Maarden, receiving' from
+Dineen's own personal bank-account a substantial advance on the expected
+receipts from the two performances, returned East, and sailed away for
+Holland.</p>
+
+<p>But an intimate friend of Penton Baxter's, before he left, he related to
+me many fine things about the latter, and spoke in special admiration of
+his wife, Hildreth.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I rehearsed and rehearsed.</p>
+
+<p>I fought and fought with the directress, a teacher of elocution, who
+tried to make me mouth my words in the old style.</p>
+
+<p>She swore that she would get rid of me as Iistral (pronounced Eestral),
+if it were not for the fact that it would seriously embarrass her to try
+others for the part, the time of production being so near.</p>
+
+<p>Dineen upbraided me for being insubordinate....</p>
+
+<p>I asked Dineen please to believe in me, and watch results.</p>
+
+<p>My idea of acting was to go into the part, be burned alive by it ... to
+recite my lines naturally.</p>
+
+<p>I was proud of myself. I was to act as lead in a play by a
+world-celebrated author, in its premier American production.</p>
+
+<p>The story of it was that of a young poet-student, Iistral ... eccentric
+... a sensitive ... who had, while tutoring the children of a count,
+fallen in love with the countess, his wife ... on the discovery of the
+liaison, she had committed suicide in a lake on their private
+grounds....</p>
+
+<p>The play opened up with the young student, Iistral, come back home,
+after the wife's death....</p>
+
+<p>The tragedy had affected him strangely.</p>
+
+<p>He wore a Hindoo robe, let his beard grow like a Yogi ... was irritated
+with the unimaginative, self-seeking smugness of the grown-ups.</p>
+
+<p>He found in Lisel, a little niece of his, the wise, innocent,
+illuminated imagination of childhood. And he associated with her,
+teaching her the mystic meanings of flowers in the garden.</p>
+
+<p>But he lived for one thing only&mdash;the coming of the voice of Egeria, as
+he called the spirit of the dead countess....</p>
+
+<p>Her voice came to him continually ... preluded by strains of music ...
+he lived from day to day with her lovely speech, a clairaudient.</p>
+
+<p>As long as nothing material was involved, he was regarded as merely a
+gentle eccentric ... by his relatives and the bourgeoisie....</p>
+
+<p>But as soon as word came that he had inherited a fortune through the
+death of a rich uncle in America&mdash;the attitude of the people around him
+changed. His relatives began intriguing to have him declared insane.</p>
+
+<p>But the village burgomaster, ordinarily decent, saw through their
+artifices....</p>
+
+<p>Goaded and goaded, finally Iistral assailed his pestering relatives with
+a shovel with which he was working among the gentle flowers in the
+garden ... at his customary task of tending them with Lisel....</p>
+
+<p>And now the burgomaster, bribed, had reason to adjudge him insane.</p>
+
+<p>And Iistral was dragged off, wailing, to the asylum.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>With my clothes in literal rags I went through the rehearsals, attended
+classes, kept up my athletics....</p>
+
+<p>Often I woke up in the night, crying out, with tears rolling down my
+cheeks, the lines of unhappy Iistral ... the spirit-woman Egeria grew
+real as flesh and blood to me....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Egeria! Egeria!&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I woke, time and again, and heard my own voice, like the voice of
+another, calling her name in the dark.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;You mustn't take the play so desperately ... remember it's just a play
+... you rehearse as if the whole thing were a part of your life.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Some of the boys,&quot; I replied, &quot;some of the football boys lost ten or
+twelve pounds in our Thanksgiving game at Kansas City last fall ... why
+do you rebuke me for taking art and beauty as seriously as athletes take
+a football match?&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Two days before the play, as I was walking by the Bellman House, I saw
+Jarvis Alexander Mackworth standing there, come up from Osageville for a
+regents' conference....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hello!&quot; the dear, good man called, &quot;you heavenly bum! You starry young
+tramp!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His eyes were twinkling in appreciative merriment over his quaint
+phraseology.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What are you doing in Laurel, Mr. Mackworth?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I noticed that he did not wear his many-patched trousers, but was well
+dressed....</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;attending a regents' meeting, young man,&mdash;where I suppose I'll have
+to stand up in your defence again....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's a good thing you don't run after the women, Gregory, or your case
+would be entirely lost.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>(Yet Mackworth didn't know of the dirty trick that had been played on
+me:</p>
+
+<p>One of the boys from the school, running wild down in Kansas City, had,
+with a curious sense of humour, given my name as his ... to the &quot;girls&quot;
+in various houses of prostitution....</p>
+
+<p>And &quot;do you know Johnnie Gregory?&quot; and &quot;when is Johnnie Gregory coming
+to see us again?&quot; other students were asked who frequented the
+&quot;houses.&quot;)</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And what are you up to now?&quot; asked Mackworth.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;acting ... in Van Maarden's <i>Iistral</i> ... leading r&ocirc;le!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You look skinnier than ever!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am taking the part seriously, and it's bringing me down. I like to do
+real things when I get a chance, Mr. Mackworth ... and
+I am going to make the two performances of <i>Iistral</i> memorable ones.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You need a new suit of clothes very badly.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I know I do. But I have no money, and no credit.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well see about that, my young Villon.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mackworth took me to one side and thrust a fifty-dollar bill into my
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>I hurried down to Locker, the clothier....</p>
+
+<p>In a very little while I was again walking by the Bellman House,
+completely togged out in new apparel from head to heel.</p>
+
+<p>Mackworth was still standing there, and he laughed with astonishment at
+the lightning-quick change in my appearance....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're a card, Gregory!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He afterward repeated the story with gusto....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The day before the night of our first performance at the Bowersby Opera
+House, Jack Travers, always turning up, came to me with a smile of faint
+sarcasm on his face&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How's the great actor, eh?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't be an ass, Jack!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've got a good proposition to make for advertising the show&mdash;and
+there'll be a lot of fun in it, too....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Suppose we kidnap you, take you out somewhere in the country&mdash;then,
+after a day or so&mdash;find you bound, in a farm house....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course it would compel them to put off the performances for a few
+days ... but look at the excitement; and the stories in the papers!...
+afterwards you could go on tour through all the principal cities of
+Kansas.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The idea fascinated me, in spite of myself....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But how about Dineen? He'd go nearly crazy!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There's where a lot of the fun would come in. And to see the way Gertie
+Black, the elocution teacher, would carry on!...&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But after a long pause of temptation I shook my head in negation of the
+suggestion....</p>
+
+<p>It <i>would</i> be a lark, but I had pledged Dineen that I would give him no
+more trouble with my vagaries....</p>
+
+<p>And, besides, I didn't trust Jack Travers&mdash;once they had me in their
+power, he and his kidnappers might hide me away for several weeks ... to
+&quot;bust up&quot; the play entirely; would, I wisely reflected, be, to Travers,
+even a greater joke than merely to delay its production.</p>
+
+<p>And I wanted this time to show my enemies that I could be depended on in
+affairs of moment....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We had to have recourse to Kansas City for our costumes. And we were
+more fortunate in them than the cast of <i>She Stoops to Conquer</i> had been
+the year before....</p>
+
+<p>Costumes had then been rented for them which left the children
+mysteriously itching, driven to the inexplicable necessity of scratching
+in embarrassing localities....</p>
+
+<p>The poor girls especially were terror-stricken ... and many of the boys
+were too innocent to conjecture what was the matter ... at first they
+thought that the rented costumes had imparted some obscure skin disease
+to the entire company ... and word was conveyed to the costuming firm
+that they were to be sued....</p>
+
+<p>But when it was discovered that an indecent sort of vermin was the
+cause, the case was dropped....</p>
+
+<p>Suit could not be conducted on such grounds....</p>
+
+<p>But the joke was passed around and caused considerable merriment among
+the wise ones.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The only thing I allowed the elocution teacher and directress to do was
+to put on my make-up for me ... including the sticking to my face of a
+close Van Dyke beard....</p>
+
+<p>I refused to avail myself of her instruction for acting, as I perceived
+that was all bosh....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The curtain went up, I sitting there, the orchestra softly breathing
+Massenet's <i>Elegy</i>&mdash;meant to be the music sent from the spirit world,
+the melody that I, Iistral, heard, whenever my dead mistress was
+present....</p>
+
+<p>The orchestra finished the melody. It stopped and left the house in
+expectancy.</p>
+
+<p>A mistake had been made on the entrance-cue of little Lisel, my
+child-nephew.</p>
+
+<p>There I sat, in my strange robe, like a bath-robe, with stars cast over
+it, waiting.</p>
+
+<p>I knew something had gone wrong.</p>
+
+<p>Several girls (of course everyone in the audience knew me) began to
+titter at my strange appearance, in my apotheosised bathrobe, in my
+close Van Dyke beard....</p>
+
+<p>I knew inwardly that in a moment all the house would be laughing ... at
+first out of sheer nervousness over the delay in the progress of the
+play&mdash;then from genuine amusement....</p>
+
+<p>I threw my will, my entire spirit, against the incoming tide of ridicule
+which would wreck the play even with the rising of the curtain.</p>
+
+<p>I pictured to myself the beautiful woman who had drowned herself; I
+burned with her unhappiness ... I felt her hovering near me ... I
+thought of the lovely passion we had known together ... I <i>was</i> Iistral.</p>
+
+<p>I was not on a stage, but in a room, holding actual and rapt communion
+with my spirit-bride, Egeria!...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Egeria! Egeria!&quot; I sobbed ... and tears streamed down my face.</p>
+
+<p>I was miserable, without her, in the flesh ... though she was there,
+beside me, in soul!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was aware of the audience again. I was proud and strong in my
+confidence now. The tittering had stopped. The house was filling with
+awe. I was pushing something back, back, back&mdash;over the footlights. I
+did not stop pushing till it had reached the topmost galleries....</p>
+
+<p>I <i>had</i> them....</p>
+
+<p>The applause after the first act was wonderful.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Great! You're great ... you've vindicated my belief in you entirely!&quot;
+Dineen was shouting, as he clapped me on the back, beside himself.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, I knew I'd do it!... I want a drink!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here's some grape juice!&quot; Gertie Black hold out a glass to me....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I won't drink that stuff,&quot; I replied, with all the petulance and
+ill-humour traditionally allowed a star.</p>
+
+<p>A Sig-Kapp, whom I had got into the play as a supe, slipped me a drink
+of real booze....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I had to run to the toilet three times before the second act, I was so
+nervous and excited.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For God's sake, keep it up!&quot; urged Dineen.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For Christ's sake, let me alone, all of you,&mdash;I know what I'm doing,&quot;
+this, as the elocution teacher tried to press home some advice....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>During the second act I was as electric as during the first, but now I
+allowed myself to see over the foot-lights and recognise people I knew.
+I even overheard one girl say to another, &quot;why, Johnnie Gregory is
+handsome in that Van Dyke!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, he has a fine profile ... he looks quite distinguished.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Before the curtain for the third act, Jack Travers worked his way back
+through the props to my dressing room....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sh! I've brought a nip of something real for you, Johnnie!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Bill already has given me some. It's enough! I don't want any
+more!&mdash;wait till the last act, and then I'll take it!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't want it <i>now</i>! <i>Do you hear</i>!&quot; I almost screamed, as he
+mischievously insisted.</p>
+
+<p>The bell rang for the third curtain....</p>
+
+<p>The news had come for Iistral that his rich uncle in America had died
+and left him a fortune ... now his family would try and have him
+adjudged insane, in order to lay hands on the wealth for their own
+uses....</p>
+
+<p>That third act went off well....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But you skipped a few lines in that act, Mr. Gregory,&quot; warned the
+directress, concerned.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, let me alone, will you!&quot; I returned, enjoying the petulance of
+stardom to the full....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Remember the fight-scene at the finish,&quot; she persisted, &quot;just <i>pretend</i>
+to strike with the shovel ... you might hurt someone!&quot; anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am going to act the thing realistically, not as a matter of
+stagecraft.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She tiptoed away. And I had the satisfaction of hearing her instruct the
+boys who acted as guards, and who were to seize on me&mdash;in my moment of
+physical exasperation&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Grab him before the cue, just a trifle before it! I think Mr. Gregory
+is going to forget himself!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I swung the shovel high in the air, making at all my relatives, crying
+out terms of reproach ... sobbing....</p>
+
+<p>In the audience, everybody sat still with wonder.</p>
+
+<p>The actors scattered from my brandished shovel, just as they would have
+done in real life ... the directress had schooled them to crowd about me
+so as to mask the action.</p>
+
+<p>But the action needed no masking. It was real.</p>
+
+<p>The two guards were on me,&mdash;boys who, in everyday life, were big
+football men on the freshman team....</p>
+
+<p>I fought them, frenzied, back and forth over the stage, smashing down
+the pasteboard hedge, falling ... getting up again....</p>
+
+<p>But, though the scenery went down, the audience did not laugh, but sat
+spellbound.</p>
+
+<p>I was finally dragged away ... on the way to the asylum, half my costume
+torn from my body ... and I kept crying aloud ... for mercy ... for
+deliverance ... after the curtain had long gone down....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Big Bill&quot; Heizer gave me a thump in the ribs.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For God's sake, Mr. Gregory&quot; (he had called me &quot;Johnnie&quot; always,
+before) &quot;it's only play-acting ... it's not real ... quit it ... it gets
+me.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The audience went wild with applause. I had won Laurel's complete
+approbation&mdash;for the day, as I had won Mt. Hebron's, that fall Field
+Day, long before!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Travers had slipped me just one shot of whiskey before the last act went
+on. He had tried to persuade me to drink more. He was in my dressing
+room....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I could hardly stand, from the weakness of excitement and exertion.</p>
+
+<p>After the play was over&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>Now</i> you can give me the rest of the bottle.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We'll drink it together ... to your success, Gregory!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes&mdash;you devil!&quot; I replied, fond of him, &quot;you'd have had me reeling
+drunk, that last act, if I had listened to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And I gave him an affectionate clout in the ribs.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Again the professors were urging me to become more &quot;regular&quot; and
+pointing out the great career that awaited me&mdash;if I only would work.</p>
+
+<p>There was some subsequent talk of sending the play to Osageville,
+Topeka, Kansas City....</p>
+
+<p>But the faculty opposed it ... it would not be proper to send girls and
+boys out together, travelling about like a regular theatrical company.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As it had been said that I was going to take up the career of animal
+trainer,&mdash;after my going into the cage with the lions&mdash;so it was now
+pronounced, and reported in the papers&mdash;Travers saw to that&mdash;that I
+meditated a career as a professional actor....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Gleeful, and vastly relieved, Professor Dineen slipped me twenty-five
+dollars out of his own pocket.</p>
+
+<p>Several fraternities showed indications of &quot;rushing&quot; me, after my star
+performance ... but my associations with the odd characters about town
+and the wild, ignorant farmers of the lower type that drove in each
+Saturday from the adjacent country, made them, at first, hesitate ...
+then utterly drop the idea....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Broke, I now wrote a long letter to Jarvis Alexander Mackworth.</p>
+
+<p>I boldly complained of my poverty, inasmuch as it deterred me from my
+work.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have now proven my case,&quot; I wrote him,&mdash;&quot;my poems have appeared in
+the <i>Century</i>, in <i>Everybody's</i>, in <i>Munsey's</i>....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have acted, as well, as a professional in a first-rate play, by a
+great European dramatist ... giving Kansas the distinction of being the
+first to produce <i>Iistral</i> on the American stage....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>Now</i> I want to finish my four-act play on Judas. To do so I must have
+enough to eat and a place to sleep, without being made to worry about
+it, for a year....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Can't you help me to a millionaire?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mackworth answered me generously, affectionately.</p>
+
+<p>In two weeks he had procured my millionaire ... Derek, of Chicago, the
+bathtub magnate ... how much could I get on with?</p>
+
+<p>I wrote that I could do with seven dollars a week....</p>
+
+<p>Mackworth replied not to be a fool&mdash;that Derek was willing to make it
+fifteen, for a year's duration....</p>
+
+<p>I replied that I could only take enough to fill my simplest wants....</p>
+
+<p>Derek jocosely added fifty cents to the sum I asked&mdash;&quot;for postage
+stamps&quot;&mdash; ... for one year, week in, week out, without a letter from me
+except those indicating changes of address, without sending me a word of
+advice, criticism, or condemnation, no matter what I got into ... Derek
+sent me that weekly stipend of seven dollars and fifty cents!...</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I settled down to consecutive literary work.</p>
+
+<p>Lyrics I could write under any condition. They came to me so deeply from
+the subconscious that at times they almost seemed like spirit-control,
+which, at times, I am sure they had been, till I set the force of my
+will against them. For I was resolved that what <i>I</i> wrote should be an
+emanation from my own personality, not from dead and gone poets who used
+me for a medium.</p>
+
+<p>But when it came to long and consecutive effort, the continual petty
+worry of actual penury sapped my mind so that I lacked the power of
+application....</p>
+
+<p>With Derek's remittances this obstacle was removed....</p>
+
+<p>I had soon completed the first act of my apostolic play....</p>
+
+<p>And then I plunged into a scrape, together with my fellow members of the
+press or &quot;Scoop Club,&quot; as it was more popularly known, which halted my
+work mid-way....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Our common adventure derived its inception from a casual remark of Jack
+Travers', at one of our meetings....</p>
+
+<p>Ever since Arthur Brisbane had come to Laurel, Jack had been on his
+toes....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Brisbane brought me a breath of what it must mean to be a big newspaper
+man in the world outside,&quot; said Travers, as he stretched and yawned,
+&quot;why don't we,&quot; he continued, &quot;<i>start</i> something to show 'em we're
+alive, and not dead like so many of the intellects on the Hill!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;s all right to talk about starting something ... that's easy to do.
+The hell of it is, to stop it, after you've got it started,&quot;
+philosophised &quot;The Colonel&quot;....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Just what is it that you propose starting?&quot; asked practical, pop-eyed
+Tom Jenkins.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, anything that will cause excitement!&quot; waved Travers, serenely.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If you boys really want some excitement ... and want to do some service
+for the community at the same time,&mdash;I've got a scheme to suggest ...
+something I've been thinking over for a long time,&quot; suggested Jerome
+Miller, president of the club....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Tell us what it is, Jerome!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Bottoms ... you know how rotten it is down there ... nigger
+whorehouses ... every other house a bootlegger's joint ... blind pigs
+... blind tigers, for the students....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We might show up the whole affair....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;how the city administration thrives on the violation of the law from
+that quarter ... how the present administration depends on crime and the
+whiskey elements to keep it in power by their vote....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>That</i> would be starting something!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I should say it would!&quot; shouted Jack Travers, ablaze with enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then we might extend operations,&quot; continued the masterful, incisive
+Jerome, &quot;and show up how all the drug stores are selling whiskey by the
+gallon, for 'medicinal' purposes, abusing the privilege of the law.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But how is all this to be done?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Through the <i>Laurelian</i>?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No ... I have a better plan than that ... we might be able to persuade
+'Senator' Blair and old Sickert, joint editors of the <i>Laurel Globe</i>, to
+let the Scoop Club run their paper for a day&mdash;just as a college stunt!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They'd never stand for it!&quot; I averred, innocently.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course they wouldn't&mdash;if we let them in on what we were up to!&mdash;for
+they are staunch supporters of the present administration&mdash;but they
+won't smell a rat till the edition is off the press ... and then it will
+be too late to stop it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In other words,&quot; laughed Travers, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke
+from his nose, &quot;they'll think they're turning over their paper, <i>The
+Globe</i>, to a bunch of boys to have some harmless fun ... a few
+sophomoric jokes on the professors, and so forth....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And they'll wake up, to find we've slipped a real man-size sheet over
+on them, for the first time in local history!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It'll raise hell's all I've got to say!&quot; sagely commented the
+prematurely bald &quot;Colonel,&quot; his eyes glinting merrily.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It'll be lots of fun,&quot; remarked Travers, characteristically, &quot;and I'm
+for it, lock, stock, and barrel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's not the reason I'm for it; I'm for it for two reasons,&quot;
+reinforced Jerome Miller magisterially, &quot;first, because it will put the
+Scoop Club on the map as something more than a mere college boys'
+organisation; secondly, because it will lead to civic betterment, if
+only temporary&mdash;a shaking up where this old burg needs a shaking up ...
+right at the court house and in the police station....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But, make no mistake about it,&mdash;it's going to kick up a big dust!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Also, remember, no one is going to stand by us ... even the Civic
+Betterment League, headed by Professor Langworth&mdash;your friend,
+Johnnie&mdash;will be angry with us&mdash;say our methods are too sensational.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And the university authorities will say we shouldn't have done it
+because it will give the school a black eye ... it will be Ibsen's
+<i>Enemy of Society</i> all over again!...&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Immediately some of our more conservative members set themselves against
+the &quot;clean up&quot; ... but Jack Travers and I delivered eloquent, rousing
+speeches. And the decision was more for full steam ahead.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Senator&quot; Blair was easily deluded, and persuaded to turn his paper over
+to us, for one day.</p>
+
+<p>Our strong-featured, energetic president, Jerome Miller, together with
+the suave, plausible Travers, went to see him, deputation-wise, where he
+sat, in the Laurel <i>Globe's</i> editorial office,&mdash;white and
+unhealthy-looking, a great, fat slug of a man, with the slug's nature,
+which battens on the corruption of earth.</p>
+
+<p>He liked the idea of the publicity his paper would get through the stunt
+of the &quot;boys.&quot; He did not guess the kind of publicity he would really
+come into.</p>
+
+<p>During the three weeks that we had before we were to bring out the paper
+we grew quite proficient in the tawdry life lived in the &quot;Bottoms.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We found out that most of the ramshackle &quot;nigger&quot; dives were owned by a
+former judge ... from which he derived exorbitant rents.</p>
+
+<p>We located all the places where booze was sold, and ascertained exactly
+how much whiskey was disposed of in the town's drug stores for &quot;snake
+bite&quot; and &quot;stomach trouble.&quot; We discovered many interesting
+things&mdash;that, for instance, &quot;Old Aunt Jennie,&quot; who would allow her
+patrons any vice, but demurred when they took the name of &quot;De Lawd&quot; in
+vain&mdash;&quot;Old Aunt Jennie&quot; ran a &quot;house&quot; where the wilder and more
+debauched among the students came (in justice to Laurel University, let
+me add, very few) girls and boys together,&mdash;and stayed for the
+night&mdash;when they were supposed to be on trips to Kansas City....</p>
+
+<p>Travers and &quot;The Colonel&quot; and I were half-lit for two weeks....</p>
+
+<p>That was the only way to collect the evidence.</p>
+
+<p>I drank but sparingly, as I loafed about the joints and &quot;houses.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Jerome Miller did not drink at all ... and was the spirit and soul of
+our activities.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Senator&quot; Blair came out with a humorous editorial the night before we
+were to take the day's charge of his paper.</p>
+
+<p>He headed his editorial &quot;A Youthful Interim ... Youth Must Be Served!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He was laying down his pen, he wrote, for a week-end holiday ... he had
+dug a can of bait and would go fishing, turning all the care and trouble
+of a newspaper over to youth and eagerness ... would forgot all his
+troubles for a few days....</p>
+
+<p>The editorial made us roar with laughter ... Blair didn't know the
+trouble that was preparing for him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I wrote a poem for the Scoop Club Edition of the Laurel <i>Globe</i> ...</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;The Bottoms now I sing, where whiskey flows</div>
+<div>And two-cent makes life coleur de rose,</div>
+<div>Where negro shanties line the sordid way</div>
+<div>And rounders wake by night who sleep by day&mdash;&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>By noon of the day, hints of what was coming were riding the winds of
+general report....</p>
+
+<p>Carefully we read the proofs.</p>
+
+<p>At last there it was&mdash;all the data, statistics, and details of the
+town's debauchery and corruption ... damning, in cold type, the
+administration, and the aquiescent powers in the university.</p>
+
+<p>We ourselves had not as yet begun to perceive what it would lead to&mdash;a
+state-wide scandal that would echo in the Chicago, San Francisco and New
+York newspapers, and result in severe criticism of the university
+faculty for remaining blind to such a condition of affairs ... and how
+there would be interrogations in the Kansas Legislature and a complete
+shake-up of the political power in Laurel.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>News of the forthcoming expos&eacute; spread mysteriously in &quot;The Bottoms&quot;
+before the paper was off the press. To avoid the coming storm, already
+negro malefactors and white, were &quot;streaming&quot; as Travers phrased it, &quot;in
+dark clouds&quot; out of town, for brief sojourns, beyond reach of the
+compelling subpoena, in Kansas City, Missouri.</p>
+
+<p>By five o'clock the edition, an extra large one, had been almost
+exhausted, and people were lining up at the newspaper office, paying
+five cents a copy....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Senator&quot; Blair rushed back, having heard of what he called our
+&quot;treachery&quot; and abuse of his confidence, over telephone....</p>
+
+<p>He looked sick and worried, as if he had run in all the way from the
+little lake, five miles from town, where he had gone for his week-end of
+idyllic, peaceful fishing....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You've ruined me, you boys have!&quot; he almost sobbed, collapsing fatly in
+his chair, then he flamed, &quot;by God, I'll have you each investigated
+personally and clapped in jail,&quot; ... which threat, however, he did not
+even try to carry through....</p>
+
+<p>Instead, his paper, and the other two town papers, tried to turn off the
+affair as a mere college joke, played on a whole community....</p>
+
+<p>But we had expected just such action&mdash;rather the executive genius of
+Jerome had expected it&mdash;for which reason we had confronted the readers
+of the <i>Globe</i> with damning facts and statistics, carefully gathered,
+which presented an insurmountable barrier to evasion.</p>
+
+<p>And as we also had expected, the Civic Betterment League was also dead
+against us....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why,&quot; cried Langworth to me, &quot;why didn't you bring all the evidence to
+us, and let <i>us</i> proceed calmly and soberly with the case?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Professor Langworth, you are a friend of mine, and a very good
+one&mdash;but you know very well that the conditions exposed you people knew
+of all along ... and for years you have dallied along without acting on
+it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We were biding the proper time!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The reason you never started something was your fear of involving the
+university in the publicity that was sure to follow!...&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Langworth was a good man, but he knew I had him. He hemmed and hawed,
+then covered his retreat in half-hearted anger at me....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You know well enough, Johnnie Gregory, that all you boys did it for was
+to 'pull a stunt'&mdash;indulge in a little youthful horseplay.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Granted&mdash;but we have effected results!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;What results? merely a lot of trouble for everybody!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Civic Betterment League now has a chance afforded it to make good
+... we've provided you with the indisputable data, the evidence ... it's
+up to you, now, to go ahead.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So God help me, Johnnie, sometimes you make me wish I had never
+sponsored you here.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The editor of the <i>Globe</i> made a right-about-face&mdash;repudiating us.</p>
+
+<p>Jack Travers, in the style of his beloved Brisbane, put an editorial in
+the school paper, the <i>Laurelian</i>, addressed to Blair, beginning, &quot;Get
+back into the collar of your masters, you contemptible cur.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The usual thing took place. Most of the worst criminals were
+mysteriously given ample time to make their get-away ... probably aided
+in it. The humorous side of the resulting investigation and trials of
+various minor malefactors were played up almost exclusively.</p>
+
+<p>Little by little the town dropped back to its outward observance of not
+seeing in its civic life what it did not care to see, and which no one
+could radically remedy till human nature is itself different.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The school year was drawing to a close, my last year at Laurel.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Black, of the English department, had assured me that, if I
+would tone down a bit, I could easily win a scholarship in his
+department, and, later, an assistant professorship.</p>
+
+<p>But I preferred my rambling, haphazard course of life, which was less
+comfortable, but better for the freedom of mind and spirit that poets
+must preserve....</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Hammond, when I had given him that luncheon on the borrowed money,
+had taken me aside and informed me that one of the professors&mdash;an
+influential man on the Hill (beyond that, he refused to identify him
+further) had advised him, Hammond, not to accept the luncheon in his
+honour....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We don't approve generally of Gregory, on the Hill, you know....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And Hammond had, he told me, replied&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm sorry, but Mr. Gregory is my friend, and Dr. Ward, our literary
+editor, looks on him as a distinguished contributor to the
+<i>Independent</i>, and a young writer of great and growing promise&quot; ... so
+the luncheon was given ... I wonder if the protesting professor was one
+of those invited, and if so, if he attended?...</p>
+
+<p>I saw clearly that I could never fit into the formal, academic life of
+the college&mdash;where professors were ashamed to be seen carrying packages
+and bags home from the stores, but must have them delivered ... for fear
+of losing their social status!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There was a park on the outskirts of town where I loved to loaf, when
+the weather was sunny,&mdash;a place where the blue jays fought with the
+squirrels and the leaves flickered in the sun ... sometimes I lay on the
+grass, reading ... sometimes I lounged on a bench ... I read my Greek
+and Latin poets there ... and my English and German poets ... and, when
+hungry, I sauntered home to my bread and cheese, or, now that I was in
+receipt of Derek's weekly stipend, to a frugal meal at some lunch
+counter. I dearly liked rib-ends of beef....</p>
+
+<p>One day, when I was in my park, lying on my belly, reading Josephus, I
+was aware of the deputy sheriff, Small, whom I knew, standing over
+me....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, it's <i>you</i>, Gregory!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, what's the matter, Deputy Small? what do you want?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;People who drove in from the country complained about your lying here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Complained about my lying here? what the hell!... look'e here, Jim
+Small, there's no ordinance to prevent me from lying on the grass.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, Johnnie, you either got to git up and sit, proper, on a bench, or
+I'll have to pull you in, much as I dislike to do it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jim, you just 'pull' ahead, if you think you're lucky ... it'll be a
+fine thing for me ... I'll sue the city for false arrest.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Deputy Small was puzzled. He pushed his hat back and scratched his
+head....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jim, who put you up to this?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The people what saw you lying here, as they drove in, stopped off at
+the office of the <i>Globe</i> ... it was 'Senator' Blair telephoned the
+courthouse&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Blair, eh?... trying to get even for what we boys did with his dirty
+paper ... he knows I like to lie out here and read my books of poetry!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was thoroughly aroused. I jumped to my feet.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jim, do me a favour, and arrest me ... and I'll sue you, the city of
+Laurel, and 'Senator' Blair ... all three of you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;guess I won't do it ... but <i>do</i> sit on the bench ... I ask it as a
+personal favour, Johnnie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;As a personal favour, Jim, till you are out of sight. Then I'll go back
+to the grass.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>That night Blair, cocksure, had the story of my arrest in the paper.
+But, as it happened, he was too previous....</p>
+
+<p>Jerome Miller and Jack Travers joined me in going to the office of the
+<i>Globe</i>, the next morning....</p>
+
+<p>After we had finished telling him what we thought of him, the &quot;Senator&quot;
+begged my pardon profusely, and the next day a retraction was
+printed....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>And now school was over at Laurel.</p>
+
+<p>And I determined to bum my way to New York, and, from there, ship on a
+cattleboat to Europe. Where I would finish writing my play, <i>Judas</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Farewell to Laurel!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>I went up to the athletic field and ran my last two miles on its track,
+at top speed, as good-bye to its cinders forever!</p>
+
+<p>I walked, with a guilty feeling of too much sentimentality, back into
+the &quot;stack&quot; 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....</p>
+
+<p>I did not say good-bye to Langworth or my other professor friends, as
+they had already left for their summer vacations.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I sat in Joe Deacon's room, talking, that last night of my sojourn in
+Laurel....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good old Joe&quot; 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....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>I spoke ardently in favour of free love.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, if a convention is wrong, it is the duty of everyone who knows the
+right in his heart, to help smash that convention....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You just wait,&quot; I boasted imaginatively, &quot;and I'll show you!&quot; &quot;Maybe,
+Joe,&quot; I concluded, for I knew what I said would tease him, &quot;maybe, when
+I reach the East, I shall break loose.&quot; Then I added&mdash;and to this day I
+cannot imagine what put it into my head to say it&mdash;what fantastic curl
+of thought, unless perhaps a premonition of what was soon to come to
+pass&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Joe was scandalised at my remark&mdash;the effect I had wished for.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Reduced again to my barest equipment, and having left as my forwarding
+address the office of the <i>National Magazine</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>I hopped off at Argentine, just outside of Kansas City.</p>
+
+<p>I found a camp of tramps and joined with them. We drank coffee
+together....</p>
+
+<p>But, somehow, the scales had fallen from my eyes. My old idealisation of
+the life of the tramp, somehow or other, was entirely gone&mdash;an
+idealisation that had, anyhow, been mainly literary, induced by the
+writings of Jack London, Josiah Flynt and Maxim Gorky.</p>
+
+<p>Now, as I listened to their filthy talk ... their continual
+&quot;Jesus-Christ'-ing&quot; over everything they said, I grew sick of them. I
+got up and walked away stiffly&mdash;never again to be a tramp.</p>
+
+<p>The reporter of the <i>Star</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There were other cars, filled with steers, sheep, and pigs.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A pig has no sense in a car ... or anywhere.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Seems to me they have ... they act as if they know what they're in for,
+at the other end of the line.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;By golly, that's true! I never thought of it that way before!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>So conversed the head brakeman and I.</p>
+
+<p>My calves soon grew to know me. They bleated, in a friendly manner, as I
+walked by, overseeing them, when the freight stopped.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where are you now?&quot; Laston asked, over the phone.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm calling you from the stockyards,&quot; and I told him what I was
+doing....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Meunier had gone to his office....</p>
+
+<p>Nichi Swartzman, the tall Japanese genius, showed up, and Bella Meunier,
+Nichi, and I ate breakfast together.</p>
+
+<p>Swartzman was, and is, a magnificent talker ... a torch of inspiration
+burned brightly in his brain, with continual conversational fire.</p>
+
+<p>But he must have his drink. Several of them. Which Laston's wife poured
+for him abundantly.</p>
+
+<p>After breakfast I sprawled on the floor ... I always sprawl on floors
+instead of sitting in chairs....</p>
+
+<p>Swartzman and Bella Meunier and I talked and talked and talked ... of
+Poe ... of Baudelaire, of Balzac....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why,&quot; I thought, &quot;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 <i>alive</i>. 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!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I found out afterward that Nichi Swartzman was utterly irresponsible as
+he was brilliant.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Laston Meunier dug up poor old Fritz Von Hammer, the former Eos
+pianist&mdash;whose breath was still as fetid as ever ... who still insisted
+on seizing you by the coat lapel and talking right into your nose&mdash;dug
+him up from the moving picture house, where he played.</p>
+
+<p>Von Hammer wept over the piano, as he found himself free again to play
+as he wished....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now play the Danse Macabre,&quot; cried Nichi, to Von Hammer....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I can't do it without a violin accompaniment.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Try it for me ... and I shall dance the Dance of Death for you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Von Hammer said he would do his best ... after much persuasion and a few
+more drinks....</p>
+
+<p>And Nichi Swartzman danced....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>At three o'clock in the morning we were all drunk. Before we parted we
+joined in singing shakily but enthusiastically <i>Down in Bohemia Land</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Meunier, fulfilling his promise to me, paid my fare to New York. I soon
+walked into the office of the <i>National Magazine</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Clara Martin was there, and Allsworth Lephil, the managing editor, and
+his assistant Galusha Siddon.</p>
+
+<p>As I sat in the office, they gave me a sort of impromptu reception.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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, <i>Babylons of To-day</i> ... exposing the corruption of our modern
+American cities.</p>
+
+<p>I spoke to them of my projected trip to Europe.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, that's true. But couldn't I write it in Europe as well as here?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You'd find too many distractions.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where would you go first?&quot; asked Clara Martin.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Paris!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Baxter has just been in here ... he's writing us a sensational novel
+exposing society. He spoke to me about you,&quot; Lephil remarked,&mdash;&quot;said he
+wished we'd put a tag on you and ship you down to his Eden colony.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause. Miss Martin thoughtfully tapped her forehead with a
+pencil.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't think it would be good for Johnnie to go down to Eden and put
+up with Penton,&quot; she interjected, &quot;they're too much alike.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ally Merton is in New York,&quot; Galusha Siddon informed me. &quot;He's working
+on the <i>Express</i>. He wants you to run down and see him.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Merton had come to New York the year before, to work on the <i>Express</i>.
+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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on up on the roof. The paper wants a photo of you ... to go with a
+story I'm writing about you.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The next morning I was in the office of the <i>Independent</i>, 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....</p>
+
+<p>Once, when on a vacation he had written me that, as pastime, he had
+read the whole of the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> over again. In the Greek, of
+course.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We talked and talked of poetry. He brought down a huge treatise on
+English versification, translated from some German scholar's
+life-research&mdash;to prove a point ... he discussed what Sidney
+Lanier&mdash;whom he had known&mdash;might have done with metrics, had he only
+lived longer....</p>
+
+<p>And &quot;no ... no ... take my advice,&quot; he said, &quot;don't go down to Eden.&quot;
+There was something so vaguely deprecatory in his voice that it brought
+from me the question&mdash;&quot;why not? isn't Penton Baxter all right?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, yes,&quot; in the same deprecatory tone,&mdash;&quot;he's all right enough,
+alone&mdash;but, together, you'd be like two balloons without ballast. He
+might get you, or you might get him, into some sort of mess.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why Dr. Ward, what do you mean?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Penton is always protesting about something or other,&mdash;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,&quot; he added
+hastily, &quot;is a real force ... he can think of more original projects in
+a given space of time than anyone else I know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I look on him as a great and wonderful man!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Have you no place else to go to, beside Eden?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I could run out to Perfection City&mdash;and camp out there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now that's a good idea ... why not try that?&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, had your lunch yet?&quot; it was Dr. Percival Hammond, the
+managing editor, who was asking, leaning out from his cubbyhole where he
+sat before his desk.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, sir!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come and share mine!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Lunch!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're utterly mad, but we like you!&quot; said one of the boys.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Globe</i>&mdash;a
+vilely slanderous article, headed, &quot;Good Riddance.&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>And first it lied that I had run away from my &quot;confederates&quot; 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....</p>
+
+<p>But the second count&mdash;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 habitu&eacute; of
+the Bottoms ... that I had been sleeping with negro women and rolling
+about with their men, drunk.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;Senator's&quot; Blair's throat ... the dirty sycophant! The
+lousy bootlicker! the nasty, putty-bodied slug!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>Jested? I did not know the man yet ... he meant it.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>Wavering this way and that, I sent a telegram which clinched the matter.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Will leave for Eden to-morrow morning. John Gregory.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He gave me the direction&mdash;&quot;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!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Maybe I might be a nut, too!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The old man laughed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, good-bye and good luck, sonny.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Soon I reached the gateway, trailing my heavy suitcase ... heavy mostly
+with manuscripts....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I stepped out of the forest straightway into the community. It was in a
+beautiful open space like a natural meadow.</p>
+
+<p>There stood the houses of the colonists&mdash;Single Taxers, Anarchists,
+Socialists, Communists,&mdash;folk of every shade of radical opinion ... who
+here strove to escape the galling mockeries of civilisation and win back
+again to pastoral simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;When Adam dolve and Eve span</div>
+<div>Who was then the gentleman?&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Toy houses picturesquely set under trees that fringed the Common ...
+houses with different, quaint colours ... the &quot;green&quot; 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....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I thought of Jusserand's <i>English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages</i>. 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....</p>
+
+<p>A tousle-headed girl-child in rompers which she was too big for, pointed
+me Baxter's house, the largest in the community.</p>
+
+<p>There seemed to be no one home when I dropped my suitcase on the front
+porch....</p>
+
+<p>I knocked vigorously. No one came. I waited a long while.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A hell of a way to welcome me!&quot; I meditated, my egotism hurt.</p>
+
+<p>Again I knocked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come in! do come in!&quot; a gentle voice bade&mdash;it was Mrs. Baxter's.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Propped up with a disordered heap of these cushions sat Mrs. Hildreth
+Baxter, in blouse and bloomers; she was reading.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Johnnie Gregory!&quot; she cried, swinging her graceful, slim legs
+down, and rising, coming toward me, extending her hand in greeting....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Johnnie Gregory&mdash;YOU here!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, didn't you!&mdash;--&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I <i>knew</i> I was right ... Penton maintained it was to-morrow you were
+due&mdash;Darrie sided with him&mdash;Darrie is a friend of mine who is visiting
+us, from Virginia&mdash;but Ruth, Mubby's secretary,&quot; she finished, relapsing
+into her intimate petting name for her husband, (Mubby is short for &quot;My
+hubby&quot;)&mdash;&quot;Ruth sided with me, though we had quite an argument about it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And you and Ruth were right!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, I was right,&quot; she assented, leaving &quot;Ruth&quot; out, with na&iuml;ve egoism.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>What an engaging, pretty, na&iuml;ve, little woman this was! I commented
+inwardly. A sweet aroma of feminine health breathed from her body,
+bosom, hair&mdash;a tumbly black mass&mdash;as perfume breathes from a wild
+flower.</p>
+
+<p>Strangely enough, I felt calm and happy in her presence; at home, as I
+had never been with any woman or girl before.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>one</i>, my
+mouth dried like sand, my tongue clove to my palate, I shook all over as
+with a palsy.</p>
+
+<p>With Hildreth Baxter I was straightway, marvellously, at my ease. We
+talked of Keats&mdash;she seemed to know all of his verse by heart....</p>
+
+<p>Shelley&mdash;she quoted his less-known fragments....</p>
+
+<p class='center'>&quot;O WORLD! O LIFE! O TIME!&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;O world! O life! O time!</div>
+<div>On whose last steps I climb,</div>
+<div class='i2'>Trembling at that where I had stood before;</div>
+<div>When will return the glory of your prime?</div>
+<div class='i2'>No more&mdash;Oh, never more!</div></div>
+
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;Out of the day and night</div>
+<div>A joy has taken flight;</div>
+<div class='i2'>Fresh spring, and summer, and the winter hoar,</div>
+<div>Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight</div>
+<div class='i2'>No more&mdash;Oh, never more!&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>&quot;Surely that does not express your feelings&mdash;and you still a young and
+beautiful woman?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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 <i>Raven</i> as a
+reminiscence from it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>Ruth, his secretary, coming close behind him,&mdash;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....</p>
+
+<p>Penton glanced from me to his wife, from his wife to me, in one look of
+instinctive inquiry, before he addressed me....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, Johnnie, here you are ... East at last ... and about to become a
+real literary man.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He's been here a full hour ... we didn't want to interrupt you&mdash;&quot; his
+wife explained.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Your work is too important for the world&quot;&mdash;I began sincerely and
+reverently.</p>
+
+<p>Baxter beamed. His being expanded under my worship.</p>
+
+<p>He caught both my hands, friendlily, in his.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Welcome to Eden,&quot; then, introducing, &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Ruth Hazlitt nodded, shy, took my hand in introduction.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Darrie, oh, Dar-<i>rie</i>!&quot; called Baxter ... &quot;a Southern society girl, but
+a mighty good radical already,&quot; he explained to me, <i>sotto voce</i>, as we
+heard sounds of her approach.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>That afternoon, at Baxter's suggestion, he and I launched forth on a
+walk together....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There is some beautiful country for walking about here.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Darrie, will you and Ruth have the veal steak cooked by six o'clock?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've done a lot of experimenting in dietetics,&quot; he explained, &quot;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,&quot;
+he flashed quickly, &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Surely you don't mean that you do your own butchering?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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,&quot; he ended gravely, &quot;and killed ... shot it ... of
+course I had to summon up all my resolution ... but I did it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>While admitting the almost childlike exactness of my friend's logic, I
+could not help smiling to myself at his grotesque sincerity....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was surprised. He did not want me in the house <i>because I was his
+friend</i>!... in silence I waited his further explanation....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; he continued, &quot;I want to spare you trouble ... Hildreth and I,
+you see,&quot; he proceeded with painful frankness, &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But, Penton, how could I become involved?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A pause;&mdash;I was startled by what he said next:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Besides, it's time you had a mate, a real mate ... and I,&quot; he proceeded
+with incredible gravity, &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Really, Penton!&quot; I demurred.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;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 <i>Judas</i>
+finished.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>Afterward, having eaten off wooden plates, we flung the plates in the
+fireplace, burning them ... Ruth washed the knives, forks, spoons....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Soon he came out, smiling placidly and blandly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I found the tent in a clump of trees ... it had a hard board floor, a
+wash-stand, table, chair, and cot.</p>
+
+<p>Along with the rest of the household, I retired early ... but not to
+sleep.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>After a brief career of adventurous poverty, she had committed suicide
+over a love affair.</p>
+
+<p>Her poetry was full of beauty and spontaneity ... a grey mist dancing
+full of rainbows, like those you see at the foot of Niagara....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The whole house stood in quiet, the embodiment of slumber.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good morning!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good morning,&quot; she replied, a query in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am John Gregory, the poet,&quot; I explained. &quot;I arrived yesterday on a
+visit to the Baxters.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She said she had heard of me ... she opened the door and went into the
+house. I followed.</p>
+
+<p>She was the wife of Anarchist Jones, of whom I had already heard the
+household speak&mdash;as a difficult, recalcitrant member of the colony.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;his two houses. I took care of the tent myself, while I was
+there....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We were, the four of us&mdash;Darrie, Hildreth, Ruth, and I&mdash;seated together
+at our outdoor table, scooping out soft-boiled eggs.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>And now, for the moment, all of us were combined against the master of
+the house ... furtively and jocularly combined, like naughty
+children....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Penton swears coffee is worse than whiskey, the rankest of poisons. We
+have to hide the percolator from him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But just then Penton himself came hurrying up the path from the little
+cottage.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;When you take that percolator off the table&mdash;&quot; he stood aloof, &quot;I'll
+sit down with you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then we laughed outright, not in disrespect of him, but as children
+laugh at a humorous incident at school.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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,&quot; he continued,
+turning to me, &quot;just as keen as the next one ... but I know, by
+scientific research, just how much damage that stuff does.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I read my sonnet to Penton, in a grave, respectful voice.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Daniel came romping out for breakfast.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I returned to my tent to work, as I had planned to do each morning, on
+my play <i>Judas</i>. 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;A noise of archery and wielded swords</div>
+<div>All night rang through his dreams. When risen morn</div>
+<div>Let down her rosy feet on Galilee</div>
+<div>Blue-vistaed, on the house-top Judas woke:</div>
+<div>Desire of battle brooded in his breast</div>
+<div>Although the day was hung with sapphire peace,</div>
+<div>And to his inner eye battalions bright</div>
+<div>Of seraphim, fledged with celestial mail,</div>
+<div>Came marching up the wide-flung ways of dawn</div>
+<div>To usher in the triumph-day of Christ....</div>
+<div>But sun on sun departed, moon on moon,</div>
+<div>And still the Master lingered by the way,</div>
+<div>Iscariot deemed, dusked in mortality</div>
+<div>And darkened in the God by flesh of man.</div>
+<div>For Judas a material kingdom saw</div>
+<div>And not a realm of immaterial gold,</div>
+<div>A city of renewed Jerusalem</div>
+<div>And not that New Jerusalem, diamond-paved</div>
+<div>With love and sapphire-walled with brotherhood,</div>
+<div>Which He, the Master, wrestled to make plain</div>
+<div>With thews of parable and simile&mdash;</div>
+<div>So ''tis the flesh that clogs him,' Judas thought</div>
+<div>(A simple, earnest man, he loved him well</div>
+<div>And slew him with great friendship in the end);</div>
+<div>'Yea, if he chose to say the word of power,</div>
+<div>The seraphim and cherubim, invoked,</div>
+<div>Would wheel in dazzling squadrons down the sky</div>
+<div>And for the hosts of Israel move in war</div>
+<div>As in those holy battles waged of yore'....</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='smallerbreak' />
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;Ah, all the world now knows Gethsemane,</div>
+<div>But few the love of that betraying kiss!&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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,&mdash;and the genuinely
+radical crowd. The anarchist, Jones, led the latter group, a very small
+one.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;Jones's workshop.</p>
+
+<p>The man looked like the philosopher he was&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What is all this trouble I'm hearing about?&quot; I asked him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Trouble?&mdash;same old thing: Alfred Grahame, when he founded, started,
+this colony, was a true idealist. But success has turned his head,
+worsened him, since,&mdash;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....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He stopped speaking, while he picked up another pair of shoes, examined
+them, chose one, and began sewing a patch on it....</p>
+
+<p>He rose, with his leathern apron on, and saw me out....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;glad you came to see old Jones ... you'll see and hear a lot more of
+me, the next week or so!&quot; and he smiled genially, prophetically.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You must come around to the big barn Friday night, after the circus.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;the circus?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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,&quot; he roared.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I found nobody but Hildreth&mdash;Mrs. Baxter&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>She looked up. She gazed at me indefinitely, as if coming back from a
+far dream to reality.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, Johnnie Gregory! You?&quot; fingering her hair with flexible fingers
+like a violinist trying his instrument.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes!&quot; I stopped abruptly and flushed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Did Jones like you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I think he did.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Help me up ... a hammock's a nice place to be in, but an awkward thing
+to get out of.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I took her hand and helped her rise to a sitting posture.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ruth's in the little house typing ... Penton and Darrie are a-field
+taking a walk.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I paused where I was. Mrs. Baxter stood directly in the pathway that led
+to my tent. And the second act of <i>Judas</i> had begun to burn in my brain,
+during my vigorous walk back from Jones's shack....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Let's <i>us</i> take a walk,&quot; she suggested.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I must go to my tent and write!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, come now ... don't you be like Mubby!... that's the way <i>he</i>
+talks.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All right,&quot; I assented, amazed at her directness, &quot;I'll put my work by
+for the day&mdash;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She laid her hand lightly, but with an electric contact, on the bend of
+my arm, and off we started, into the inviting fields.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The example the children set was contagious.... Hildreth and I were
+soon romping too&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There's one thing sure about Eden ... in spite of the squabbles and
+disagreements of the elders, the place is a children's paradise.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's only because they have all nature for their backyard&mdash;no thanks
+to their elders,&quot; Hildreth answered, looking up into my face with a
+quick smile, &quot;the grown-ups find misery wherever, they go.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Does that mean that you are unhappy?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I suppose I should say 'no.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't understand what you mean.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Neither do I, then.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Again that sweet, tantalizing, enigmatic droop of her mouth's corner.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>A change in our spirit again. A fresh desire to romp.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Let's play just as if we were children, too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Tag! You're <i>it</i>!&quot; 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. &quot;That's no fair!&quot; she cried, &quot;you're
+running too fast.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, then, I'll almost stand still, then see if you can catch me!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She made at me, shouting, her face flushed with the exercise. I ducked
+and swerved and doubled.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're quite quick and strong,&quot; she exclaimed, admiringly, as I caught
+her by the shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>I stooped over, hunching my back.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, play leap-frog,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly we disentangled ourselves. I reached a hand and helped her up.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm no good at that, either ... let's stop playing ... I'm tired.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We caught sight of a little man crossing a field, trotting like a dog
+out hunting on his own. He looked back twice as he went.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;wonder if he saw us?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;perhaps&mdash;but what matter if he did?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then I hope he's not a fellow Edenite. You have no idea what an
+undercurrent of gossip runs in this place.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We sank down together on a small knoll under the low-spreading branches
+of a live oak. We watched the man who we thought had observed our antics
+bobbing off down the road, as if running for exercise.</p>
+
+<p>We sat quite apart, at first. Then our hands met in instinctive fondness
+... met in the spirit in which we had been romping together.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're like a small boy, Johnnie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And you haven't acted so very much like a grown woman, have you,
+Hildreth?&quot; It was the first time I had called her by her first name.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Can you, or anyone else, tell me just how grown women do act? I myself
+don't know, yet I'm a woman.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I drew closer to her as if drawn by some attractive power. A stray wisp
+of her hair lit across my cheek stingingly. Then the wind blew a
+perfumed strand of it across my lips and over my nostrils.</p>
+
+<p>It made me rub my lips, it tickled so. Hildreth noticed it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wait,&quot; she bade playfully, &quot;I'll bet I can make you rub your lips
+again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, you can't.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hold still!&quot; she leaned toward me; I could look down into her bosom.
+She just touched my lips with her forefinger.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now!&quot; she exclaimed triumphantly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;think you've tickled me, do you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;just wait!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I forgot myself. My lips tickled and I rubbed them with the length of a
+finger ... Hildreth laughed....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I leaned toward my friend's wife, calling her again by her first name.</p>
+
+<p>I lay in a half-reclining posture, my head almost against her hip. I
+was looking up into her face. She glanced down at me with a quick start
+at the tone of my voice. She looked gravely for a moment into my face. I
+observed an enigmatic something deep in her eyes ... which sank slowly
+back as the image of a face does, in water,&mdash;as the face itself is
+withdrawn. She moved apart a little, with a motion of slow deliberation.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth!&quot; I heard myself calling again, with a deep voice, a voice
+that sounded alien in my own ears....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come, boy!&quot; and she pulled back her hand from my grasp, and catching
+mine in hers a moment, patted the back of it lightly&mdash;&quot;come, don't let's
+be foolish ... we've had such a happy afternoon together, don't let's
+spoil it ... now let's start home.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As soon as I was on my feet and away from her, she became playful again.
+She reached up her hand for me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Help me up!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I brought her to her feet with a strong, quick pull, and against my
+breast. But I did not dare do what I desired&mdash;take her in my arms and
+try to kiss her. She paused a second, then thrust me back.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look, the sun's almost gone down ... and Mubby and Darrie will be home
+a long time by this time ... and Mubby will be getting fidgety.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The sun's last huge shoulder of red was hulking like a spy behind a
+distant, bare knoll ... separate blades of grass stood up in microscopic
+yet giant distinctness, against its crimson background.</p>
+
+<p>Our walk home was a silent, passively happy one that went without
+incident....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Penton and Darrie were indeed home before us.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where have you two been all this time,&quot; Penton asked, a slight touch of
+querulousness in his voice.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, Johnnie and I have been out for a walk, too!&quot; replied Hildreth in
+an even voice.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>At lunch, the next day,&mdash;a day when Penton was called in to Philadelphia
+on business&mdash;while Darrie, Ruth, Hildreth and I sat talking together
+peacefully about our outdoor board, Hildreth suddenly threw a third of a
+glass of milk on Darrie's shirt-waist front.</p>
+
+<p>We were astounded.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Hildreth, what does this mean?&quot; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I won't stop to explain,&quot; she said, &quot;but from now on I won't stay in
+the same house with her ... I'm going to move this afternoon, down to
+Penton's house&quot; (meaning the little cottage but a few steps from my
+tent).... Ruth rose to intercede ... &quot;Don't Ruth, don't! I want to be
+let alone.&quot; And Hildreth hurried away.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What in the world could be the matter with Hildreth?&quot; I asked of Ruth.
+Darrie had also departed, to the big house, to rub her blouse quickly,
+so that no stain would remain.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth's capricious,&quot; answered Ruth, &quot;but the plain explanation is
+downright jealousy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jealousy?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes ... even though Hildreth no longer loves Penton, she's jealous of
+him ... the fact is, Hildreth doesn't know what she wants.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But Darrie&mdash;Darrie is her friend?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course ... and remains her friend. Darrie doesn't want Penton. She
+only pities him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I quoted the line about pity being akin to love ... &quot;they do a lot of
+strolling together.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes. But there's nothing between them ... not even a kiss ... of that
+I'm certain. Darrie is as cool as a cucumber ... and Penton is as shy
+with women as&mdash;you are!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I smiled to myself. If Ruth had seen us that preceding afternoon!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course the fault could not all be on Hildreth's side.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, they're both a couple of ninnies ... but there's this to be said
+for Penton, he's trying to get something done for the betterment of
+humanity ... while Hildreth's only a parasite.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And Darrie&mdash;how about her? What does she do but loaf around in a more
+conventional manner, talking about her social prestige, the dress of one
+of her ancestresses in the Boston Museum, her aristocratic affiliations
+... how many and how faithful those negro servants of hers are, down
+South ... between the two, Hildreth has the livest brain, and puts on
+less.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Take care! You'll be falling in love with Penton Baxter's wife yet!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Our talk was halted by Darrie's re-appearance. Hildreth came furtively
+back, too, from the little cottage, like a guilty child. She apologized
+to Darrie, and her apology was accepted, and, in a few minutes we were
+talking ahead as gaily as before....</p>
+
+<p>We rehearsed Hildreth in her part as Titania ... for that was the part
+she was to play in <i>The Mid-Summer Night's Dream</i>, that the Actors'
+Guild of the colony was to put on in their outdoor theatre, a week from
+that afternoon ... Hildreth insisted on dressing for the part ... in her
+green, skin tights ... letting her black hair flow free ... wearing even
+her diadem, as fairy queen. She had a good, musical voice ... a way of
+speaking with startled shyness that was engaging.</p>
+
+<p>But Hildreth stuck to her original intention of moving to the cottage.
+She had Mrs. Jones move her things for her.</p>
+
+<p>As I sat in the library of the big house reading Tolstoy's <i>Anna
+Karenina</i>, I overheard Darrie telling Ruth in the bathroom that Hildreth
+would not have insisted on donning her tights, if she had not been proud
+of her symmetrical legs, and had not wanted to show them off to me.</p>
+
+<p>Between the three women, nevertheless, Hildreth was easily my choice
+already ... Darrie was lovely, but talked like a d&eacute;butante from morning
+till night....</p>
+
+<p>Ruth had too much of the quietist in her, the non-resistent. She had a
+vast fund of scholarship, knew English poetry from the ground up ... but
+her bringing that knowledge to me as an attraction was like presenting a
+peacock's feather to a bird of paradise....</p>
+
+<p>However, when Penton came home that night, he found us all in huge good
+humour. I had just received a check from Derek, and had insisted on
+spending most of it for a spread for all of us, including a whopping
+beefsteak.</p>
+
+<p>And we ate and joked and enjoyed ourselves just like the bourgeoisie.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>If Penton only had had a sense of humour ... but this I never detected
+in him.</p>
+
+<p>Even at singing classes, which I attended one evening with him ... his
+whole entourage, in fact....</p>
+
+<p>With solemn face he sang high, and always off key, till the three women
+had to stuff their handkerchiefs in their mouths to keep from laughing
+at him before his face....</p>
+
+<p>After class, we strolled home by a devious path, through the moonlight.
+This time Ruth walked ahead with little Dan, Hildreth with her husband,
+Penton,&mdash;Darrie with me....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Drag back a little, Johnnie ... Penton and Hildreth are having a
+private heart-to-heart talk, I can tell by their voices.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We hung back till they disappeared around a bend. We were alone. Darrie
+began to laugh and laugh and laugh.... &quot;Oh, it's so funny, I shall die
+laughing&quot;....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Why&mdash;why, what's the matter!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>For I saw tears streaming down the girl's face in the moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's so awful,&quot; replied Darrie, now crying quietly, &quot;&mdash;so tragic ...
+yet I had to laugh ... I'm so sorry for Penton ... for both of them....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Penton <i>is</i> such a jackass, Johnnie,&quot; she gulped, &quot;and God knows, as I
+do, he's such an honest, good man ... helping poor people all over the
+country ... really fighting the fight of the down-trodden and the
+oppressed.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I put my arm around the girl's waist, and she wept on my shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>Finally she straightened up her head, stopping her crying with
+difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We're all so funny, aren't we?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, we're a funny bunch, Darrie ... all so mixed up,&mdash;the world
+wouldn't believe it, would they, if we told them?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And you could never make them understand, even if you did tell them.
+You know, my dear, old Southern daddy&mdash;he thinks Penton is a limb of the
+old Nick himself ... with his theories about life, and the freedom of
+relations between the sexes, and all that ... even yet he may leave me
+out of his will for coming up here, though he has all the confidence in
+the world in me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And Mary Darfield Malcolm&mdash;whom we always called &quot;Darrie&quot;&mdash;went quickly
+to her room when we got back, so the others wouldn't notice that she had
+been crying....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Quite often, in the afternoons, toward dusk, around a dying fire, the
+whole community had &quot;sings&quot; out in the woods, near the one large stream
+that abutted the colony, and gathered into itself, all the little
+brooks....</p>
+
+<p>The old songs were sung; rich, beautiful, old Scotch and English and
+Irish ballads&mdash;which were learnt, by all who wanted to know them, at the
+singing school ... and the old-fashioned American songs, too.</p>
+
+<p>And the music softened our hearts and fused us into one harmony of
+feeling. And all the bickerings of the community's various &quot;isms&quot; melted
+away ... after all, there was not so very much disharmony among us. And,
+after all, the marvel is that human beings get along together at all.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The afternoon before the &quot;circus&quot; the little settlement more than ever
+took on the appearance of a medieval village ... almost everybody took
+turns in participating in the &quot;circus&quot; ... almost everybody togged out
+in costume. But first we had a parade of the &quot;guilds&quot; ... the Actors'
+Guild, in which Hildreth bore a part; in her pretty tights she looked
+like a handsome boy page in some early Italian prince's court.</p>
+
+<p>Don Grahame was the son of the leader of the community whom Jones had
+promised to rake over the coals that night, after the circus.</p>
+
+<p>Don led the Carpenters' Guild, looking like nothing else than a handsome
+boy Christ. Don, secretly disliking in his heart the free-love doctrines
+his father and others taught (though he always rose loyally in his
+father's defence) had gone to the other extreme, he lived an ascetic,
+virgin life. But it didn't seem to hurt him. He was as handsome as
+Hildreth was beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody liked the young fellow. He had sworn that he would maintain
+his manner of abstinent living till he fell in love with a girl who
+loved him in return. Then they would live together....</p>
+
+<p>That, he maintained, was the true and only meaning of free love. He had
+no use for varietism nor promiscuity.</p>
+
+<p>The Guilds paraded twice around the Village Green, led by the Guild of
+Music Masters, who played excellently well.</p>
+
+<p>The Children's Guild was a romping, lovely sight.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The circus was held shortly afterward in the huge communal barn, in the
+centre of its great floor,&mdash;the spectators seated about on the sides....</p>
+
+<p>There was the trick mule, made up of two men under an ox-hide, the mule
+fell apart and precipitated Don Grahame in between its two halves ...
+each half then ran away in opposite directions.</p>
+
+<p>Don rode so well that that was the only way they (I mean the mule) could
+unseat him. He won much affectionate applause.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the fearful, great boa-constrictor ... which turned out
+to be a double-jointed, lithe, acrobatic, boy-like girl whom we knew as
+Jessie ... Jessie, they whispered, was marked for death by consumption,
+if she didn't look out and stop smoking so many cigarettes ... she was
+slender and pretty&mdash;but spoke with an adenoidal thickness of speech.</p>
+
+<p>The colony was as merry as if no storm impended.</p>
+
+<p>We adjourned for supper.</p>
+
+<p>After supper, under the evening star we marched back to the barn again,
+which also served as our town hall. On the way there our talk was
+subdued and expectant. Many people were disgruntled with Jones.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why must he do this?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why can't old Jones let well enough alone?... no community's perfect,
+not even our community.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Daniel had been put to bed, angrily objecting.</p>
+
+<p>The five of us joined the flow of people toward the barn. Penton carried
+a lantern.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jones is all right,&quot; said Penton to me, &quot;I like his spirit. I'm going
+to stand by him, if he finds himself seriously pressed, just because the
+man's spirit is a good one ... nothing mean about him ... but I know
+he'll place me among the snobs and wealthy of the community.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When all were gathered, as still as at the opening of a prayer meeting,
+Grahame came in, and, with his son and other friends, took seats
+opposite Jones. Grahame, who had been master of ceremonies and ring
+master for the afternoon circus, had not changed his dress of
+knee-britches and ruffed shirt.</p>
+
+<p>The debate was prolonged and fiery....</p>
+
+<p>Jones launched into a gallant attack on Grahame, and was replied to
+evasively. Don Grahame wanted to punch Jones's head for what he called
+slurs cast at his father's good name....</p>
+
+<p>Penton made a famous speech reconciling, almost, the irreconcilable
+parties.</p>
+
+<p>And so we adjourned.</p>
+
+<p>Penton and I accompanied Jones home. All the way the latter was arguing
+against Baxter's plea, that he be more lenient with Grahame....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You look out, Penton,&quot; Jones warned with genial firmness ... &quot;Grahame
+has been trying to persuade people in this community not to bring shoes
+to me to be mended ... a dirty attempt to starve me out ... Oh, no!... I
+haven't the slightest trace of persecution mania....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And you'd better look out, Penton, and not play tennis this Sunday, for
+I'm going to strike back at the tennis-playing snobs here, of whom
+you're one.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jones, what do you mean by that? Surely not a bomb to smear us all over
+the courts!&quot; Penton joked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A bomb, yes ... it will be a bomb of sorts ... but I warn you you
+shan't play games on Sunday any more. I'll see to that ... not that I've
+unexpectedly grown religious, but that I mean to strike back as pettily
+as the way in which I'm being persecuted.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I suppose he means the Blue Laws,&quot; Penton commented seriously, &quot;but
+surely he can get no one to enforce them.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But Jones found a facetious officer of the law or so, down in
+Philadelphia, who were as glad of a chance to molest a radical colony as
+of an opportunity to put over a good joke....</p>
+
+<p>Baxter, Grahame, Bedell, and others of the prominent members of the
+community were haled in to court ... and, to the surprise of everyone,
+sentenced to forty-eight hours hard labour on the rock-pile, in the
+workhouse....</p>
+
+<p>And Jones sang triumphant snatches of song and hammered away merrily at
+shoes in his little shack along the road, while unused hands gathered
+water blisters making big stones into little ones, with other and
+heavier hammers.</p>
+
+<p>The newspapers made a great to-do about the matter. The affair was just
+serio-comic enough to attract nation-wide attention. And the story was a
+good one&mdash;the story of the anarchist-shoemaker who invoked the use of
+archaic, reactionary laws, in his battle against his less radical
+antagonists, the Single Taxers and Socialists.</p>
+
+<p>Story after story was also written about our curious little colony.</p>
+
+<p>Penton Baxter shared honours with the shoemaker. Reporters swarmed over
+his front porch and into his house to interview him, on the triumphant
+return of the party when they had served their forty-eight hours.</p>
+
+<p>Penton gave out interview after interview. And, to his credit let it be
+said, though he revelled in the notice accorded him, he also effected
+two serious results from what had begun as almost a practical joke ...
+he started a fight on the absurd Blue Laws by focusing publicity on them
+... and he exposed the bad prison conditions his unknown fellow
+prisoners lived under, who had <i>not</i> gone to the workhouse in a jocular
+mood because of resurrected Blue Laws.</p>
+
+<p>Jones was willing to let the matter rest, as well as were his other
+opponents ... but Baxter kept the fight going as long as he could. He
+was accused of loving notoriety. His attitude toward it was mixed. He
+did love notoriety ... he enjoyed every clipping about himself with
+infinite gusto. But he also used publicity as a lever to get things done
+with, that would otherwise never have been noticed. The others were
+willing to consider what had happened to them, as a private affair.
+Penton gracelessly used that, and every private adventure for
+propaganda&mdash;turned it sincerely in the way he thought it might benefit
+people....</p>
+
+<p>He gave the papers a very bad poem&mdash;<i>The Prison Night</i>. I remember but
+one line of it&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;The convict rasped his vermin-haunted hide.&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Come, get into the group; I want the papers to tell the public about
+you, too,&quot; he urged me, prophetically, as I stood on the outskirts,
+while three camera men were focusing on him, as he stood, expectant,
+blandly smiling, and vain-glorious.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Boys, I want my friend, the poet, Mr. John Gregory, in the picture,
+too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, all right!&quot; they assented indifferently, which injured my egotism.
+But I was too adroit to show it. I still demurred with mock modesty.
+Penton would have been franker.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, at his urgency, they snapped us, our arms about each other's
+shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>In the light of subsequent events, they were glad of that picture.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Our tennis-playing, Blue-Law martyrs, as I have said, were held over
+night in the workhouse ... or maybe two nights, I do not exactly
+remember which ... and when they came back they were full of the
+privations of jail-life, and the degradation of the spirit and mind
+suffered by prisoners there. To me, their attitude seemed rather
+tender-foot and callow. It was something that would have been accepted
+off-handedly by me. I had been in jail often, not for a cause, as I
+punned wretchedly, but <i>be-cause</i>. I did not accord hero-worship to
+Penton when he returned, as the women of the household did.</p>
+
+<p>For a week it quite reconciled Hildreth with him....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But on the first night of his absence Hildreth and I took a stroll
+together in the moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>Long the three women and myself had sat in the library, while I read
+aloud from a MSS. volume of my poetry, which I intended submitting to
+the Macmillans soon. For Ruth knew Mr. Brett and promised to give me an
+introduction to him. And I was to make a special trip to the city on the
+money I had saved from my weekly remittances ... for Penton would not
+permit me to spend a cent for my keep while I visited him. And I had
+already been with him three weeks....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I read them many love poems&mdash;those I had written for Vanna....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why,&quot; commented Hildreth, &quot;these verses sound like what a very callow
+youth would write, who never had experience with women ... I mean by
+that, intimate knowledge of them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I flushed and sat silent.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Some day, when you've lived more,&quot; remarked Ruth, &quot;you'll write
+love-poetry more simple, more direct.&quot;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;Though infinite ways He knows</div>
+<div class='i2'>To manifest His power,</div>
+<div>God, when He made your face,</div>
+<div class='i2'>Was thinking of a flower!&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>I read.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There again you have an instance, of what I mean ... you are only
+rhetoricising about love; not partaking of its feelings.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I wrote all these poems about a real girl,&quot; and I told them the
+story of my distant passion for Vanna.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No matter&mdash;you're a grown-up man who, as far as knowledge of women is
+concerned, has the heart of a baby,&quot; observed Hildreth.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&quot;in these days of sex-sophistication a fine thing!&quot; cried Ruth.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, when out of the mouths of babes and sucklings come quotations from
+Havelock Ellis and Ellen Key!&quot; cried Darrie.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good! Darrie, good!&quot; Hildreth applauded....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;time to go to bed ... here it's almost one o'clock.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;had no idea it was so late. I have a lot of typing to do to-morrow.
+Good night, folks!&quot; and Ruth was off to her room upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-night, Hildreth,&mdash;suppose you're going to sleep down in the little
+house!&quot; It was Darrie who spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; answered Hildreth, in a simple tone, &quot;I will feel quite safe
+there ... Johnnie's tent is only a few yards away.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth and Darrie kissed each other on the mouth tenderly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good night, Johnnie&mdash;&quot; and impulsively Darrie stepped up to me, took me
+by the two shoulders, and kissed me also a kind sisterly kiss.... I
+responded, abashed and awkward.</p>
+
+<p>A ripple of pleasant laughter at me from both women.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie's a dear, innocent boy!&quot; Darrie.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He makes me feel like a mother to him!&quot; said Hildreth.</p>
+
+<p>Though each of these remarks was made without the slightest colour of
+irony, I did not like them ... I lowered my head, humiliated under them.</p>
+
+<p>Ever since I had been among them the three women had treated me in the
+way they act with small boys, preserving scarcely any reserve in my
+presence. Penton himself had lost all his first disquiet.</p>
+
+<p>Outside&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll take you as far as the cottage ... it's right on the way, you
+know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All right, but where are you going?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Into the kitchen to get a lantern.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The moon is almost as bright as day. We won't need it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We stepped out into the warm, scented night. In a mad flood of silver
+the moon reigned high in the sky, dark and bright with the contours and
+shades of its continents and craters, as if nearer the earth than it had
+ever been before....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This night reminds me of those lines in Marlowe's <i>Doctor Faustus</i>,
+the ones that follow after 'Is this the face that launched a thousand
+ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilion?' which are, to me, a
+trifle over-rhetorical ... the ensuing lines are more lovely:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'Fair as the evening air&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,' or is it 'ten thousand
+stars'?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth turned her face up to me. Her arm went through mine. She drew
+my arm close against her body and held it tight in silent response for a
+quiet interval....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You <i>are</i> a poet ... a <i>real</i> poet ... and,&quot; she dropped her voice,
+&quot;and, what is more, a real man, too!&quot; there was a world of compassion in
+her voice....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;You remember Blake's evening star&mdash;that 'washed the dusk with
+silver?'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jesus, how beautiful!&quot; I cried.</p>
+
+<p>We were standing in front of her cottage, that darkled in the trees.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, roused by our voices, like some sweet, low, miraculous thing,
+a little bird sang a few bars of song, sweet and low, in the bushes
+somewhere, and stopped....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth, don't let's go to bed yet.&quot; I caught her arm in my hands,
+&quot;it's too beautiful ... to go to bed.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was trembling all over....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, boy?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Let's&mdash;let's take a walk.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We went through the little sleeping community. She clung to my arm
+lightly....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're the first woman I haven't been frightened of, rather, have felt
+at home with.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You, who have been a tramp, a worker all over the country ... in big
+cities ... do you mean to tell me that?&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes ... yes ... before God, it is true! You don't think I'm a fool, do
+you&mdash;a ninny?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, on the contrary, I think you are a good man ... that it is
+miraculous ... I&mdash;I feel so old beside you ... how old are you,
+Johnnie?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Twenty-six.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, I'm only two years older ... yet I feel like your mother.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the groves adjoining the colony, for a mile on either side, wherever
+there was a big tree, a circular seat had been built about it. It was on
+one of these that we sat down, without a word.</p>
+
+<p>I laid my head against Hildreth's shoulder. Soothingly she began
+stroking my hair. With cool fingers she stroked it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What fine hair you have. It's as soft and silky as a girl's.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I took after my mother in that.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What a mixture you are ... manly and strong ... an athlete, yet
+sensitive, so sensitive that sometimes it hurts to look at your face
+when you talk ... you've suffered a lot, Johnnie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In curious ways, yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Tell me about yourself. I won't even whisper it in the dark, when I'm
+alone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I know I can trust you, Hildreth.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What are you doing, boy?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to sit at your feet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You dear boy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I feel quite humble ... I don't want you to see my face when I talk.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She drew my head against her knees. Threw one arm as if protectingly
+over my shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There. Are you comfortable, boy?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes. Are you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Quite ... don't be ashamed ... I know much about life that you do not
+know ... tell me all.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>So I told her all about myself ... my ambition ... my struggles ... my
+morbidity ... my lack of experience with girls and women....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And I must have experience soon ... it's obsessing me ... it can't last
+this way much longer ... I shall go mad.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And I rehearsed to her a desperate resolve I had made ... to find a
+woman of the streets, in New York, when I went in, the ensuing week ...
+and force myself, no matter how I loathed it&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>I buried my head in her lap and sobbed hysterically.</p>
+
+<p>Then I apologised&mdash;&quot;forgive me if I have been too frank!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am a radical woman ... Penton and I both believe in the theory of
+free love, though we happen to be married ... what you have told me is
+all sweet and natural to me ... only&mdash;you must not do what you say
+you'll do&mdash;in New York!&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I must, or&mdash;&quot; and I paused, to go on in a lower, embarrassed voice ...
+&quot;Do&mdash;do you know what else I thought of&mdash;dreamed of&mdash;?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In Paris&mdash;I understand&mdash;men live with women as a matter of course&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You see&mdash;&quot; I was hot with shame to the very ears, &quot;you see&mdash;there, you
+know,&mdash;I thought if I went there I would find some pretty little French
+girl that I would take to live with me ... in some romantic attic in the
+Montmartre district ... and we would be happy together ... and I would
+be grateful, so grateful, to her!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why you're the Saint Francis of the Radicals,&quot; Hildreth exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Please don't make fun of me ... I suppose you think me very foolish.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Foolish?... No, I think you have a very beautiful soul. I wish every
+man had a soul like that.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She took my head in her hands and kissed me on the brow.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth, only tell me what I am to do?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I do not know ... theoretically I believe in freedom in sex ... I wish
+to God I could help you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why can't you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hush, you do not know what you're asking!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;By the living Christ, I only know that I would crawl after you, and
+kiss your holiest feet before all the world, if you helped me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now I understand what Lecky meant when he spoke of the sacrificial
+office of a certain type of women ... I only wish ... but come, we must
+go.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was on my feet beside her, as she rose.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, we had better go home,&quot; I spoke quietly, though my heart pumped as
+if I had taken strychnine.</p>
+
+<p>I put my arms about her, to steady her going, for she stumbled.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Hildreth, dearest woman, you're trembling all over, what's the
+matter?... have I&mdash;I frightened you with my wild talk?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Never mind ... no, take your arm away ... Let me walk alone a minute
+and I'll be all right ... I'll be all right in a minute ... it's just
+turned a trifle chilly, that's all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hush!&quot; going down the path by the big house, Hildreth stopped,
+hesitated. &quot;I'm&mdash;I'm not going to the little cottage to-night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then I'll say good-night!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, come on in and we'll sneak out to the kitchen and find something to
+eat ... aren't you hungry?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A little bit. But I'm afraid we might wake Ruth and Darrie up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We tip-toed in. Hildreth searching for the matches, knocked the
+wash-basin to the floor. We stood hushed like mice.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Who's down there?&quot; asked Darrie's voice, with a dash of hysteria in it
+... of hysteria and fright.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Damn it, there's Darrie waked up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Such a clatter would wake anyone up!&quot;</p>
+
+<p><i>&quot;Who's there, I say!&quot;</i></p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's only me, Darrie ... I got hungry in the night and came up to the
+house to snatch a bite to eat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh ... I'm coming down to join you, then.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We saw Darrie standing at the top of the stairs, her eyes luminous and
+wide with emotion.</p>
+
+<p>She stood, rosy-bodied, in her night-dress, which was transparent in the
+light of the lamp she carried....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie's here, too!&quot; warned Hildreth.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh!&quot; cried Darrie, and turned back, to re-appear in her kimono.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm sorry we waked you up. But I knocked that infernal basin down off
+the sink.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You didn't wake me. I was awake already. I haven't slept a wink.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Neither have we!&quot; I responded.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What?&quot; Darrie asked me in so startled, impulsive a manner that Hildreth
+and I laughed ... and she laughed a little, too ... and then grew grave
+again....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It was such a beautiful night, Johnnie and I took a walk in the
+moonlight.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Darrie looked from one to the other of us with a wide, staring look.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You needn't look that way, Darrie!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Please, please, Hildreth!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You and Penton have taken walks in the moonlight.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth, dear, I'm not rebuking you ... and you know my walks with
+Penton are all right, are harmless.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, I know they are ... but you mustn't rebuke me, either.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I wasn't rebuking either you or Johnnie ... it isn't that I'm thinking
+of at all ... but everything has been so uncanny here to-night ... I
+could not sleep ... every little rustle of curtains, every creak or
+motion in the whole house vibrated through me ... something's going to
+happen to someone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're only upset because Penton's in jail,&quot; I explained.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, that's not it ... that's nothing compared to this feeling ... this
+premonition&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on, let's make some coffee ... in the percolator.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You girls sit down and I'll make it. I've been a cook several times in
+my career.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Someone was knocking about in the dark, upstairs. We heard a match
+struck....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There, we've waked Ruth, too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the matter down there?&quot; Ruth was calling.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come on down and join us, Ruth,&mdash;we're having a cup of coffee a-piece.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's only two o'clock ... what's everybody doing up so early? Has
+Penton come back?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No ... but do come down and join us,&quot; I replied.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I tell you, I thought it was burglars at first, and I was going to the
+drawer in Penton's room and get out his six-shooter.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Does Penton keep a gun?&quot; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes ... it's the one he bought to shoot the mongrel dog with.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We ate some cold roast beef sandwiches and drank our coffee.</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth stayed in the big house, not going down the path with me.</p>
+
+<p>I went silently to my tent. It was blowing a little now. The moon was
+surging along behind little, grey, running clouds. It would rain before
+daylight. A haunted shiver swept through my back as I stole along the
+path. I repeated poetry rapidly aloud to crowd out uncanny imaginings. I
+had a silly, sick impulse to run back to the big house and sleep on the
+couch in the library.</p>
+
+<p>But I forced myself on. &quot;If you're ever going to be a man, you'd better
+begin now,&quot; I muttered to myself, as if talking to another person.</p>
+
+<p>In my tent ... I lit the lamp. I removed all hanging objects because
+their lurching shadows sent shivers of apprehension through me....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That damned coffee&mdash;wish I hadn't drunk it.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The wind and rain came up like a phantom army. It sang in the trees, it
+drummed musically on my tent. It comforted me.</p>
+
+<p>The floodgates of my mind, my inspiration, broke loose. I rose to my
+super-self. And now if a horrible thing had stood grey at my elbow,
+unmoved, I would have looked it unflinchingly in the sightless
+visage....</p>
+
+<p>My pencil raced over paper ... raced and raced.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here it comes ... just like your good rain, so kind to earth.... Oh,
+beautiful God, I thank Thee for making me a poet,&quot; I prayed, tears
+streaming down my face.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The second act of <i>Judas</i> stood complete, as if it had written itself.</p>
+
+<p>I rose. It seemed hardly an hour had passed.</p>
+
+<p>It took me a few minutes to work the numbness out of my legs. How they
+ached! I stepped out of the tent-door like a drunken man ... fell on my
+face in some bushes and bled from several scratches. The blare of what
+was full daylight hurt my eyes. I had been writing on, entranced, by
+unneeded lamp, when unheeded day burned about me.</p>
+
+<p>Stepping inside again, I saw by my Ingersoll that it was twelve o'clock.
+I fell into a deep sleep, still dressed ... I was so exhausted. Usually
+I slept absolutely naked.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>These were the things that happened while Penton was in jail because he
+played tennis on Sunday.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Now I was part and parcel of the household, no longer a stranger-friend
+on a visit. Though Penton's jail-experience did not thrill me, the
+continued thronging of reporters did, as did Baxter's raging desire to
+do good for the poor ordinary prisoners in jail. He had got at several
+of them who had received a raw deal in the courts, and was moving heaven
+and earth to bring redress to them. He gave interviews, dictated
+articles ... the State officials were furious. &quot;What's the matter with
+the fellow? What's he bother about the other fellows for, he ought to be
+glad he's not in their shoes!&quot;...</p>
+
+<p>In agitations for the public good, in humanitarian projects, Baxter was
+indeed a great man ... I loomed like a pigmy beside him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Darrie and I in dialogue:</p>
+
+<p>She met me on the path, as I was proceeding toward the big house. She
+carried Carpenter's <i>Love's Coming of Age</i> in her hand. She was dressed
+daintily. Her brown eyes smiled at me, and a rich dimple broke in her
+cheek.</p>
+
+<p>But Darrie was taller than Hildreth, and I like small women best;
+perhaps because I am myself so big.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't go up to the house, Johnnie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want a book from the library.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth and Penton are there. Hildreth is having a soul-state.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A what?&quot; I laughed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, she thinks something is the matter with her soul, and, for the
+three hundredth time since I've known them, Penton and she are
+discussing their lives together.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't see anything to jest about in that.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm tiring of it ... if Hildreth has a tooth-ache, or anything that the
+rest of us women accept as a matter of course, she runs to Mubby, as she
+calls him ... and, as if it were some abstruse, philosophical problem,
+they talk on, hour after hour ... like German metaphysics, there's no
+end to it. They've been at it since ten and they'll go on till four, if
+they follow precedents ... Penton takes Hildreth too seriously.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You talk as if you, you were jealous of Hildreth and in love with
+Penton.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's neither the one nor the other. I love them both, and I want to see
+them happy together.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You see, Darrie, neither you nor I are married, and neither of us knows
+anything about sex, except in the theory of the books we've read&mdash;how
+can <i>we judge</i> the troubles of a man and woman who are married?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There's a lot in what you say.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I believe it would be better if we both cleared out and left them to
+fight this out alone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Perhaps it would.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Darrie, Oh, Darrie!&mdash;want to come for a walk with Hildreth and me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>So the three set off together, leaving me and Ruth alone.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Ruth and I had just settled down to a discussion of the writing of
+narrative poetry, how it was done, and the reason why it was no longer
+customary with the poets to write longer stories out of real life, like
+Chaucer's <i>Canterbury Tales</i>,&mdash;when we heard a rustling as of some wild
+thing in the bushes beside the house, and here came Hildreth breaking
+through, her eyes blazing, her hair down, her light walking skirt that
+she had slipped on over her bloomers torn by catching on thorns.</p>
+
+<p>She staggered into the open, swept us with a blazing glance as if we had
+done something to her, and hurried on down the path toward the little
+house where Penton had written in quiet till she had strangely routed
+him out and taken its occupancy for herself.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth!&quot; I leaped to my feet, starting after her, &quot;Hildreth what's
+the matter?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I had put all thought of narrative poetry out of my head.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't follow her,&quot; advised Ruth, in a low, controlled voice, &quot;it's best
+to let her alone when she acts like that ... she'll have it out, and
+come back, smiling, in an hour or so.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I plunged on. Ruth ran after me, catching me by the shoulder from
+behind.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Listen to me. Take my advice and keep out of this&mdash;Johnnie!&quot; she called
+my name with a tender drop in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>If it had not been for her tell-tale pronouncement of my name I might
+have listened to her ... but that made me angry, and it ran through my
+mind how she and Penton had fatuously arranged my marrying her....</p>
+
+<p>I ran after Hildreth. She slammed the door when I was so close upon her
+that the wind of its shutting went against my face like a blow.</p>
+
+<p>I found myself on my knees by the door.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Let me in,&quot; I said through the key-hole, for the door was locked; she
+had thrown the bolt on the inside.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Go away, Johnnie, I want to be alone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth, dearest woman, do let me in. It hurts my heart to see you so
+suffer so.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't want to see anybody. I want to die.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll come in the window.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was at the window madly. I caught it. It was locked. But I pulled it
+up like a maniac. The lock, rusty, flew off with a zing! The window
+crashed up. I tumbled in at one leap.</p>
+
+<p>My whole life was saying, &quot;this is your woman, your first and only
+woman&mdash;go where she is and take her to yourself!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>That avalanche of me bursting in without denial, struck little Hildreth
+Baxter dumb with interest. She had been kneeling by her bed, sobbing.
+Now she rose and was sitting on it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well?&quot; and she smiled wanly, looking at me with fear and a twinkle of
+amusement, and intrigued interest, all at one and the same time, on her
+face&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I couldn't stand seeing you suffer, Hildreth. I had to come in. And you
+wouldn't unlock the door ... what has gone wrong?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's Darrie!&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But you all three started on your hike like such a happy family, and&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For God's sake don't think I'm jealous of Darrie ... I'm only wild
+about the way she encourages Mubby to talk over his troubles with
+her&mdash;and tell her about him and me, asking <i>her</i> advice ... as if <i>she</i>
+could give any advice worth while&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They began to talk and talk about me just as if I were a laboratory
+specimen....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Damn this laboratory marriage! damn this laboratory love!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Penton experiments, and Penton experiments ... on his cat, his dog,
+himself, me&mdash;you, if you'd let him ... everybody! let him marry Humanity
+if he loves it so much.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But what did you do?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I caught myself running away from them, and sobbing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And what did they do?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'Hildreth, for God's sake!' Mubby called, 'what's the matter now?' in
+that bland, exasperating tone of his,&mdash;that injured, self-righteous,
+I'm-sacrificing-myself-for-mankind tone&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I had to laugh at her exact mimicry....</p>
+
+<p>I stroked her hair....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I'm glad you came to Eden, John Gregory. You might be a poet, but you
+have some human sense in you, too....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, you don't know what I've been through,&quot; then, femininely, &quot;poor,
+poor Mubby, he's been through a lot, too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Her tears began to flow again. I sat beside her on the bed. I put my arm
+about her and drew her to me. I kissed her tear-wet mouth. The taste of
+her ripe sweet mouth with the salt of her tears wet on her lips was very
+good to me....</p>
+
+<p>In a minute unexpectedly she began returning my kisses ... hungrily ...
+her eyes closed ... breathing deeply like one in a trance....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Go up to the house now, Johnnie, my love ... go, so Mubby won't be
+suspicious of us ... I want to stay here ... leave the blinds drawn as
+they are....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You have been so gentle, so sweet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth ... listen to me ... this has been the greatest day in my
+life, will always be! If I died now, I would go to death, singing....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're the most wonderful woman in the world....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want you to be mine forever....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I know what it all means now....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's like Niagara, sweetheart ... one hears so much of it ... expects
+so much ... that it seems disappointing, the first actuality....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then afterward, it's more than any dream ever dreamed of what it would
+be!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to work for you....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to let you walk all over me with your little feet....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want you to kill me, sweetheart....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to die for you....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth, I love you!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll tell Penton ... I'll tell everybody&mdash;'I love Hildreth! I love
+Hildreth!'&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, my own sweet darling, my own dear, pure-hearted, mad, young
+poet....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't talk that way....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come to me again....&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Penton must not know. Not yet. You must let <i>me</i> tell him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It is my place to tell him, sweetest of men, my darling boy....&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Go to your tent.</p>
+
+<p><i>&quot;He'd see it in your eyes now.&quot;</i></p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I won't go to my tent. I'll go right up to the house.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;If he says anything to me I'll kill him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm a man now.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll fight him or anybody you want me to.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>These were the words we said, or left unsaid. I am even yet too confused
+to remember the exact details of that memorable time.</p>
+
+<p>For I was re-born then, into another life.</p>
+
+<p>Is there anyone who can remember his birth?</p>
+
+<p>I returned to my tent in a blissful daze.</p>
+
+<p>I had not the least feeling of having betrayed a friend.</p>
+
+<p>The only problem that now confronted us was divorce! I would ask Penton
+to divorce Hildreth, and then Hildreth and I would marry.</p>
+
+<p>But why even that? Was not this the greatest opportunity in the world
+for Hildreth and me to put to practical test our theories ... proclaim
+ourselves for Free Love,&mdash;as Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher
+Godwin had done, a century or so before us?</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The following day Ruth and I ate breakfast together, alone. I had
+behaved with unusual sedateness, had showed an aplomb I had never before
+evidenced. Full manhood, belated, had at last come to me.</p>
+
+<p>With more than usual satisfaction I drank my coffee, holding the cup
+with my hands around it like a child ... warming my fingers, which are
+nearly always cold in the morning....</p>
+
+<p>Then, while Ruth sat opposite me, eyeing me curiously, I began to sing,
+half-aloud, to myself.</p>
+
+<p>A silence fell. We exchanged very few words.</p>
+
+<p>And it was our custom, when together, Ruth and I, to hold long
+discussions concerning the methods and technique of the English poets,
+especially the earlier ones.</p>
+
+<p>This morning Baxter's secretary rose and left part of her breakfast
+uneaten, hurrying into the house as if to avoid something which she had
+seen and dreaded.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I ate a long time, dreaming.</p>
+
+<p>Darrie came out, followed immediately by Daniel. Daniel was in an
+obstreperous mood ... he cried out that I must be his &quot;telegraph pole,&quot;
+that he would be a lineman, and climb me. I felt an affection for him
+that I had not known before. I played with him, letting him climb up my
+leg.</p>
+
+<p>He finished, a-straddle my shoulders. I reached up and sat him still
+higher, on my head. And he waved his arms and shouted, as if making
+signals to someone far off.</p>
+
+<p>Darrie laughed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Which would you rather have, a son or a daughter?&quot; she asked me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't know,&quot; I replied, letting Daniel slide down, &quot;but I think I'd
+rather have a daughter ... the next generation will see a great age of
+freedom for women ... feminism....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then it would be a grand thing, too, to have a beautiful daughter to go
+about with ... and I would be old and silver-haired and
+benignant-looking ... and people would say, as they saw the two of us:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'There goes the poet, John Gregory, and his daughter ... isn't she a
+beautiful girl!'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And she would be a great actress.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Penton came forth from the big house ... he poised tentatively like a
+queer bird on the verge of a long flight ... then he wavered rapidly
+down the steps.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;slept late!... has the mail come yet?... where's Ruth?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Isn't she in the house?&quot; I queried.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I saw her stepping out at the back door a minute ago&quot; ... said Darrie.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We had breakfast together ... I....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I hope she doesn't stay away long ... I have an article on Blue Laws as
+a Reactionary Weapon, that I want to dictate for a magazine ...&mdash;one of
+her moods, I suppose!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I looked the little, large-browed man over almost impersonally. I saw
+him as from far away. He came out very clear to me.</p>
+
+<p>I found a profound pity for him waking in my heart, together with a
+sort of contempt.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And where's Hildreth?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Not up yet I presume,&quot; replied Darrie.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I excused myself and hurried back to my tent ... where, instead of
+settling down to work on the third act of my play, I lay prone on my
+cot, day-dreaming of the future. How beautiful it would be, now that I
+had at last found my life-mate!</p>
+
+<p>I thanked God that nothing trivial was in my heart to mar the
+stupendousness of my love, my first real passion for a woman!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I leaped alert. It was Hildreth, at my tent door....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Get up, you lazy boy ... surely you haven't been sleeping all this
+time?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, darling.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I ate my breakfast all alone,&quot; she remarked, in an aggrieved tone,
+&quot;where's Darrie and Mubby and Ruth?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;God knows! I don't&mdash;and I don't care!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You needn't be peevish!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Peevish?&mdash;as long as you are with me I don't care if all the rest of
+humanity are dead.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I stepped out beside her. We stood locked in a long embrace.</p>
+
+<p>She drew back, with belated thoughtfulness....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We ought to be more careful ... so near the house.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm so glad you're in the little house near my tent, Hildreth.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But we can't be together there much ... it's too near the big house.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What shall we do, then?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There's the fields and the woods ... miles of them ... the whole
+outside world for us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't see why <i>we</i> shouldn't go strolling together ... the rest are
+all abroad somewhere, too ... but we must be careful, Johnnie, very
+careful.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Careful&mdash;why?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Because of Mubby.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But he doesn't love you any more?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm not so sure about that ... I'm not so sure about anything.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I never saw the world so beautiful as on that day. I was translated to
+the veritable garden of Eden. The community had been named rightly. I
+was Adam and Hildreth was my Eve.</p>
+
+<p>And so it went on for two blissful weeks....</p>
+
+<p>If the Voice of God had met us, going abroad beneath the trees, I would
+not have been surprised.</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth took her volume of Blake with her on our rambles ... and we
+revelled in his &quot;Songs of Experience&quot; as well as &quot;Songs of Innocence&quot;;
+and we were moved deeply by the huge, cloudy grandeur of his prophetic
+books....</p>
+
+<p>Why could it not go on forever thus? eternal summer, everlasting love in
+its first rosy flush?...</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth was very wise and very patient with one who was as yet a mere
+acolyte in love's ways and uses ... she taught me many things, and I
+adored her for it&mdash;as little by little, day by day, she brought me to
+the full stature of my manhood....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Of course the two other women of the household immediately sensed what
+was happening. But Penton remained pathetically blind....</p>
+
+<p>What an incredible man! A mole would have gotten a glimmer of the
+gradually developing change.</p>
+
+<p>With bravado I acted my part of the triangular drama ... but Hildreth
+carried off her part with an easiness, a femininely delicate boldness,
+that compelled my utmost admiration ... she even threw suspicious Ruth
+and Darrie off the scent&mdash;at times.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The night of the performance of <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i> I shall
+never forget ... Hildreth as Titania in her green tights ... I sat in
+the back (she would not allow me in the front because it might fluster
+her, she pleaded) and enjoyed a sense of blissful ownership in her, as
+she glided about, through the Shakespearean scenes ...&mdash;such a sense of
+ownership that it ran through my veins with a full feeling, possessed my
+entire body....</p>
+
+<p>Who was this little, alien man, Penton Baxter, who also dared claim her
+possession!...</p>
+
+<p>Nonchalantly and with an emotion of inner triumph I let him walk
+homeward with Hildreth, while I paced along with Ruth and Darrie.</p>
+
+<p>Let him congratulate her now on her triumph ... that she had had, as
+Titania, there under the wide heaven of stars, in our outdoor theatre
+... in the midst of the Chinese lanterns that swayed in the slight
+breaths of summer air....</p>
+
+<p>Later on, when she was warm in my arms, <i>I</i> would congratulate her
+...&mdash;tell her she was greater than Bernhardt ... than Duse herself!...
+tell her every incredible thing that lovers hold as mere, commonplace
+truths.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Jones had acquitted himself wonderfully as Bottom ... roaring like any
+suckling dove ... putting real philosophic comedy in his part ... to the
+applause of even the elder Grahame, who, to do him credit, was not such
+a bad sport, after all.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, we are having a sing to-night ... there'll be a full moon up.
+I have informed the committee that you will read a few of your poems by
+the camp-fire.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;the first time I ever heard of it,&quot; I replied, concealing my pride in
+the invitation, under show of being disgruntled....</p>
+
+<p>That was Penton's way, arranging things first, telling you afterward.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But you will do it? I have said you would!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Penton, if you wish me to!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Hildreth was always insistent on my strength ... my greyhound length of
+limb, my huge chest ... she stood up and pounded on my chest once....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, why do I pick out a poor poet, and not a millionaire, for a lover!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>There grew up between us a myth ... we were living in cave-days ... she
+was my cave-woman ... I was her cave-man....</p>
+
+<p>As I came to her in my bath-robe (for now, bolder with seeming immunity,
+we threw caution aside, and met often in the little house)&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>As I came to her in my bath-robe, unshaven, once ... she called me her
+Paphnutius ... and she was my Tha&iuml;s ... and she told me Anatole France's
+story of <i>Tha&iuml;s</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But the cave-legend of our love ... in a previous incarnation ... was
+what spelled her most ... she doted on strength ... cruel, sheer, brute
+strength....</p>
+
+<p>That I could carry her, lift her high up with ease, toss her about,
+rejoiced her to the utmost....</p>
+
+<p>I caught her up in my arms, pleasing this humour, tossing her like a
+ball ... till my muscles were as sore as if I had fought through the two
+halves of a foot-ball game....</p>
+
+<p>Out of all this play between us there grew a series of Cave Poems.</p>
+
+<p>One of them I set aside to read at the sing, beside the camp-fire.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>They had chorused <i>Up With the Bonnet for Bonny Dundee</i> and <i>You Take
+the Highway</i>....</p>
+
+<p>There ran a ripple of talk while they waited for me.</p>
+
+<p>In the red glow of the camp-fire I towered over the stocky little
+husband as he introduced me. Hildreth was sitting there ... I must make
+a good impression before my mate. All I saw was she&mdash;too patently, I
+fear.</p>
+
+<p>I went through poem after poem, entranced with the melody of my verse
+... mostly delicate, evanescent stuff ... like this one ...</p>
+
+<p class='center'>&quot;THE EMPEROR TO HIS LOVE</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;I've a green garden with a grey wall 'round</div>
+<div>Where even the wind's foot-fall makes no sound;</div>
+<div>There let us go and from ambition flee,</div>
+<div>Accepting love's brief immortality.</div>
+<div>Let other rulers hugely labour still</div>
+<div>Beneath the burden of ambition's ill</div>
+<div>Like caryatids heaving up the strain</div>
+<div>Of mammoth chambers, till they stoop again ...</div>
+<div>Your face has changed my days to splendid dreams</div>
+<div>And baubled trumpets, traffics, and trir&egrave;mes;</div>
+<div>One swift touch of your passion-parted lips</div>
+<div>Is worth five armies and ten seas of ships.&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Hildreth's applause was sweet. My heart almost burst with happiness
+within me, as those tiny hands, that had run through my hair and been so
+wonderful with me ... hands that I had kissed and fondled in
+secret&mdash;joined in unison with Penton's and Darrie's and Ruth's
+hand-claps.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And now I will finish with the <i>Song of Kaa, the Cave-Man</i>,&quot; I
+announced ... it seemed that the poem was not, after all, in the bunch
+of MSS. I had brought along with me....</p>
+
+<p>At last I found it&mdash;and read:</p>
+
+<p class='center'>&quot;THE SONG OF KAA</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;Beat with thy club on a hollow tree</div>
+<div>While I chant the song of Kaa for thee:</div>
+<div>I lived in a cave, alone, at first,</div>
+<div>Till into a neighbouring valley I burst</div>
+<div>Wild and bearded and seeking prey,</div>
+<div>And I came on Naa, and bore her away ...</div>
+<div>Away to my hole in the crest of the hill,</div>
+<div>Where I broke her body to my fierce will....</div></div>
+</div>
+<hr class='smallerbreak' />
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;My fellow cave-men, fell in a rage:</div>
+<div>'What hast thou done?' cried Singh, the Sage,</div>
+<div>'For I hear far off a battle-song,</div>
+<div>And the tree-men come, a hundred strong ...'</div>
+<div>Long the battle and dread the fight;</div>
+<div>We hurled rocks down from our mountain height&quot;&mdash;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>I copy this from memory alone ... Hildreth has all my cave-poems. I gave
+them to her, holding no transcripts of them&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The upshot&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;All of our tribe were slain ... Naa and I alone escaped&mdash;going far off&mdash;</div>
+<div>To start another people and clan:</div>
+<div>She, the woman, and I, the man!&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In my love-drunkenness, I looked directly at Hildreth as I read the
+last lines ... she lowered her head and picked at her sandal....</p>
+
+<p>The applause was tumultuous....</p>
+
+<p>Penton Baxter rose to his feet, as chairman of the occasion....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm sure we all thank Mr. Gregory&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Events trod rapidly on one another's heels. Though Penton had gone on
+frequent walks with Darrie, after his day's work,&mdash;chiefly because
+Hildreth had not wanted to go on walks with him herself, or had not
+wanted to accompany them both&mdash;yet she and I seized on the precedent
+Penton and Darrie had set, and we were abroad most of the time ...
+roaming idyllically in the fields, the woods ... passionate ... mad with
+the new love that had come to us ... unseeing, in our absorption in each
+other's arms ... praying with devout lover's prayers that we were as
+unseen as unseeing....</p>
+
+<p>We were abroad in the fields so much that even Penton himself must
+notice it....</p>
+
+<p>So we developed the flimsiest of all flimsy pretexts ... pretended to be
+engrossed, together, in of all things, the study of&mdash;toadstools and
+mushrooms ... taking with us Neltje Blanchan's book on <i>Mushrooms and
+Toadstools</i>, with its beautiful coloured illustrations ... and we did
+learn a lot about these queer vegetations that grow without the need of
+chlorophyll ... entering into a world of new colours in the vegetable
+kingdom ... exquisite pinks and mauves and greys ... blues ... purples
+... reds ... russets ... in the darkest spots of the woods we sought and
+found strange species of these marvellous growths ... that grow more
+readily in the dark and obscurity, the twilights of nature, than in the
+open sunlight of green summer days....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Down vistas of forest we often pursued each other ... often got lost so
+that it took hours for re-orientation ... once, for awhile, to our great
+fright, we could not re-discover our clothes, that we had lightly tossed
+aside on the bank of a brook lost and remote,&mdash;that had never before
+laved a human body in its singing recesses of forest foliage ... for I
+had been playing satyr to her nymph, pursuing her....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>And each day saw us a little more reckless, more bold and open in our
+love, our passion, for each other.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;How handsome love is making you, my Paphnutius!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was wearing my bath-robe, had stopped at her cottage a moment, in the
+morning, where she sat, in an easy chair, reading peacefully ... I was
+on my way for my morning dip in a nearby brook....</p>
+
+<p>My bath-robe, that made me, somehow, feel so aristocratic, so like a
+member of the leisure class ... I forgot to tell how I had brought it
+all the way from Kansas, together with my MSS.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As I swam about in the brook, not over four feet deep, I sang and
+shouted. I had never been so happy in my life....</p>
+
+<p>I dried myself in the sun, using its morning heat for a towel....</p>
+
+<p>As I sat there on a rock, I heard a crackling of twigs, and Penton
+thrust his way through the intervening branches to my bare rock and my
+bare self ... I hastily, I do not know why, put on my bathrobe....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hello, Penton.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good morning, Johnnie. I felt you'd be down here for your morning bath
+... I came to have a serious talk with you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want you to take calmly what I am about to say!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Penton was much impressed with my stories of tramp days and tales of
+adventure on land and sea, which you may be sure my sense of the
+dramatic had encouraged me to lay on thick&mdash;and he, plainly, did not
+desire any heat in the discussion which was to follow....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Recently it has come to my attention that there has been a lot of
+gossip about you and Hildreth ... your conduct together.&quot; He drew his
+lips together tightly, settled himself for a long siege....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Penton,&quot; I began, protestingly and hypocritically,&mdash;I had planned
+far other and franker conduct in such an emergency&mdash;but here I was,
+deprecating the truth&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Penton, God knows&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Never mind ... if it is true, I am very sorry for you&mdash;for Hildreth's
+sake, for yours, for mine ... but I want to warn you, if it is not true,
+to look out ... you, as a friend, owe me some obligations ... I have
+taken you in here, accepted you as one almost of my family, and&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But, Penton, this is unfair,&quot; I lied, &quot;unfair even to suspect me&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If it had been anybody but you, Johnnie, I would have been suspicious
+weeks ago ... Oh, I know, Hildreth ... she is giving all the
+manifestations ... how her face shines, how beautiful she has grown, as
+she does, with a new heart interest!... and her taking my little cottage
+... ousting me from it....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If it was anyone else,&quot; and he fetched a deep sigh, with tears standing
+in his eyes, leaving the sentence incomplete.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment I was impelled almost to cast myself at his feet, to
+confess, and beg forgiveness....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to warn you,&quot; he went on, &quot;of Hildreth ... once before this has
+happened ... she is a varietist by nature, as I am essentially a
+monogamist.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;and the free love idea, it was you who taught her this, brought her
+into contact with Havelock Ellis, Ellen Key, Rosa Von Mayerreder?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I deny that. I believe in human freedom ... divorce ... remarriage ...
+but not in extreme sex-radicalism ... Hildreth has misinterpreted me ...
+the people you mention are great idealists, but in many ways they go too
+far ... true&mdash;I brought Hildreth into contact with these books; but only
+that she might use her own judgment, not accept them wholly and blindly,
+as she has done....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I looked at the man. He was sincere. An incredible, na&iuml;ve, almost
+idiotic purity shone in his face....</p>
+
+<p>Again I was impelled to confess. Again I held my tongue. Again I lied.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Penton, what you have just said about you and Hildreth and your lives
+together, I shall consider as sacred between us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He gave me his hand.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Promise me one thing, that you will not take Hildreth as your
+sweetheart ... be true to our friendship first, Johnnie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Penton, I am only flesh and blood; I will promise, if anything happens,
+to tell you, ultimately, the truth.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He looked at me with close scrutiny again, at this ambiguous speech.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, <i>have</i> you told me the absolute truth?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes!&quot; evading his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;because there is a wild strain in Hildreth that only needs a little
+rousing&mdash;&quot; He paused.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie,&quot; as we walked away, &quot;don't you think you had better pack up
+and leave? <i>The next time</i> I am going to sue for a divorce.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We walked home arm in arm. I simulated so well that it was Baxter who
+begged pardon for even suspecting me.</p>
+
+<p>But I felt like a dog. I, for my part, determined to bid farewell to
+Hildreth that very evening, before she retired for the night, in her
+cottage&mdash;take train to New York, and so to Paris, without first
+finishing my <i>Judas</i>, as I had intended.</p>
+
+<p>We would bury forever in the secret places of our hearts what had
+already happened between us ... this was my first impulse....</p>
+
+<p>My next was&mdash;that we should up and run away together, and defy Penton
+Baxter and the world.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Hildreth could see by the strangeness in my behaviour, as I came into
+the cottage, to kiss her good-night ... and stay a little while&mdash;a new
+custom of ours, as we grew bolder&mdash;could see that I had something on my
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>I related to her all that had taken place between me and Penton that
+morning....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The cad,&quot; she cried, &quot;the nasty cad, to talk to you so about me ... I
+would have told you myself because you are my lover ... but he had no
+right to tell you ... as far as he has proof positive, you are merely a
+mutual friend....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But that's the way with him. He has mixed his own life up so that it is
+all public, to him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; she cried impetuously and passionately ... &quot;it's true ... I have
+not been faithful to him before....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;and you returned to him? wasn't that weak?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I took her hands in mine, with mind and soul made up at last....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This time you can go through with it. Here's a man who will stand by
+you forever. I can earn a living for both of us, and&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't let's discuss the horrid old subject any more to-night ... I'm
+tired of discussing ... as you love me, read some poetry to me ... or I
+shall scream!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Have you ever read the sonnets of George Santayana?... I know most of
+them by heart ... let me quote you his best ...</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>'O world, thou choosest not the better part!</div>
+<div>It is not wisdom to be only wise,</div>
+<div>And on the inward vision close the eyes,</div>
+<div>But it is wisdom to believe the heart.</div>
+<div>Columbus found a world, and had no chart</div>
+<div>Save one that faith deciphered in the skies</div>
+<div>To trust the soul's invincible surmise</div>
+<div>Was all his science and his only art.</div>
+<div>Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine</div>
+<div>That lights the pathway but one step ahead</div>
+<div>Across a void of mystery and dread.</div>
+<div>Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine</div>
+<div>By which alone the mortal heart is led</div>
+<div>Unto the thinking of the thought divine!'&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I wish I had written that!&quot; I said, in a hushed, awed voice, after a
+moment's silence....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Now kiss me good-night and go to your tent ... I feel restless,
+troubled in spirit, to-night,&quot; she said, continuing:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Perhaps I have been too harsh with Penton....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He is steering on a chartless sea with no compass....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No wonder he, and all radicals and pioneers in human thought, blunder
+ridiculously....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The conservative world has its charts, its course well mapped out....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I suppose I am not strong enough, big enough, for him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hush! now it is you who're just talking!&quot; I replied.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're jealous!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;By God, yes. I <i>am</i> jealous, though I suppose I ought to be ashamed of
+it.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>She sat in bed, propped up with pillows. She had been reading
+Shakespeare's sonnets aloud to me. The big green-shaded reading lamp
+cast a dim light that pervaded the room.</p>
+
+<p>She reached out both arms to me, the wide sleeves falling back from
+them, and showing their feminine whiteness....</p>
+
+<p>I sat down beside her, caught her to me, kissed her till she was
+breathless....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There ... there ... please! <i>Please!</i>&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What! you're not tiring of my kisses?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, dearest boy, but I have a curious feeling, I tell you ... maybe
+we're being watched....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nonsense ... he believes I told him the truth.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And I caught her in my arms again, half-reclining on the bed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sh!&quot; she flung me off with a sudden impulse of frightened strength, &quot;I
+hear someone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's only the wind.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Quick!... my God!&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I snatched up a volume of Keats. It fell open at &quot;St. Agnes Eve.&quot; I
+hurled myself into a chair ... gathering my breath I began aloud, as
+naturally as I could&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;St. Agnes' Eve! ah, bitter chill it was;</div>
+<div>The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold&mdash;&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>At that very instant, Penton burst in at the door.</p>
+
+<p>He paused a dramatic moment, his back to it, facing us.</p>
+
+<p>I stopped reading, in pretended astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, Penton?&quot; acted Hildreth languidly....</p>
+
+<p>The look of defeat and bewilderment on the husband's face would have
+been comic if it had not been pitiable.</p>
+
+<p>I rose, laying the book down carefully.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I think I'll go now, Hildreth ... you wish to see Penton alone.&quot; I put
+all the calm casual deference in my voice possible. I started to walk
+easily to the door.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No! stop! I wish you to stay here, John Gregory ... since you've got
+yourself into this&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'd like to know what you mean by 'got yourself into this'?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, Gregory, let's not talk nonsense any longer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You don't believe what I assured you this morning?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, it's not human ... I can't make myself, and I've tried and
+tried, God knows!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'd like to know, for my part, just what you mean, Penton Baxter,
+spying on me this way&mdash;bursting in on poor Johnnie Gregory and me like a
+maniac, while we were only reading poetry together.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;reading poetry together!&quot; he echoed bitterly, almost collapsing, as
+he went into a chair.</p>
+
+<p>Again I tried to make my exit.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, I want you to stay. I want to have all this out right here and
+now,&quot; snapped Baxter decisively.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Very well ... if you put it that way.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;a nice way to treat your guest,&quot; Hildreth interposed, &quot;the way you've
+been raving about him, too. 'Johnnie Gregory' this, and 'Johnnie
+Gregory' that!&mdash;and the minute he arrives, first you try to make him put
+up at the community inn; and now you accuse him of&mdash;of&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth began to weep softly....</p>
+
+<p>And then began a performance at which I stood aside, mentally, in
+admiration ... the way that little woman handled her husband!</p>
+
+<p>She wept, she laughed, she upbraided, she cajoled ... at one moment
+swore she wanted nothing better than to die, at the other, vowed eternal
+fidelity till old age overtook them both....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I <i>must</i> go,&quot; I cried, quite ashamed of myself in my heart. Baxter's
+credulity had expanded again, in the sun of Hildreth's <i>forgiveness</i> of
+him for his unjust suspicions!...</p>
+
+<p>For the first time in my life I perceived how a desperate woman can
+twist a man any way she wants.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, you must not go! it is I who am going&mdash;to show that I trust you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good God!&quot; I protested&mdash;this was too much! &quot;no, no ... good-night, both
+of you ... good-night, Penton! good-night, Hildreth!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Penton Baxter stepped in my way, took hold of one of my hands in both of
+his....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Please, Johnnie, please, dear friend ... I wish you to stay while I
+myself go. Finish reading the poem to Hildreth ... I think I have been
+too harsh in my judgment of both of you ... only please do be more
+discreet, if only for appearance's sake, in the future....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sit down where you were. I wish to show that I trust you both....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-night, Hildreth!&quot; and he kissed his wife in fond contrition.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-night, Johnnie ... forgive me!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And he wavered out at the door, his face set in pain.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As soon as he had gone I rose swiftly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And now I must go.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If you men aren't the funniest things!&quot; she caught me by the hand,
+detaining me ... &quot;not yet ... wait a minute. Read more of that poem you
+began, if only for a blind.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I picked up the book, started reading again ... strangely a rush of
+tears flooded my eyes and blurred the type....</p>
+
+<p>I began to sob, heart-sick. I did love the absurd little man. My heart
+ached, broken over my lies....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh! Oh!&quot; I sobbed, &quot;Hildreth, my woman, my sweetheart&mdash;he trusted me,
+Hildreth ... he trusted me!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I knelt by the bed, thrusting my head into the lap of my First Woman.</p>
+
+<p>She kissed me on top of the head.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're both two big, silly babies, that's all you are.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was dawn when I returned to my tent, pulled the flap aside, fell,
+exhausted, on my cot in dreamless sleep....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>How was it all going to end?</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to me that I had tapped violent, subterranean currents in life
+and passion, that I had not hitherto known existed....</p>
+
+<p>Free Love, Marriage, Polygamy, Polyandry, Varietism, Promiscuity&mdash;these
+were but tossing chips of nomenclature, bits of verbal welter, upborne
+by deep terrible human currents that appalled the imagination!</p>
+
+<p>The man who prated glibly of any ready solution, orthodox or heterodox,
+radical or conventional, of the problem of the relationships between men
+and women was worse than a fool, he was a dangerous madman!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Hildreth and I, a-field, had found a bed of that exceptionally poisonous
+mushroom named <i>Pallida</i> something or other ... the book said its poison
+was kin to that of the poison in the rattlesnake's bite. My eyes met
+with Hildreth's ... we needed say no word, both thinking the same
+thought that frightened us!... &quot;how easy it would be&mdash;!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Now we were plumbing the darker side of passion. Something that
+Carpenter does not write of in his <i>Love's Coming of Age</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>A night of wind, shifting into rain. Hildreth I knew would be afraid,
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>I stepped into her cottage, in my bath-robe. She almost screamed at my
+sudden appearance. For I came in at the door like a shadow, the wind and
+rain making such a tumult that a running horse would not have been
+heard.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Dearest ... you're all wringing wet ... you're dripping all over the
+floor. Throw off that robe. Dry yourself&mdash;there's a towel there!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She flung me her kimono. &quot;Here, put this on, till you're comfortable
+again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I came out in her kimono, which I was bursting through ... my arms
+sticking out to my elbow.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed herself almost into hysteria at my funny appearance.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;It will be quite safe to-night. I don't think he'd venture out. This is
+a hurricane, not a rainstorm ... besides, I believe he's a little afraid
+of you, Johnnie ... I was watching him rather closely, while I handled
+him, the other night ... he kept an uneasy eye on you all the time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;God, but you were superb, Hildreth ... if you could only act that way
+on the stage!&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I <i>could</i> act that way on the stage,&quot; she replied unexpectedly, a
+trifle put out....</p>
+
+<p>Then&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A woman has to do many things to save herself&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, I swear that you are the most marvellous, the most beautiful woman
+in the world ... I love you ... I adore you ... I'd die for you ...
+right here ... now!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>As we lay there in the dark the storm pulled and tugged and battered as
+if with great, sinister hands, striving to get in at us.</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth trembled in my arms, shaking afresh at each shock of the wind
+and the rain.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't be afraid, my little woman!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I wonder if he'd dare come down to-night?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If he did, and caught us, I'd kill him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He knows that, if he knows anything, I'm sure ... that's why I think
+we're all right!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And she came up closer into my arms with a sigh of content.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I had been asleep....</p>
+
+<p>The sudden madness and saturnalia of love into which I had these few
+weeks been plunged tapped, it seemed, my subliminal consciousness, maybe
+my memory of former incarnations....</p>
+
+<p>I never had such a vision in my life....</p>
+
+<p>I was fully aware of my surroundings, yet through them shone another, a
+far reality that belonged to me, too.</p>
+
+<p>I described it to Hildreth, as she lay, thrilled, beside me.</p>
+
+<p>A cave ... high up on the hill-crest ... our cave, that we had imagined,
+now come true....</p>
+
+<p>I was a huge chap, with a girdle of leaves about my waist ... strange,
+tropic leaves ... there was black hair all over my body ... there was a
+little, red fire back in the cave's obscurity....</p>
+
+<p>I had come in, casting a dead fawn down from my shoulder....</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth came forward ... it was plainly she ... though with fine red
+hair like down on her legs....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But your name is Naa ... my name is Kaa, the hunter, the slayer of
+good, red meat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, do you really see that,&mdash;<i>all</i> that!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She was enthralled like a child, as I described the landscape that lay,
+spread immense, beneath us ... and the wide ocean, great and blue, that
+tossed to the east.</p>
+
+<p>Though I was genuinely possessed by this strange vision, though it was
+no make-believe, I could not help injecting a little Kansas horse-play
+into it....</p>
+
+<p>I sank my teeth in &quot;Naa's&quot; shoulder, till she cried aloud. I seized her
+by the hair and dragged her till she lay prone on the floor.</p>
+
+<p>I stood over her, making guttural noises, which I did so realistically
+that it made shivers run up and down my back while doing it....</p>
+
+<p>I was almost as frightened as she was.</p>
+
+<p>Before I knew it, she was thinking I had suddenly gone mad. She was
+shouting &quot;Mubby&quot; for help&mdash;her husband's pet name....</p>
+
+<p>The little fool! I caught her over the mouth with a grim hand.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't do that ... can't a fellow play once in a while?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But it wasn't <i>all</i> play, was it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, I really saw the cave, and the primeval landscape.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Shall I tell you some more?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, it frightens me too much ... it seems too real. And you've bruised
+me, and my head feels as if you've torn half my hair out.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why did you call out your husband's pet name?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I don't know ... did I?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;After a pause in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Tell me, was he ... was Mubby.. back there, in our former life?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;O yes, he was there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And Darrie, too?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Darrie, too!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If my name was Naa and your name was Kaa, what were their names?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mubby was named Baa and Darrie was Blaa!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This convulsed Hildreth.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You great, big, sweet fool of a poet, I do love you, I really do!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;We were made for each other in every way ... my head just fits your
+shoulder,&quot; she observed quaintly.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Mubby came down to me this morning,&quot; said Hildreth one evening, &quot;and
+pleaded to be taken back again ... as husband....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And what?&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What did I do?... when I love you?... the mere idea made me sick to
+think of. I couldn't endure him again.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One afternoon Penton and Hildreth were closeted together from lunch to
+dark. It was my turn to cry out in my heart, and suffer agonies of
+imagination.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The next morning Hildreth began packing up, with the aid of Mrs. Jones.
+I came upon her, in the library, where I had gone to get a book. My face
+fell dismally.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I can't endure it any longer, Johnnie, I'm going back home, to New York
+... my father will take me in.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And how about me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;wait patiently a few days then, if you still feel the same about me,
+follow me!... and, until you come to join me, write me at least three
+times a day.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll do it ...&quot; then I couldn't help being playful again, &quot;I'll write
+you entirely in cave-fashion.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am taking a big step, Johnnie, I'm through with Penton Baxter
+forever&mdash;but I wonder if my new life is to be with you ... you are such
+an irresponsible, delightful madman at times....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're wonderful as a lover ... but as a man with a woman to take care
+of&mdash;!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't worry about that! just give me a chance, and I'll show you I can
+be practical too.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Hildreth had gone. With her going the bottom seemed to drop out of my
+existence, leaving a black hole where it had fallen through. I walked
+about, looking so truly miserable, that even Baxter spoke with gentle
+consideration to me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Poor Johnnie, to think you'd run into a proposition like this, the
+first pop out of the box.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, it isn't what you think ... I'm getting malaria, I believe.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But to be deprived of her, my first love. No longer to be in her
+presence, no longer to watch her quiet smile, the lovely droop of her
+mouth's corner ... to feed on the kisses no more that had become as
+necessary as daily bread itself to me&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>I began to lose weight ... to start up in the night, after a brief fit
+of false slumber, hearing myself, as if it were an alien voice, crying
+her name aloud....</p>
+
+<p>I whispered and talked tender, whimsical, silly things to my pillow,
+holding it in my arms, as if it were she....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Each day I sent her four, five letters ... letters full of madness,
+absurdity, love, despair, wild expressions of intimacy that I would Have
+died to know anybody else ever saw.</p>
+
+<p>Her first letter in return burned me alive with happiness....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;you know why she went to the city,&quot; Penton teased, &quot;it's because
+'Gene Mallows, the California poet, is up there. He and she got on
+pretty well when we were on the coast.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You lie!&quot; I bellowed, beside myself, &quot;Hildreth will be faithful to me
+... she has promised.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Penton Baxter looked me up and down, courageously, coolly, for a long
+time. Slowly I realised what I had just said.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's all I wanted to know, John Gregory! I've got it out of you at
+last!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He turned on his heel.</p>
+
+<p>Changing his mind, he faced me again. This time there was a despairful
+agony of kindness in his face.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Dear boy, I'm sorry for all this thing that has come between us. But
+there is yet time for you to keep out of it. Hildreth and I are done
+with each other forever ... but you needn't be mixed up in this
+affair....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, let her stay in New York, and, no matter how much she wants
+you, don't go up there to join her.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I love her. I adore her. I want to be where she is. Now the whole truth
+is out.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My poor friend!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't call me your friend&mdash;you&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He tightened his lips....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If you go up there to join her, remember that I gave you fair warning.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I could endure it no longer, the torment of not seeing her, of not being
+with her....</p>
+
+<p>As her favourite sonneteer, Santayana, writes&mdash;lines she often quoted&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;Love leads me on, no end of love appears.</div>
+<div>Is this the heaven, poets, that ye paint?</div>
+<div>Oh then, how like damnation to be blessed!&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I informed Ruth, Darrie, Penton that I was going to New York in the
+morning....</p>
+
+<p>Penton immediately whisked out of my sight, full of uncontrollable
+emotion....</p>
+
+<p>Darrie and Ruth almost fell upon me, trying to persuade me not to rejoin
+Hildreth. I evaded by saying that I was now on my way to Europe, that
+possibly I might see her before I went, but&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I had an hour till train time. My MSS. was packed again, my Josephus, my
+Homer, my Shakespeare, my Keats, my bath robe.</p>
+
+<p>I thought I would escape without saying good-bye.</p>
+
+<p>But Penton came down the front porch, stood in my path.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, a last warning.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want none of your last warnings.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Are you going to Hildreth?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm tired of being a liar. I've never lied so much in my life ... yes,
+I'm going to Hildreth ... and I'm going to persuade her to live with me,
+and defy the whole damned world&mdash;the world of fake radicals that talk
+about divorces when the shoe pinches them, as well as the world of
+conservatives,&quot; I announced harshly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I've done all I could!&quot; he responded wearily, &quot;I see you won't come to
+your senses&mdash;wait a minute!&quot; and he turned on his heel. He had asked me
+to wait with such solemnity that I stuck still in my tracks, waiting.</p>
+
+<p>He disappeared into the big house, to re-emerge with, of all things,
+<i>the coffee percolator</i>!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here!&quot; he exclaimed, holding out the object to me ceremoniously and
+seriously, &quot;you can take this to your goddess, this poison-machine, and
+lay it on her altar. Tell her I offered this to you. Tell her that it is
+a symbol of her never coming back here again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Here was where I too lacked a sense of humour. I struck the coffee
+percolator out of his hands. I stalked off.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>On the way to New York I built the full dream of what Hildreth and I
+were to effect for the world&mdash;a practical example, in our life as we
+lived it together, of the rightness of free love....</p>
+
+<p>We would test it out, would rent a cottage somewhere, preferably on the
+Jersey coast near the sea shore ... autumn was coming on, and there
+would be lovely, crystal-clear weather ... and the scent of pines in the
+good air.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Perhaps Penton, Hildreth and I could all three join in amicable accord,
+over the solution of our difficulty, along radical and idealistic lines.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I hurried to the address given me by Hildreth. She was not in, but her
+mother was ... a plump, rather good looking, fashionably dressed woman.
+Evidently the mother did not know of the relationship between me and her
+daughter.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So you are the poet Hildreth has told me about?&quot; after we had
+discoursed for upwards of an hour&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I can easily see how Hildreth has grown so fond of you,&quot; and she patted
+me on the head as if I were a schoolboy, in motherly fashion.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Mother's rather stupid and old-fashioned ... there'd be no use trying
+to explain the situation to her. The best thing we can do is to persuade
+her that Daniel needs her, down in Eden ... that will remove her from
+the flat, so we can have it all to ourselves for a few days, in order to
+plan what is to be done next.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Next morning Mrs. Deuell, Hildreth's mother, as innocent as a new-born
+lamb as to what was up, permitted herself to be shipped off to Eden, to
+take care of Daniel.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Instead of planning, however, and marshalling our resources, Hildreth
+and I abandoned ourselves to the mutual happiness and endearments of two
+love-drunk, emotion-crazed beings on a honeymoon....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The bell rang. In walked Darrie.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, Darrie!&quot; and Hildreth embraced her friend. And I was glad to see
+her, too. I knew that, in spite of the high pressure we had lived under
+during the past summer, Darrie was trying hard to be just, to be friend
+to all of us....</p>
+
+<p>She laughed at the disorder of the place ... dishes unwashed ... food
+scattered about on the table....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What a pair of love-birds you two are.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And has Penton accepted the situation?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I came up to tell you that he has ... it has made him quite sick,
+though!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Poor Mubby!&quot; Hildreth ejaculated.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;but he has sent me to tell you that you can go away together wherever
+you please, that he won't molest you in the least.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's too incredible!&quot; cried Hildreth, almost disappointed, &quot;you don't
+know him ... he's changed his mind, I am sure, since you left.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He said he would follow me by Saturday (it was Wednesday) leaving your
+mother in care of Daniel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Does mother suspect?&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No ... not at all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If the entire world fell about mother's ears, she wouldn't know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What do you two lovers purpose doing?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I unfolded my scheme of living with Hildreth in a Jersey bungalow ...
+Derek's income to me would go on a while yet ... I could sell stories
+and poems to the New York magazines ... Hildreth could write a book as
+well as I ... we would become to the modern world an example of the
+radical love-life ... the Godwin and Wollstonecraft of the age.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We ate supper together, the three of us, in the flat. It was so cosy.
+Darrie and Hildreth joined in cleaning the house that afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>But a bomb was to be hurled among us.</p>
+
+<p>At twelve o'clock of the next day the 'phone rang.</p>
+
+<p>Darrie answered it. After a few words she came for me, her face as white
+as a sheet....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My God, Penton is in town!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;this is only Thursday ... he was not coming till Saturday!&quot; I
+exclaimed, full of forboding.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I knew, I knew he wouldn't keep his original mind!&quot; exclaimed Hildreth.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He's holding the wire ... wants to say something to you, Johnnie.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Penton, what is it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Only this,&quot; his voice replied, as if rehearsing a set speech,
+&quot;yesterday afternoon I sent a telegram to my lawyer to institute
+proceedings for a divorce, and I mentioned you as co-respondent....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Damn you to hell ... I thought we were going to settle this in the
+radical way?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's the only way out that I can see. I've stood this business till
+it's almost killing me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, is that all?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No ... somehow&mdash;how, I do not know, the <i>New York Journal</i> has gotten
+hold of my wire ... it will be in all the papers to-night or to-morrow
+... so I advise you and Hildreth to disappear quietly somewhere, if you
+don't want to see the reporters,&mdash;who will all presently be on the way
+to the flat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Damn you, Penton ... needn't tell <i>me</i> about the news leaking out ...
+you've done it yourself ... now I want you to promise me only one thing,
+that you'll hold the reporters off for a couple of hours, till we have a
+good start.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll do my best,&quot; answered he, &quot;but please believe me. How they got the
+contents of the telegram I do not know, but on my honour I did not give
+it out nor did I tell the reporters where you are.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Hildreth was so angry she could hardly speak.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This is a fine to-do,&quot; exclaimed Darrie, &quot;Penton distinctly promised
+me&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'd like to get a good crack at him!&quot; I boasted, at the same time
+enjoying the excitement.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Hildreth began packing her clothes in a large suitcase ... as we later
+found she cast all her clean clothes aside, and in her excitement
+included all her soiled linen and lingerie....</p>
+
+<p>We had our last meal together. I brought in a large bottle of white
+wine. All of us grew rather hilarious and made a merry joke of the
+adventure. We poked fun at Penton.</p>
+
+<p>We sallied forth at the front door, Darrie to go to the Martha
+Washington. &quot;I don't want to be mixed up in the coming uproar and
+scandal,&quot; she exclaimed ... &quot;so far, I'm clear of all blame, and I know
+only too well what the papers would insinuate.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth and I took train for New Jersey ... two tickets for&mdash;anywhere
+... in our excited condition we ran off first to Elizabeth. We had with
+us exactly one hundred dollars, which I had borrowed of Darrie before we
+parted on our several ways.</p>
+
+<p>I registered for Hildreth and myself as &quot;Mr. Arthur Mallory and wife,&quot;
+in the register of an obscure hotel hear the noise and clatter of a
+hundred trains drawing continually out and in.</p>
+
+<p>It made me happy and important to sign her name on the register as
+something belonging to me.</p>
+
+<p>Once alone in the room, Hildreth, to my consternation, could talk of
+nothing else but Penton.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;to think that he would do such a thing to me, only to think of it!&quot;
+she cried vehemently, again and again.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If he believes in freedom for men and women, why was all this
+necessary? the sordidness of the public clamour? the divorce court?...
+oh, my poor, dear, sweet, wild poet-boy, you're in for it! Don't you
+wish you were well out of all this and back in Kansas again?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No; I am glad. As long as I am with you I don't care what happens. I
+love you, Hildreth!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the night she woke, screaming, from a nightmare. I could hardly stop
+her.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hush, dearest ... darling ... sweetheart ... I am with you; everything
+is all right&quot; ... then, as she kept it up, &quot;for God's sake ... Hildreth,
+do be quiet ... you're all right ... the man you love is here, close by
+you ... no harm shall come to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, Johnnie,&quot; clutching me, quivering, &quot;I've just had such a horrible
+dream,&quot; sobbing as I took her tenderly in my arms....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There, there, darling!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She was quiet now.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In a few minutes we would have had the whole hotel breaking in at the
+door ... thinking I was killing you.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>She woke up again, and woke me up.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, find me some ink and a pen. I'm going to write that cad a
+letter that will shrivel him up like acid.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Can't you wait till morning, Hildreth?&quot; sleepily.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No ... I <i>must</i> write it now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I dressed. I went down to the hotel writing-room and came back with pen
+and ink.</p>
+
+<p>She sat up in bed and wrote the letter. She then read it aloud to me.
+She was immensely pleased with her effort.</p>
+
+<p>With a final gesticulation of vindictive, feminine joy, she succeeded in
+spilling the whole bottle of ink on the white bed-spread.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now you've done it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We'll have to clear out early before the chambermaid comes in ...
+we're only staying here for one night and can't waste our money paying
+for the damage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In the morning I bought the papers.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>American</i> had made a scoop. There it was, the story of the whole
+thing on the front page.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>&quot;PENTON BAXTER SUES FOR DIVORCE</p>
+
+<hr class='smallerbreak' />
+
+<p class='center'>NAMES VAGABOND-POET AS CO-RESPONDENT&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There it stood, in big head-lines.</p>
+
+<p>The actuality stared us in the face. We belonged to each other now. It
+was no longer a summer idyll, but a practical reality.</p>
+
+<p>As we took the train for Long Branch we realised that we had plunged
+midmost into the action that would put all our theories to the test....</p>
+
+<p>I looked at my woman with a sidelong glance, as she sat beside me on the
+train seat.... She was so pretty, so frail, so feminine that I pitied
+her, while at the same time my heart swelled with tenderness for her,
+and with pride of possession. For she was mine now without dispute. She,
+for her part, spoke but little, except illogically to upbraid Penton
+Baxter, as if he had perpetrated an ill on two people thoroughly
+innocent.</p>
+
+<p>I was angry with him on other grounds ... he was not playing the radical
+game, but taking advantage of the rules of the conventional world.</p>
+
+<p>With a fugitive sense of pursuit, we hired a cabby to drive us to a
+summer boarding house at Long Branch ... where Hildreth and I rented a
+single large room for both of us....</p>
+
+<p>And there Hildreth immediately went into hysterics, and did nothing but
+weep. While I waited on her hand and foot, bringing up food to her
+because she was sensitive about the probability of people recognising
+her.</p>
+
+<p>We stayed there a week. Each day the papers were full of our mysterious
+disappearance ... reporters were combing the country to find us. Reports
+of our being in various places were sent in by enterprising local
+correspondents....</p>
+
+<p>Again we entrained ... for Sea Girt.</p>
+
+<p>An old cabman who drove a dilapidated rig hailed us with uplifted whip.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We are looking for a place to board.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll take you to a nice, quiet place, just suited to two home-loving
+folks like you,&quot; he replied, thinking he had paid us a compliment, and
+whipping up his ancient nag.</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth gave me a nudge and a merry look and it pleased me to see she
+still had her sense of humour left.</p>
+
+<p>That night, as I held her in my arms, &quot;Don't let these little, trivial
+inconveniences and incidents&mdash;the petty persecutions we are undergoing,
+have any effect on our great love,&quot; I pleaded.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's all very well, darling Johnnie, but where are we going to?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We'll find a cottage somewhere ... a pretty little cottage within our
+means,&quot; I replied, visioning a vine-trellised place such as poets and
+their brides must live in.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Our money is giving out ... soon we'll have&mdash;to turn back to New York!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If we do, that need not part us.... I'll get a job on some newspaper or
+magazine and take care of you.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>When I called for my mail at the Sea Girt post office, sure of hearing
+from Darrie, anyhow,&mdash;who promised us she would keep us posted, I found
+no letter. And the man at the window was certain he had handed over
+several letters addressed to me to someone else who had called for them,
+giving my name as his.</p>
+
+<p>A wave of hot anger suffused my face. How stupid of me not to have
+noticed it before. Now I remembered the men who had followed us.</p>
+
+<p>Our mail was being intercepted. How was Baxter to procure his divorce
+without gaining evidence in just such a way?</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One night I started on a long walk alone. I walked along the beach. In
+the dark I took off my clothes and plunged for a swim into the chilly
+surf ... a high sea was thundering in. I was caught in the undertow,
+swept off my feet, and dragged beyond by depth ... for a moment I was of
+a heart to let go, to permit myself to be drowned ... I was even
+intrigued, for the moment, by the thought of what the newspapers would
+say about my passing over in such a romantic way.</p>
+
+<p>But the will to live rose up in me. And I fought my way,&mdash;and it was a
+bitter fight,&mdash;back to shallow water. I flung myself prone on the beach,
+exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>When I reached our room again, I related my adventure to Hildreth.</p>
+
+<p>It was she who took care of me now. I lay all night in a high fever ...
+but I was so happy, for the woman of my heart sat close by me, holding
+my hand, speaking soft terms of endearment to me, tending to all my
+wants.</p>
+
+<p>This tenderness, this solicitude and companionship seemed for the first
+time better to me than the maddest transports of passion that swept us
+into one.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the morning mail came a letter, general delivery, from Penton.... Now
+I was sure he was having our every step watched. A blind passion against
+him rose in me ... the little bounder!</p>
+
+<p>In the letter he asked me to meet him at the Sea Girt railway station at
+four o'clock. I made it by the time indicated, by a brisk walk.</p>
+
+<p>There he was, dropping off the train as it came to a stop. Another scene
+flashed through my mind, a visual remembrance of the day he had dropped
+off to visit me at Laurel.</p>
+
+<p>Then we had rushed toward each other, hands extended in warm,
+affectionate greeting ... now ... I slowly sauntered up to him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Penton, what do you want; how much longer are you going to torture
+your wife?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;yours now, Johnnie; mine no longer!&quot; grimly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If she were wholly mine, I'd knock you flat ... but you still have a
+sort of right in her that protects you from what I otherwise might do to
+you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For heaven's sake, let's be calm.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Calm&mdash;when you say in your letter, 'you need not be afraid, I meditate
+no harm?'&mdash;do you mean to imply that, under any circumstance, I would be
+afraid of you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, there is only one way to settle this ... I'm set on getting
+the complete evidence for a divorce ... exactly where is Hildreth now?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;None of your damned business ... all I can say is that she is somewhere
+near here ... and she's sick and hysterical through your persecutions
+... and if you don't call off your snooping detectives, by the Lord God,
+if I run into any of them, I'll try to kill them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, it's the best thing to deliver the legal evidence and have it
+over with. Let me accompany you to where Hildreth is, and&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If she set eyes on you,&quot; I replied, &quot;she'd fly at you and scratch your
+eyes out&mdash;in her present mood.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Only <i>show</i> me where she is, then&mdash;point out the place.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If I find you snooping around, you'll need hospital attention for a
+long time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then you won't help facilitate the proceedings, secretly?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, since you've begun this game, find out what you can yourself. What
+do you think I am?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A very foolish young man to treat me so when I am still your best
+friend.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here comes the north-bound train. You hop aboard and go on back to New
+York.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Seething with rage, I caught Penton Baxter by the arm and thrust him up
+the steps....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Next morning came a letter from Darrie, from the Martha Washington. We
+were the talk of the town, she told us.</p>
+
+<p>She had tried to keep Penton from employing detectives to follow us. She
+advised us to return to New York&mdash;we must be out of money by this
+time....</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth could stay at her mother's and father's flat till we made
+further arrangements for going off some place together.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;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?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course not, Johnnie ... I think Darrie offered very good advice,&quot;
+she sighed.</p>
+
+<p>Back we turned, by the next day's train, full of a sense of frustration;
+what an involved, unromantic, practical world we lived in!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We had Darrie over the telephone, and soon she was with us, giving us
+the latest news of the uproar.</p>
+
+<p>The papers were at us pro and con, mostly con.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Globe</i> was running a forum, suddenly stopped, as to whether people
+of genius and artistic temperament should be allowed more latitude than
+ordinary folk....</p>
+
+<p>As Hildreth and I rode down Broadway together, side by side,
+unrecognised, on a street car, we saw plastered everywhere, &quot;Stop That
+Affinity Hunt,&quot; a play of that name to be shown at Maxime Elliott's
+Theatre....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But this was not what I wanted of the papers ... I must use this space
+offered me to propagandise my ideas of free love....</p>
+
+<p>So I arranged to meet Penton privately in the lobby of the Martinique.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Someone had tipped off the reporters and they were on time, too,
+crowding about us eagerly. One young fellow from the <i>Sun</i>, looking like
+a graduate from a school of divinity, asked a special interview of me
+alone, which I gave ... afterward ... in a corner.</p>
+
+<p>That <i>Sun</i> 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....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Come over and join us, Hildreth.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>The reporter from the <i>Sun</i> shook hands good-bye.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But you haven't taken a single note!&quot; I protested.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have it all here, in my head.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But how can you report me accurately?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;See to-morrow's <i>Sun</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas!&quot; I had exclaimed to Hildreth,
+in the hearing of the reporters.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, bother Kansas!&quot; replied Hildreth humorously.</p>
+
+<p>For a month &quot;I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas&quot; was a catch-word
+for Broadway and the town.</p>
+
+<p>When the <i>Evening Journal</i> put us in their &quot;Dingbat Family&quot; I enjoyed
+the humour of it. But Hildreth was angry and aggrieved.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You and Penton,&quot; remarked she, &quot;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!...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The only way to conduct propaganda for a cause is through the dignified
+medium of books, I am rapidly becoming convinced&mdash;not through newspaper
+interviews; which, when they are not silly, are insulting.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Baxter's lawyer soon put a stop to our public amicability ...
+&quot;collusion,&quot; he warned Penton; &quot;they'll call it collusion and you won't
+get your final decree.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Tad drew cartoons of us ... a cluster of them ... &quot;<i>Silk Hat Harry's
+Divorce Suit</i>&quot; ... 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....</p>
+
+<p>A box car loomed in the centre of the main picture, &quot;<i>The Affinity Nest
+of the Hobo Poet</i>,&quot; 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>&quot;I am the hobo poet,</div>
+<div class='i2'>I lead a merry life:</div>
+<div>One day I woo the Muse, the next,</div>
+<div class='i2'>Another fellow's wife!&quot;</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When Hildreth saw the cartoons, she laughed a little, at first; then she
+wept violently.</p>
+
+<p>Then she wrote a savage letter to Tad, letting him know what she thought
+of his vulgarity.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;There is one thing in you which I shall never quite compass; with my
+understanding,&quot; she almost moaned, &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I came and went to and from my cottage by a bye-path through the pines
+that led to the back door.</p>
+
+<p>Darrie, as we called her, performed the most difficult task of all&mdash;the
+task of remaining friends to all parties concerned.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Once, when I was galloping along the road in imitation of a horse, with
+him perched on my shoulders&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say, Johnnie, I like you ... I won't call you buzzer any more!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I like you, too, Daniel, but don't squeeze me so hard about the neck
+... it's choking my wind off.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Though everybody knew well who I was, it assuaged the American passion
+for outward &quot;respectability,&quot; and we were left, comparatively speaking,
+alone to do as we wished....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Hildreth was a spoiled, willful little rogue ... once or twice she tried
+a &quot;soul-state&quot; on me....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, don't be such a damn fool! What <i>are</i> you doing?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I ran at her. She leaped up, pealing laughter. I began biting at her
+ankles ... at the calves of her legs ... &quot;oof! oof! I'm going crazy
+too!&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;My darling big rascal ... my own Johnnie Gregory!&quot; She caught me fondly
+by the hair, &quot;I can't do anything with you at all!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Once again, waking me up in the middle of the night:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, I&mdash;I have a dreadful impulse, an impulse to hit you ... I just
+can't help it, Johnnie dear! I must do it!&quot; and she fetched me a very
+neat blow in the face.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You don't mind, do you ... having your own little girl hit you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Now, poor Penton would have spent the remainder of the night taking
+this &quot;impulse&quot; 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....</p>
+
+<p>My procedure was a different one:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;of course I don't mind you following your impulses ... you should ...
+but also I have just as imperative an impulse&mdash;now that you suggest
+it&mdash;to hit you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And I was not chary of the vigorous blows I dealt her, a tattoo of them
+on her back....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why, Johnnie,&quot; she gasped, &quot;you&mdash;hit&mdash;me!&quot; and her big eyes, wide with
+hurt, filled with tears. And she cried a little....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There, there, dear!&quot; I soothed. Then, with a solemn look in my face, &quot;I
+couldn't resist my impulse, either.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You mustn't do that any more, Johnnie ... but,&mdash;you must let <i>me</i> hit
+<i>you</i> whenever I want to.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But she never had that &quot;impulse&quot; again.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But, though we romped a lot, Darrie, Hildreth, Daniel, and I,&mdash;and
+though Hildreth called me her &quot;Bearcat&quot; (the only thing she took from
+the papers, whose title for me was &quot;The Kansas Bearcat&quot;) don't think
+that this made up all our life in our cottage....</p>
+
+<p>In the morning, after breakfast, which Daniel and I usually ate together
+alone, we being the early risers of the household&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;when he and I didn't go off, as I have said, for the
+afternoon, together, crabbing and fishing.</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth, of course, was working hard at <i>her</i> book&mdash;a novel of radical
+love....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wait till Penton wins the decree, then we can come out into the open
+and live in a Free Union together&mdash;or <i>marry</i>!&quot; Hildreth begged of me
+... and I acquiesced, for the time....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>We had but few disagreements, and those trifling ones.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Penton recalled Daniel to the city.... Afraid now that the papers might
+locate him with us....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Sex in Its Relation
+to Society</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Rond smoked incessantly, rolling her own cigarettes, from packages
+of Plowboy tobacco....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She was thoroughly radical, but quiet and unostentatious about it. She
+looked on me and Hildreth as play-children of the feminist movement.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;what's the matter? children, what's the
+matter?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, nothing, mother ... we're only playing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And her relief would be so great that she would forget to scold them for
+their childlike, unthinking cruelty.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;Now
+every poem of mine was sent hurriedly back with an accompanying
+rejection slip.</p>
+
+<p>Yet I was sure that I was writing better than ever before.</p>
+
+<p>Simonds, of the <i>Coming Nation</i>, and the editor of the Kansas City
+<i>Star</i> 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!</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I sat there a long while with him in Riverside Park,&quot; Darrie reported,
+&quot;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....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He seemed so lonely ... admitted he was so lonely....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, you're both poor, dear innocents, that's what you are&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How did Penton speak of me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Splendidly&mdash;said he considered that in a way, perhaps, he had worked
+you a wrong, done an injustice to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nonsense, the poor little chap!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He made me cry, he acted so pathetic ... he seemed like a motherless
+little boy that needed a woman's love and protection.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Darrie, why don't <i>you</i> marry him?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now you're trying to do with me as he tried to do with Ruth and you ...
+marry him ... no ... I'm&mdash;I think I'm&mdash;in love with 'Gene Mallows.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Penton was pleased to hear, she said, that Daniel and I had got on so
+nicely together, while he was down at West Grove....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>In the office of the New York <i>Independent</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>He greeted me with a mixture of constraint and friendliness.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, my boy, you've certainly got yourself into a mess this time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A 'mess,' Dr. Ward?&quot; I interrogated, quoting back to him the word he
+had used,&mdash;with rebuke in my voice.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How else shall I phrase it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;with the understanding that I expect from an old friend, one who
+bought my first poems, encouraged my first literary endeavours,&mdash;who
+enheartened and helped me at the inception of my struggle for
+recognition and fame.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And now you've won too much of the baser coinage of fame, of a kind
+that a poet should never have.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have a poem with me ... one on the subject of what Christ wrote on
+the sand&mdash;after which he bade the woman go and sin no more ... and he
+who was without sin should cast the first stone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Ward looked over the half-moons of his triple glasses at me ... he
+reached for the poem and read it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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,&quot; paused he, &quot;we do not allow the <i>Woman Taken in
+Adultery</i> in the columns of the <i>Independent</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well,&quot; I shot back, pleased with myself at the retort I was making,
+&quot;well, I'm mighty glad Christ didn't keep her out of the pages of the
+New Testament, Dr. Ward!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He barely smiled. He fixed me with a steadfast look of concern.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Are you still with&mdash;with Mrs. Baxter?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes&mdash;since you ask it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The sooner you put that woman out of your life the better for you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Dr. Ward&mdash;one moment!... understand that no woman I love can be spoken
+of as 'that woman' in my presence&mdash;if you were not an old man!&mdash;&quot; I
+faltered, choking with resentment.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now, now, my dear boy,&quot; he replied very gently, &quot;I am older than you
+say ... I am a very, very old man ... and I know life&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But do you know the woman you speak of?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have met Mrs. Baxter casually with her husband several times.&quot; He
+stopped short. He paused, gave a gesture of acquiescence.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, come, Mr. Gregory, you're right ... quite right ... I had no right
+whatever to speak to you as I have&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But please interpret it as my serious concern over your career as a
+poet ... it seems such a pity ... you had such a good start.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You mean?&mdash;&quot; I began, and halted.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Precisely ... I mean that for the next two or three years all the
+reputable magazines will not dare consider even a masterpiece from your
+hands.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In other words, if Shelley were alive to-day and were the same
+Shelley, he would be presented with a like boycott?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If his manner of living came out in the papers&mdash;yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And Fran&ccedil;ois Villon?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Undoubtedly.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm in good company then, am I not?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You should thank me for being frank with you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I do thank you ... that explains why the atmosphere up at the office of
+the <i>National</i> was as cold as the refrigerator-box of a meat car, when I
+was up there an hour ago ... but they were not as frank as you ... they
+acted like a company of undertakers officiating at my funeral.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was glad to find myself back in my little cottage, that same
+night&mdash;back in my little cottage, and in the arms of the woman who was
+everything to me, no matter if they said she spelled the ruination of my
+career.</p>
+
+<p>For any man, I held, and still hold, who lets a woman ruin his career,
+ought to have it ruined.</p>
+
+<p>I did not tell her of what Dr. Ward had told me. Why cause her
+unnecessary worry?</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>After all, the magazine world was not the only medium to present my
+literary wares to the public. There remained the book world, a less
+narrow and prejudiced one.</p>
+
+<p>Kennerley had written me that he waited eagerly the completion of my
+Biblical play.</p>
+
+<p>And Zueblin, of the now defunct <i>Twentieth Century</i> had just sent me a
+twenty-five dollar check for a poem called <i>Lazarus Speaks</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I brought back with me from New York two books as a present for Hildreth
+... Mary Wollstonecraft's <i>A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,</i> and
+<i>The Life of Mary Wollestonecraft</i> ... these were two books she had long
+desired. She was thoroughly pleased with her resemblance to the
+frontispiece picture of the celebrated woman radical, in the <i>Life</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You possess all her vivacity, all her intelligence ... but you are
+beautiful where she was plain ... she is like a plainer sister of
+yours.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>While in New York I had also paid a visit to the editor of one of the
+biggest sensational magazines in the city, and I had arranged with him,
+acting as Hildreth's agent, for a thousand dollars advance on her
+unfinished novel. The editor had dictated a letter in which he promised
+to deliver the thousand on receipt of two-thirds of the book....</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth kissed me again and again when I gave her the letter....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, you really are wonderful ... and quite practical, after all.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>&quot;And now, my darling Hildreth, we'll take this old world and shake it
+into new life, into the vital thing I have dreamed!&quot; I boasted
+grandiloquently....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here in this little sequestered dream-cottage of ours you and I will
+carry out, popularise, through novels, poems, plays, essays, and
+treatises, the noble work that Ellis, Key, and Rosa Von Mayerreder, and
+others, are doing in Europe ... and we ourselves will set the example of
+true love that fears nothing but the conventional legal slavery.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It will soon be very cold down here,&quot; commented Darrie, irrelevantly,
+&quot;this is only a summer cottage, and they say&mdash;the old settlers&mdash;that we
+are to have a severe winter ... the frost fish are already beginning to
+come ashore.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>It was generally known, sub rosa, that Hildreth and I were living
+together. But, as long as she pretended it was not so, as long as I
+lived seemingly in another house, pretending, under another name, to be
+Mrs. Baxter's literary adviser, the hypocrisy of the world was
+satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>I was, in other words, following the accepted mode.</p>
+
+<p>It was a nasty little article by a fellow literary craftsman from the
+Pacific coast, that set me off, brought me to the full realisation that
+I was but playing the usual, conventional game,&mdash;that roused me to the
+determination that I must no longer sail under false colours.</p>
+
+<p>This writer retailed how, after a brief, disillusioning few weeks
+together, Hildreth had grown tired of the poverty and spareness of the
+living a poet was able to make for her ... of how I was lazy, impliedly
+dirty ... of how, up against realities, we had parted ... I had, he
+stated, in fact, deserted her, and was now on my way back to Kansas,
+riding the rods of freights, once more an unsavoury outcast, a knight of
+the road ... he ended with the implication, if I remember correctly,
+that the reception that awaited me in Kansas, would be, to say the
+least, problematical.</p>
+
+<p>Of course this story was made up out of whole cloth.</p>
+
+<p>'Gene Mallows afterward informed me that the big literary club in San
+Francisco that this hack belonged to had seriously considered
+disciplining him by expulsion for his unethical behaviour toward a
+fellow-writer.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But I maintain that it was good that he penned the scurrilous article.
+For I had allowed happiness to lull my radical conscience asleep. It was
+now goaded awake. I held a conference with Hildreth.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There is now only one thing for me to ... to come right out with it
+that you and I are living here together in a free union, and that the
+love we bear each other not only justifies, but sanctifies our doing as
+we do&mdash;as no legal or ecclesiastical procedure could....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That here we are and here we intend to abide, on these principles&mdash;no
+matter what the rest of the world does or says or thinks.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I admit, Johnnie, that that would be the ideal way, but&mdash;&quot; interrupted
+Darrie&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But nothing&mdash;I'm tired of sneaking around, hiding from grocers and
+butcher boys, when everybody knows&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And besides, Hildreth,&quot; turning to her, taking her in my arms, kissing
+her tenderly on the brow&mdash;&quot;don't you see what it all means?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;As long as I pretend not to be living with you I'm considered a sly dog
+that seduced his friend's wife and got away with it ... 'served him
+right, the husband, for being such a boob!' ... 'rather a clever chap,
+that Gregory, don't you know, not to be blamed much, eh?' ... 'only
+human, eh?' ...&mdash;'she's a deuced pretty little woman, they say!'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Can't you see the sly looks, the nudges they give each other, as they
+gossip in the clubs?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't let your imagination get the better of you, please don't!&quot; urged
+Darrie....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; I went on, &quot;I'm going to send right now for Jerome Miller, a
+newspaper lad I knew in Kansas, who's now in New York on a paper, and
+give him an interview that will set us right with the stupid world once
+and for all. Miller was a fellow student of mine at Laurel ... he's a
+fine, square chap who will give me a clean break ... was president of
+our Scoop Club.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Darling, darling, dearest,&quot; pleaded Hildreth, &quot;I thought you had about
+enough of the newspapers ... you've seen how they've distorted all our
+ideals ... how our attempt to use them for propaganda has gone to smash
+... how they pervert ... the filth and abuse they heap upon pioneers of
+thought in any direction&mdash;why wake the wild beasts up again?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What's the use believing in anything, if we don't stick up for what we
+believe?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, go ahead, dear, if you feel so strongly about it, but&mdash;&quot; and her
+tiny, dark head drooped, &quot;I'm a little wearied ... I want quiet and
+peace a little while longer ... I'm getting the worst of it&mdash;not you so
+much, or Penton.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm the woman in the case.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Remember the invitation the other night, from the Congregational
+minister&mdash;for tea? He invited you for tea, you remember, and left me
+out?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;remember, too,&quot; I replied fondly, caressing her head, &quot;how I didn't
+even deign to reply to the &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash;!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sh!&quot; putting her hand gently and affectionately over my mouth, &quot;don't
+swear so ... very well, poke the wild beasts again!... but we'll only
+serve as sport for another Roman holiday for the newspapers.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I wrote Miller to come down, that I had an exclusive interview for him.</p>
+
+<p>He arrived the very night of the day he received my letter.</p>
+
+<p>Darrie stepped out over to the Ronds', not to be herself brought into
+what she had so far managed to keep out of.</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth consumed the better part of two hours fixing herself up as
+women do when they want to make an impression....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Your friend from Kansas must see that you haven't made such a bad
+choice in picking me,&quot; she proclaimed, with that pretty droop of her
+mouth.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, no! be a good boy, don't muss me up now!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She wore a plain, navy-blue skirt ... wore a white middy blouse with
+blue, flowing tie ... easy shoes that fitted snug to her pretty little
+feet ... her eyes never held such depths to them, her face never shone
+with such beauty before.</p>
+
+<p>I wore a brown sweater vest with pearl buttons ... corduroy trousers ...
+black oxfords ... a flowing tie....</p>
+
+<p>A large log fire welcomed my former Kansas friend.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, Johnnie, it's been a long time since I've seen you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jerome, let me introduce you to the only woman that ever lived, or
+shall live, for me ... Hildreth Baxter.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As Hildreth gave Miller her hand, I could see that he liked her, and
+that he inwardly commented on my good taste and perhaps said to himself,
+&quot;Well, Johnnie is not so crazy after all!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After I had given him the interview, he asked her a few questions, but
+she begged to be left out, that it was my interview.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mr. Miller, you are a friend of Johnnie's ... I have often heard him
+speak highly of you; can't you dissuade him from having this interview
+printed ... no matter if you have been sent by your paper all the way
+down here for it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Jerome liked what Hildreth had said, admired her for her common sense.
+He offered to return to the city, and risk his job by stating that he
+had been hoaxed.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I will leave you to argue it out with him, Mr. Miller.&quot; And Hildreth
+excused herself and went off down the path to the Ronds' too.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie,&quot; my friend urged, putting his hand on my shoulder, &quot;your
+little lady has a lot of sense ... it <i>will</i> kick up a hell of a row ...
+it's true what you say about them rather approving of you now, some of
+them, considering you a sly dog and so forth.... Yes, I'm sorry to say,
+what you're doing, much of the world is doing most of the time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I beg your pardon, Jerome, but there you've made my point ... do you
+think I want a sneaking, clandestine thing kept up between me and the
+woman I love?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then why not stay apart till the divorce is granted, then marry her
+like a regular fellow?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Damn it, Jerome, you don't understand, you don't get what we radicals
+are driving at....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll take a chance with my job and quash this interview&mdash;that's how
+much I like you, Johnnie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, I know you mean well enough ... most of you boys have treated me
+rather well, according to your lights ... it's the damned lead-writers
+and re-writers and editorial writers&mdash;they're the ones that do the
+damage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You want me to go ahead then?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, that is the only way.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It is a big story, a real scoop.&quot; Miller was again the newspaper man
+who had scored a beat on rival newspapers....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Can't you stay over night, Jerome? We can make room.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I must catch the next train back ... I'm off now ... there's the taxi I
+arranged to have come and take me ... it's out there now ... good-bye,
+Johnny, and God help you and your little girl.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Hildreth came in soon after Miller's departure, looking like a
+fresh-faced girl of twelve.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Did&mdash;did your friend think I was good-looking?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, I am sure he thoroughly approved of you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To-morrow another Roman holiday begins.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The result of that interview was worse than I could have surmised. All
+the batteries opened fire again. The Kansas papers called me &quot;the
+shameless tramp&quot; ... reporters spilled from autos and rigs all over the
+front stoop. After giving a few more interviews in the mad hope that
+this time they would get it straight, I saw that the harvest was even
+greater abuse and defamation ... and, as Hildreth had predicted, she
+came in for more than her share of the moral indignation of people who
+sold that precious ware at so much a line, or were paid salaries for
+such work....</p>
+
+<p>We practically deserted our house so the reporters could not find us....</p>
+
+<p>Many of the reporters never came near the house. Instead, lurid stories
+were concocted in the back rooms of nearby roadhouses. And, failing to
+find us at home, interviews were faked so badly that they verged on the
+burlesque ... where not vulgar, they were vicious ... words were slipped
+in that implied things which, expressed clearly, had furnished ample
+grounds for libel.</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth and I were pictured as living on frost fish almost entirely;
+the fish that run along the ocean shore, and, growing numb with the cold
+of autumn, are tossed up on the sand by the waves....</p>
+
+<p>I was depicted as strident-voiced ... belligerent ... waving my arms
+wildly. It was said that, full of threats, I had taken a shotgun
+menacingly from a rack ... that a vicious bull dog lay between my feet,
+growling ... that I went, sockless, in sandals ... had long, flowing,
+uncombed hair....</p>
+
+<p>Once a party of three reporters, from a big metropolitan paper,&mdash;two men
+and a woman, after stopping at a nearby road house till they were well
+lit,&mdash;drove about in a livery rig till they finally located us at the
+house of Mrs. Rond....</p>
+
+<p>All the old nonsense was re-written ... things we had never said or even
+had in our thought ... vulgarities alien to Hildreth's mouth or mine....</p>
+
+<p>The final insinuation&mdash;a sly touching on the fact that the Rond family
+was on intimate terms with me, and that the young daughters were
+attractive-looking, and seemed to favour the ideals I expressed with
+murmurs of approval ... thus the story afterward appeared....</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Rond, after a peculiarly impertinent question of the woman member
+of the party, realised by this time that the three reporters were more
+than a little tipsy, and ordered these guardians of the public morality
+out of the house....</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, they had wormed admittance through a fraud to
+Hildreth and me ... the woman falsely pretended that she was a friend of
+Hildreth's mother ... a great stroke of journalistic enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Rond's rebuke was so sharply worded that it got through even their
+thick skins....</p>
+
+<p>I must say, though, that the behaviour of these three was not
+characteristic ... generally the newspaper men and women were most
+considerate and courteous ... even when they afterward wrote unpleasant
+articles about us. And often I have had them blue-pencil wild statements
+I had made, which, on second thought, I wished withdrawn ... and during
+all the uproar I never had a reporter break his word, once given.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say, Mr. Gregory, that's great stuff, do let us keep that in the
+interview.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Please, boys, draw your pencil through that ... it doesn't sound the
+way I meant it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, all right&quot;&mdash;a sigh&mdash;&quot;but it's a shame to leave it out.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The last and final outrage&mdash;perpetrated by the papers by orders from
+above, I am sure....</p>
+
+<p>Even the second uproar had died down.</p>
+
+<p>Always the &quot;natives&quot; in West Grove and round about, our neighbours,
+behaved considerately, let us alone ... we were greeted politely
+wherever we went....</p>
+
+<p>But now, Mrs. Rond informed me, strange men were appearing on the street
+corners, conducting a regular soapbox campaign against us....</p>
+
+<p>Some of them were seen to get on and off trains going to and coming from
+New York....</p>
+
+<p>Goaded and spurred by these mysterious outsiders, the village people
+began to act aloof, and the more ignorant of them sullen toward us ...
+but as yet it was only in the air, nothing concrete to lay hold of.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Mrs. Suydam had run away with her plumber ... the interviews she gave
+out showed that it was our case mainly that had impelled her to launch
+forth in imitation ...</p>
+
+<p>Others, in a wave of sex-radicalism, were running off together all about
+the country ...</p>
+
+<p>But it was Mrs. Suydam's case that interested me and Hildreth most ...
+she was a dainty, pretty little slight thing, as Hildreth was&mdash;I could
+judge by her pictures....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth,&quot; I urged, &quot;let's drop Mrs. Suydam a note encouraging her ...
+she's probably without a friend in the world, she and her man ...
+they're trying to oust her from her flat ... she's being hounded about.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My God, Johnnie dear, let's <i>don't!</i> ... they'll only give our letter
+to the papers ... let's let well enough alone once more ... the grocer
+boy passed me in the street to-day and didn't tip his hat to me.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was sitting at Mrs. Rond's tea-table having afternoon tea with her.
+She had sent one of her girls over to the cottage to tell me she wished
+to see me &quot;alone&quot; ... &quot;on a matter of great importance.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The cats, who had trailed her eldest daughter, Editha, across to our
+place, followed us back again with sailing tails in the air.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Rond poured me a cup of strong tea.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Drink that first, then I'll give you a little information that won't
+be so very agreeable to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The glimmer of satiric yet benevolent humour that was never long absent
+from her eyes, lightened there again, as she rolled and lit a &quot;Plowboy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Have you noticed a change in the weather? A storm is blowing up. I'm
+speaking figuratively ... I might as well out with it, Johnnie,&mdash;there's
+a report, growing in strength, that a mob of townspeople is scheduled to
+come your way to-night, some time, and treat you to a serenade of
+protest and the traditional yokel hospitality of mobs ... a coat of tar
+and feathers and a ride on a rail beyond the town limits.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So it's come to that, has it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Johnnie, it isn't the townsfolk that started it ... of that I am
+certain ... left alone, they would still have been content to mind their
+business, and accept you and Hildreth on a friendly basis....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She brought up the story of the strange men haranguing from street
+corners again....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's the New York newspapers, or one or two of the most sensational of
+them, that are back of this new phase.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You mean, Mrs. Rond, that they would dare go so far as to instigate an
+attack on me and Hildreth ... with possibly fatal results?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course they would ... they need more news ... they want something
+more to happen ... to have all this uproar end tamely in happy,
+permanent love&mdash;that's what they couldn't endure....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well,&quot; she resumed after a pause, &quot;what are you going to do? You're not
+afraid, are you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To tell the truth I am, very much afraid.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You and Hildreth and Darrie would best take the three o'clock train
+back to New York then.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I haven't the least intention of doing that.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What are you going to do?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;just let them come.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You won't&mdash;fight?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;As long as I'm alive.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You just said you were afraid.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where a principle is considered, one can be afraid and still stick by
+one's guns.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're a real man, John Gregory, as well as a real poet, and I'm going
+to help you ... if it was the townspeople alone I would hesitate
+advising you ... but it's dirty, hired outsiders who are back of this
+feeling. Here!&quot; and she stepped over to the mantel and brought a
+six-shooter to me and laid it in my hand, &quot;can you shoot?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A little, but not very well.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It's loaded already ... here is a pocketful of extra bullets.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She filled my coat pocket till it sagged heavily. I slipped the gun in
+my hip pocket.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're really going to stand them off if they come?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;As long as no one tries to break into my house I will lie quiet ... the
+minute someone tries to break in, I'll shoot, I'll shoot to kill, and
+I'll kill as many as I can before they take me. I'll admit I'm
+frightened, but I have principles of freedom and radical right, and I'll
+die for them if necessary.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Rond put her hand on my shoulder like a man.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You have the makings of a fine fanatic in you ... in the early
+Christian era you would have been a church martyr.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I held immediate consultation with Darrie and Hildreth and they were
+both scared blue ... but they were game, too.</p>
+
+<p>Darrie, however, unfolded a principle of strategy which I put into
+immediate effect ... she advised me to try a bluff first.</p>
+
+<p>When I walked downtown within the hour, to obtain the New York papers,
+there was no doubt, by the even more sullen attitude of the inhabitants
+that I passed on the street, that something serious was a-foot....</p>
+
+<p>I sauntered up to the news stand, took my <i>Times</i> ... hesitated, and
+then tried the bluff Darrie had suggested:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Jim,&quot; I began, to the newsdealer, who had been enough my friend for us
+to speak to each other by our first names, &quot;Jim, I hear the boys are
+planning a little party up my way to-night!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Not as I've heard of, Johnnie,&quot; Jim answered, with sly evasion, and I
+caught him sending a furtive wink to a man I'd never seen in town
+before.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now, Jim, there's no use trying to fool me. I'm <i>on</i>!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The newspaper stand was, I knew, the centre for the town's
+dissemination of gossip. I knew what I said would sweep everywhere the
+moment I turned my back.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;As I said,&quot; I continued, &quot;I'm on!&quot; And I looked about and spoke in a
+loud voice, while inwardly quaking, &quot;Yes, I know all about it, and I
+want to drop just this one hint ... tell the boys they can come. Tell
+them they'll be welcome ... So far I've had no trouble here ...
+everybody has been right decent with me,&quot; affecting a Western,
+colloquial drawl, &quot;and I've tried to treat everybody, for my part, like
+a gentleman,&mdash;ain't that true?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That's true, Mr. Gregory&quot; (it was suddenly &quot;Mr. Gregory&quot; now, not
+&quot;Johnnie&quot;). &quot;As I was saying just the other day, there's lots worse in
+the world than Mr. Gregory that ain't found out.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I want to leave this message with you, Jim. I'm from the West. I'm a
+good shot. I've got a six-shooter ready for business up at the cottage.
+I've got a lot of extra bullets, too. As I've said, I ain't the kind
+that looks for trouble, but when anybody goes out of their way&mdash;Well, as
+I said before, as soon as the boys begin getting rough&mdash;I'll begin to
+shoot ... I'll shoot to kill, and I'll kill everybody I can get, till
+someone gets me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, Mr. Gregory!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mind you, Jim, I've always considered you as my friend. I mean what I
+say. I'm a householder. I'm in the right ... if the law wants me that's
+another matter ... but no group of private citizens&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye, Mr. Gregory.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I walked rapidly back to the cottage. I was thinking as rapidly as I
+walked. For the space of a full minute I thought of packing off
+ignominiously with my little household.</p>
+
+<p>But before I stepped in at the door something murky had cleared away
+inside me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, Hildreth! Darrie!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The women came dragging forward. But with them, too, it was a passing
+mood.</p>
+
+<p>My indignation at the personal outrage of the impending mob incited me
+as them ... till I think not one of the three of us would have stepped
+aside from the path of a herd of stampeding elephants.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The yokels,&quot; and Darrie's nostrils flared, her blue blood showing, &quot;to
+dare even think of such an action, against their betters!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>We lit a roaring log fire. We sat reading aloud from Shelley. As the
+hours drew by ... eight ... nine ... ten ... eleven ... there is no
+doubt that our nerves grew to a very fine edge....</p>
+
+<p>And at twelve o'clock&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Far off, at a respectful distance, a carol of rough, humorous voices
+sang the song, &quot;<i>Happily Married</i>&quot;!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;H-a-double-p-y,&quot; etc.</p>
+
+<p>And we knew that my bluff had worked.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The next day we went through a let-down.</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth was quite nerve-shaken, and so was Darrie.</p>
+
+<p>But I strutted about with my chest out, the cock of the walk.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>But, nevertheless, and despite their bravery and the fiasco of the mob's
+attack, the hearts seemed to have left the bodies of both &quot;my&quot; women.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The cold weather that Darrie and the old settlers had predicted was now
+descending on the countryside....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One morning Hildreth timidly and haltingly proposed returning to her
+mother's flat in New York....</p>
+
+<p>I could stay and finish my play and, having disposed of it, come
+likewise to the city, and rent a flat, and she would come and live with
+me again. I am sure she was sincere in this. Or I could come to New
+York, rent a furnished room somewhere, and she would be with me daily,
+as now....</p>
+
+<p>Darrie seconded Hildreth's proposal.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>And yet my heart broke as Hildreth rode off in the carriage that came
+for her. I kissed her, and I kissed her ... despite the stern, unbending
+figure of the aged, moral coachman in the seat.</p>
+
+<p>Then, after she had started off, I pursued the carriage, overtook it by
+a short cut, cried out that I had still something I had forgotten to
+give her ... it was more kisses ... and I kissed and kissed her again
+and again.. and we both wept, with aching hearts.</p>
+
+<p>Then the moral coachman unbent.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;beg pardon,&quot; he ventured, &quot;but I'm sorry for you two children ... oh,
+yes, I know all about you ... everybody knows ... and I wish you good
+luck.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Darrie stayed over for the night, after Hildreth left, in order to see
+to packing the latter's clothes in her trunk ... Hildreth had been too
+upset to tend to the packing....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>The next day Darrie left, too.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You have no more need of your chaperon,&quot; she laughed, a tear glinting
+in her eye....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>So now I was left utterly alone....</p>
+
+<p>And a hellish winter descended upon the coast ... bitter, blowing,
+frosty winds that ate into the very bone and made a fellow curse God as
+he leaned obliquely against them.</p>
+
+<p>I learned how little a summer cottage was worth&mdash;in winter.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Rond lent me a huge-bellied stove, the fireplace no longer proving
+of comfort.</p>
+
+<p>But though I kept the stove so hot that it glowed red, I still had to
+hug it close, my overcoat on, and a pair of huge, woollen socks that I'd
+bought at the general store down in West Grove.</p>
+
+<p>But, despite the intense cold, I worked and worked ... my play, <i>Judas</i>
+was nearing completion ... its publication would mean the beginning of
+my life as a man of letters, my &quot;coming out&quot; in the literary world.</p>
+
+<p>I ate my food from open cans, not taking the trouble to cook.</p>
+
+<p>At night (I had pulled my bed out close to the stove) I heaped all the
+blankets in the house over me, and still shivered ... I lived on the
+constant stimulus of huge draughts of coffee....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Only a little while longer ... only a few days more ... and the play
+will then be finished ... and it will be published. And it will be
+produced.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then <i>the woman</i>, my first and only woman, she will be with me again
+forever ... I'll take her to Italy, away from all the mess that has
+cluttered about our love for each other.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>One day, in an effort to keep the house warm&mdash;the one room I confined
+myself to, rather,&mdash;I stoked the stove so hot that the stovepipe grew
+red to the place where it went through the roof into the attic....</p>
+
+<p>My mind, at the time, was in far-off Galilee. I was on the last scene of
+the last act of my play ... the disciples, after the crucifixion, were
+gathered in the upper room again, waiting for the resurrected Christ to
+appear to take the seat left vacant for Him....</p>
+
+<p>I looked up from the page over which my frosty fingers crawled....</p>
+
+<p>The boards were smoking faintly. If I didn't act quickly the house would
+catch fire ... I laughed at the thought of the curious climax it would
+present to the world; I imagined myself among the embers.</p>
+
+<p>I must lessen the heat in the stove. I ran and brought in a bucket of
+water. I pried open the red-hot door of the stove with a stick that
+almost caught flame as I pried.</p>
+
+<p>With a backward withdrawal, a forward heave, I shot the contents of the
+pail into the stove....</p>
+
+<p>There followed a detonation like a siege gun.</p>
+
+<p>The stove-lid shot so close to my head it was no joke ... it took out
+the whole window-sash and lit in the outside snow. The stove itself,
+balanced on bricks under its four feet, slumped sidewise, fortunately
+did not collapse to the floor ... the stovepipe fell, but the wire that
+held it up at the bend also prevented it from touching the carpet ...
+the room was instantly full of suffocating soot and smoke.</p>
+
+<p>I crawled forth like a scared animal ... found myself in the kitchen. In
+the mirror hanging there I looked like a Senegalese.</p>
+
+<p>Then, finding myself unhurt, I laughed and laughed at myself, at the
+grotesqueness and irony of life, at everything ... but mostly at myself.</p>
+
+<p>I righted the stove as best I could, brought the door in again from
+where it had bitten to the bottom of the snow drift, like an angry
+animal. It was still uncomfortably hot ... shifting it from hand to hand
+I managed to manoeuvre it back to a slant position on its hinges....</p>
+
+<p>Before I could light another and more moderate fire, unexpectedly the
+inspiration for the completion of the last scene of <i>Judas</i>&mdash;the
+inspiration for which I had been waiting and hoping&mdash;rode in on me like
+a wave....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Christ, in the spirit, unseen, comes to his waiting disciples.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thomas</i>. Someone has flung open the door. The wind has blown out the
+candles.</p>
+
+<p><i>Andrew</i>. Nay, I sit next the door. 'Tis closed!</p>
+
+<p><i>John</i>. He has risen. He is even now among us.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thomas</i>. Someone sits in the chair. I feel a presence by my side.</p>
+
+<p><i>Peter</i>. Brethren, 'tis the Comforter of which He spake! [<i>A misty light
+fills the room</i>.]</p>
+
+<p><i>John</i>. Ah, 'tis He! 'tis He! He is with us. He has not forsaken us.
+Verily, He has risen from the dead into a larger life than ever! Dear
+Lord, Beloved Shepherd of Souls, is it Thou?</p>
+
+<p><i>Thomas</i>. I believe, I believe! It is past speech! Thy Kingdom comes as
+I dreamed, but dared not believe!</p>
+
+
+<p><i>John</i>. He lives, He lives&mdash;the very Son of God!</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>Behold the Kingdom that He promised us;</div>
+<div>'Tis no vain dream, 'tis everlasting truth!</div>
+<div>He shall bind all the nations into one,</div>
+<div>The love of him shall flood the world!</div>
+<div>He shall conquer with love and gentleness, and not with the sword.</div>
+<div>He shall live again in every heart that loves its fellow men.</div>
+<div>Peace he will plant where discord grew before.</div>
+<div>He will save and heal the souls of men forever and forever.</div>
+<div>Ah, dear Master, forgive us, we beseech Thee,</div>
+<div>For deeming Thou hadst ever died.</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>And so, having nearly burnt a house down, and perhaps myself with it, I
+had written &quot;finis&quot; to my four-act play called <i>Judas</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Hildreth and I had written faithfully to each other twice a day ... the
+absurd, foolish, improper letters that lovers exchange ... I wrote most
+of my letters in the cave-language that we had invented between us....</p>
+
+<p>And we marked all the interspaces with secret symbols that meant
+intimate caresses ... kisses ... everything....</p>
+
+<p>The play brought to a successful end, I realised that for one day no
+letters had come from Hildreth. And the next none came ... and the
+next....</p>
+
+<p>I besieged the post office five and six times a day in a panic, till the
+postmaster first pitied me, then grew a bit put out....</p>
+
+<p>A week, and not a single letter from the woman I loved....</p>
+
+<p>The day before, Mrs. Suydam and her plumber affinity, for whom I felt
+myself and Hildreth and Penton largely responsible, in the example we
+had set&mdash;the day before these two young people had committed suicide.</p>
+
+<p>As I walked about the cottage, alone, I had the uncanny feeling that the
+place was haunted ... that maybe the ghosts of these two poor children
+who had imitated us were down there haunting me ... why had not Hildreth
+and I written that joint letter to them as I had suggested!</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;only a little thing, but it might have given them courage to go
+on!....</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I was at the long-distance phone.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hildreth!&quot; I cried, hearing her dear voice....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, how good, how sweet, my love, my life, it is to hear your voice
+again ... tell me you still love me!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hush, Johnnie, hush!&quot; answered a far-away, strange voice ... &quot;I'm
+writing you a long letter ... somebody might be listening in.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Did you see in the paper about Mrs. Suydam?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, it was a terrible thing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;if we had only written to them!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;&mdash;that was what I thought!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Shall I come to the city now? My book is finished. I'm a real author
+now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The book is finished? That's fine, Johnnie ... but don't come to the
+city now ... wait my letter.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>When the bulky letter came, the roads rang like iron to my step. I
+wouldn't allow myself to read it in the post office. I hugged the luxury
+of the idea of reading it by the fire, slowly. I kissed the still
+unopened envelope many times on the way home.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I broke the letter open ... it fell out of my hands as if a paralysis
+had smitten me....</p>
+
+<p>No, no, I would not believe it ... it could not be true ... in so short
+a time ... with hands that shook as with palsy I plucked it up from the
+chilly, draughty floor again....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>Another man</i>!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She had met, was in love with, another man!</p>
+
+<p>Oh, incredible! incredible! I moaned in agony. I rocked like an old
+woman rocking her body in grief.</p>
+
+<p>Now was my time to end it all!</p>
+
+<p>Damn all marriage! Damn all free love! God damn to hell all women!</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>I thought of many ways of committing suicide. But I only <i>thought</i> of
+them.</p>
+
+<p>I flung out into the night, meaning to go and tell Mrs. Rond of the
+incredible doom that had fallen upon me, the unspeakable betrayal.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Poor Penton!&quot; I cried. &quot;Poor Penton!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>At last I sympathised fully with him.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Ashamed, in my slowly gathering new man's pride, I did not go in to see
+Mrs. Rond. Instead, I drove past her house with that curious, bent-kneed
+walk of mine,&mdash;and I walked and walked, not heeding the cold, till the
+ocean shouldered, phosphorescent, in the enormous night toward me.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Home again, I slept like a drunkard. It was broad day when I woke.</p>
+
+<p>I had dreamed deliciously all night of Hildreth ... was strangely not
+unsatisfied&mdash;when I woke again to the hell of the reality her letter had
+plunged me into.</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p>Mrs. Rond ... of course I finally took her into my confidence, and told
+her the entire story....</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Not to speak in disparagement of Hildreth, I knew it all along, Johnnie
+... knew that this would be the result ... but come, come, you have
+bigger things in you ... Penton Baxter will win his divorce sooner or
+later. Hildreth has another man, poor little girl! You have all that God
+means you to have at present: <i>Your first book</i>!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class='smallbreak' />
+
+<p class='center'>THE END</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Tramping on Life, by Harry Kemp
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tramping on Life, by Harry Kemp
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Tramping on Life
+       An Autobiographical Narrative
+
+Author: Harry Kemp
+
+Release Date: March 19, 2005 [EBook #15415]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAMPING ON LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Martin Pettit and the PG
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE AUTHOR OF _Tramping on Life_]
+
+
+
+
+TRAMPING ON LIFE
+
+AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE
+
+HARRY KEMP
+
+GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
+
+GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY, Inc.
+
+_Copyright, 1922, by_
+
+BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
+
+
+
+First Printing, September, 1922
+
+Second Printing, November, 1922
+
+Third Printing, January, 1923
+
+Fourth Printing, April, 1923
+
+Fifth Printing, July, 1923
+
+Sixth Printing, September, 1923
+
+Seventh Printing, November, 1923
+
+Eighth Printing, May, 1924
+
+Ninth Printing, November, 1924
+
+Tenth Printing, July, 1925
+
+Eleventh Printing, March, 1926
+
+Twelfth Printing, February, 1927
+
+
+
+_Printed in the United States of America_
+
+
+
+
+All in this book that is good and enduring
+and worth while for humanity, I
+dedicate to the memory of my wife,
+
+MARY PYNE
+
+
+_Waterbury, Connecticut,
+May 20, 1922._
+
+
+
+
+TRAMPING ON LIFE
+
+Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother.
+For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in her
+family. And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weakness
+in her. She was not even strong enough to suckle me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section of
+that great, steel-manufacturing city which was neither city, suburb, nor
+country,--but a muddy, green-splashed, murky mixture of all three.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They told me, when I was old enough to understand, that my mother was
+English, that her folks lived in Cleveland and owned a millinery and
+drygoods store there ... and that my father met my mother one day in
+Mornington. She was visiting an uncle who ran a candy store on Main
+Street, and, she girl-like, laughed and stood behind the counter, ready
+for a flirtation....
+
+My father was young, too. And he was employed there in the store,
+apprenticed to the candy-maker's trade. And, on this day, as he passed
+through, carrying a trayful of fresh-dipped chocolates, he winked at my
+mother and joked with her in an impudent way ... and she rebuffed him,
+not really meaning a rebuff, of course ... and he startled her by
+pulling off his hat and grotesquely showing himself to be entirely bald
+... for he had grown bald very young--at the age of sixteen ... both
+because of scarlet fever, and because baldness for the men ran in his
+family ... and he was tall, and dark, and walked with rather a military
+carriage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was four years old when my mother died.
+
+When she fell sick, they tell me, my grandfather did one of the few
+decent acts of his life--he let my father have a farm he owned in
+central Kansas, near Hutchinson. But my father did not try to work it.
+
+He was possessed of neither the capital nor knowledge necessary for
+farming.
+
+He went to work as clerk in a local hotel, in the rapidly growing town.
+Crazy with grief, he watched my mother drop out of his life a little
+more each day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father and mother both had tempers that flared up and sank as
+suddenly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had lung fever when I was a baby. That was what they called it then. I
+nearly died of it. It left me very frail in body.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As soon as I could walk and talk my mother made a great companion of me.
+She didn't treat me as if I were only a child. She treated me like a
+grown-up companion. I am told that I would follow her about the house
+from room to room, clutching at her skirts, while she was dusting and
+sweeping and working. And to hear us two talking with each other, you
+would have imagined there was a houseful of people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father's anguish over my mother's death caused him to break loose
+from all ties. His grief goaded him so that he went about aimlessly. He
+roamed from state to state, haunted by her memory. He worked at all
+sorts of jobs. Once he even dug ditches for seventy-five cents a day. He
+had all sorts of adventures, roaming about.
+
+As for me, I was left alone with my grandmother, his mother,--in the big
+house which stood back under the trees, aloof from the wide, dusty road
+that led to the mills.
+
+With us lived my young, unmarried aunt, Millie....
+
+My grandmother had no education. She could barely read and write.
+
+And she believed in everybody.
+
+She was stout ... sparse-haired ... wore a switch ... had kindly,
+confiding, blue eyes.
+
+Beggars, tramps, pack-peddlers, book-agents, fortune-tellers,--she lent
+a credulous ear to all,--helped others when we ourselves needed help,
+signed up for preposterous articles on "easy" monthly payments,--gave
+away food, starving her appetite and ours.
+
+When, child though I was, even I protested, she would say, "well,
+Johnnie, you might be a tramp some day, and how would I feel if I
+thought some one was turning you away hungry?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My Grandfather Gregory was a little, alert, erect, suave man,--he was a
+man whose nature was such that he would rather gain a dollar by some
+cheeky, brazen, off-colour practice than earn a hundred by honest
+methods.
+
+He had keen grey eyes that looked you in the face in utter, disarming
+frankness. He was always immaculately dressed. He talked continually
+about money, and about how people abused his confidence and his trust in
+men. But there was a sharpness like pointed needles in the pupils of his
+eyes that betrayed his true nature.
+
+Coming to Mornington as one of the city's pioneers, at first he had kept
+neck to neck in social prestige with the Babsons, Guelders, and the
+rest, and had built the big house that my grandmother, my aunt, and
+myself now lived in, on Mansion avenue....
+
+When the Civil War broke out, that streak of adventure and daring in my
+grandfather which in peace times turned him to shady financial
+transactions, now caused him to enlist. And before the end of the war he
+had gone far up in the ranks.
+
+After the war he came into still more money by a manufacturing business
+which he set up. But the secret process of the special kind of material
+which he manufactured he inveigled out of a comrade in arms. The latter
+never derived a cent from it. My grandfather stole the patent, taking it
+out in his own name. The other man had trusted him, remembering the
+times they had fought shoulder to shoulder, and had bivouacked
+together....
+
+My grandfather, though so small as to be almost diminutive, was spry and
+brave as an aroused wasp when anyone insulted him. Several times he
+faced down burly-bodied men who had threatened to kill him for his
+getting the better of them in some doubtful business transaction.
+
+For a long time his meanness and sharp dealings were reserved for
+outsiders and he was generous with his family. And my sweet, simple, old
+grandmother belonged to all the societies, charitable and otherwise, in
+town ... but she was not, never could be "smart." She was always saying
+and doing naive things from the heart. And soon she began to disapprove
+of my grandfather's slick business ways.
+
+I don't know just what tricks he put over ... but he became _persona non
+grata_ in local business circles ... and he took to running about the
+country, putting through various projects here and there ... this
+little, dressy, hard-faced man ... like a cross between a weasel and a
+bird!
+
+He dropped into Mornington, and out again, each time with a wild,
+restless story of fortunes to be made or in the making!
+
+Once he came home and stayed for a longer time than usual. During this
+stay he received many letters. My grandmother noticed a furtiveness in
+his manner when he received them. My grandmother noticed that her
+husband always repaired immediately to the outhouse when he received a
+letter.
+
+She followed after him one day, and found fragments of a torn letter
+cast below ... she performed the disagreeable task of retrieving the
+fragments, of laboriously piecing them together and spelling them out.
+She procured a divorce as quietly as possible. Then my grandfather made
+his final disappearance. I did not see him again till I was quite grown
+up.
+
+All support of his numerous family ceased. His sons and daughters had to
+go to work while still children, or marry.
+
+My Aunt Alice married a country doctor whom I came to know as "Uncle
+Beck." My Uncle Joe, who inherited my grandfather's business-sense, with
+none of his crookedness, started out as a newsboy, worked his way up to
+half-proprietorship in a Mornington paper ... the last I heard of him he
+had money invested in nearly every enterprise in town, and had become a
+substantial citizen.
+
+My father still pursued his nomadic way of living, sending, very seldom,
+driblets of money to my grandmother for my support ... my uncle Jim went
+East to work ... of my uncle Landon I shall tell you later on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The big house in which my grandmother, my Aunt Millie, and I lived was
+looking rather seedy by this time. The receding tide of fashion and
+wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing
+city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great,
+flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one ... and a
+welter of strange people we then called the "low Irish" came to work in
+them, and our Mansion Avenue became "Kilkenny Row." And a gang of tough
+kids sprang up called the "Kilkenny Cats," with which my gang used to
+fight.
+
+After the "Low Irish" came the "Dagoes" ... and after them the "Hunkies"
+... each wilder and more poverty-stricken than the former.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Industrial Panic of '95 (it was '95, I think) was on ... always very
+poor since the breaking up of our family, now at times even bread was
+scarce in the house.
+
+I was going to school, scrawny and freckle-faced and ill-nourished. I
+had a pet chicken that fortunately grew up to be a hen. It used to lay
+an egg for me nearly every morning during that hard time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My early remembrances of school are chiefly olfactory. I didn't like the
+dirty boy who sat next to me and spit on his slate, rubbing it clean
+with his sleeve. I loved the use of my yellow, new sponge, especially
+after the teacher had taught me all about how it had grown on the bottom
+of the ocean, where divers had to swim far down to bring it up, slanting
+through the green waters. But the slates of most of the boys stunk
+vilely with their spittle.
+
+I didn't like the smell of the pig-tailed little girls, either. There
+was a close soapiness about them that offended me. And yet they
+attracted me. For I liked them in their funny, kilt-like, swinging
+dresses. I liked the pudginess of their noses, the shiny apple-glow of
+their cheeks.
+
+It was wonderful to learn to make letters on a slate. To learn to put
+down rows of figures and find that one and one, cabalistically, made
+two, and two and two, four!
+
+It always seemed an age to recess. And the school day was as long as a
+month is now.
+
+We were ready to laugh at anything ... a grind-organ in the street, a
+passing huckster crying "potatoes," etc.
+
+I have few distinct memories of my school days. I never went to
+kindergarten. I entered common school at the age of eight.
+
+My grandfather, after his hegira from Mornington, left behind his
+library of travels, lives of famous American Statesmen and Business
+Men, and his Civil War books. Among these books were four treasure
+troves that set my boy's imagination on fire. They were _Stanley's
+Adventures in Africa_, Dr. Kane's Book of _Polar Explorations_, _Mungo
+Park_, and, most amazing of all, a huge, sensational book called _Savage
+Races of the World_ ... this title was followed by a score of harrowing
+and sensational sub-titles in rubric. I revelled and rolled in this book
+like a colt let out to first pasture. For days and nights, summer and
+winter, I fought, hunted, was native to all the world's savage regions
+in turn, partook gleefully of strange and barbarous customs, naked and
+skin-painted. I pushed dug-outs and canoes along tropic water-ways where
+at any moment an enraged hippopotamus might thrust up his snout and
+overturn me, crunching the boat in two and leaving me a prey to
+crocodiles ... I killed birds of paradise with poison darts which I blew
+out of a reed with my nostrils ... I burned the houses of white settlers
+... even indulged shudderingly in cannibal feasts.
+
+The one thing that pre-eminently seized my imagination in _Savage Races
+of the World_ was the frontispiece,--a naked black rushing full-tilt
+through a tropical forest, his head of hair on fire, a huge
+feather-duster of dishevelled flame ... somehow this appealed to me as
+especially romantic. I dreamed of myself as that savage, rushing
+gloriously through a forest, naked, and crowned with fire like some
+primitive sun-god. It never once occurred to me how it would hurt to
+have my hair burning!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Aunt Millie was taken down with St. Vitus's dance, it afforded me
+endless amusement. She could hardly lift herself a drink out of a full
+dipper without spilling two-thirds of the contents on the ground.
+
+Uncle Beck, the Pennsylvania Dutch country doctor who married Aunt
+Alice, came driving in from Antonville, five miles away, once or twice a
+week to tend to Millie, free, as we were too poor to pay for a doctor. I
+remember how Uncle Beck caught me and whipped me with a switch. For I
+constantly teased Aunt Millie to make her scream and cry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Granma," I used to call out, on waking in the morning....
+
+"Yes, Johnnie darling, what is it?"
+
+"Granma, yesterday ... in the woods back of Babson's barn, I killed
+three Indians, one after the other." (The funny part of it was that I
+believed this, actually, as soon as the words left my mouth.)
+
+A silence....
+
+"Granma, don't you believe me?"
+
+"Yes, of course, I believe you."
+
+Aunt Millie would strike in with--"Ma, why do you go on humouring
+Johnnie while he tells such lies? You ought to give him a good
+whipping."
+
+"The poor little chap ain't got no mother!"
+
+"Poor little devil! If you keep on encouraging him this way he'll become
+one of the greatest liars in the country."
+
+A colloquy after this sort took place more than once. It gave me
+indescribable pleasure to narrate an absurd adventure, believe it myself
+in the telling of it, and think others believed me. Aunt Millie's scorn
+stung me like a nettle, and I hated her.
+
+In many ways I tasted practical revenge. Though a grown girl of
+nineteen, she still kept three or four dolls. And I would steal her
+dolls, pull their dresses for shame over their heads, and set them
+straddle the banisters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We took in boarders. We had better food. It was good to have meat to eat
+every day.
+
+Among the boarders was a bridge builder named Elton Reeves. Elton had a
+pleasant, sun-burnt face and a little choppy moustache beneath which his
+teeth glistened when he smiled.
+
+He fell, or pretended to fall, in love with gaunt, raw-boned Millie.
+
+At night, after his day's work, he and Millie would sit silently for
+hours in the darkened parlour,--silent, except for an occasional murmur
+of voices. I was curious. Several times I peeked in. But all I could see
+was the form of my tall aunt couched half-moonwise in Elton Reeve's lap.
+I used to wonder why they sat so long and still, there in the
+darkness....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once a grown girl of fourteen named Minnie came to visit a sweet little
+girl named Martha Hanson, whose consumptive widower-father rented two
+rooms from my grandmother. They put Minnie to sleep in the same bed with
+me....
+
+After a while I ran out of the bedroom into the parlour where the
+courting was going on.
+
+"Aunt Millie, Minnie won't let me sleep."
+
+Millie did not answer. Elton guffawed lustily.
+
+I returned to bed and found Minnie lying stiff and mute with fury.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Elton left, the bridge-work brought to completion. He had a job waiting
+for him in another part of the country.
+
+It hurt even my savage, young, vindictive heart to see Millie daily
+running to the gate, full of eagerness, as the mail-man came....
+
+"No, no letters for you this morning, Millie!"
+
+Or more often he would go past, saying nothing. And Millie would weep
+bitterly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have a vision of a very old woman walking over the top of a hill. She
+leans on a knobby cane. She smokes a corn-cob pipe. Her face is
+corrugated with wrinkles and as tough as leather. She comes out of a
+high background of sky. The wind whips her skirts about her thin shanks.
+Her legs are like broomsticks.
+
+This is a vision of my great-grandmother's entrance into my boyhood.
+
+I had often heard of her. She had lived near Halton with my Great-aunt
+Rachel for a long time ... and now, since we were taking in boarders and
+could keep her, she was coming to spend the rest of her days with us.
+
+At first I was afraid of this eerie, ancient being. But when she dug out
+a set of fish-hooks, large and small, from her tobacco pouch, and gave
+them to me, I began to think there might be something human in the old
+lady.
+
+She established her regular place in a rocker by the kitchen stove. She
+had already reached the age of ninety-five. But there was a constant,
+sharp, youthful glint in her eye that belied her age.
+
+She chewed tobacco vigorously like any backwoodsman (had chewed it
+originally because she'd heard it cured toothache, then had kept up the
+habit because she liked it).
+
+Her corncob pipe--it was as rank a thing as ditch digger ever poisoned
+the clean air with.
+
+Granma Wandon was as spry as a yearling calf. She taught me how to
+drown out groundhogs and chipmunks from their holes. She went fishing
+with me and taught me to spit on the bait for luck, or rub a certain
+root on the hook, which she said made the fish bite better.
+
+And solemnly that spring of her arrival, and that following summer, did
+we lay out a fair-sized garden and carefully plant each kind of
+vegetable in just the right time and phase of the moon and, however it
+may be, her garden grew beyond the garden of anyone else in the
+neighbourhood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following winter--and her last winter on earth--was a time of wonder
+and marvel for me ... sitting with her at the red-heated kitchen stove,
+I listened eagerly to her while she related tales to me of old settlers
+in Pennsylvania ... stories of Indians ... ghost stories ... she curdled
+my blood with tales of catamounts and mountain lions crying like women,
+and babies in the dark, to lure travellers where they could pounce down
+from branches on them.
+
+And she told me the story of the gambler whom the Devil took when he
+swore falsely, avowing, "may the Devil take me if I cheated."
+
+She boasted of my pioneer ancestors ... strapping six-footers in their
+stocking feet ... men who carried one hundred pound bags of salt from
+Pittsburgh to Slippery Rock in a single journey.
+
+The effect of these stories on me--?
+
+I dreamed of skeleton hands that reached out from the clothes closet for
+me. Often at night I woke, yelling with nightmare.
+
+With a curious touch of folk lore Granma Gregory advised me to "look for
+the harness under the bed, if it was a nightmare." But she upbraided
+Granma Wandon, her mother, for retailing me such tales.
+
+"Nonsense, it'll do him good, my sweet little Johnnie," she assured her
+daughter, knocking her corncob pipe over the coal scuttle like a man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a story of Granma Wandon's that cut deep into my memory. It
+was the story of the man who died cursing God, and who brought, by his
+cursing, the dancing of the very flames of Hell, red-licking and
+serrate, in a hideous cluster, like an infernal bed of flowers, just
+outside the window, for all around his death-bed to see!
+
+In the fall of the next year Granma Wandon took sick. We knew it was
+all over for her. She faded painlessly into death. She knew she was
+going, said so calmly and happily. She made Millie and Granma Gregory
+promise they'd be good to me. I wept and wept. I kissed her leathery,
+leaf-like hand with utter devotion ... she could hardly lift it. Almost
+of itself it sought my face and flickered there for a moment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She seemed to be listening to something far off.
+
+"Can't you hear it, Maggie?" she asked her daughter.
+
+"Hear what, mother?"
+
+"Music ... that beautiful music!"
+
+"Do you see anything, mother?"
+
+"Yes ... heaven!"
+
+Then the fine old pioneer soul passed on. I'll bet she still clings
+grimly to an astral corncob pipe somewhere in space.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A week before she died, Aunt Millie told us she was sure the end was
+near. For Millie had waked up in the night and had seen the old lady
+come into her room, reach under the bed, take the pot forth, use
+it,--and glide silently upstairs to her room again.
+
+Millie spoke to the figure and received no answer. Then, frightened, she
+knew she had seen a "token" of Granma Wandon's approaching death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the parlour stood the black coffin on trestles; the door open, for we
+had a fear of cats getting at the body,--we could glimpse the ominous
+black object as we sat down to breakfast. And I laid my head on the
+table and wept as much because of that sight as over the loss of my old
+comrade and playmate.
+
+Something vivid had gone out of my life. And for the first time I felt
+and knew the actuality of death. Like a universe-filling, soft,
+impalpable dust it slowly sifted over me, bearing me under. I saw for
+the first time into all the full graves of the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To my great-grandmother's funeral came many distant relatives I had
+never rested eye on before ... especially there came my Great-aunt
+Rachel, Granma Gregory's sister,--a woman just as sweet-natured as she,
+and almost her twin even to the blue rupture of a vein in the middle of
+the lower lip. She, too, had a slightly protrusive stomach over which
+she had the habit of folding her hard-working hands restfully, when she
+talked ... and also there came with her my Great-uncle Joshua, her
+husband ... and my second cousins, Paul and Phoebe, their children. The
+other children, two girls, were off studying in a nurses' college ...
+working their way there.
+
+After the burial Josh and Paul went on back to Halton, where they worked
+in the Steel Mills. They left Aunt Rachel and Phoebe to stay on and pay
+us a visit.
+
+Paul and Josh were "puddlers"--when they worked ... in the open furnaces
+that were in use in those days ... when you saw huge, magnificent men,
+naked to the belt, whose muscles rippled in coils as they toiled away in
+the midst of the living red of flowing metal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Phoebe was wild and beautiful in a frail way. She wore a pea green skirt
+and a waist of filmy, feminine texture. We instantly took to each other.
+She was always up and off, skimming swallow-like in all directions, now
+this way, now that, as if seeking for some new flavour in life, some
+excitement that had not come to her yet.
+
+We made expeditions together over the country. She joined me in my
+imaginary battles with Indians ... my sanguinary hunts for big game....
+It was she who first taught me to beg hand-outs at back doors--one day
+when we went fishing together and found ourselves a long way off from
+home.
+
+Once Phoebe fell into a millpond from a springboard ... with all her
+clothes on ... we were seeing who dared "teeter" nearest the end.... I
+had difficulty in saving her. It was by the hair, with a chance clutch,
+that I drew her ashore.
+
+The picture of her, shivering forlornly before the kitchen stove! She
+was beautiful, even in her long, wet, red-flannel drawers that came down
+to her slim, white ankles. She was weeping over the licking her mother
+had given her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I'm afraid your cousin Phoebe will come to no good end some day, if she
+don't watch out," said my grandmother to me, "and I don't like you to
+play with her much.... I'm going to have Aunt Rachel take her home
+soon" ... after a pause, "as sure as I have ten fingers she'll grow up
+to be a bad woman."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Granma, what is a bad woman?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aunt Rachel and Cousin Phoebe returned home. Uncle Josh, that slack old
+vagabond with his furtive, kindly eye-glances, came for them with a
+livery rig.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I think I read every dime novel published, during those years of my
+childhood ... across the bridge that Elton had helped build, the new
+bridge that spanned the Hickory River, and over the railroad tracks,
+stood a news-stand, that was run by an old, near-sighted woman. As she
+sat tending counter and knitting, I bought her books ... but for each
+dime laid down before her, I stole three extra thrillers from under her
+very eye.
+
+From my grandfather's library I dug up a book on the Hawaiian Islands,
+written by some missionary. In it I found a story of how the natives
+speared fish off the edges of reefs. Straightway I procured a pitchfork.
+
+I searched the shallows and ripples of Hickory River for miles ... I
+followed Babson's brook over the hills nearly to its source.
+
+One day, peering through reeds into a shallow cove, I saw a fish-fin
+thrust up out of the water. I crept cautiously forward.
+
+It was a big fish that lay there. Trembling all over with excitement, I
+made a mad thrust. Then I yelled, and stamped on the fish, getting all
+wet in doing so. I beat its head in with the haft of the fork. It rolled
+over, its white belly glinting in the sun. On picking it up, I was
+disappointed. It had been dead for a long time; had probably swam in
+there to die ... and its gills were a withered brown-black in colour,
+like a desiccated mushroom ... not healthy red.
+
+But I was not to be frustrated of my glory. I tore the tell-tale gills
+out ... then I beat the fish's head to a pulp, and I carried my capture
+home and proudly strutted in at the kitchen door.
+
+"Look, Granma, at what a big fish I've caught."
+
+"Oh, Millie, he's really got one," and Granma straightened up from the
+wash-tub. Millie came out snickering scornfully.
+
+"My Gawd, Ma, can't you see it's been dead a week?"
+
+"You're a liar, it ain't!" I cried. And I began to sob because Aunt
+Millie was trying to push me back into ignominy as I stood at the very
+threshold of glory.
+
+"Honest-to-God, it's--fresh--Granma!" I gulped, "didn't I just kill it
+with the pitchfork?" Then I stopped crying, absorbed entirely in the
+fine story I was inventing of the big fish's capture and death. I stood
+aside, so to speak, amazed at myself, and proud, as my tongue ran on as
+if of its own will.
+
+Even Aunt Millie was charmed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But she soon came out from under the spell with, "Ma, Johnnie means well
+enough, but surely you ain't going to feed that fish to the boarders?"
+
+"Yes, I am. I believe in the little fellow."
+
+"All right, Ma ... but I won't eat a mouthful of it, and you'd better
+drop a note right away for Uncle Beck to drive in, so's he'll be here on
+time for the cases of poison that are sure to develop."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cleaned and baked, the fish looked good, dripping with sauce and basted
+to an appetizing brown.
+
+As I drew my chair up to the table and a smoking portion was heaped on
+my plate, Aunt Millie watched me with bright, malicious eyes.
+
+"Granma, I want another cup o' coffee," I delayed.
+
+But the big, fine, grey-haired mill boss, our star boarder, who liked me
+because I always listened to his stories--he sailed into his helping
+nose-first. That gave me courage and I ate, too ... and we all ate.
+
+"Say, but this fish is good! Where did it come from?"
+
+"The kid here caught it."
+
+"Never tasted better in my life."
+
+None of us were ever any the worse for our rotten fish. And I was
+vindicated, believed in, even by Aunt Millie.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Summer vacation again, after a winter and spring's weary grind in
+school.
+
+Aunt Rachel wrote to Granma that they would be glad to have me come over
+to Halton for a visit.
+
+Granma let me, after I had pleaded for a long while,--but it was with
+great reluctance, warning me of Phoebe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aunt Rachel, Uncle Joshua, Cousin Phoebe and cousin Paul lived in a big,
+square barn-like structure. Its unpainted, barren bulk sat uneasily on
+top of a bare hill where the clay lay so close to the top-soil that in
+wet weather you could hardly labour up the precipitous path that led to
+their house, it was so slippery.
+
+As I floundered upward in the late spring rain, gaining the bare summit
+under the drizzly sky, a rush of dogs met me. They leaped and slavered
+and jumped and flopped and tumbled and whined all about me and over me
+... ten of them ... hound dogs with flop-ears and small, red-rimmed eyes
+... skinny creatures ... there was no danger from them; but they planted
+their mud-sticky paws everywhere in a frenzy of welcome.
+
+"A hound ain't got no sense onless he's a-huntin'," drawled Paul, as his
+great boot caught them dextrously under their bellies and lifted them
+gently, assiduously, severally, in different directions from me....
+
+Aunt Rachel's face, ineffably ignorant and ineffably sweet, lit up with
+a smile of welcome. She met me in the doorway, kissed me.
+
+And she made me a great batch of pancakes to eat, with bacon dripping
+and New Orleans molasses ... but first--
+
+"Josh, where on earth is them carpet slippers o' yourn?"
+
+Josh yawned. He knocked the tobacco out of his pipe leisurely ... then,
+silent, he began scraping the black, foul inside of the bowl ... then at
+last he drawled.
+
+"Don't know, Ma!"
+
+But Phoebe knew, and soon, a mile too wide, the carpet slippers hung on
+my feet, while my shoes were drying in the oven and sending out that
+peculiar, close smell that wet leather emanates when subjected to heat.
+Also, I put on Phoebe's pea-green cotton skirt, while my knee britches
+hung behind the stove, drying. The men chaffed me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the industrial Middle West of those days, when the steel kings'
+fortunes were in bloom of growth, these distantly related kinsfolk of
+mine still lived the precarious life of pioneer days. Through the bare
+boards of the uneven floor whistled the wind. Here and there lay a
+sparse, grey, homemade rag rug. And here and there a window pane,
+broken, had not been replaced. And an old pair of pants, a ragged shirt,
+a worn out skirt stuffed in, kept out the draft,--of which everybody but
+Phoebe seemed mortally afraid. Incidentally these window-stuffings kept
+out much of the daylight.
+
+Aunt Rachel, near-sighted, with her rather pathetic stoop, was
+ceaselessly sewing, knitting, scrubbing, washing, and cooking. She took
+care of her "two men" as she phrased it proudly--her husband and her
+great-bodied son--as if they were helpless children.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We're going a-huntin' to-day, Johnny,--wan' ter come along?"
+
+"Sure!"
+
+"Wall, git ready, then!"
+
+But first Paul fed the hounds out in the yard ... huge slabs of white
+bread spread generously with lard. This was all they ever got, except
+the scraps from the table, which were few. They made a loud, slathering
+noise, gulping and bolting their food.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But we started off without the hounds.
+
+"Ain't you going to take the dogs along?"
+
+"Nope."
+
+"Why not--ain't we going to hunt rabbits?"
+
+"Yep."
+
+"Then why not take them?"
+
+"Put your hand in my right hand pocket an' find out!"
+
+I stuck my hand down, and it was given a vicious bite by a white,
+pink-eyed ferret Paul was carrying there. I yelled with pain and
+surprise. I pulled my hand up in the air, the ferret hanging to a
+finger. The ferret dropped to the ground. Paul stooped and picked it up,
+guffawing. It didn't bite him. It knew and feared him. That was his idea
+of a joke, the trick he played on me!
+
+"Yew might git blood-pisen from that bite!" teased Josh, to scare me.
+But I remained unscared. I sucked the blood from the tiny punctures,
+feeling secure, after I had done it. I remembered how Queen Eleanore had
+saved the life of Richard Coeur de Lion in the Holy Land, when he had
+been bitten by an adder, by sucking out the venom. I enjoyed the thrill
+of a repeated historic act.
+
+"If we got ketched we'd be put in jail fer this!" remarked Josh with
+that sly, slow smile of his; "it ain't the proper season to hunt
+rabbits in, an' it's agin the law, in season or out, to hunt 'em with
+ferrets," and he chuckled with relish over the outlawry of it.
+
+We came to a hole under a hollow tree. Paul let the ferret go down,
+giving him a preliminary smack.
+
+"Mind you, Jim,--God damn you,--don't you stay down that hole too long."
+
+"Think he understands you?"
+
+"In course he does: jest the same es you do."
+
+"And why would Jim stay down?"
+
+"He might corner the rabbit, kill him, an' stay to suck his blood ...
+but Jim knows me ... I've given him many's the ungodly whipping for
+playing me that trick ... but he's always so greedy and hongry that
+sometimes the little beggar fergits."
+
+"And then how do you get him out again?"
+
+"Jest set an' wait till he comes out ... which he must do, sometime ...
+an' then you kin jest bet I _give_ it to him."
+
+We waited a long time.
+
+"Damn Jim, he's up to his old tricks again, I'll bet," swore Josh,
+shifting his face-deforming quid of tobacco from one protuberant cheek
+to the other, meditatively....
+
+The ferret appeared, or, rather, a big grey rabbit ... squealing with
+terror ... coming up backward ... the ferret clinging angrily to his
+nose ... and tugging like a playing pup.
+
+Paul took Jim off and put him back in his pocket ... he had to smack him
+smartly to make him let go--"hongry little devil!" he remarked fondly.
+
+A crack of the hand, brought down edgewise, broke the rabbit's neck, and
+he was thrust into a bag which Josh carried slung over his shoulder.
+
+We caught fifteen rabbits that afternoon.
+
+We had a big rabbit stew for supper. Afterward the two men sat about in
+their socks, chairs tilted back, sucking their teeth and picking them
+with broom straws ... and they told yarns of dogs, and hunting, and
+fishing, till bed-time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The morning sun shone brightly over me through three panes of glass in
+the window, the fourth of which was stopped up with an old petticoat.
+
+I woke with Phoebe's warm kiss on my mouth. We had slept together, for
+the older folks considered us too young for it to make any difference.
+We lay side by side all night ... and like a little man and woman we lay
+together, talking, in the morning.
+
+We could smell the cooking of eggs and bacon below ... an early
+breakfast for Paul, for he had been taken by a whim that he must work in
+the mine over the hill for a few weeks in order to earn some money ...
+for he was a miner, as well as a puddler in the mills ... he worked in
+coal mines privately run, not yet taken into the trust. He often had to
+lie on his side in a shallow place, working the coal loose with his
+pick--where the roof was so close he couldn't sit up straight....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"What shall we do to-day?" asked Phoebe of me, as we lay there, side by
+side, "I say let's go swimming?"
+
+"You and me together?" I demurred.
+
+"In course!"
+
+"And you a girl?"
+
+"Can't I swim jest as well as you can?"
+
+"Phoebe, git up, you lazy-bones," called Aunt Rachel, from the bottom of
+the stairs.
+
+"All right, Ma!"
+
+"Johnnie, you git up, too!"
+
+"Coming down right now, Aunt Rachel!"
+
+"Hurry up, or your breakfast'll git cold ... the idea of you children
+laying in bed like this ... what on earth are you doing up there,
+talking and talking? I kin hear you buzzing away clear down here!"
+
+I had been rapt in telling Phoebe how, when I grew to be a man, I was
+going to become a great adventurer, traveller, explorer.
+
+Phoebe sat up on the edge of the bed, lazily stretching for a moment, as
+a pretty bird stretches its leg along its wing. Then, her slim, nubile
+body outlined sharply in the brilliant day, she stood up, slipped off
+her flannel nightgown with a natural, unaffected movement, and stood
+naked before me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a custom of mine to swing my feet as I ate; "just like a little
+calf wags its tail when it sucks its mother's tit," my grandmother would
+say. I swung my feet vigorously that morning, but did not eat noisily,
+as my uncles, all my male relatives, in fact, did. I never made a noise
+when I ate. I handled my food delicately by instinct. If I found a fly
+in anything it generally made me sick to my stomach.
+
+Feeling warm, I suppose, in her heart toward me, because I was different
+in my ways, and frail-looking, and spoke a sort of book-English and not
+the _lingua franca_ that obtained as speech in the Middle West, my Aunt
+Rachel heaped my plate with griddle cakes, which she made specially for
+me.
+
+"You're goin' to be diff'rent from the rest, the way you read books and
+newspapers," she remarked half-reverentially.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A foamy bend in a racing brook where an elbow of rock made a swirling
+pool about four-foot deep. Phoebe took me there.
+
+We undressed.
+
+How smooth-bodied she was, how different from me! I studied her with
+abashed, veiled glances. The way she wound her hair on the top of her
+head, to put it out of the way, made her look like a woman in miniature.
+
+She dove first, like a water-rat. I followed on her heels.
+
+We both shot to the surface immediately. For all the warmth of the day,
+the water was deceptively icy. We crawled out. We lay on the bank, in
+the good sun, gasping....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we lay there, I spoke to her of her difference ... a thing which was
+for the first time brought home to me in clear eyesight.
+
+Phoebe proceeded to blaze her way into my imagination with quaint,
+direct, explanatory talk ... things she had picked up God knows where
+... grotesque details ... Rabelaisan concentrations on seldom-expressed
+particulars....
+
+I learned many things at once from Phoebe ... twisted and childish, but
+at least more fundamental than the silly stories about storks and
+rabbits that brought babies down chimneys, or hid them in hollow stumps
+... about benevolent doctors, who, when desired by the mothers and
+fathers, brought additions to the family, from nowhere!...
+
+The house-cat ... kittens and the way they came ... surely I knew, but
+had not lifted the analogy up the scale....
+
+A furtive hand touched mine, interwove itself, finger with thrilling
+finger ... close together, we laughed into each other's eyes, over-joyed
+that we knew more than our elders thought we knew....
+
+Girls, just at the gate of adolescence, possess a directness of purpose
+which, afterwards, is looked upon as a distinct, masculine
+prerogative....
+
+Phoebe drew closer to me, pressing against me ... but a fierce, battling
+reluctance rose in my breast....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was astonished, stunned by my negation.
+
+Silently I dressed,--she, with a sullen pout on her fresh, childish
+mouth.
+
+"You fool! I hate you! You're no damn good!" she cried passionately.
+
+With a cruel pleasure in the action, I beat her on the back. She began
+to sob.
+
+Then we walked on a space. And we sat down together on the crest of a
+hill. My mood changed, and I held her close to me, with one arm flung
+about her, till she quietened down from her sobbing. I was full of a
+power I had never known before.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have told of the big, double house my grandmother had for renting, and
+how she might have made a good living renting it out, if she had used a
+little business sense ... but now she let the whole of it to a caravan
+of gypsies for their winter quarters,--who, instead of paying rent,
+actually held her and Millie in _their_ debt by reading their palms,
+sometimes twice a day ... I think it was my Uncle Joe who at last ousted
+them....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I came back from Aunt Rachel's I found a voluble, fat, dirty, old,
+yellow-haired tramp established in the ground floor of the same house.
+He had, in the first place, come to our back door to beg a hand-out.
+And, sitting on the doorstep and eating, and drinking coffee, he had
+persuaded my grandmother that if she would give him a place to locate on
+credit he knew a way to clear a whole lot of money. His project for
+making money was the selling of home-made hominy to the restaurants up
+in town.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found him squatted on the bare floor, with no furniture in the room.
+He had a couple of dingy wash-boilers which he had picked up from the
+big garbage-dump near the race-track.
+
+Day in, day out, I spent my time with this tramp, listening to his
+stories of the pleasures and adventures of tramp-life.
+
+I see him still, wiping his nose on his ragged coat-sleeve as he
+vociferates....
+
+When one day he disappeared, leaving boilers, hominy and all, behind, I
+missed his yarns as much as my grandmother missed her unpaid rent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It appears that at this time my grandfather had a manufacturing plant
+for the terra cotta invention he had stolen from his comrade-in-arms, in
+Virginia somewhere, and that, during all these years, he had had Landon
+working with him,--and now word had come to us that Landon was leaving
+for Mornington again.
+
+My grandmother was mad about him, her youngest ... always spoke of him
+as "her baby" ... informed me again and again that he was the most
+accomplished, the handsomest man the Gregory family had ever produced.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Landon arrived. He walked up to the front porch from the road. He came
+in with a long, free stride ... he gave an eager, boyish laugh ... he
+plumped down his big, bulged-to-bursting grip with a bang.
+
+"Hello, Ma!... hello, Millie!... well, well, so this is Duncan's kid?...
+how big he's grown!"
+
+Landon's fine, even, white teeth gleamed a smile at me.
+
+Granma couldn't say a word ... she just looked at him ... and looked at
+him ... and looked at him ... after a long while she began saying his
+name over and over again....
+
+"Landon, Landon, Landon,"--holding him close.
+
+Landon began living with us regularly as one of the family. He went to
+work in the steel mills, and was energetic and tireless when he worked,
+which he did, enough to pay his way and not be a burden on others. He
+performed the hardest kinds of labour in the mills.
+
+But often he laid off for long stretches at a time and travelled about
+with a wild gang of young men and women, attending dances, drinking,
+gambling.
+
+Nothing seemed to hurt him, he was so strong.
+
+At most of the drinking bouts, where the object was to see who could
+take down the most beer, Landon would win by drinking all he could
+hold, then stepping outside on another pretext ... where he would push
+his finger down his throat and spout out all he had drunk. Then he would
+go back and drink more.
+
+Sunday afternoons were the big gambling and card-playing times in our
+semi-rural neighbourhood.
+
+The "boys" spent the day till dusk in the woods back of Babson's Hill.
+They drank and played cards. Landon taught me every card game there was.
+
+He could play the mouth-organ famously, too ... and the guitar and
+banjo. And he had a good strong voice with a rollick in it. And he was
+also a great mimic ... one of his stunts he called "the barnyard," in
+which he imitated with astonishing likeness the sounds every farm-animal
+or bird makes ... and by drumming on his guitar as he played, and by the
+energetic use of his mouth-organ at the same time, he could also make
+you think a circus band was swinging up the street, with clowns and
+camels and elephants.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+His great fault was that he must have someone to bully and domineer. And
+he began picking on me, trying to force me to model my life on his
+pattern of what he thought it should be.
+
+One day I saw him eating raw steak with vinegar. I told him it made me
+sick to see it.
+
+"Well, you'll have to eat some, too, for saying that." And he chased me
+around and 'round the table and room till he caught me. He held me,
+while I kicked and protested. He compelled me, by forcing his finger and
+thumb painfully against my jaws, to open my mouth and eat. He struck me
+to make me swallow.
+
+Everything I didn't want to do he made me do ... he took to beating me
+on every pretext. When my grandmother protested, he said he was only
+educating me the way I should go ... that I had been let run wild too
+long without a mastering hand, and with only women in the house. He must
+make a man out of me....
+
+My reading meant more to me than anything else. I was never so happy as
+when I was sitting humped up over a book, in some obscure corner of the
+house, where Uncle Landon, now grown the incarnate demon of my life,
+could not find me.
+
+It was a trick of his, when he surprised me stooping over a book, to hit
+me a terrific thwack between the shoulder-blades, a blow that made my
+backbone tingle with pain.
+
+"Set up straight! Do you want to be a hump-back when you grow big?"
+
+His pursuit drove me from corner to corner, till I lost my mischievous
+boldness and began to act timid and fearful.
+
+Whenever I failed to obey Granma, that was his opportunity. (Millie
+would cry triumphantly, "_Now_ you have someone to make you be good!")
+The veins on his handsome, curly forehead would swell with delight, as
+he caught me and whipped me ... till Granma would step in and make him
+stop ... but often he would over-rule her, and keep it up till his right
+arm was actually tired. And he would leave me to crawl off, sobbing dry
+sobs, incapable of more tears.
+
+A black hatred of him began to gnaw at my heart ... I dreamed still of
+what I would do when I had grown to be a man ... but now it was not any
+more to be a great traveller or explorer, but to grow into a strong man
+and kill my uncle, first putting him to some savage form of torture ...
+torture that would last a long, long while.
+
+He would often see it in my eyes.
+
+"Don't you look at me that way!" with a swipe of the hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out in the woods I caught a dozen big yellow spiders, the kind that make
+pretty silver traceries, like handwriting with a flourish--on their
+morning webs.
+
+I brought these spiders home in a tin can and transferred them to some
+empty fruit jars in the cellar, keeping them for some boyish reason or
+other, in pairs, and putting in flies for them.
+
+Aunt Millie came upon them and set up a scream that brought Uncle "Lan,"
+as we called him, down to see what was the matter....
+
+I took my beating in silence. I would no longer beg and plead for mercy.
+After he had finished, I lay across the sloping cellar door, lumpish and
+still, inwardly a shaking jelly of horror.
+
+I was wanting to die ... these successive humiliations seemed too great
+to live through.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The grey light of morning filtering in.
+
+Lan stood over my bed.
+
+"--want to go hunting with me to-day?... shootin' blackbirds?"
+
+"Yes, Uncle Lan," I assented, my mind divided between fear of him and
+eagerness to go.
+
+In the kitchen we ate some fried eggs and drank our coffee in silence.
+Then we trudged on through the dew-wet fields, drenched to the knees as
+if having waded through a brook.
+
+Lan bore his double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulder. He shot into a
+tree-top full of bickering blackbirds and brought three down, torn,
+flopping, bleeding. He thrust them into his sack, which reddened
+through, and we went on ... still in silence. The silence began to make
+me tremble but I was glad, anyhow, that I had gone with him. I
+conjectured that he had brought me a-field to give me a final
+whipping--"to teach me to mind Granma."
+
+"--had to bring you out here ... the women are too chicken-hearted--they
+stop me too soon...."
+
+"--Pity your pa's away ... don't do to leave a kid alone with women
+folks ... they don't make him walk the chalk enough!"
+
+It was about an hour after sunrise. We had come to an open field among
+trees. Lan set down his gun against a tree-trunk.
+
+"--needn't make to run ... I can catch you, no matter how fast you go."
+
+He cut a heavy stick from a hickory.
+
+"Come on and take your medicine ... I'm goin' away to-morrow to Halton,
+and I want to leave you something to remember me by--so that you'll obey
+Ma and Millie while I'm gone. If you don't, when I come back, you'll
+catch it all over again."
+
+My heart was going like a steam engine. At the last moment I started to
+run, my legs sinking beneath me. He was upon me with my first few steps,
+and had me by the scruff of the neck, and brought down the cudgel over
+me.
+
+Then an amazing thing happened inside me. It seemed that the blows were
+descending on someone else, not me. The pain of them was a dull,
+far-away thing. Weak, fragile child that I was (known among the other
+children as "Skinny Gregory" and "Spider-Legs") a man's slow fury was
+kindling in me ... let Lan beat me for a year. It didn't matter. When I
+grew up I would kill him for this.
+
+I began to curse boldly at him, calling him by all the obscene terms I
+had ever learned or heard. This, and the astounding fact that I no
+longer squirmed nor cried out, but physically yielded to him, as limp as
+an empty sack, brought him to a puzzled stop. But he sent me an extra
+blow for good measure as he flung me aside. That blow rattled about my
+head, missing my shoulders at which it had been aimed. I saw a shower
+of hot sparks soaring upward into a black void.
+
+I woke with water trickling down my face and all over me. I heard, far
+off, my uncle's voice calling, cajoling, coaxing, with great fright
+sounding through it....
+
+"Johnnie, Johnnie ... I'm so sorry ... Johnnie, only speak to me!" He
+was behaving exactly like Aunt Millie when she had St. Vitus' dance.
+
+He began tending me gently like a woman. He built a fire and made some
+coffee over it--he had brought coffee and some lunch. I crouched white
+and still, saying not a word.
+
+Landon squatted with his back turned, watching the coffee. His shotgun,
+leaning against the tree-trunk, caught my eye. I crept toward that
+shotgun. I trembled with anticipatory pleasure. God, but now I would pay
+him back!...
+
+But it was too heavy. I had struggled and brought it up, however, half
+to my shoulder, when that uncanny instinct that sometimes comes to
+people in mortal danger, came to Uncle Lan. He looked about.
+
+He went as pale as a sheet of paper.
+
+"--God, Johnnie!" he almost screamed my name.
+
+I dropped the gun in the grass, sullenly, never speaking.
+
+"Johnnie, were you--were you?" he faltered, unnerved.
+
+"Yes, I was going to give you both barrels ... and I'm sorry I didn't."
+
+All his desire to whip me had gone up like smoke.
+
+"Yes, and I'll tell you what, you big, dirty ----, I'll kill you yet,
+when I grow big."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night I fainted at supper. When Granma put me to bed she saw how
+bruised and wealed I was all over ... for the first time she went after
+Uncle Lan--turned into a furious thing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Shortly after, I was taken sick with typhoid fever. They used the
+starvation cure for it, in those days. When they began to give me solid
+food, I chased single grains of rice that fell out of the plate, about
+the quilt, just as a jeweller would pearls, if a necklace of them broke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With my recovery came news, after many days, of my father.
+
+The Hunkies were pushing out the Irish from the mills--cheaper labour.
+My grandmother could not afford to board the Hunkies, they lived so
+cheaply. Renewed poverty was breaking our household up.
+
+My grandmother was about to begin her living about from house to house
+with her married sons and daughters.
+
+My father was sending for me to come East. He had a good job there in
+the Composite Works at Haberford. He was at last able to take care of
+his son--his only child.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My grandmother and my aunt Millie took me to the railroad station. I
+tried to be brave and not cry. I succeeded, till the train began to pull
+out. Then I cried very much.
+
+The face of my grandmother pulled awry with grief and flowing tears.
+Aunt Millie wept, too.
+
+No, I wouldn't leave them. I would stay with them, work till I was rich
+and prosperous, never marry, give all my life to taking care of them, to
+saving them from the bitter grinding poverty we had shared together.
+
+I ran into the vestibule. But the train was gathering speed so rapidly
+that I did not dare jump off.
+
+I took my seat again. Soon my tears dried.
+
+The trees flapped by. The telegraph poles danced off in irregular lines.
+I became acquainted with my fellow passengers. I was happy.
+
+I made romance out of every red and green lamp in the railroad yards we
+passed through, out of the dingy little restaurants in which I ate....
+
+The mysterious swaying to and fro of the curtains in the sleeper
+thrilled me, as I looked out from my narrow berth.
+
+In the smoker I listened till late to the talk of the drummers who
+clenched big black cigars between their teeth, or slender Pittsburgh
+stogies, expertly flicking off the grey ash with their little fingers,
+as they yarned.
+
+I wore a tag on my coat lapel with my name and destination written on
+it. My grandmother had put it there in a painful, scrawling hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The swing out over wide, salt-bitten marshes, the Jersey marshes grey
+and smoky before dawn!... then, far off, on the horizon line, New York,
+serrate, mountainous, going upward great and shining in the still dawn!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Beneath a high, vast, clamorous roof of glass....
+
+As I stepped down to the platform my father met me.
+
+I knew him instantly though it had been years since I had seen him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father whisked me once more across the long Jersey marshes. To
+Haberford. There, on the edge of the town, composed of a multitude of
+stone-built, separate, tin-roofed houses, stood the Composite Works. My
+father was foreman of the drying department, in which the highly
+inflammable sheets of composite were hung to dry....
+
+My father rented a large, front room, with a closet for clothes, of a
+commuting feed merchant named Jenkins ... whose house stood three or
+four blocks distant from the works.
+
+So we, my father and I, lived in that one room. But I had it to myself
+most of the time, excepting at night, when we shared the big double bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Still only a child, I was affectionate toward him. And, till he
+discouraged me, I kissed him good night every night, I liked the smell
+of the cigars he smoked.
+
+I wanted my father to be more affectionate to me, to notice me more. I
+thought that a father should be something intuitively understanding and
+sympathetic. And mine was offish ... of a different species.. wearing
+his trousers always neatly pressed ... and his neckties--he had them
+hanging in a neat, perfect row, never disarranged. The ends of them were
+always pulled even over the smooth stick on which they hung.
+
+I can see my father yet, as he stands before the mirror, painstakingly
+adjusting the tie he had chosen for the day's wear.
+
+I was not at all like him. Where I took my knee britches off, there I
+dropped them. They sprawled, as if half-alive, on the floor ... my
+shirt, clinging with one arm over a chair, as if to keep from falling to
+the floor.. my cap, flung hurriedly into a corner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Christ, Johnnie, won't you ever learn to be neat or civilised? What
+kind of a boy are you, anyhow?"
+
+He thought I was stubborn, was determined not to obey him, for again and
+again I flung things about in the same disorder for which I was rebuked.
+But a grey chaos was settling over me. I trembled often like a person
+under a strange seizure. My mind did not readily respond to questions.
+It went here and there in a welter. Day dreams chased through my mind
+one after another in hurried heaps of confusion. I was lost ... groping
+... in a curious new world of growing emotions leavened with grievous,
+shapeless thoughts.
+
+Strange involuntary rhythms swung through my spirit and body. Fantastic
+imaginations took possession of me.
+
+And I prayed at night, kneeling, great waves of religious emotion going
+over me. And when my father saw me praying by the bedside, I felt
+awkwardly, shamefully happy that he saw me. And I took to posing a
+childishness, an innocence toward him.
+
+Jenkins, the little stringy feed merchant, had two daughters, one
+thirteen, Alva, and another Silvia, who was fifteen or sixteen.. and a
+son, Jimmy, about seven....
+
+It was over Alva and Silvia that my father and Jenkins used to come
+together, teasing me. And, though the girls drew me with an enchanting
+curiosity, I would protest that I didn't like girls ... that when I
+became full-grown I would never marry, but would study books and mind my
+business, single....
+
+After this close, crafty, lascivious joking between them, my father
+would end proudly with--
+
+"Johnnie's a strange boy, he really doesn't care about such things. All
+he cares about is books."
+
+So I succeeded in completely fooling my father as to the changes going
+on within me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though I had not an atom of belief left in orthodox Christianity (or
+thought I had not) I still possessed this all-pervasive need to pray to
+God. A need as strong as physical hunger.
+
+Torn with these curious, new, sweet tumults, I turned to Him. And I
+prayed to be pure ... like Sir Galahad, or any of the old knights who
+wore their lady's favour in chastity, a male maiden,--and yet achieved
+great quests and were manly in their deeds....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The crying and singing of the multitudinous life of insects and animals
+in the spring marshes under the stars almost made me weep, as I roamed
+about, distracted yet exalted, alone, at night.
+
+I was studying the stars, locating the constellations with a little book
+of star-maps I possessed.
+
+I wanted, was in search of, something ... something ... maybe other
+worlds could give this something to me ... what vistas of infinite
+imagination I saw about me in the wide-stretching, star-sprinkled sky!
+
+Dreaming of other worlds swinging around other suns, seething with
+strange millions of inhabitants, through all space, I took to reading
+books on astronomy ... Newcomb ... Proctor's _Other Worlds_ ... Camille
+Flammarion ... Garret Serviss as he wrote in the daily papers ... and
+novels and romances dealing with life on the moon, on Mars, on Venus....
+
+During my night-rovings I lay down in dark hollows, sometimes, and
+prayed to God as fervently as if the next moment I might expect His
+shining face to look down at me out of the velvet, far-reaching
+blackness of night:
+
+"O God, make me pure, and wonderful ... let me do great things for
+humanity ... make me handsome, too, O God, so that girls and women will
+love me, and wonder at me, in awe, while I pass by unperturbed--till one
+day, having kept myself wholly for _her_ as she has kept herself for
+me,--give me then the one wonderful and beautiful white maiden who will
+be mine ... mine ... all and alone and altogether, as I shall be all and
+alone and altogether hers. And let me do things to be wondered at by
+watching multitudes, while bands play and people applaud."
+
+Such was my mad, adolescent prayer, while the stars seemed to answer in
+sympathetic silence. And I would both laugh and weep, thrilled to the
+core with ineffable, enormous joy because of things I could not
+understand ... and I would want to shout and dance extravagantly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Jenkins girls were curious about me, and while they, together with
+the rest of the feed merchant's family, thought me slightly "touched,"
+still they liked the unusual things I said about the stars ... and about
+great men whose biographies I was reading ... and about Steele's Zoology
+I was studying, committing all the Latin nomenclature of classification
+to heart, with a curious hunger for even the husks and impedimenta of
+learning....
+
+Silvia was a rose, half-opened ... an exquisite young creature. Alva was
+gawky and younger. She was callow and moulting, flat-footed and
+long-shanked. Her face was sallow and full of freckles.
+
+In the long Winter evenings we sat together by the warmth of the kitchen
+stove, alone, studying our lessons,--the place given over entirely to us
+for our school work.
+
+A touch of the hand with either of them, but with Silvia especially, was
+a superb intoxication, an ecstasy I have never since known. When all my
+power of feeling fluttered into my fingers ... and when we kissed, each
+night, good-night (the girls kissed me because I pretended to be
+embarrassed, to object to it) our homework somehow done,--the thought of
+their kisses was a memory to lie and roll in, for hours, after going to
+bed.
+
+I would pull away as far as I could from my father, and think
+luxuriously, awake sometimes till dawn.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I hated school so that I ran away. For the first time in my life, but by
+no means my last, I hopped a freight.
+
+I was absent several weeks.
+
+When I returned, weary, and dirty from riding in coal cars, my father
+was so glad to see me he didn't whip me. He was, in fact, a little proud
+of me. For he was always boastful of the many miles he had travelled
+through the various states, as salesman, not many years before. And
+after I had bathed, and had put on the new suit which he bought me, I
+grew talkative about my adventures, too.
+
+I now informed my father that I wanted to go to work. Which I didn't so
+very much. But anything, if only it was not going to school. He was not
+averse to my getting a job. He took out papers for me, and gave me work
+under him, in the drying department of the Composite Works. My wage was
+three dollars a week. My task, to hang the thin sheets of composite, cut
+from three to fifteen hundredths of an inch in thickness, on metal clips
+to dry.
+
+In the Composite Works I discovered a new world--the world of factory
+life.
+
+I liked to be sent to the other departments on errands. There were
+whirling wheels and steadily recurring, ever-lapsing belts ... and men
+and women working and working in thin fine dust, or among a strong smell
+as of rubbed amber--the characteristic smell of composite when subjected
+to friction....
+
+And these men and women were continually joking and jesting and making
+horse-play at one another's expense, as rough people in their social
+unease do.
+
+They seemed part and adjunct to the machines, the workers! Strong,
+sturdy, bared forearms flashed regularly like moving, rhythmic shafts
+... deft hands clasped and reached, making only necessary movements.
+
+Each department housed a different kind of worker. In the grinding,
+squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with
+women.
+
+They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness
+and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade. Always they
+were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone. And, if the trick
+were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed it,
+laughing grimly with the "boys."
+
+Once I was sent to the machine shop for "strap oil." I was thrown over a
+greasy bench and was given it--the laying on of a heavy strap not at all
+gently! I ran away, outraged, to tell my father; as I left, the men
+seemed more attentive to their work than ever. They smiled quietly to
+themselves.
+
+In the comb department the throwing of chunks of composite was the
+workers' chief diversion. And if you were strange there, you were sure
+to be hit as you passed through.
+
+The acid house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards
+around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of
+some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company
+could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of
+America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,--who on
+week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the
+pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each
+man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But
+many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness,
+dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they
+dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was
+not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy
+Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young
+girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked,
+jaundice-coloured death's-heads. They went about, soon, with eyes that
+had grey gaunt hollows about them--pits already cavernous like the
+eye-pits of a skull.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well, they don't _have_ to work in there unless they want to, do they?"
+
+"Ah, they're only a lot of foreigners anyhow."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three dollars a week was a lot of money for me ... a fortune, because I
+had never owned anything higher than nickles and dimes before.
+
+And my father, for the first few weeks, allowed me to have all I earned,
+to do with as I wished. Later on he made me save two dollars a week.
+
+Each Saturday I went down to Newark and bought books ... very cheap,
+second hand ones, at Breasted's book store.
+
+Every decisive influence in life has been a book, every vital change in
+my life, I might say, has been brought about by a book.
+
+My father owned a copy of Lord Byron in one volume. It was the only book
+he cared for, outside of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, together with, of
+course, his own various books on Free Masonry and other secret
+societies.
+
+At first, oddly enough, it was my instinct for pedantry and linguistic
+learning that drew me to Byron. I became enamoured of the Latin and
+Greek quotations with which he headed his lyrics in _Hours of Idleness_,
+and laboriously I copied them, lying on my belly on the floor, under the
+lamp light. And under these quotations I indited boyish rhymes of my
+own.
+
+Then I began to read--_Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus_--the
+Deformed Transformed ... The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The
+Prisoner of Chillon_.
+
+The frontispiece to the book was a portrait of Byron with flowing tie
+and open shirt. Much as a devout Catholic wears a gold cross around his
+neck to signify his belief, with a like devoutness I took to wearing my
+shirt open at the neck, and a loose, flowing black tie. And I ruffled my
+hair in the Byronic style.
+
+"I see you're discovering Byron," my father laughed.
+
+Then he slyly intimated that the best of the poet's works I had
+evidently overlooked, _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_. And he quoted me
+the passage about the lifted skirt above the peeking ankle. And he
+reinforced his observation by grinning salaciously.
+
+From that time on I searched with all the fever of adolescence through
+Byron for every passage which bore on sex, the mystery of which was
+beginning to devour my days.
+
+I read and pondered, shaking with eagerness, the stories of Haidee, of
+Antonia and Julia--the tale of the dream of Dudu. I dwelt in a
+musk-scented room of imagination. Silver fountains played about me.
+Light forms flowed and undulated in white draperies over mosaiced
+pavements ... flashing dark eyes shone mysteriously and amorously,
+starry through curtains and veils.
+
+My every thought was alert with naive, speculative curiosity concerning
+the mystery of woman.
+
+Through Byron I learned about Moore. I procured the latter's _Lalla
+Rookh_, his odes of Anacreon.
+
+From Byron and Moore I built up an adolescent ideal of
+woman,--exquisitely sensual and sexual, and yet an angel, superior to
+men: an ideal of a fellow creature who was both a living, breathing
+mystery and a walking sweetmeat ... a white creation moved and actuated
+by instinct and intuition--a perpetually inexplicable ecstasy and
+madness to man.
+
+I drew more and more apart to myself. Always looked upon as queer by the
+good, bourgeois families that surrounded us, I was now considered madder
+still.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How wonderful it would be to become a hermit on some far mountain side,
+wearing a grey robe, clear-browed and calmly speculative under the
+stars--or, maybe,--more wonderful: a singer for men, a travelling
+minstrel--in each case, whether minstrel or hermit, whether teaching
+great doctrines or singing great songs for all the world--to have come
+to me, as a pilgrim seeking enlightenment, the most beautiful maiden in
+the world, one who was innocent of what man meant. And together we would
+learn the mystery of life, and live in mutual purity and innocence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The strangeness of my physical person lured me. I marvelled at,
+scrutinised intimately the wonder of myself. I was insatiable in my
+curiosities.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My discovery of my body, and my books, held me in equal bondage. I
+neglected my work in the drying room. My father was vexed. He'd hunt me
+out of the obscure corners back of the hanging sheets of composite where
+I hid, absorbed in myself and the book I held, and would run me back to
+work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day, in the factory, two other boys on an errand from another
+department, came back where I sat, in a hidden nook, reading Thompson's
+_Seasons_. One of them spit over my shoulder, between the leaves. I
+leaped to my feet, infuriated, and a fight began. The desecration of my
+beloved poetry gave me such angry strength that I struck out lustily and
+dropped both of them....
+
+Rushing in on the uproar and blaming me for it, my father seized me by
+the collar. He booted the other boys off, who were by this time on their
+feet again, took me up into the water-tower, and beat me with one of the
+heavy sticks, with metal clips on it, that was used for hanging the
+composite on.
+
+Still trembling with the fight, I shook with a superadded ague of fear.
+My father's chastisement brought back to me with a chill the remembrance
+of the beatings Uncle Landon had given me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"By God, Johnnie, this is the only thing there's left to do with you."
+He flung me aside. I lay there sobbing.
+
+"Tell me, my boy, what _is_ the matter with you?" he asked, softening.
+Unlike Landon, he was usually gentle with me. He seldom treated me
+harshly.
+
+"Father, I don't want to work any more."
+
+"Don't want to work?... but you quit school just to _go_ to work, at
+your own wish!"
+
+"I want to go back to school!"
+
+"Back to school?... you'll be behind the rest by now."
+
+"I've been studying a lot by myself," I replied, forgetting the feel of
+the stick already and absorbed in the new idea.
+
+By this time we were down the stairs again, and I was sitting by my
+father's desk. He took up the unlighted cigar he always carried in his
+mouth (for smoking was not allowed among such inflammable material as
+composite). He sucked at it thoughtfully from habit, as if he were
+smoking.
+
+"Look here, my son, what _is_ the matter with you ... won't you tell
+your daddy?"
+
+"Nothing's the matter with me, Pop!"
+
+"You're getting thin as a shadow ... are you feeling sick?"
+
+"No, Pop!"
+
+"You're a queer little duck."
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+"You're always reading ... good books too ... yet you're no more good in
+school than you are at work ... I can't make you out, by the living God,
+I can't ... what is it you want to be?"
+
+"I don't know, only I want to go back to school again."
+
+"But what did you leave for?"
+
+"I hated arithmetic."
+
+"What do you want to study, then?"
+
+"Languages."
+
+"Would you like a special course in the high school?
+
+"Principal Balling of the Keeley Heights High School might be able to
+work you in. He is a brother Mason of mine."
+
+"I know some Latin and Greek and Ancient History already. I have been
+teaching myself."
+
+"Well, you _are_ a queer fish ... there never was anyone like you in the
+family, except your mother. She used to read and read, and read. And
+once or twice she wrote a short story ... had one accepted, even, by the
+_Youth's Companion_ once, but never printed."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though it was some months off till the Fall term began, on the strength
+of my desire to return to school my father let me throw up my job....
+
+But we soon found out that, brother in the bond, or not, Principal
+Balling could not get me into high school because I was not well enough
+prepared. My studying and reading by myself, though it had been quite
+wide, had also been too desultory. The principal advised a winter in the
+night school where men and boys who had been delayed in their education
+went to learn.
+
+I ran about that summer, with a gang of fellow adolescents; our
+headquarters, strange to say, being the front room and outside steps of
+an undertaker's establishment. This was because our leader was the
+undertaker's boy-of-all-work. Harry Mitchell was his name. Harry, a sort
+of young tramp, fat and pimply-faced, had jaunted into our town one day
+from New York, and had found work with the undertaker. Harry had watery
+blue eyes and a round, moon face. He was a whirlwind fighter but he
+never fought with us. It was only with the leaders of other gangs or
+with strangers that he fought.
+
+Harry continued our education in the secrets and mysteries of life, in
+the stable-boy and gutter way,--by passing about among us books from a
+sort of underground library ... vile things, fluently conceived and made
+even more vivid and animal with obscene and unimaginable illustrations.
+And our minds were trailed black with slime.
+
+And whole afternoons we stood about on the sidewalk jeering and
+fleering, jigging and singing, talking loud, horse-laughing, and
+hungrily eyeing the girls and women that passed by, who tried hard to
+seem, as they went, not self-conscious and stiff-stepping because of our
+observation ... and sometimes we whistled after them or called out to
+them in falsetto voices.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As a child my play had been strenuous and absorbing, like work that one
+is happy at, so that at night I fell asleep with all the pleasant
+fatigue of a labourer.
+
+It is the adolescent who loafs and dawdles on street corners. For the
+cruel and fearful urge of sex stirs so powerfully in him, that he hardly
+knows what to do, and all his days and nights he writhes in the grip of
+terrible instincts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet, in the midst of the turbidness of adolescence, I was still two
+distinct personalities. With my underground library of filth hidden
+away where my father could not find it, at the same time I kept and
+read my other books. The first were for the moments of madness and
+curious ecstasy I had learned how to induce.
+
+But my better self periodically revolted. And I took oath that I would
+never again spew a filthy expression from my mouth or do an ill thing. I
+suffered all the agonies of the damned in hell. I believe hell to be the
+invention of adolescence.
+
+Always, inevitably, I returned to my wallow and the gang.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were not always loafing in front of the undertaker's shop. Sometimes
+we were quite active. Many windows and street lamps were smashed. And we
+derived great joy from being pursued by the "cops"--especially by a
+certain fat one, for whom we made life a continual burden.
+
+Once we went in a body to the outskirts of the town and stoned a
+greenhouse. Its owner chased us across ploughed fields. We flung stones
+back at him. One hit him with a dull thud and made him cry out with
+pain, and he left off pursuing us. It was so dark we could not be
+identified.
+
+One of our favourite diversions was to follow mature lovers as they
+strolled a-field, hoping to catch them in the midst of intimate
+endearments.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father received a raise of a few dollars in salary. As it was they
+paid him too little, because he was easy-going. The additional weekly
+money warranted our leaving the Jenkinses and renting four rooms all our
+own, over the main street. This meant that I was to have a whole room to
+myself, and I was glad ... a whole room where I could stand a small
+writing desk and set up my books in rows. With an extreme effort I
+burned my underground books.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All the women liked my father. He dressed neatly and well. His trousers
+were never without their fresh crease. He was very vain of his neat
+appearance, even to the wearing of a fresh-cut flower in his buttonhole.
+This vanity made him also wear his derby indoors and out, because of his
+entirely bald head.
+
+Every time he could devise an excuse for going to the departments where
+the women worked, he would do so, and flirt with them. He, for this
+reason I am sure, made special friends with Schlegel, foreman of the
+collar department. I never saw a man derive a keener pleasure out of
+just standing and talking with women.
+
+Though, like most men, he enjoyed a smutty story, yet I never heard him
+say a really gross thing about any woman. And his language was always in
+good English, with few curses and oaths in it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our new place was a bit of heaven to me. I procured a copy of Whitman's
+_Leaves of Grass_, of Darwin's _Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_.
+Laboriously I delved through these last two books, my knowledge of
+elementary zoology helping me to the explication of their meaning.
+
+The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I
+knew it all, before,--as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought
+out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life,
+exactly to the Darwinian conclusion.
+
+Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ became my Bible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been
+working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a
+daily paper.
+
+And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly
+discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the
+victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would
+follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and
+degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner
+still. I fell into a hacking cough.
+
+And, at the same time, I became more perverse in my affectation of
+innocence and purity--saying always to my father that I never could care
+for girls, and that what people married for was beyond my comprehension.
+Thus I threw his alarmed inquisitiveness off the track....
+
+I procured books about sexual life. My most cherished volume was an old
+family medical book with charred covers, smelling of smoke and water,
+that I had dug out of the ruins of a neighbouring fire.
+
+In the book was a picture of a nude woman, entitled _The Female Form
+Divine_. I tore this from the body of the book and kept it under my
+pillow.
+
+I would draw it forth, press it against myself, speak soft words of
+affection to it, caress and kiss it, fix my mind on it as if it were a
+living presence. Often the grey light of dawn would put its ashen hand
+across my sunken cheeks before dead-heavy, exhausted sleep proved kind
+to me....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again: my imagination grew to be all graveyards, sepulchral urns,
+skeletons. How beautiful it would be to die young and a poet, to die
+like the young English poet, Henry Kirke White, whose works I was so
+enamoured of. The wan consumptive glamour of his career led me, as he
+had done, to stay up all night, night after night, studying....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the surging and mounting of that in me which I could not resist,
+several hours of strange, abnormal calm would ensue and for that space I
+would swing calm and detached from myself, like a luminous, disembodied
+entity. And then it was that I would write and write. The verses would
+come rushing from my pen. I must hurry with them before my early death
+overtook me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were two visions I saw continually in my sleep:
+
+One was of myself walking with a proud step down a vast hall, the usual
+wreath of fame on my head. I wore a sort of toga. And of course a great
+concourse of people stood apart in silent reverence on either side,
+gazing at me admiringly. With the thunder of their hand-clapping I would
+wake.
+
+The other dream was of being buried alive.
+
+I lay there, smelling the dark earth, and not being able to stir so much
+as the last joint of my little finger. Yet every nerve of me ached with
+sentience.. and I woke gasping, my face bathed with tears and the
+moisture of terror.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From head to foot hot flushes swept over me. And I was stung with the
+pricking of a million needles, going in sharply at every pore!... was
+bathed in cold sweats. And I hoped I was dying.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie, what are you doing to yourself?" And my father fixed his eyes
+on me.
+
+"Nothing, Father!"
+
+"If you weren't such a good boy, I'd--" and he halted, to continue,
+"as it is, you're a clean boy, and I'm proud of you."
+
+I struggled hard to speak with him, to make a confidant of him, but I
+could not.
+
+"I wonder," he added with alarm in his voice, "I wonder if you're
+catching consumption, the disease your mother died of ... you must be
+careful of yourself."
+
+I told him I would be careful....
+
+"I think I'll send you back home to visit the folks this fall."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a restaurant just around the corner from where we lived in our
+second story flat--a restaurant which bore the legend stuck up in the
+window, "Home Cooking." The sign itself was of a dull, dirty,
+fly-specked white which ought to have been a sufficient warning to the
+nice palate.
+
+The place was run by a family of three ... there was Mister Brown, the
+man, a huge-built, blotch-faced, retired stone-mason, his meagre little
+wife, Mrs. Brown, and their grass-widow daughter, Flora.... Flora did
+but little work, except to lean familiarly and with an air of unspoken
+intimacy, over the tables of the men, as she slouched up with their food
+... and she liked to sit outside in the back yard when there was
+sunshine ... in the hammock for more comfort ... shelling peas or
+languidly peeling potatoes.
+
+Flora's vibrant, little, wasplike mother whose nose was so sharp and red
+that it made me think of Paul's ferret--she bustled and buzzed about,
+doing most of the work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Looking out from our back window, I could see Flora lolling, and I would
+read or write a little and then the unrest would become too strong and I
+would go down to her. Soon two potato knives would be working.
+
+"Come and sit by me in the hammock."
+
+I liked that invitation ... she was plump to heaviness and sitting in
+the hammock crushed us pleasantly together.
+
+This almost daily propinquity goaded my adolescent hunger into an
+infatuation for her,--I thought I was in love with her,--though I never
+quite reconciled myself to the cowlikeness with which she chewed gum.
+
+She was as free and frank of herself as I was curious and timid.
+
+"Johnnie, what small feet and little hands you have ... you're a
+regular aristocrat."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A pause.
+
+I give her a poem written to her. She reads it, letting her knife stick
+in a half-peeled potato. She looks up at me out of heavy-lidded eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I believe you're falling in love with me."
+
+I trembled, answered nothing, was silent.
+
+"Kiss me!"
+
+Seeing me so a-tremble, she obeyed her own injunction. With slow
+deliberation she crushed her lips, full and voluptuous, into mine. The
+warmth of them seemed to catch hold of something deep down in me, and,
+with exquisite painfulness, draw it out. Blinded with emotion, I
+clutched close to her. She laughed. I put one hand over her full breast
+as infants do. She pushed me back.
+
+"There, that's enough for one day--a promise of sweets to come!" and she
+laughed again, with a hearty purr like a cat that has a mouse at its
+mercy.
+
+She rose and carried in the pan of potatoes we had just finished
+peeling. And I saw her sturdy, but not unshapely ankles going from me as
+she went up the steps from the yard, her legs gleaming white through her
+half-silk hose (that were always coming down, and that she was always
+twisting up, just under her knees, before my abashed eyes). She wore
+shoes much too little for her plump feet ... and, when not abroad, let
+them yawn open unbuttoned. And her plump body was alive and bursting
+through her careless, half-fastened clothes.
+
+She sang with a deep sultriness of voice as she walked away with the pan
+of potatoes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You ought to see my Florrie read books!" exclaimed the mother.
+
+Flora did read a lot ... but chiefly the erotic near-society novels that
+Belford used to print....
+
+"Yes, she's a smart girl, she is."
+
+And the father....
+
+"I won't work till the unions get better conditions for a man. I won't
+be no slave to no man."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One sultry afternoon I went into the restaurant and found Flora away.
+Poignantly disappointed, I asked where she was.
+
+"--Gone on a trip!" her mother explained, without explaining.
+
+From time to time Flora went on "trips."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And one morning, several mornings, Flora was not there to serve at the
+breakfast table ... and I was hurt when I learned that she had gone back
+to Newark to live, and had left no word for me. Her father told me she
+"had gone back to George," meaning her never-seen husband from whom she
+evidently enjoyed intervals of separation and grass-widowhood.
+
+I was puzzled and hurt indeed, because she had not even said good-bye
+to me. But soon came this brief note from her:
+
+     "Dearest Boy:--
+
+     Do come up to Newark and see me some afternoon. And come more than
+     once. Bring your Tennyson that you was reading aloud to me. I love
+     to hear you read poetry. I think you are a dear and want to see
+     more of you. But I suppose you have already forgotten
+
+                                    Your loving
+
+                                          FLORA."
+
+In the absurd and pitiful folly of youth I lifted the letter to my lips
+and kissed it. I trembled with eagerness till the paper rattled as I
+read it again and again. It seemed like some precious holy script.
+
+I bolted my lunch nervously and it stuck half way down in a hard lump. I
+would go to her that very afternoon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The car on which I rode was subject to too frequent stoppage for me. I
+leaped out and walked along with brisk strides. But the car sailed forth
+ahead of me now on a long stretch of roadway and I ran after it to catch
+it again. The conductor looked back at me in derisive scorn and made a
+significant whirling motion near his temple with his index finger,
+indicating that I had wheels there....
+
+At last I found the street where Flora lived. I trailed from door to
+door till the number she had given me met my eye. It made my heart jump
+and my knees give in, to be so near the quarry. For the first time I was
+to be alone with a woman I desired.
+
+At the bell, it took me a long time to gain courage to pull. But at last
+I reached out my hand. I had to stand my ground. I couldn't run away
+now. The bell made a tinkling sound far within.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The door opened cautiously. A head of touseled black hair crept out.
+
+"Johnnie, dear! _You_!... you _are_ a surprise!"
+
+Did I really detect an echo of disappointment in her deep, contralto
+voice?
+
+Frightened in my heart like a trapped animal, I went in. Down a long,
+dusk, musty-smelling corridor and into a back-apartment on the first
+floor; she led me into a room which was bed-and-sitting room combined.
+In one part of it stood several upholstered chairs with covers on,
+cluttered about a plain table. In the other part stood a bureau heaped
+with promiscuous toilette articles, and a huge, brass-knobbed bed with a
+spread of lace over its great, semi-upright pillows.
+
+"Shall I let in a little more light, dear?"
+
+"Do."
+
+For the blinds were two-thirds down.
+
+"I like to sit and think in the dark," she explained, and her one dimple
+broke in a rich, brown-faced animal smile.
+
+"Yes, but I--I want to see your lovely face," I stuttered, with much
+effort at gallantry....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"He's not at home ... he's off at Wilmington, on a job" (meaning her
+husband, though I had not asked about him). "But what made you come so
+soon? You must of just got my letter!"
+
+"I--I wanted you," I blurted ... in the next moment I was at her feet in
+approved romantic fashion, following up my declaration of desire. Calmly
+she let me kneel there ... I put my arms about her plump legs ... I was
+almost fainting....
+
+After a while she took me by the hair with both hands. She slowly bent
+my head back as I knelt. Leaning over, she kissed deliberately, deeply
+into my mouth ... then, gazing into my eyes with a puzzled expression,
+as I relaxed to her--almost like something inanimate....
+
+"Why, you dear boy, I believe you're innocent like a child. And yet you
+know so much about books ... and you're so wise, too!"
+
+As she spoke she pushed back my mad hands from their clutching and
+reaching. She held both of them in hers, and closed them in against her
+half-uncovered, full breasts, pressing them there.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that you've never gone out with the boys for a
+good time?... how old are you?"
+
+I told her I was just sixteen.
+
+"Do you think I'm ... I'm too young?" I asked.
+
+"I feel as if I was your mother ... and I'm not much over twenty ... but
+do sit up on a chair, dear!"
+
+She stood on her feet, shook out her dress, smiled curiously, and
+started out of the room. I was up and after her, my arms around her
+waist, desperate. She slid around in my arms, laughing quietly to
+herself till the back of her head was against my mouth. I kissed and
+kissed the top of her head. Then she turned slowly to face me, pressing
+all the contours of her body into me ... she crushed her bosom to mine.
+Already I was quite tall; and she was stocky and short ... she lifted
+her face up to me, a curious kindling light in her eyes ... of a
+phosphorescent, greenish lustre, like those chance gleams in a cat's
+eyes you catch at night....
+
+She took my little finger and deliberately bit it ... then she leaned
+away from my seeking mouth, my convulsive arms....
+
+"You want too much, all at once," she said, and, whirling about broke
+away....
+
+With the table between me and her....
+
+"Wouldn't you like a little beer, and some sandwiches? I have some in
+the ice box.... _Do_ let's have some beer and sandwiches."
+
+I assented, though hating the bitter taste of beer, and hungry for her
+instead of sandwiches. And soon we were sitting down calmly at the
+table, or rather, she was sitting down calmly ... baffled, I pretended
+to be calm.
+
+As she rose for something or other, I sprang around the table and caught
+her close to me once more, marvelling, at the same time, at my loss of
+shyness, my new-found audacity. Again she snuggled in close to me, her
+flesh like a warm, palpitating cushion.
+
+"Flora, my darling ... help me!" I cried, half-sobbing.
+
+"What do you mean?" laughing.
+
+"I love you!"
+
+"I know all _you_ want!"
+
+"But I do love you ... see...."
+
+And I prostrated myself, in a frenzy, at her feet.
+
+"Say, you're the queerest kid I've ever known."
+
+And she walked out of the room abruptly, while I rose to my feet and sat
+in a chair, dejected. She came in again, a twinkle in her eye.
+
+"Don't torture me, Flora!" I pleaded, "either send me away, or--"
+
+"Stop pestering me ... let's talk ... read me some of that Tennyson you
+gave me...." and I began reading aloud, for there was nothing else she
+would for the moment, have me do....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You're a poet," whimsically, "I want you to write some letters to me
+because I know you must write beautiful."
+
+"--if you will only let me love you!"
+
+"Well, ain't I lettin' you love me?"
+
+A perverse look came into her face, a thought, an idea that pleased
+her--
+
+"I've lots and lots of letters from men," she began, "men that have been
+in love with me."
+
+"Oh!" I exclaimed weakly ... she had just expressed a desire to add some
+of mine to the pack ... the next thing that she followed up with gave me
+a start--
+
+"Your father--"
+
+"My father?--" I echoed.
+
+"He's written me the best letters of all ... wait a minute ... I'll read
+a little here and there to you." And, gloating and triumphant, and
+either not seeing or, in her vulgarity, not caring what effect the
+reading of my father's love letters would have on me, she began reading
+ardent passages aloud. "See!" She showed me a page to prove that it was
+in his handwriting. The letters told a tale easy to understand. She was
+so eager in her vanity that she read on and on without seeing in my
+face what, seen, would have made her stop.
+
+A frightful trembling seized me, a loathing, a horror. This was my
+father's woman ... and ... I!...
+
+I sat on, dumbfounded, paralysed. I remembered his stories of trips to
+T---- and other places on supposed lodge business ... unluckily, I also
+remembered that several times Flora had been off on trips at the same
+time.
+
+"Just listen to this, will you!" and she began at another passage.
+
+She was so absorbed in her reading that she did not see how I was on my
+feet ... had seized my hat ... was going.
+
+"I'm sorry, Flora, but I've got to go!"
+
+"What?" looking up and surprised, "--got to go?"
+
+"Yes ... Yes ... I must--must go!" my lips trembled.
+
+"Why, we're just getting acquainted ... I didn't mean for you to go
+yet."
+
+She rose, dropping the letters all in a heap.
+
+She was the aggressive one now. She drew me to her quickly, "Stay ...
+and I'll promise to be good to you!"
+
+I pushed back, loathing ... loathing her and myself, but myself more,
+because in spite of all my disgust, my pulses leaped quick again to
+hers.
+
+"Sit down again."
+
+I did not listen, but stood.
+
+"I was thinking that you would stay for supper and then we could go to
+some show and after come back here and I would give you a good time."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I staggered out, shocked beyond belief, the last animal flush had died
+out of me. All my body was ice-cold.
+
+"Promise me you'll come again this day next week," she called after me
+persistently.
+
+She drew the door softly shut and left me reeling down the dark
+corridor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I could hardly speak to my father that night. I avoided him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the creeping edge of dawn I woke from a dream with a jerk as I slid
+down an endless black abyss. The abyss was my bed's edge and I found
+myself on the floor. When I went to rise again, I had to clutch things
+to stand up. I was so weak I sat on the bed breathing heavily. I tumbled
+backward into bed again and lay in a daze during which dream-objects
+mixed with reality and my room walked full of people from all the books
+I had read--all to evaporate as my father's face grew, from a cluster of
+white foreheads and myriads of eyes, into _him_.
+
+"Johnnie, wake up ... are you sick?"
+
+"Please go away from me and let me alone." I turned my face to the wall
+in loathing.
+
+"I'll call a doctor."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The doctor came. He felt my pulse. Put something under my tongue.
+Whispered my father in a room, apart. Left.
+
+My father returned, dejected, yet trying to act light and merry.
+
+"What did the doctor say?" I forced myself to ask of him.
+
+"To be frank, Johnnie ... you're old enough to learn the truth ... he
+thinks you're taken down with consumption."
+
+"That's what my mother died of."
+
+My father shuddered and put his face down in his hands. I felt a little
+sorry for him, then.
+
+"Well you've got to go West now ... and work on a farm ... or
+something."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I began to get ready for my trip West. Surely enough, I had consumption,
+if symptoms counted ... pains under the shoulder blades ... spitting of
+blood ... night-sweats....
+
+But my mind was quickened: I read Morley's _History of English
+Literature_ ... Chaucer all through ... Spenser ... even Gower's
+_Confessio Amantis_ and Lydgate's ballads ... my recent discovery of
+Chatterton having made me Old English-mad.
+
+As I read the life of young Chatterton I envied him, his fame and his
+early death and more than ever, I too desired to die young.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The week before I was to set out my father calmly discovered to me that
+he intended I should work on a farm as a hand for the next four years,
+when I reached Ohio ... was even willing to pay the farmer something to
+employ me. This is what the doctor had prescribed as the only thing that
+would save my life--work in the open air. My father had written Uncle
+Beck to see that this program was inaugurated.
+
+"I won't become a clod-hopper," I exclaimed, seeing the dreary, endless
+monotony of such a life.
+
+"But it will do you good. It will be a fine experience for you."
+
+"If it's such a fine experience why don't you go and do it?"
+
+"I won't stand any nonsense."
+
+"I'd rather die.... I'm going to die anyhow."
+
+"Yes, if you don't do what I tell you."
+
+"I won't."
+
+"We'll see."
+
+"Very well, father, we _will_ see."
+
+"If you weren't such a sick kid I'd trounce you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You could approach Antonville by surrey, buggy or foot ... along a
+winding length of dusty road ... or muddy ... according to rain or
+shine.
+
+My Uncle Beck drove me out in a buggy.
+
+Aunt Alice, so patient-faced and pretty and sweet-eyed in her neat
+poverty--greeted me with a warm kiss.
+
+"Well, you'll soon be well now."
+
+"But I won't work on a farm."
+
+"Never mind, dear ... don't worry about that just yet."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon I sat with Aunt Alice in the kitchen, watching her make
+bread. Everyone else was out: Uncle Beck, on a case ... Cousin Anders,
+over helping with the harvest on a neighbouring farm ... Cousin Anna was
+also with the harvesters, helping cook for the hands ... for the
+Doctor's family needed all the outside money they could earn.
+
+For Uncle Beck was a dreamer. He thought more of his variorum
+Shakespeare than he did of his medical practice. And he was slow-going
+and slow-speaking and so conscientious that he told patients the truth
+... all which did not help him toward success and solid emolument. He
+would take eggs in payment for his visits ... or jars of preserves ...
+or fresh meat, if the farmer happened to be slaughtering.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Where's Granma?" I asked Aunt Alice, as she shoved a batch of bread in
+the oven.
+
+"She's out Halton way ... she'll go crazy with joy when she gets word
+you're back home. She'll start for here right off as soon as she hears
+the news. She's visiting with Lan and his folks."
+
+When I heard Lan mentioned I couldn't help giving a savage look.
+
+Aunt Alice misinterpreted.
+
+"What, Johnnie--won't you be glad to see her!... you ought to ... she's
+said over and over again that she loved you more than she did any of her
+own children."
+
+"It isn't that--I hate Landon. I wish he was dead or someone would kill
+him for me."
+
+"Johnnie, you ought to forgive and forget. It ain't Christian."
+
+"I don't care. I'm not a Christian."
+
+"O Johnnie!" shocked ... then, after a pause of reproach which I
+enjoyed--"your Uncle Lan's toned down a lot since then ... married ...
+has four children ... one every year." And Alice laughed whimsically.
+
+"--and he's stopped gambling and drinking, and he's got a good job as
+master-mechanic in a factory....
+
+"He was young ... he was only a boy in the days when he whipped you."
+
+"Yes, and I suppose I was old?... I tell you, Aunt Alice, it's something
+I can't forget ... the dirty coward," and I swore violently, forgetting
+myself.
+
+At that moment Uncle Beck appeared suddenly at the door, back from a
+case.
+
+"Here, here, that won't do! I don't allow that kind of language in my
+household." And he gave me a severe and admonishing look before going
+off on another and more urgent call that waited him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And how's Granma been getting on?"
+
+"--aging rapidly ... " a pause, " ... hasn't got either of the two
+houses on Mansion Avenue now ... sold them and divided the money among
+her children ... gave us some ... and Millie ... and Lan ... wouldn't
+hear of 'no' ... " parenthetically, "Uncle Joe didn't need any; he's
+always prospered since the early days, you know."
+
+"And what's Granma up to these days?" For she was always doing sweet,
+ignorant, childish, impractical things.
+
+"--spirit-rapping is it? or palmistry? or magnetic healing? or what?"
+
+"You'll laugh!"
+
+"Tell me!"
+
+"She's got a beau."
+
+"What? a beau? and she eighty if a day!"
+
+"Yes, we--all her children--think it's absurd. And we're all trying to
+advise her against it ... but she vows she's going to get married to him
+anyhow."
+
+"And who is her 'fellow'"?
+
+"--a one-legged Civil War veteran ... a Pennsylvania Dutchman named
+Snyder ... owns a house near Beaver Falls ... draws a pension ... he's a
+jolly old apple-cheeked fellow ... there's no doubt they love each other
+... only--only it seems rather horrible for two people as old as they
+are to go and get married like two young things ... and really fall in
+love, too!"
+
+I was silent ... amused ... interested ... then--"well, Granma'll tell
+me all about it when she comes ... and I can judge for myself, and," I
+added whimsically, "I suppose if they love each other it ought to be all
+right."
+
+And we both laughed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Granma heard I was West she couldn't reach Antonville fast enough.
+She was the same dear childlike woman, only incredibly older-looking.
+Age seemed to have fallen on her like an invading army, all at once. Her
+hair was, every shred of it, not only grey, but almost white. There
+shone the same patient, sweet, ignorant, too-trusting eyes ... there was
+the blue burst of vein on her lower lip.
+
+After she had kissed and kissed me, stroked and stroked my head and face
+in speechless love, I looked at her intently and lied to please her:
+
+"Why, Granma, you don't look a day older."
+
+"But I am, Johnnie, I am. I've been working hard since you left." As if
+she had not worked hard _before_ I left ... she informed me that, giving
+away to her children what she had received for the sale of her two
+houses (that never brought her anything because of her simplicity, while
+they were in her possession) she had grown tired of "being a burden to
+them," as she phrased it, and had hired herself out here and there as
+scrubwoman, washerwoman, housekeeper, and what not....
+
+Later I learned that nothing could be done with her, she was so
+obstinate. She had broken away despite the solicitude of all her
+children--who all loved her and wanted her to stay with them.
+
+At last she had answered an advertisement for a housekeeper ... that
+appeared in a farm journal ... and so she had met her old cork-legged
+veteran, whom she now had her mind set on marrying.
+
+"But Granma, to get married at your age?"
+
+"I'd like to ask why not?" she answered sweetly, "I feel as young as
+ever when it comes to men ... and the man ... you wait till you see him
+... you'll like him ... he's such a good provider, Johnnie; he draws a
+steady pension of sixty dollars a month from the Government, and he'll
+give me a good home."
+
+"But any of my aunts and uncles would do the same."
+
+"Yes, Johnnie, but it ain't the same as having a man of your own around
+... there's nothing like that, Johnnie, for a woman."
+
+"But your own children welcome you and treat you well?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Johnnie, my little boy, but in spite of that, I feel in the
+way. And, no matter how much they love me, it's better for me to have a
+home of my own and a man of my own."
+
+"Besides, Billy loves me so much," she continued, wistfully, "and even
+though he's seventy whereas I'm eighty past, he says his being younger
+don't make no difference ... and he's always so jolly ... always
+laughing and joking."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We must begin to allow for Granma," Aunt Alice told me, "she's coming
+into her second childhood."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Granma believed thoroughly in my aspirations to become a poet. With
+great delight she retailed incidents of my childhood, reminding me of a
+thousand youthful escapades of which she constituted me the hero,
+drawing therefrom auguries of my future greatness.
+
+One of the incidents which alone sticks in my memory:
+
+"Do you 'mind,'" she would say, "how you used to follow Millie about
+when she papered the pantry shelves with newspapers with scalloped
+edges? and how you would turn the papers and read them, right after her,
+as she laid them down, and make her frantic?"
+
+"Yes," I would respond, highly gratified with the anecdote, "and you
+would say, Oh, Millie, don't get mad at the little codger, some day he
+might turn out to be a great man!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Uncle Beck had a fine collection of American Letters. I found a complete
+set of Hawthorne and straightway became a moody and sombre Puritan ...
+and I wrote in Hawthornian prose, quaint essays and stories. And I lived
+in a world of old lace and lavender, of crinoline and brocade.
+
+And then I discovered my uncle's books on gynecology and obstetrics ...
+full of guilty fevers I waited until he had gone out on a call and then
+slunk into his office to read....
+
+One afternoon my doctor-uncle came suddenly upon me, taking me unaware.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie, what are you up to?"
+
+"--was just reading your medical books."
+
+"Come over here," already seated at his desk, on his swivel-chair, he
+motioned me to a seat.
+
+"Sit down!"
+
+I obeyed him in humiliated silence.
+
+He rose and closed the door, hanging the sign "Busy" outside.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last I learned about myself and about life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The harvesting over, Anders began to chum with me. We took long walks
+together, talking of many things ... but, chiefly, of course, of those
+things that take up the minds of adolescents ... of the mysteries of
+creation, of life at its source ... of why men and women are so ... and
+I took it for granted, after he confessed that he had fallen into the
+same mistakes as I, suffering similar agonies, that he had been set
+right by his father, the doctor, as I just had. I was surprised to find
+he had not. So I shared with him the recent knowledge I had acquired.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And you mean to tell me that Uncle Beck has said nothing to you?"
+
+"Not a single word ... never."
+
+"But why didn't you ask him then ... him being a doctor?"
+
+"How can a fellow talk with his father about such things?"
+
+"It's funny to me he didn't inform you, anyhow."
+
+"I was his son, you see!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anders had a girl, he told me, confidingly. She was off on a visit to
+Mornington, at present ... a mighty pretty little girl and the best
+there was....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"By the way, Anders, do you know second cousin Phoebe at all?"
+
+"Sure thing I know her ... the last time I heard of her ... which was
+almost a year ago--she was wilder than ever."
+
+"How do you mean, Anders?"
+
+"Her folks couldn't keep her in of nights ... a gang of boys and girls
+would come and whistle for her, and she'd get out, sooner or later, and
+join them."
+
+"I tell you what," I began, in an unpremeditated burst of invention,
+which I straightway believed, it so appealed to my imagination, "I've
+never told anybody before, but all these years I've been desperately in
+love with Phoebe."
+
+Anders scrutinised me quizzically, then the enthusiasm of the actor in
+my face made him believe me....
+
+"Well, no matter how bad she is, she certainly was a beaut, the last
+time I saw her."
+
+"I'm going," I continued "(you mustn't tell anybody), I'm going down to
+Aunt Rachel's, after I leave here, and _get_ Phoebe." And eagerly and
+naively we discussed the possibilities as we walked homeward....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After my talk with Uncle Beck all my morbidity began to melt away, and,
+growing better in mind, my body grew stronger ... he wrote to my father
+that it was not consumption ... so now I was turning my coming West into
+a passing visit, instead of a long enforced sojourn there for the good
+of my health.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found different household arrangements on revisiting Aunt Rachel and
+her household.
+
+For one thing, the family had moved into town ... Newcastle ... and they
+had a fine house to live in, neat and comfortable. Gone was that
+atmosphere of picturesque, pioneer poverty. Though, to be sure, there
+sat Josh close up against the kitchen stove, as of old. For the first
+sharp days of fall were come ... he was spitting streams of tobacco, as
+usual.
+
+"I hate cities," was his first greeting to me. He squirted a brown
+parabola of tobacco juice, parenthetically, into the wood-box behind the
+stove, right on top of the cat that had some kittens in there.
+
+Aunt Rachel caught him at it.
+
+"Josh, how often have I told you you mustn't spit on that cat."
+
+"'Scuse me, Ma, I'm kind o' absint-minded."
+
+The incident seemed to me so funny that I laughed hard. Aunt Rachel gave
+me a quiet smile.
+
+"Drat the boy, he's allus findin' somethin' funny about things!"
+
+This made me laugh more. But I had brought Uncle Josh a big plug of
+tobacco, and he was placated, ripping off a huge chew as soon as he held
+it in his hands.
+
+The great change I have just spoken of came over the family because
+Phoebe's two sisters, Jessie and Mona--who had been off studying to be
+nurses, now had come back, and, taking cases in town, they were making a
+good living both for themselves and the two old folks....
+
+I had learned from Uncle Beck, as he drove me in to Mornington, that,
+the last he heard of Phoebe, she was working out as a maid to "some
+swells," in that city.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Damme, ef I don't hate cities an' big towns," ejaculated Uncle Josh,
+breaking out of a long, meditative silence, "you kain't keep no dogs
+there ... onless they're muzzled ... and no ferrets, neither ... and
+what 'ud be the use if you could?... there ain't nothin' to hunt anyhow
+... wisht we lived back on thet old muddy hilltop agin."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Supper almost ready ... the appetizing smell of frying ham--there's
+nothing, being cooked, smells better....
+
+Paul came in from work ... was working steady in the mills now, Aunt
+Rachel had informed me.
+
+Paul came in without a word, his face a mask of such empty hopelessness
+that I was moved by it deeply.
+
+"Paul, you mustn't take on so. It ain't right nor religious," said Uncle
+Josh, knocking the ashes out of his pipe ... he smoked and chewed in
+relays. Paul replied nothing.
+
+"Come on, folks," put in Rachel, "supper's ready ... draw your chairs
+up to the table."
+
+We ate our supper under a quiet, grey mood. An air of tragedy seemed to
+hang over us ... for the life of me I couldn't understand what had
+become of Paul's good-natured, rude jocosity. Why he had grown into a
+silent, sorrowful man....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You kin bunk up with Paul to-night, Johnnie," announced Rachel, when it
+came bedtime.
+
+Paul had already slunk off to bed right after supper. It was dark in the
+room when I got there.
+
+"Paul, where's the light?"
+
+"--put it out ... like to lie in the dark an' think," answered a deep,
+sepulchral voice.
+
+"Whatever _is_ the matter with you, Paul?"
+
+"Ain't you heered? Ain't Ma told you?"
+
+"No!"
+
+Paul struck a match and lit the lamp. I sat on the side of the bed and
+talked with him.
+
+"Ain't you heered how I been married?" he began.
+
+"So that's it, is it?" I anticipated prematurely, "and you weren't happy
+... and she went off and left you!"
+
+"Yes, she's left me all right, Johnnie, but not that way ... she's
+dead!"
+
+And Paul stopped with a sob in his throat. I didn't know what to say to
+his sudden declaration, so I just repeated foolishly, "why, I never knew
+you got married!" twice.
+
+"Christ, Johnnie, she was the best little woman in the world--such a
+little creature, Johnnie ... her head didn't more'n come up to under my
+armpits."
+
+There followed a long silence, to me an awkward one; I didn't know what
+to do or say. Then I perceived the best thing was to let him ease his
+hurt by just talking on ... and he talked ... on and on ... in his slow,
+drawling monotone ... and ever so often came the refrain, "Christ, but
+she was a good woman, Johnnie ... I wish you'd 'a' knowed her."
+
+At last I ventured, "and how--how did she come to die?"
+
+"--baby killed her, she was that small ... she was like a little girl
+... she oughtn't to of had no baby at all, doctor said...."
+
+"I killed her, Johnnie," he cried in agony, "and that's the God's truth
+of it."
+
+Another long silence.
+
+The lamp guttered but didn't go out. A moth had flown down its chimney,
+was sizzling, charring, inside ... Paul lifted off the globe. Burnt his
+hands, but said nothing ... flicked the wingless, blackened body to the
+floor....
+
+"But the baby?--it lived?"
+
+"Yes, it lived ... a girl ... if it hadn't of lived ... if it had gone,
+too, I wouldn't of wanted to live, either!..."
+
+"That's why I'm workin' so hard, these days, with no lay-offs fer
+huntin' or fishin' or anything."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day I learned more from Rachel of how Paul had agonized over
+the death of his tiny wife ... "'she was that small you had a'most to
+shake out the sheets to find her,' as Josh useter say," said Rachel
+gravely and unhumorously ... and she told how the bereaved husband
+savagely fought off all his womenfolk and insisted on mothering, for a
+year, the baby whose birth had killed its mother.
+
+"At last he's gittin' a little cheer in his face. But every so often the
+gloomy fit comes over him like it did last night at supper. I keep
+tellin' him it ain't Christian, with her dead two years a'ready--but he
+won't listen ... he's got to have his fit out each time."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As if this had not been enough of the tragic, the next day when I asked
+about Phoebe, Aunt Rachel started crying.
+
+"Phoebe's gone, too," she sobbed.
+
+"O, Aunt Rachel, I'm so sorry ... but I didn't know ... nobody told me."
+
+"That's all right, Johnnie. Somehow it relieves me to talk about
+Phoebe." She rose from her rocker, laid down her darning, and went to a
+dresser in the next room. She came out again, holding forth to me a
+picture ... Phoebe's picture....
+
+A shy, small, oval, half-wild face like that of a dryad's. Her chin
+lifted as if she were some wood-creature listening to the approaching
+tread of the hunter and ready on the instant to spring forth and run
+along the wind....
+
+An outdoor picture, a mere snapshot, but an accidental work of art.
+
+Voluminous leafage blew behind and above her head, splashed with the
+white of sunlight and the gloom of swaying shadow.
+
+"Why, she's--she's beautiful!"
+
+"Yes--got prettier and prettier every time you looked at her...."
+
+"But," and Aunt Rachel sighed, "I couldn't do nothin' with her at all.
+An' scoldin' an' whippin' done no good, neither. Josh useter whip her
+till he was blue in the face, an' she wouldn't budge. Only made her more
+sot and stubborner....
+
+"--guess she was born the way she was ... she never could stay still a
+minute ... always fidgettin' ... when she was a little girl, even--I
+used to say, 'Now, look here, Phoebe,' I'd say, 'your ma 'ull give you a
+whole dime all at once if you'll set still jest for five minutes in that
+chair.' An' she'd try ... and, before sixty seconds was ticked off she'd
+be on her feet, sayin', 'Ma, I guess you kin keep that dime.'
+
+"When she took to runnin' out at nights," my great-aunt continued, in a
+low voice, "yes, an' swearin' back at her pa when he gave her a bit of
+his mind, it nigh broke my heart ... and sometimes she'd see me cryin',
+and that would make her feel bad an' she'd quiet down fer a few days ...
+an' she'd say, 'Ma, I'm goin' to be a good girl now,' an' fer maybe two
+or three nights she'd help clean up the supper-things--an' then--" with
+a breaking voice, "an' then all at once she'd scare me by clappin' both
+hands to that pretty brown head o' hers, in sech a crazy way, an'
+sayin', 'Honest, Ma, I can't stand it any longer ... this life's too
+slow.... I've gotta go out where there's some life n' fun!'
+
+"It was only toward the last that she took to sneakin' out after she
+pretended to go to bed.. gangs of boys an' girls, mixed, would come an'
+whistle soft fer her, under the window ... an' strange men would
+sometimes hang aroun' the house ... till Josh went out an' licked a
+couple.
+
+"It drove Josh nigh crazy.
+
+"One evenin', after this had gone on a long time, Josh ups an' says,
+'Ma, Phoebe's run complete out o' hand ... she'll hafta be broke o' this
+right now ... when she comes back to-night I'm going to give her the
+lickin' of her life.'
+
+"'Josh, you mustn't whip her. Let's both have a long talk with her. (I
+knowed Josh 'ud hurt her bad if he whipped her. He has a bad temper when
+he is het up.) Maybe goin' down on our knees with her an' prayin' might
+do some good.'"
+
+"'No, Ma, talkin' nor prayin' won't do no good ... the only thing left's
+a good whippin' to straighten her out.'"
+
+"O Aunt Rachel," I cried, all my desire of Phoebe breaking but into
+tenderness. I looked at the lovely face, crossed with sunlight, full of
+such quick intelligence, such mischievousness....
+
+You can catch a wild animal in a trap, but to whip it would be sacrilege
+... that might do for domesticated animals.
+
+"Josh never laid a hand on her, though, that night ... she never came
+home ... men are so awful in their pride, Johnnie ... don't you be like
+that when you grow to be a man...."
+
+Then Aunt Rachel said no more, as Paul came in at that moment. Nor did
+she resume the subject.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next morning I packed away to visit Uncle Lan. I might as well go, even
+if I hated him. It would be too noticeable, not to go.
+
+He was at the train, waiting for me. He proffered me his hand. To my
+surprise, I took it. He seized my grip from me, put his other hand
+affectionately on my shoulder.
+
+"I've often wondered whether you'd ever forgive me for the way I beat
+you.... I've learned better since."
+
+Before I knew it my voice played me the trick of saying yes, I forgave
+him.
+
+"That's a good boy!" and Lan gave my hand such a squeeze that it almost
+made me cry out with the pain of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Lan," as we walked along, "can you tell me more about Phoebe.... Aunt
+Rachel told me some, but--"
+
+"Oh, she ended up by running away with a drummer ... she hadn't been
+gone long when her ma got word from her asking her to forgive her ...
+that she'd run off with a man she loved, and was to be married to him
+pretty soon.... Phoebe gave no address, but the letter had a Pittsburgh
+postmark....
+
+"A month ... six months went by. Then a letter came in a strange hand.
+The girl that wrote it said that she was Phoebe's 'Roommate.'" Lan
+paused here, and gave me a significant look, then resumed:
+
+"Paul went down to bring the body home, and found she'd been buried
+already. They were too poor to have it dug up and brought home."
+
+"It seems that the man that took Phoebe off was nothing but a pimp!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Suicide: early one Sunday morning; early, for girls of their profession,
+the two girls, Phoebe and her roommate were sitting in their bedrooms in
+kimonos.
+
+"What a nice Sunday," Phoebe had said, looking out at the window.
+"Jenny," she continued to her roommate, "I have a feeling I'd like to go
+to church this morning...."
+
+Jenny had thought _that_ was rather a queer thing for Phoebe to say....
+
+Jenny went out to go to the delicatessen around the corner, to buy a
+snack for them to eat, private, away from the rest of the girls, it
+being Sunday morning. She'd bring in a Sunday paper, too.
+
+When she returned, Phoebe didn't seem to be in the room. Jenny felt that
+something was wrong, had felt it all along, anyhow....
+
+She heard a sort of gasping and gurgling....
+
+She found Phoebe on the floor, two-thirds under the bed. Her eyes were
+rolled back to the whites from agony. A creamy froth was on her mouth.
+And all her mouth and chin and pretty white neck were burned brown with
+the carbolic acid she had drunk.. a whole damn bottle of it.
+
+Jenny dropped on her knees by Phoebe and called out her name--loud....
+"Phoebe, why don't you speak to me!" Took her head in her lap and it
+only lolled. Then she began screaming, did Jenny, and brought the whole
+house up. And the madame had shouted:
+
+"Shut up, you bitch, do you want people to think someone's gettin'
+killed? Ain't we in bad enough already?"
+
+"So Phoebe came to a bad end," commented Lan, "as we always thought she
+would."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The nearest I came to having my long-cherished revenge on Landon:
+
+Once, in the night, during my week's stay with him, I stepped from bed,
+sleep-walking, moving toward the room where he and Aunt Emily lay.
+Imagining I held a knife in my left hand (I am left-handed) to stick him
+through the heart with.
+
+But I bumped terrifically into a door half ajar, and received such a
+crash between the eyes that it not only brought me broad awake, but gave
+me a bump as big as a hen's egg, into the bargain.
+
+The dream of my revenge had been so strong in my brain that still I
+could feel the butcher-knife in my hand ... and I looked into the empty
+palm to verify the sensation, still there, of clasping the handle.
+
+"--that you, Johnnie?" called my uncle.
+
+"Yep!"
+
+"What's the matter? can't you sleep?"
+
+"No!--got up to take a drink of water."
+
+"You'll find a bucketful on the kitchen table, and the dipper floating
+in it ... and there's matches on the stand by your bed." A pause. He
+continued: "You must of run into something. I heard a bang."
+
+"I did. I bumped my head into the door."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I visited Aunt Millie last.
+
+I found her a giantess of a woman, not fat, but raw-boned and tall. Her
+cheeks were still as pitted with hollows, her breath as catarrhal as
+ever. But she had become a different woman since she had married.
+
+Her husband was a widower with three children already before he took her
+in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the
+yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile
+... with a deep, hoarse voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man
+had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost
+have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see
+this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted
+virility and strength, and wore his shirt open at the neck, and several
+buttons lower, in order to reveal his full hirsuteness.
+
+Millie had already given birth to two children of her own, by him. And
+she toiled about the house at endless duties, day and night, happy with
+him, and loving his children and hers with an equal love. And being
+adored in turn by them.
+
+It was "Ma!" here and "Ma!" there ... the voices of the children ever
+calling for her.... And she, running about, waiting on the youngsters,
+baking ovensful of bread, sewing, scrubbing, dusting ... and talking,
+talking, talking all the time she flew about at her ceaseless work....
+
+Uncle Dick loved his joke, and the broader the better. As I sat across
+the table from him, at mealtimes, and looked into his amused, small
+twinkling eyes, I thought continually of the Miller in Chaucer's
+_Canterbury Tales_....
+
+Millie, too, was not slow at having her joke. She was roughly
+affectionate of me, in memory of old days. And she continually asked me,
+with loud, enjoying laughter, if I remembered this, that, and the other
+bad (Rabelaisan) trick I had played on her back in Mornington....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But I was glad to see Haberford and the East again. I was all over my
+desire to die a poet, and young.... Principal Balling had me come to see
+him. He examined me in Latin and in English and History. He found that,
+from study by myself, I had prepared so that I was more than able to
+pass in these subjects. But when it came to mathematics I was no less
+than an idiot. He informed my father that he had been mistaken in me,
+before ... that he had given me a too cursory look-over, judging me
+after the usual run ... he announced that he would admit me as special
+student at the Keeley Heights High School.
+
+The one thing High School gave me--my Winter there--was Shelley. In
+English we touched on him briefly, mainly emphasising his _Skylark_. It
+was his _Ode to the West Wind_ that made me want more of him ... with
+his complete works I made myself a nuisance in class, never paying
+attention to what anyone said or did, but sitting there like a man in a
+trance, and, with Shelley, dreaming beautiful dreams of revolutionising
+the world.
+
+I awoke only for English Composition. But there, inevitably, I
+quarrelled with the teacher over her ideas of the way English prose was
+to be written. She tried to make us write after the Addisonian model. I
+pointed out that the better style was the nervous, short-sentenced,
+modern one--as Kipling wrote, at his best, in his prose. We had
+altercation after altercation, and the little dumpy woman's eyes raged
+behind her glasses at me--to the laughter of the rest of the class. Who
+really did not care for anything but a lark, while I was all the while
+convinced with the belief that they sat up nights, dreaming over great
+books as I did.
+
+Even yet, though now I know better, I cannot accept the fact that the
+vast majority find their only poetry in a good bellyful of food, as I do
+in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ and in the _Epipsychidion_....
+
+Dissatisfied and disillusioned, it was again a book that lifted me out
+of the stupidity in which I found myself enmeshed. Josiah Flynt's
+_Tramping With Tramps_,--and one other--_Two Years Before the Mast_, by
+Dana. And I lay back, mixing my dreams of humanity's liberation, with
+visions of big American cities, fields of wheat and corn, forests,
+little towns on river-bends.
+
+A tramp or sailor--which?
+
+First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and
+back again?
+
+Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my
+favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett
+and Fielding?
+
+It took me days of talk with the gang--boasting--and nights of dreaming,
+to screw myself up to the right pitch.
+
+Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the
+English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New
+York waterfront that same afternoon....
+
+I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to
+go to sea, and that he needn't try to find me in order to fetch me home
+again. I wished him good luck and good-bye.
+
+Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books: my Caesar and
+Vergil in the Latin, Young's _Night Thoughts_, and Shelley.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+South Street ... here were ships ... great tall fellows, their masts
+dizzy things to look up at.
+
+I came to a pier where two three-masted barks lay, one on either side.
+First I turned to the one on the right because I saw two men up aloft.
+And there was a boy passing down the deck, carrying a pot of coffee aft.
+I could smell the good aroma of that coffee. Ever since, the smell of
+coffee makes me wish to set out on a trip somewhere.
+
+"Hey, Jimmy," I shouted to the boy.
+
+"Hey, yourself!" he replied, coming belligerently to the side. Then,
+"what do ye want?"
+
+"To go to sea. Do you need anybody aboard for the voyage?"
+
+He looked scornfully at me, as I stood there, skinny, shadow-thin.
+
+"You go to hell!" he cried. Then he resumed his way to the cabin,
+whistling.
+
+The ship opposite, I inspected her next. It was grand with the
+figurehead of a long, wooden lady leaning out obliquely with
+ever-staring eyes, her hands crossed over her breasts.
+
+Aboard I went, down the solitude of the deck. I stopped at the cook's
+galley. I had gone there because I had seen smoke coming out of the
+little crooked pipe that stood akimbo.
+
+I looked in at the door. A dim figure developed within, moving about
+among pots and pans. It was the cook, I could tell by the white cap he
+wore ... an old, very old man. He wore a sleeveless shirt. His long
+skinny, hairy arms were bare. His long silvery-grey beard gave him an
+appearance like an ancient prophet. But where the beard left off there
+was the anomaly of an almost smooth, ruddy face, and very young,
+straight-seeing, blue eyes.
+
+When I told the old cook what I wanted, he invited me in to the galley
+and reached me a stool to sit on.
+
+"The captain isn't up yet. He was ashore on a jamboree last night.
+You'll see him walking up and down the poop when he's hopped out of his
+bunk and eaten his breakfast."
+
+The cook talked about himself, while I waited there. I helped him peel a
+pail of potatoes....
+
+Though I heard much of strange lands and far-away ports, he talked
+mostly of the women who had been in love with him ... slews of them ...
+"and even yet, sixty-five years old, I can make a good impression when I
+want to ... I had a girl not yet twenty down in Buenos Ayres. She was
+crazy about me ... that was only two years ago."
+
+He showed me pictures of the various women, in all parts of the world,
+that had "gone mad about him" ... obviously, they were all prostitutes.
+He brought out a batch of obscene photographs, chuckling over them.
+
+It was a German ship--the _Valkyrie_. But the cook spoke excellent
+English, as did, I later found out, the captain, both the mates, and all
+but one or two of the crew.
+
+Before the captain came up from below the cook changed the subject from
+women to history. In senile fashion, to show off, he recited the names
+of the Roman emperors, in chronological sequence. And, drawing a curtain
+aside from a shelf he himself had built over his bunk, he showed me
+Momsen's complete history of Rome, in a row of formidable volumes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"There's the captain now!"
+
+A great hulk of a man was lounging over the rail of the poop-deck,
+looking down over the dock.
+
+I started aft.
+
+"Hist!" the cook motioned me back mysteriously. "Be sure you say 'Sir'
+to him frequently."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Beg pardon, sir. But are you Captain Schantze, sir?" (the cook had told
+me the captain's name).
+
+"Yes. What do you want?"
+
+"I've heard you needed a cabin boy."
+
+"Are you of German descent?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"What nationality are you, then?"
+
+"American, sir."
+
+"That means nothing, what were your people?"
+
+"Straight English on my mother's side ... Pennsylvania Dutch on my
+father's."
+
+"What a mixture!"
+
+He began walking up and down in seaman fashion. After spending several
+minutes in silence I ventured to speak to him again.
+
+"Do you think you could use me, sir?"
+
+He swung on me abruptly.
+
+"In what capacity?"
+
+"As anything ... I'm willing to go as able seaman before the mast, if
+necessary."
+
+He stopped and looked me over and laughed explosively.
+
+"Able seaman! you're so thin you have to stand twice in one place to
+make a shadow ... you've got the romantic boy's idea of the sea ...
+but, are you willing to do hard work from four o'clock in the morning
+till nine or ten at night?"
+
+"Anything, to get to sea, sir!"
+
+"--sure you haven't run away from home?"
+
+"No-no, sir!"
+
+"Then why in the devil do you want to go to sea? isn't the land good
+enough?"
+
+I took a chance and told the captain all about my romantic notions of
+sea-life, travel, and adventure.
+
+"You talk just like one of our German poets."
+
+"I _am_ a poet," I ventured further.
+
+The captain gave an amused whistle. But I could see that he liked me.
+
+"To-morrow morning at four o'clock ... come back, then, and Karl, the
+cabin boy, will start you in at his job. I'll promote him to boy before
+the mast."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I spent the night at Uncle Jim's house ... he was the uncle that had
+come east, years before. He was married ... a head-bookkeeper ... lived
+in a flat in the Bronx.
+
+He thought it was queer that I was over in New York, alone ... when he
+came home from work, that evening....
+
+I could keep my adventure to myself no longer. I told him all about my
+going to sea. But did Duncan (my father) approve of it? Yes, I replied.
+But when I refused to locate the ship I was sailing on, at first Jim
+tried to bully me into telling. I didn't want my father to learn where I
+was, in case he came over to find me ... and went up to Uncle Jim's....
+
+Then he began laughing at me.
+
+"You've always been known for your big imagination and the things you
+make up ... I suppose this is one of them."
+
+"Let the boy alone," my aunt put in, a little dark woman of French and
+English ancestry, "you ought to thank God that he has enough imagination
+to make up stories ... he might be a great writer some day."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Imagination's all right. I'm not quarrelling with Johnnie for that. But
+you can't be all balloon and no ballast."
+
+They made me up a bed on a sofa in the parlour ... among all the
+bizarre chairs and tables that Uncle Jim had made from spools ... Aunt
+Lottie still made dresses now and again ... before she married Jim she
+had run a dressmaking establishment.
+
+Uncle Jim set a Big Ben alarm clock down on one of the spool tables for
+me.
+
+"I've set the clock for half-past three. That will give you half an hour
+to make your hypothetical ship in ... you'll have to jump up and stop
+the clock, anyhow. It'll keep on ringing till you do."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My first morning on shipboard was spent scrubbing cabin floors, washing
+down the walls, washing dishes, waiting on the captain and mates' mess
+... the afternoon, polishing brass on the poop and officers' bridge,
+under the supervision of Karl, the former cabin boy.
+
+"Well, how do you like it?" asked the cook, as he stirred something in a
+pot, with a big wooden ladle.
+
+"Fine! but when are we sailing?"
+
+"In about three days we drop down to Bayonne for a cargo of White Rose
+oil and then we make a clean jump for Sydney, Australia."
+
+"Around Cape Horn?" I asked, stirred romantically at the thought.
+
+"No. Around the Cape of Good Hope."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early in the afternoon of the day before we left the dock, as I was
+polishing brass on deck, my father appeared before me, as abruptly as a
+spirit.
+
+"Well, here he is, as big as life!"
+
+"Hello, Pop!"
+
+I straightened up to ease a kink in my back.
+
+"You had no need to hide this from me, son; I envy you, that's all, I
+wish I wasn't too old to do it, myself ... this beats travelling about
+the country, selling goods as a salesman. It knocks my dream of having a
+chicken farm all hollow, too...."
+
+He drew in a deep breath of the good, sunny harbour air. Sailors were up
+aloft, they were singing. The cook was in his galley, singing too. There
+were gulls glinting about in the sun.
+
+"Of course you know I almost made West Point once ... had the
+appointment ... if it hadn't been for a slight touch of rheumatism in
+the joints ..." he trailed off wistfully.
+
+"We've never really got to know each other, Johnnie."
+
+I looked at him. "No, we haven't."
+
+"I'm going to start you out right. Will the captain let you off for a
+while?"
+
+"The cook's my boss ... as far as my time is concerned. I'm cabin boy."
+
+My father gave the cook a couple of big, black cigars. I was allowed
+shore leave till four o'clock that afternoon....
+
+"--you need a little outfitting," explained my father, as we walked
+along the dock to the street....
+
+"I've saved up a couple of hundred dollars, which I drew out before I
+came over."
+
+"But, Father...."
+
+"You need a lot of things. I'm going to start you off right. While you
+were up in the cabin getting ready to go ashore I had a talk with the
+cook.... I sort o' left you in his charge--"
+
+"But I don't want to be left in anyone's charge."
+
+"--found out from him just what you'd need and now we're going to do a
+little shopping."
+
+I accompanied my father to a seamen's outfitting place, and he spent a
+good part of his two hundred buying needful things for me ... shirts of
+strong material ... heavy underwear ... oilskins ... boots ... strong
+thread and needles ... and a dunnage bag to pack it all away in....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We stood together on the after-deck again, my father and I.
+
+"Now I must be going," he remarked, trying to be casual. He put a ten
+dollar bill in my hand.
+
+"--to give the boys a treat with," he explained ... "there's nothing
+like standing in good with an outfit you're to travel with ... and
+here," he was rummaging in his inside pocket ... "put these in your
+pocket and keep them there ... a bunch of Masonic cards of the lodge
+your daddy belongs to ... if you ever get into straits, you'll stand a
+better chance of being helped, as son of a Mason."
+
+"No, Father," I replied, seriously and unhumorously, "I can't keep
+them."
+
+"I'd like to know why not?"
+
+"I want to belong to the brotherhood of man, not the brotherhood of the
+Masons."
+
+He looked puzzled for a moment, then his countenance cleared.
+
+"That's all right, Son ... you just keep those cards. They might come in
+handy if you find yourself stranded anywhere."
+
+When my father turned his back, with a thought almost prayerful to the
+spirit of Shelley, I flung the Masonic cards overboard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After dusk, the crew poured _en masse_ to the nearest waterfront saloon
+with me. The ten dollars didn't last long.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"His old man has lots of money."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our last night at the pier was a night of a million stars.
+
+The sailmaker, with whom I had become well acquainted, waddled up to me.
+He was bow-legged. He waddled instead of walked. We sat talking on the
+foreward hatch....
+
+"I'm glad we're getting off to-morrow," I remarked.
+
+"--we might not. We lack a man for the crew yet."
+
+"--thought we had the full number?"
+
+"We did. But one of the boys in your party strayed away ... went to
+another saloon and had a few more drinks ... and someone stuck him with
+a knife in the short ribs ... he's in the hospital."
+
+"But can't Captain Schantze pick up another man right away?"
+
+"The consulate's closed till ten to-morrow morning. We're to sail at
+five ... so he can't sign on a new sailor before ... of course he might
+shanghai someone ... but the law's too severe these days ... and the
+Sailors' Aid Society is always on the job ... it isn't like it used to
+be."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But in spite of what the sailmaker had told me, the captain decided to
+take his chance, rather than delay the time of putting forth to sea.
+Around ten o'clock, in the full of the moon, a night-hawk cab drew up
+alongside the ship where she lay docked, and out of it jumped the first
+mate and the captain with a lad who was so drunk or drugged, or both,
+that his legs went down under him when they tried to set him on his
+feet.
+
+They tumbled him aboard, where he lay in an insensate heap, drooling
+spit and making incoherent, bubbling noises.
+
+Without lifting an eyebrow in surprise, the sailmaker stepped forward
+and joined the mate in jerking the man to his feet. The captain went aft
+as if it was all in the day's work.
+
+The mate and the sailmaker jerked the shanghaied man forward and bundled
+him into a locker where bits of rope and nautical odds and-ends were
+piled, just forward of the galley.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the sharp but misty dawn we cast our moorings loose. A
+busy little tug nuzzled up to take us in tow for open sea.
+
+We were all intent on putting forth, when a cry came from the port side.
+The shanghaied man had broken out, and came running aft ... he stopped a
+moment, like a trapped animal, to survey the distance between the dock
+and the side ... measuring the possibilities of a successful leap.
+
+By this time the first and second mates were after him, with some of the
+men ... he ran forward again, doubled in his tracks like a schoolboy
+playing tag ... we laughed at that, it was so funny the way he went
+under the mate's arm ... the look of surprise on the mate's face was
+funny ... Then the man who was pursued, in a flash, did a hazardous
+thing ... he flung himself in the air, over the starboard side, and took
+a long headlong tumble into the tugboat....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was tied like a hog, and hauled up by a couple of ropes, the
+sailmaker singing a humorous chantey that made the boys laugh, as they
+pulled away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This delayed the sailing anyhow. The mist had lifted like magic,
+and we were not far toward Staten Island before we knew a fine,
+blowing, clear day, presided over, in the still, upper spaces, by
+great, leaning cumulus clouds. They toppled huge over the great-clustered
+buildings as we trod outward toward the harbour mouth....
+
+The pilot swung aboard. The voyage was begun.
+
+The coast of America now looked more like a low-lying fringe of
+insubstantial cloud than solid land.
+
+My heart sank. I had committed myself definitely to a three-months'
+sea-trip ... there was no backing out, it was too far to swim ashore.
+
+"What's wrong, Johann," asked the captain, "are you sea-sick already?"
+He had noticed my expression as he walked by.
+
+"No, sir!"
+
+"If you are, it isn't anything to be ashamed of. I've known old
+sea-captains who got sea-sick every time they put out of port."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a running forward. The shanghaied man hove in sight, on the
+rampage again. He came racing aft. "I must speak with the captain."
+
+There was a scuffle. He broke away. Again the two mates were close upon
+him. Suddenly he flung himself down and both the mates tripped over him
+and went headlong.
+
+The captain couldn't help laughing. Then he began to swear ... "that
+fellow's going to give us a lot of trouble," he prophesied.
+
+Several sailors, grinning, had joined in the chase. They had caught the
+fellow and were dragging him forward by the back and scruff of the neck,
+while he deliberately hung limp and let his feet drag as if paralysed
+from the waist down.
+
+The captain stood over the group, that had come to a halt below. The
+captain was in good humour.
+
+"Bring him up here."
+
+The shanghaied man stood facing Schantze, with all the deference of a
+sailor, yet subtly defiant.
+
+The captain began to talk in German.
+
+"I don't speak German," responded the sailor stubbornly.
+
+Yet it was in German that he had called out he must see the captain.
+
+This did not make the captain angry. Instead, like a vain boy, he began
+in French....
+
+"I don't speak French ..." again objected the sailor, still in English.
+
+"Very well, we'll speak in English, then ... bring him down into the
+cabin ..." to the men and mates ... To the sailor again, "Come on,
+Englishman! (in derision), and we'll sign you on in the ship's
+articles."
+
+They haled him below. The captain dismissed the sailors. The captain,
+the two mates and I, were alone with the mutineer.... I stepped into the
+pantry, pretending to be busy with the dishes. I didn't want to miss
+anything.
+
+"Now," explained the captain, "what's happened has happened ... it's up
+to you to make the best of it ... we had to shanghai you," and he
+explained the case in full ... and if he would behave and do his share
+of the work with the rest of the crew, he would be treated decently and
+be paid ... and let go, if he wished, when the _Valkyrie_ reached
+Sydney....
+
+"Now sign," commanded the mate, "I never heard of a man in your fix ever
+being treated so good before."
+
+"But I won't sign."
+
+"Damme, but you will," returned Miller, the first mate, who, though
+German, spoke English in real English fashion--a result, he later told
+me, of fifteen years' service on English boats....
+
+"Take hold of him, Stanger," this to the second mate, a lithe,
+sun-browned, handsome lad who knew English but hated to speak it.
+
+They wrestled about the cabin at a great rate ... finally they succeeded
+in forcing a pen into the mutineer's hand....
+
+Then the man calmed down, apparently whipped.
+
+"Very well, where shall I sign?"
+
+"Da," pointed the captain triumphantly, pointing the line out, with his
+great, hairy forefinger ... and, with victory near, relapsing into
+German.
+
+But, just as it reached the designated spot, the fellow gave a violent
+swish with the pen. The mates made a grab for his hand, but too late. He
+tore a great, ink-smeared rent through the paper....
+
+_Whang!_ Captain Schantze caught him with the full force of his big,
+open right hand on the left side of his face.... _Whish!_ Captain
+Schantze caught him with the full force of his open left, on the other
+cheek!
+
+The shanghaied man stiffened. He trembled violently.
+
+"Do it a thousand times, my dear captain. I won't sign till you kill
+me."
+
+"Take him forward. He'll work, and work hard, without signing on.... No,
+wait ... tie him up to the rail on the poop ... twenty-four hours of
+that, my man, since you must speak English--will make you change your
+mind."
+
+He was tied, with his hands behind him.
+
+The captain paced up and down beside him.
+
+Then Franz (as I afterward learned his name) boldly began chaffing the
+"old man" ... first in English.
+
+"I don't understand," replied Schantze; he was playful now, as a cat is
+with a mouse ... or rather, like a big boy with a smaller boy whom he
+can bully.
+
+After all, Schantze was only a big, good-natured "kid" of thirty.
+
+Then Franz ran through one language after another ... Spanish, Italian,
+French....
+
+The captain noticed me out of the tail of his eye. His big, broad face
+kindled into a grin.
+
+"What are you doing here on deck, you rascal!" He gave me an
+affectionate, rough pull of the ear.
+
+"Polishing the brass, sir!"
+
+"And taking everything in at the same time, eh? so you can write a poem
+about it?"
+
+His vanity flattered, Schantze began answering Franz back, and, to and
+fro they shuttled their tongues, each showing off to the other--and to
+me, a mere cabin boy. And Franz, for the moment, seemed to have
+forgotten how he had been dragged aboard ... and the captain--that Franz
+was a mutineer, tied to the taffrail for insubordination!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sea-sickness never came near me. Only it was queer to feel the footing
+beneath my feet rhythmically rising and falling ... for that's the way
+it seemed to my land-legs. But then I never was very sturdy on my legs
+... which were then like brittle pipestems.... I sprawled about,
+spreading and sliding, as I went to and from the galley, bringing, in
+the huge basket, the breakfast, dinner and supper for the cabin....
+
+The sailors called me "Albatross" (from the way an albatross acts when
+sprawling on shipdeck). They laughed and poked fun at me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Look here, you Yankee rascal," said the captain, when I told him I
+never drank ... "I think it would do you good if you got a little smear
+of beer-froth on your mouth once in a while ... you'd stop looking
+leathery like a mummy ... you've already got some wrinkles on your face
+... a few good drinks would plump you out, make a man of you.
+
+"In Germany mothers give their babies a sip from their steins before
+they are weaned ... that's what makes us such a great nation."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If I didn't drink, at least the two mates and the sailmaker made up for
+me ... we had on board many cases of beer stowed away down in the
+afterhold, where the sails were stored. And next to the dining room
+there was the space where provisions were kept--together with kegs of
+kuemmel, and French and Rhine wines and claret....
+
+And before we had been to sea three days I detected a conspiracy on the
+part of the first and second mates, the cook, and the sailmaker--the
+object of the conspiracy being, apparently, to drink half the liquor out
+of each receptacle, then fill the depleted cask with hot water, shaking
+it up thoroughly, and so mixing it.
+
+As far as I could judge, the old, bow-legged sailmaker had taken out a
+monopoly on the cases of beer aft. Never were sails kept in better
+condition. He was always down there, singing and sewing.
+
+Several times I saw him coming up whistling softly with a lush air of
+subdued and happy reminiscence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Several mornings out ... and I couldn't believe my ears ... I heard a
+sound of music. It sounded like a grind-organ on a city street....
+
+_The Sunshine of Paradise Alley_.
+
+And the captain's voice was booming along with the melody.
+
+I peeked into Schantze's cabin to announce breakfast.
+
+He had a huge music box there. And he was singing to its playing, and
+dancing clumsily about like a happy young mammoth.
+
+"Spying on the 'old man,' eh?"
+
+He came over and caught me by an ear roughly but playfully.
+
+"No, Captain, I was only saying breakfast is ready."
+
+"You're a sly one ... do you like that tune? _The Sunshine of Paradise
+Alley?_ It's my favorite Yankee hymn."
+
+And it must have been; every morning for eighty-nine days the gaudy
+music box faithfully played the tune over and over again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ship drifted slowly through the Sargasso Sea--that dead, sweltering
+area of smooth waters and endless leagues of drifting seaweed.... Or we
+lifted and sank on great, smooth swells ... the last disturbance of a
+storm far off where there were honest winds that blew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The prickly heat assailed us ... hundreds of little red, biting pimples
+on our bodies ... the cook's fresh-baked bread grew fuzz in twenty-four
+hours after baking ... the forecastle and cabin jangled and snarled
+irritably, like tortured animals....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was with a shout, one day, that we welcomed a good wind, and shot
+clear of this dead sea of vegetable matter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we crossed the equator Father Neptune came on board ... a curious
+sea-ceremony that must hark back to the Greeks and Romans....
+
+The bow-legged sailmaker played Neptune.
+
+He combed out a beard of rope, wrapped a sheet around his shoulders,
+procured a trident of wood....
+
+"Come," shouted one of the sailors to me, running up like a happy boy,
+"come, see Neptune climbing on board."
+
+The sail-maker pretended to mount up out of the sea, climbing over the
+forecastle head--just as if he had left his car of enormous,
+pearl-tinted sea-shell, with the spouting dolphins still hitched to it,
+waiting for him, while he paid his respects to our captain.
+
+Captain Schantze, First Mate Miller, Second Mate Stange, stood waiting
+the ceremonial on the officers' bridge, an amused smile playing over
+their faces.
+
+A big, boy-faced sailor named Klaus, and the ship's blacksmith, a
+grey-eyed, sandy-haired fellow named Klumpf, followed the sailmaker
+close behind, as he swept along in his regalia, solemnly and
+majestically. And Klaus beat a triangle. And Klumpf played an accordion.
+
+"Sailmaker" (the only name he was called by on the ship) made a
+grandiose speech to the Captain.
+
+Schantze replied in the same vein, beginning,
+
+"Euer Majestaet--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sailors marched forward again, to their music, like pleased
+children. For custom was that they should have plum duff this day, and
+plenty of hot grog....
+
+Before I was aware, I was caught up by several arms.
+
+For I had never before crossed the line. So I must be initiated.
+
+They set me on a board, over a great barrel of sea-water.
+
+Klumpf gave me a mock-shave with a vile mixture of tar and soap. He used
+a great wooden razor about three feet long. The officers shouted and
+laughed, looking on from the bridge.
+
+"What's your name, my boy?" asked Father Neptune.
+
+"John Greg--" Before I could articulate fully the blacksmith thrust a
+gob of the vile lather into my mouth. As I spluttered and spit everyone
+gave shouts of laughter. One or two sailors rolled on the deck,
+laughing, as savages are said to do when overtaken with humour.
+
+The board on which I sat was jerked from under me. Once, two times,
+three times, I was pushed, almost bent double, far down into the barrel
+of sea-water. It was warm, at least.
+
+Then a hue and cry went up for Franz. He was caught. He swore that he
+had crossed the line before, as doubtless he had. But there was now a
+sort of quiet feud between him and the rest aboard. So in a tumbling
+heap, they at last bore him over. He fought and shrieked. And because he
+did not submit and take the ceremony good-naturedly, he was treated
+rather roughly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My certificate of initiation was handed me formally and solemnly. It was
+a semi-legal florid document, sealed with a bit of rope and tar. It
+certified that I had crossed the line. The witnesses were "The
+Mainmast," "The Mizzen Mast," and other inanimate ship's parts and
+objects....
+
+"Keep this," said Sailmaker, as he handed it to me, "as evidence that
+you have already crossed the line, and you will never be shaved with tar
+and a wooden razor again. You are now a full-fledged son of Neptune."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On a ship at sea where the work to do never ends, it is a serious matter
+if one of the crew does not know his work, or fails to hold up his end.
+That means that there is so much more work to be done by the others.
+
+Franz deliberately shirked. And, as far as I could see, he purposely
+got in bad with the mates, under whom he had approximately sixty days
+more of pulling and hauling, going up aloft, scrubbing, and chipping to
+do. I was puzzled at the steadfast, deliberate malingering of the man.
+The crew all hated him, too. I have seen the man at the wheel
+deliberately deflect the ship from its course, in order to bring the
+wind against the mutineer's belly, hoping to have him blown overboard
+while he was running aloft....
+
+And one night, in the forecastle, someone hurled a shoe at him. A blow
+so savagely well-aimed, that when he came running aft, howling with pain
+(for, for all his obstinacy, he seemed to lack courage)--to complain of
+the outrage, to Schantze--his eye popped out so far that it seemed as if
+leaping out of its socket! It was ghastly and bloody like a butchered
+heart.
+
+Later, I asked the sailors why this had been done to Franz. And Klumpf
+said--
+
+"We had a scuffle over something. We were all taking it friendly ... and
+Franz bit Klaus through the hand, almost ... then someone threw a shoe
+and hit him in the eye"....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In about a week, after his eye had healed just a little, I drew Franz
+apart. We sat down together on the main hatch. I was worried about him.
+I did not understand him. I was sorry for him.
+
+"Look here, Franz ... don't you know you might get put clean out of
+business if you keep this mutiny of one up much longer? You can't whip a
+whole ship's crew."
+
+"I don't want to whip a whole ship's crew."
+
+"The captain had to have another man in a hurry, you know ... but he's
+really willing to give you decent treatment."
+
+"Did the captain send you to tell me this?"
+
+"Of course not ... only I'm sorry for you."
+
+Franz gave me a broad, inexplicable wink. He smiled grotesquely--from
+swollen lips made more grotesque because of a recent punch in the mouth
+"Sailmaker" had fetched him....
+
+"Don't trouble yourself about me. I know what I'm doing, my boy."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean that, as soon as I came out of my drunk, and found myself
+shanghaied, I _wanted_ them to ill-treat me ... there's a Sailors' Aid
+Society at Sydney, you know!"
+
+"What good will the Sailors' Aid Society do you?"
+
+"You just wait and see what good it will do me!"
+
+"Nonsense, Franz! The captain's willing to pay you off at Sydney."
+
+"Pay me off, eh? Yes, and the old boy will pay me handsome damages,
+too!... the sentimental old ladies that have nothing else to do but
+befriend the poor abused sailor, will see to it that I find justice in
+the courts there."
+
+"You have a good case against the captain as it is, then. Why don't you
+turn to and behave and be treated decently?"
+
+"No," he replied, with a curious note of strength in his voice, "the
+worse I'm treated the more damages I can collect. I'm going to make it a
+real case of brutal treatment before I leave this old tub."
+
+"But they--they'll--they might kill you!"
+
+"Not much ... those days are about gone ... for a man who knows how to
+handle himself, as I do....
+
+"Well, let us thank God," he finished, "for the Sailors' Aid Society and
+the dear old maids at Sydney!"
+
+I walked off, thinking. Franz had sworn me not to tell. Yet I was
+tempted to. It would get me in right with Captain Schantze.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We shaped to the Cape of Good Hope with great, southern jumps. We were
+striking far south for the strong, steady winds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"There was a damned English ship, the _Lord Summerville_, that left New
+York about the same time we did ... she's a sky-sailer ... we mustn't
+let her beat us into Sydney."
+
+"Why not, Captain?"
+
+"An Englishman beat a German!" the captain spat, "fui! We're going to
+beat England yet at everything ... already we're taking their
+world-trade away from them ... and some day we'll beat them at sea and
+on land, both."
+
+"In a war, sir?"
+
+"Yes, in a war ... in a great, big war! It will have to come to that,
+Johann, my boy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The cook's opinion on the same subject was illuminating.
+
+He told me many anecdotes which tended to prove that even England's
+colonies were growing tired of her arrogance: he related droll stories
+told him by Colonials about the Queen ... obscene and nasty they were,
+too.
+
+"Catch a German talking that way about the Kaiserin!"
+
+The old cook couldn't realize a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon
+temperament--that those they rail against and jibe at they love the
+most!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Off the Tristan da Cunha Islands we ran head-on into a terrific storm
+... one that lasted forty-eight hours or more, with rushing, screaming
+winds, and steady, stinging blasts of sleet that came thick in
+successions of driving, grey cloud.
+
+It was then that we lost overboard a fine, handsome young Saxon, one
+Gottlieb Kampke:
+
+Five men aloft ... only four came down ... Kampke was blown overboard
+off the footrope that ran under the yard, as he stood there hauling in
+on the sail. For he was like a young bull in strength; and, scorning, in
+his strength, the tearing wind, he used to heave in with both hands ...
+not holding fast at all, no matter how hard the wind tore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was all that the ship herself could do, to live. Already two
+lifeboats had been bashed in. And the compass stanchioned on the bridge
+had gone along with a wave, stanchions and all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no use trying to rescue Gottlieb Kampke. Besides, he would be
+dead as soon as he reached the water, in such a boiling sea, the captain
+said to me.
+
+The melancholy cry, "Man overboard!" ...
+
+I took oath that if I ever reached home alive, I would never go to sea
+again. If I just got home, alive, I would be willing even to tie up
+brown parcels in grocery cord, for the rest of my life, to sweep out a
+store day after day, regularly and monotonously, in safety!...
+
+The captain saw me trembling with a nausea of fear. And, with the winds
+booming from all sides, the deck as slippery as the body of a live eel,
+he gave me a shove far out on the slant of the poop. I sped in the grey
+drive of sleet clear to the rail. The ship dipped under as a huge wave
+smashed over, all fury and foam, overwhelming the helmsman and bearing
+down on me....
+
+It was miraculous that I was not swept overboard.
+
+After that, strangely, I no longer feared, but enjoyed a quickening of
+pulse. And I gladly took in the turns in the rope as the men sang and
+heaved away ... waves would heap up over us. We would hold tight till we
+emerged again. Then again we would shout and haul away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It's all according to what you grow used to," commented the captain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By the time I was beginning to look into the face of danger as into a
+mother's face, the weather wore down. The ocean was still heavy with
+running seas, but we rode high and dry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unlucky Kampke!
+
+His shipmates bore his dunnage aft, for the captain to take in charge.
+And, just as in melodramas and popular novels, a picture of a
+fair-haired girl was found at the bottom of his sea-chest, together with
+one of his mother ... his sweetheart and his mother....
+
+Depositions were taken down from his forecastle mates, as to his going
+overboard, and duly entered into the log ... and the captain wrote a
+letter to his mother, to be mailed to her from Sydney.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For a day we were sad. An imminent sense of mortality hung over us.
+
+But there broke, the next morning, a clear sky of sunshine and an open
+though still yesty sea--and we sang, and became thoughtless and gay
+again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Yes," sighed the cook, "I wish it had been Franz instead of Gottlieb.
+Gottlieb was such a fine fellow, and Franz is such a son of a----."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... I have left something out.
+
+At the beginning of the voyage Captain Schantze housed a flock of two
+dozen chickens in a coop under the forecastle ... in order to insure
+himself of fresh eggs during the voyage....
+
+And for fresh meat, he had a huge sow hauled aboard--to be killed later
+on....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One morning, when I went forward to fetch the captain's and mates'
+breakfast, I found the cook all white and ghastly....
+
+"What's the matter, Cook?"
+
+"To-day's the day I've got to butcher the sow," he complained, "and I'd
+give anything to have someone else do it ... I've made such a pet of her
+during the voyage ... and she's so intelligent and affectionate ...
+she's decenter than lots of human beings I've met."
+
+I kept to the cabin while the butchering was going on.
+
+The cook, the next day, with tears streaming down his face, told me how
+trusting the sow had been to the last moment....
+
+"I'll never forget the look in her eyes when she realised what I had
+done to her when I cut her throat."
+
+"And I'll never be able to eat any of her. I'd throw it up as fast as it
+went down ... much as I do like good, fresh pork."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ship-boys, Karl and Albert, always stole the eggs, the captain was
+sure, as soon as they were laid, though he was never able to catch them
+at it.
+
+"Run," he would shout hurriedly to me, "there! I hear the hens cackling.
+They've laid an egg."
+
+I'd run. But there'd be no egg. Someone would have reached the nest,
+from the forecastle, before I did.
+
+Because the eggs were always stolen as soon as laid, the captain decreed
+the slaughter of the hens, too ... not a rooster among them ... the hens
+were frankly unhappy, because of this....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The last hen was to be slain. Pursued, she flew far out over the still
+ocean. Further and further she flew, keeping up her heavy body as if by
+an effort of will.
+
+"Come back! Don't be such a damn fool!" I shouted in my excitement.
+
+Everybody was watching when the chicken would light ... how long it
+could keep up....
+
+As soon as I shouted "come back!" the bird, as if giving heed to my
+exhortation, slowly veered, and turned toward the ship again. Everybody
+had laughed till they nearly sank on deck, at my naive words.
+
+Now a spontaneous cheer went up, as the hen slowly tacked and started
+back....
+
+It was still weather, but the ship was moving ahead....
+
+"She won't make it!"
+
+"She will!"
+
+Another great shout. She lit astern, right by the wheel. Straightway she
+began running forward, wings spread in genuine triumph.
+
+"Catch her!" shouted the mate.
+
+Nobody obeyed him; they stood by laughing and cheering, till the hen
+made safety beneath the forecastle head.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was spared for three days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"If you ever tell the captain on us," First Mate Miller threatened, as
+he and the second mate stood over a barrel of Kuemmel, mixing hot water
+with it, to fill up for what they had stolen, "if you ever tell, I'll
+see that you go overboard--by accident ... when we clear for Iqueque,
+after we unload at Sydney."
+
+"Why should I tell? It's none of my business!"
+
+I had come upon them, as they were at work. The cook had sent me into
+the store-room for some potatoes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miller, the first mate, was quite fat and bleary-eyed. He used to go
+about sweating clear through his clothes on warm days. At such times I
+could detect the faint reek of alcohol coming through his pores. It's a
+wonder Schantze didn't notice it, as I did.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sometimes, at meals, the captain would swear and say, sniffing at the
+edge of his glass, "What's the matter with this damned brandy ... it
+tastes more like water than a good drink of liquor."
+
+As he set his glass down in disgust, the mates would solemnly and
+hypocritically go through the same operation, and express their wonder
+with the captain's.
+
+Finally one of the latter would remark sagely, "they always try to palm
+off bad stuff on ships."
+
+In spite of my fear of the mates, I once had to stuff a dirty dish-rag
+down my mouth to keep from laughing outright. The greasy rag made me gag
+and almost vomit.
+
+"And what's the matter with you?" inquired Schantze, glaring into the
+pantry at me, while the two mates also glowered, for a different reason.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You skinny Yankee," said the captain, taking me by the ear, rather
+painfully, several days after that incident, "I'm sure someone's
+drinking my booze. Could it be you, in spite of all your talk about not
+drinking? You Anglo-Saxons are such dirty hypocrites."
+
+"Indeed, no, sir,--it isn't me."
+
+"Well, this cabin's in your care, and so is the storeroom. You keep a
+watch-out and find out for me who it is.... I don't think its Miller or
+the second mate ... it must be either the cook or that old rogue of a
+sailmaker....
+
+"Or it might be some of the crew," he further speculated, "but anyhow,
+it's your job to take care of the cabin, as I said before....
+
+"Remember this--all sailors are thieves, aboard ship, if the chance to
+take anything good to eat or drink comes their way."
+
+I promised to keep a good look-out.
+
+On the other hand....
+
+"Mind you keep your mouth shut ... and don't find things so damned
+funny, neither," this from the first mate, early one morning, as I
+scrubbed the floors. He stirred my posteriors heavily with a booted
+foot, in emphasis.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sea kicked backward in long, speedy trails of foam, lacing the
+surface of a grey-green waste of waves....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I had any spare time, I used to lie in the net under the bowsprit,
+and read. From there I could look back on the entire ship as it sailed
+ahead, every sail spread, a magnificent sight.
+
+One day, as I lay there, reading Shelley, or was it my Vergil that I was
+puzzling out line by line, with occasional glances at the great ship
+seeming to sail into me--myself poised outward in space--
+
+There came a great surge of water. I leaped up in the net, bouncing
+like a circus acrobat. My book fell out of my hand into the sea.
+
+I looked up, and saw fully half the crew grinning down at me. The mate
+stood over me. A bucket that still dripped water in his hand showed me
+where the water had come from.
+
+"Come up out of there! The captain's been bawling for you for half an
+hour ... we thought you'd gone overboard."
+
+I came along the net, drenched and forlorn.
+
+"What in hell were you doing down there?"
+
+"I--I was thinking," I stammered.
+
+"He was thinking," echoed the mate scornfully. "Well, thinking will
+never make a sailor of you."
+
+Boisterous laughter.
+
+"After this do your thinking where we can find you when you're wanted."
+
+As I walked aft, the mate went with me pace for pace, poking more fun at
+me. To which I dared not answer, as I was impelled, because he was
+strong and I was very frail ... and always, when on the verge of danger,
+or a physical encounter, the memory of my Uncle Lan's beatings would now
+crash into my memory like an earthquake, and render my resolution and
+sinews all a-tremble and unstrung.
+
+I was of a mind to tell the captain _who_ was drinking his liquor--but
+here again I feared, and cursed myself for fearing.
+
+When the mate told him of where he had found me, at last--what he had
+done--what I had said--Schantze laughed....
+
+But, later on, he sympathised with me and unexpectedly remarked:
+
+"Johann, how can you expect a heavy-minded numbskull like Miller to
+understand!"
+
+Then, laughing, he seized me by the ear--his usual gesture of fondness
+for me--
+
+"Remember me if you ever write a book about this voyage, and don't give
+me too black a name! I'm not so bad, am I, eh?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Australian coast had lain blue across the horizon for several days.
+
+"Watch me to-morrow!" whispered Franz cryptically to me as he strolled
+lazily by....
+
+Next day, around noon, I heard a big rumpus on the main deck, I hurried
+up from the cabin.
+
+There lay Franz, sprawled on his back like a huge, lazy dog, and the
+mate was shaking his belly with his foot on top of it, just as one plays
+with a dog ... but to show he was not playing, he delivered the
+prostrate form of the sailor a swift succession of kicks in the ribs....
+
+"You won't work any longer, you say?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I'll kick your guts out."
+
+"Very well."
+
+"Stand on your feet like a man."
+
+"What for? You'll only knock me down again!" and Franz grinned comically
+and grotesquely upward, through the gap in his mouth where two of his
+teeth had been punched out earlier in the voyage.
+
+It was easy to see that Franz's curious attitude of non-resistance had
+the mate puzzled what to do next. All the sailors indulged in furtive
+laughter. None of them had a very deep-rooted love for Miller, and, for
+the first time, they rather sympathised with the man who had been
+shanghaied ... some of them even snickered audibly ... and straightway
+grew intent on their work....
+
+Miller turned irritably on them. "And what's the matter with _you_!"...
+
+"Bring him up here!" shouted Captain Schantze.
+
+Four sailors picked Franz up and carried him, unresisting, bumping his
+back on the steps as he sagged like a sack half full of flour....
+
+"Here! I've had about enough of this!" cried the captain, furious, "tie
+him to the rail again!..."
+
+"Now, we'll leave you there, on bread and water, till you say you'll
+work."
+
+"What does it matter what you do," sauced Franz; "we'll be in port in
+four days ... and then you'll see what I'll do!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"What's that?" cried the captain. Then catching an inkling of Franz's
+scheme, he hit the man a quick, hard blow in the mouth with his clenched
+fist.
+
+"Give him another!" urged the mate.
+
+But the captain's rage was over, though Franz sent him a bold, mocking
+laugh, even as the blood trickled down in a tiny red stream from where
+his mouth had, been struck.
+
+I never saw such courage of its kind.
+
+They left him there for ten hours. But he stood without a sign of
+exhaustion or giving in. And they untied him. And let him loose.
+
+And, till we hove to at Dalghety's Wharf, in Sydney Harbour, unnoticed,
+Franz, the Alsace-Lorrainer, roamed the boat at will, like a passenger.
+
+"Wait till I get on shore ... this little shanghaiing party of the
+captain's will cost him a lot of hard money," he said, in a low voice,
+to me,--standing idly by, his hands in his pockets, while I was bending
+over the brass on the bridge railing, polishing away.
+
+"But they've nearly killed you, Franz ... will it be worth it?"
+
+"All I can say is I wish they'd use me rougher."
+
+"You know, Franz, I'm not a bit sorry for you now ... I was at first."
+
+"That so?... I don't need anybody to be sorry for me. In a week or so,
+when I have won my suit against the captain through the Sailors' Aid
+Society, I'll be rolling in money ... then you can be sorry for the
+captain."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sydney Harbour ... the air alive with sunlight and white flutterings of
+sea gulls a-wing ... alive with pleasure boats that leaned here and yon
+on white sails.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now that we were safe in harbour, I hesitated whether to run away or
+continue with the ship. For I had signed on to complete the voyage, via
+Iqueque, on the West Coast of South America, to Hamburg ... I hesitated,
+I say, because, on shipboard, you're at least sure of food and a place
+to sleep....
+
+Karl and I had been set to work at giving the cabin a thorough
+overhauling. We fooled away much of our time looking into the captain's
+collections of erotic pictures and photographs ... and his obscene books
+in every language.
+
+And we discovered under the sofa-seat that was built against the side, a
+great quantity of French syrups and soda waters. So we spent quite a
+little of our time in mixing temperance drinks for ourselves.
+
+Cautiously I spoke to the cook about what Karl and I were doing. For he
+knew, of course, that I knew of his marauding ... and of the mates' and
+sailmaker's ... so it was safe to tell him.
+
+"You'd better be careful," the cook admonished me.
+
+"But what could Captain Schantze want with so many bottles of syrup and
+soda water aboard?"
+
+"The English custom's officer who comes aboard here is an old friend of
+Schantze's, and a teetotaler ... so the captain always treats him to
+soda water."
+
+"But Karl and I have drunk it all up already," I confessed slowly.
+
+"You'll both catch a good hiding then when he calls for it and finds
+there is none."
+
+The next day the customs man came aboard.
+
+"Have a drink, Mr. Wollaston?" Schantze asked him.
+
+"Yes, but nothing strong," for probably the tenth occasion came the
+answer.
+
+Then offhandedly, the captain--as if he had not, perhaps, said the same
+thing for ten previous voyages: "I have some fine French soda water and
+syrup in my private locker, perhaps you'd like some of that, Mr.
+Wollaston?"
+
+Mr. Wollaston, whose face and nose was so ruddy and pimply anyone would
+take him for a toper, answers: "Yes, a little of that Won't do any harm,
+Captain!"
+
+"Karl!--Johann!" We had been listening, frightened, to the colloquy. We
+came out, trembling.
+
+"Look under the cushions in my cabin ... bring out some of the syrup and
+soda water you find there."
+
+"Very well, sir!"
+
+We both hurried in ... stood facing each other, too scared to laugh at
+the situation. The captain had a heavy hand--and carried a heavy cane
+when he went ashore. He had the cane with him now.
+
+After a long time: "You tell him there is none," whispered Karl.
+
+"Well, what's wrong in there?" cried Schantze impatiently.
+
+"We can't find a single bottle, sir!" I repeated, louder.
+
+"What? Come out here! Speak louder! What did you say?"
+
+"We can't find a single bottle, sir!" I murmured, almost inaudibly.
+
+Then Karl, stammering, reinforced me with, "There are a lot of empty
+bottles here, sir!"
+
+"What does this mean? Every voyage for years I have had soda and French
+syrup in my locker for Mr. Wollaston."
+
+"Oh, don't mind me," deprecated the little customs man, at the same time
+as furious as his host.
+
+Karl had already began to blubber in anticipation of the whipping due.
+The captain laid his heavy cane on everywhere. The boy fell at his feet,
+bawling louder, less from fear than from the knowledge that his
+abjectness would please the captain's vanity and induce him to let up
+sooner.
+
+"Now _you_ come here!" Schantze beckoned me.
+
+He raised the cane at me. But, to my own surprise, something brave and
+strange entered into me. I would not be humiliated before a countryman
+of my mother's, that was what it was!
+
+I looked the captain straight in the eye.
+
+"Sir, I did not do it, and I won't be whipped!"
+
+"Wha-at!" ejaculated Schantze, astonished at my novel behaviour.
+
+"I didn't touch the syrup." Karl looked at me, astonished and
+incredulous at my audacity, through his tear-stained face.
+
+The captain stepped back from me.
+
+I must be telling the truth to be behaving so differently.
+
+"Get to your bunk then!" he commanded.
+
+I obeyed.
+
+"Who is he?" ... I heard the little customs man ask the skipper; "he
+doesn't talk like an Englishman."
+
+"He isn't. He just a damn-fool Yankee boy I picked up in New York."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had rounded Franz up and locked him away. The captain was
+determined to frustrate his little scheme for reimbursement, which he
+had by this time guessed.
+
+I lie. I must tell the truth in these memoirs.
+
+I had told on him.
+
+But my motive was only an itch to see what would then take place. But
+when I saw that the issue would be an obvious one: that he would merely
+be spirited forth to sea again, and this time, _forced_ to work, I felt
+a little sorry for the man. At the same time, I admit I wanted to
+observe the denouement myself, of his case ... and as I now intended to
+desert the ship, it would have to take place in Sydney.
+
+So, on the second night of Franz's incarceration, when nearly everybody
+was away on shore-leave, I took the captain's bunch of keys, and I let
+the shanghaied man, the mutineer, the man from Alsace-Lorraine--out!
+
+It was not a very dark night. Franz stole along like a rat till he
+reached the centre of the dock. There he gave a great shout of defiance
+... why, I learned later....
+
+The _Lord Summerville_, which had, after all, beat us in by two days,
+despite Captain Schantze's boast, was lying on the other side of our
+dock. And her mate and several sailors thus became witnesses of what
+happened.
+
+The shout brought, of course, our few men who remained on watch, on
+deck, and over on the dock after Franz ... who allowed himself to be
+caught ... the dock was English ground ... the ship was German ... a
+good point legally, as the canny Franz had foreseen.
+
+His clothes were almost torn from his body.
+
+Miller accidentally showed up, coming back from shore. And he joined in.
+
+"Come back with us, you verfluchte _Alsatz_-Lothringer."
+
+The Englishmen from the _Lord Summerville_ now began calling out, "Let
+him alone!" and "I say, give the lad fair play!"
+
+Some of them leaped down on the dock in a trice.
+
+"Who the hell let him out?" roared the mate.
+
+I stood on deck, holding my breath, and ready to bolt in case Franz
+betrayed me. But nevertheless my blood was running high and happy over
+the excitement I had caused by unlocking the door.
+
+"No one let me out. I picked the lock. Will that suit you?" lied Franz,
+protecting me.
+
+"What's the lad been and done?" asked the mate of the _Lord
+Summerville_.
+
+"I was shanghaied in New York," put in Franz swiftly, "and I demand
+English justice."
+
+"And you shall get it, my man!" answered the mate proudly, "for you have
+been assaulted on English ground, as I'll stand witness."
+
+A whistle was blown. Men came running. Soon Franz was outside the
+jurisdiction of Germany.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day Captain Schantze stalked about, hardly speaking to Miller.
+He was angry and laid the blame at the latter's door.
+
+"Miller, why in the name of God didn't you guard that fellow better? An
+English court ... you know what _they'll_ do to us!"
+
+Miller spread his hands outward, shrugged his shoulders expressively,
+remained in silence. The two mates and the captain ate the rest of their
+supper in a silence that bristled.
+
+The ship was detained for ten days more after its cargo had been
+unloaded.
+
+At the trial, during which the "old maids" and The Sailors' Aid Society
+came to the fore, Captain Schantze roared his indignant best--so much so
+that the judge warned him that he was not on his ship but on English
+ground....
+
+Franz got a handsome verdict in his favour, of course.
+
+And for several days he was seen, rolling drunk about the streets, by
+our boys, who now looked on him as a pretty clever person.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was my time to run away--if I ever intended to. Within the next day
+or so we were to take on coal for the West Coast. We were to load down
+so heavily, the mate, who had conceived a hatred of me, informed me,
+that even in fair weather the scuppers would be a-wash. Significantly he
+added there would be much danger for a man who was not liked aboard a
+certain ship ... by the mates ... much danger of such a person's being
+washed overboard. For the waves, you know, washed over the deck of so
+heavily loaded a ship at will.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the _Lord Summerville_ was a mad Pennsylvania boy who had, like
+myself, gone to sea for the first time ... but he had had no uncle to
+beat timidity into him ... and he had dared ship as able seaman on the
+big sky-sailed lime-juicer, and had gloriously acquitted himself.
+
+He was a tall, rangy young bullock of a lad. He could split any door
+with his fist. He liked to drink and fight. And he liked women in the
+grog-house sense.
+
+One of his chief exploits had been the punching of the second mate in
+the jaw when both were high a-loft. Then he had caught him about the
+waist, and held him till he came to, to keep him from falling. The mate
+had used bad language at him.
+
+Hoppner had worked from the first as if he had been born to the sea.
+
+He and I met in a saloon. The plump little barmaid had made him what she
+called, "A man's drink," while me she had served contemptuously with a
+ginger ale.
+
+Hoppner boasted of his exploits. I, of mine.
+
+"I tell you what, Gregory, since we're both jumping ship here, let's be
+pals for awhile and travel together."
+
+"I'm with you, Hoppner."
+
+"And why jump off empty-handed, since we are jumping off?"
+
+"What is it you're driving at?"
+
+"There ought to be a lot of loot on two boats!"
+
+"Suppose we get caught?" I asked cautiously.
+
+"Anybody that's worth a damn will take a chance in this world. Aren't
+you game to take a chance?"
+
+"Of course I'm game."
+
+"Well, then, you watch your chance and I'll watch mine. I'll hook into
+everything valuable that's liftable on my ship and you tend to yours in
+the same fashion."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We struck hands in partnership, parted, and agreed to meet at the
+wharf-gate the next night, just after dark, he with his loot, I with
+mine.
+
+I spent the morning of the following day prospecting. I had seen the
+captain put the ship's money for the paying of the crew in a drawer, and
+turn the key.
+
+But first, with a curious primitive instinct, I fixed on a small ham and
+a loaf of rye bread as part of the projected booty, in spite of the fact
+that, if I but laid hands on the ship's money, I would have quite a
+large sum.
+
+It was the piquaresque romance of what I was about to do that moved me.
+The romance of the deed, not the possession of the objects stolen, that
+appealed to my imagination. I pictured my comrade and myself going
+overland, our swag on our backs, eluding pursuit ... and joining with
+the natives in some far hinterland. I would be a sort of Jonathan Wilde
+plus a Francois Villon.
+
+Before the captain returned I had surveyed everything to my satisfaction
+... after supper the captain and the two mates left for shore again.
+
+Now was the time. I searched the captain's old trousers and found the
+ship's keys there. They were too bulky to carry around with him.
+
+The keys seemed to jangle like thunder as I tried them one after the
+other on the drawer where I had seen him put away the gold.
+
+I heard someone coming. I started to whistle noisily, and to polish the
+captain's _carpet slippers!_ ... it was only someone walking on deck ...
+The last key was, dramatically, the right one. The drawer opened ... but
+it was empty! I had seen the captain--the captain had also seen me. Now
+I started to take anything I could lay my hands on.
+
+I snatched off the wall two silver-mounted cavalry pistols, a present
+from his brother to Schantze. I added a bottle of kuemmel to the ham and
+the rye bread. The kuemmel a present for Hoppner.
+
+Then, before leaving the _Valkyrie_ forever, I sat down to think if
+there were not something I might do to show my contempt for Miller.
+There were many things I could do, I found.
+
+In the first place, I took a large sail-needle and some heavy-thread and
+I sewed two pairs of his trousers and two of his coats up the middle of
+the legs and arms, so he couldn't put them on, at least right away. I
+picked up hammer and nails and nailed his shoes and sea-boots securely
+to the middle of his cabin floor. Under his pillow I found a full flask
+of brandy. I emptied half ... when I replaced it, it was full again. But
+I had not resorted to the brandy cask to fill it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The apprehension that I might be come upon _flagrante delictu_ gave me a
+shiver of apprehension. But it was a pleasurable shiver. I enjoyed the
+malicious wantonness of my acts, and my prospective jump into the
+unknown ... all the South Seas waited for me ... all the world!
+
+But, though every moment's delay brought detection and danger nearer, I
+found time for yet one more stroke. With a laughable vision of Schantze
+smashing Miller all over the cabin, I wrote and left this note pinned on
+the former's pillow:
+
+     Dear Captain:--
+
+     By the time you read this letter I will be beyond your reach (then
+     out of the instant's imagination ... I had not considered such a
+     thing hitherto). I am going far into the interior and discover a
+     gold mine. When I am rich I shall repay you for the cavalry pistols
+     which I am compelled to confiscate in lieu of my wages, which I now
+     forfeit by running away, though entitled to them.
+
+     You have been a good captain and I like you.
+
+     As for Miller, he is beneath my contempt. It was he who drank all
+     your wines, brandies, and whiskies ... the sailmaker is to answer
+     for your beer. The second mate has been in on this theft of your
+     liquors, too (I left the cook out because he had been nice to me).
+
+     Good-bye, and good luck.
+
+     Your former cabin boy, and, though you may not believe me, always
+     your well-wisher and friend,
+
+                                                        JOHN GREGORY.
+
+I left what I had stolen bundled up in my blanket. I walked forward
+nonchalantly to see if anyone was out to observe me. I discovered the
+sandy-haired Blacksmith, Klumpf, sitting on the main hatch. I saw that I
+could not pass him with my bundle without strategy. The strategy I
+employed was simple.
+
+I drew him a bottle of brandy. I gave it to him. After he had drawn a
+long drink I told him I was running away from the ship. He laughed and
+took another drink. I passed him with my bundle. He shouted good-bye to
+me.
+
+Before I had gone by the nose of the old ship, who should I run into but
+Klaus, coming back from a spree. He was pushing along on all fours like
+an animal, he was so drunk ... good, simple Klaus, whom I liked. I laid
+down my bundle, risking capture, while I helped him to the deck. He
+stopped a moment to pat the ship's side affectionately as if it were a
+living friend, or nearer, a mother.
+
+"Gute alte _Valkyrie!_.. gute alte _Valkyrie!_" he murmured.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Safe so far. At the outside of the dock-gate Hoppner waited my arrival.
+He was interested in the kuemmel, and in the pistols, which were
+pawnable.
+
+He had been more daring than I. He had tried to pick his captain's
+pocket of a gold watch while the latter slept. But every time he reached
+for it the captain stirred uneasily. He would have snatched it anyhow,
+but just then his first mate stepped into the cabin ... "and I hid till
+the mate went out again."
+
+"And what then?"
+
+"I picked up a lot of silverware the captain had for show occasions ...
+that I found, rummaging about."
+
+"And him there sleeping?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I found four revolvers that belonged to the mates and captain. I put
+them all in one bundle and chucked them into a rowboat over the ship's
+side. And now we must go back to your boat--"
+
+"To my boat?" I asked, amazed.
+
+"Yes" (I had told him how nearly I had missed our ship-money).
+
+"To your boat, and ransack the cabin till we locate that coin."
+
+"That's too risky."
+
+"Hell, take a chance, can't you?"
+
+That's what Hoppner was always saying as long as we travelled together:
+"Hell, take a chance."
+
+But when I began telling him with convulsive laughter, of the revenge I
+had taken on the mate ... and also how I had thrown all the keys
+overboard, Hoppner, instead of joining in with my laughter, struck at
+me, not at all playfully, "What kind of damn jackass have I joined up
+with, anyhow," he exclaimed. "Now it won't be any use going back, you've
+thrown the keys away and we'd make too great a racket, breaking open
+things...."
+
+He insisted, however, on going back to his own boat, sliding down to the
+rowboat, and rowing away with the loot he had cast into it. We had no
+sooner reached the prow of the _Lord Summerville_ than we observed
+people bestirring themselves on board her more than was natural.
+
+"Come on, _now_ we'll beat it. They're after me."
+
+Hoppner had also brought a blanket. We went "humping bluey" as swagmen,
+as the tramp is called in Australia.
+
+The existence of the swagman is the happiest vagrant's life in the
+world. He is usually regarded as a bona fide seeker for work, and food
+is readily given him for the asking. Unlike the American hobo, he is
+given his food raw, and is expected to cook it himself. So he carries
+what he calls a "tucker bag" to hold his provisions; also, almost more
+important--his "billy can" or tea-pot....
+
+Hoppner and I acquired the tea-habit as badly as the rest of the
+Australian swagmen. Every mile or so the swagman seems to stop, build a
+fire, and brew his draught of tea, which he makes strong enough to take
+the place of the firiest swig of whiskey. I've seen an old swagman boil
+his tea for an actual half-hour, till the resultant concoction was as
+thick and black as New Orleans molasses. With such continual draughts of
+tea, only the crystalline air, and the healthy dryness of the climate
+keeps them from drugging themselves to death.
+
+"Tea ain't any good to drink unless you can put a stick straight up in
+it, and it can stand alone there," joked an old swagman, who had invited
+us to partake of a hospitable "billy-can" with him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We had long, marvellous talks with different swagmen, as we slowly
+sauntered north to Newcastle....
+
+We heard of the snakes of Australia, which workmen dug up in torpid
+writhing knots, in the cold weather ... of native corrobories which one
+old informant told us he had often attended, where he procured native
+women or "gins" as they called them, for a mere drink of whiskey or gin
+... "that's why they calls 'em 'gins'" he explained ... (wrong, for
+"gin" or a word of corresponding sound is the name for "woman" in many
+native languages in the antipodes)....
+
+The azure beauty of those days!... tramping northward with nothing in
+the world to do but swap stories and rest whenever we chose, about
+campfires of resinous, sweetly smelling wood ... drinking and drinking
+that villainous tea.
+
+In Australia the law against stealing rides on freights is strictly
+enforced. The tramp has always to walk--to the American tramp this is at
+first a hardship, but you soon grow to like it ... you learn to enjoy
+the wine in the air, the fragrance of the strange trees that shed bark
+instead of leaves, the noise of scores of unseen Waterfalls in the hills
+of New South Wales.
+
+The morning that the little sea-port of Newcastle lay before us, I felt
+as if I had been on tour through a strange world. For the first time the
+story-books of my youth had come true.
+
+But Hoppner rose from the camp fire that we'd been sleeping by,
+stretched, and remarked, "now, thank Christ, I'll be able to find a good
+seat in a pub again, just like in Sydney, and all the booze I can drink.
+We can go to some sailors' boarding house here, tell them we want to
+ship out, and they'll furnish us with the proper amount of drinks and
+take care of us, all hunky dory, till they find us a berth on ship ...
+of course they'll be well paid for their trouble ... two months' advance
+pay handed over to them by the skipper ... but that won't bother me a
+bit."
+
+From the hill on which we lay encamped we saw all the ships in the
+harbour. I no longer feared the sea. Your true adventurer forgets danger
+and perils experienced as a woman forgets the pangs of childbirth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We met a sailor on the street, who, though at first a stranger, soon
+became our friend and, with the quick hospitality of the sea, steered us
+to a pub known as the Green Emerald, bought us drinks, and introduced us
+to Mother Conarty, the proprietress.
+
+"I'll ship ye out all right, but where's your dunnage?"
+
+We confessed that we had run away from our ships down at Sydney.
+
+The old sailor had spoken of Mother Conarty as rough-mannered, but a
+woman with "a good, warm heart."
+
+She proved it by taking us in to board, with no dunnage for her to hold
+as security.
+
+"Oh, they're good lads, I'm sure," vouched our sailor-friend, speaking
+of us as if we had been forecastle mates of his for twenty voyages on
+end ... the way of the sea!
+
+Now Mother Conarty was not stupid. She was a great-bodied, jolly
+Irishwoman, but she possessed razor-keen, hazel eyes that narrowed on us
+a bit when she first saw us. But the woman in her soon hushed her
+passing suspicions. For Hoppner was a frank-faced, handsome lad, with
+wide shoulders and a small waist like a girl's. It was Hoppner's good
+looks took her in. She gave us a room together.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a blowsy cheeked bar-maid, Mother Conarty's daughter. She
+knew well how to handle with a few sharp, ironic remarks anyone who
+tried to "get fresh" with her ... and if she couldn't, there were plenty
+of husky sailormen about, hearty in their admiration for the resolute,
+clean girl, and ready with mauling fists.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Mother Conarty's proud o' that kid o' hers, she is."
+
+"And well she may be!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I've been thinkin' over you b'yes, an' as ye hain't no dunnage wit' ye,
+I'm thinkin' ye'll be workin' fer yer board an' room."
+
+"We're willing enough, mother," I responded, with a sinking of the
+heart, while Hoppner grimaced to me, behind her back.
+
+We scrubbed out rooms, and the stairs, the bar, behind the bar, the
+rooms back and front, where the sailors drank. We earned our board and
+room ... for a few days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Green Emerald I met my first case of delirium tremens. And it was
+a townsman who had 'em, not a sailor. The townsman was well-dressed and
+well-behaved--at first ... but there lurked a wild stare in his eye that
+was almost a glaze ... and he hung on the bar and drank and drank and
+drank. It apparently had no effect on him, the liquor that he took.
+
+"Say, but you're a tough one," complimented Molly.
+
+But _it_ began in the afternoon. He picked up a stray dog from the floor
+and began kissing it. And the dog slavered back, returning his
+affection. Then he dropped the dog and began picking blue monkeys off
+the wall ... wee things, he explained to us ... that he could hold
+between thumb and forefinger ... only there were so many of them ...
+multitudes of them ... that they rather distressed him ... they carried
+the man away in an ambulance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hoppner and I tired of the ceaseless scrubbing. One day we simply walked
+out of the Green Emerald and never showed up again. Hoppner stayed on in
+town.
+
+I found that the _Valkyrie_ had run up from Sydney to coal at Newcastle,
+for the West Coast. I thought that in this case a little knowledge was
+not a dangerous thing, but a good thing, as long as I confined that
+knowledge to myself. I knew that the _Valkyrie_ was there. It was not
+necessary that the officers of the boat should know I was there ...
+which I wasn't, for I turned south, my swag on my back, and made Sydney
+again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Sydney and "on the rocks," that is with nothing to eat and no place
+to sleep but outdoors.
+
+Of course I couldn't keep away from the ships. I arrived at the Circular
+Quay. I ran into the Sailors' Mission. They were serving tea and having
+a prayer-meeting. I wandered in.
+
+A thin, wisplike man, timid, in black, but very gentlemanly, made me
+heartily welcome. Not with that obnoxious, forced heartiness sky-pilots
+think the proper manner to affect in dealing with sailors, but in a
+human way genuinely felt.
+
+After a service of hearty singing, he asked me if he could help me in
+any way.
+
+"I suppose you can. I'm on the rocks bad."
+
+He gave me all the cakes to eat which were left over from the tea. And a
+couple of shillings beside.
+
+"I wonder if there's anything else I can do?"
+
+"Yes, I'm a poet," I ventured, "and I'd like to get Chaucer's
+_Canterbury Tales_ to read again." I said this as much to startle the
+man as really meaning it. I can go so long without reading certain
+poets, and after that I starve for them as the hungry starve for food. I
+was hungry for Chaucer.
+
+Such a request, coming from a youth almost in rags, impressed the
+sky-pilot so deeply that he insisted on giving me a job pumping the
+organ during services and a little room to sleep in at the mission. What
+is more, he lent me Skeats' edition of Chaucer, complete. And all the
+time I was with him he proved a "good sport." He didn't take advantage
+of my dependence on him to bother me so very much about God.
+
+He took it for granted that I was a Christian, since I never discussed
+religion with him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It began to grow wearisome, pumping an organ for a living. And I had fed
+myself full on Chaucer.
+
+I began to yawn, behind the organ, over the growing staleness of life in
+a sailors' mission. And also I was being pestered by a tall, frigid old
+maid in purples and blacks, who had fixed her eye on me as a heathen she
+must convert.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"How'd you like a voyage to China?" the sky-pilot asked, one day.
+
+Cathay ... Marco Polo ... Milton's description of the Chinese moving
+their wheelbarrows along the land by means of sails ... many poetic
+visions marched across my mind at the question.
+
+"I'd like to, right enough."
+
+"Then here's a chance for you," and he handed me a copy of the Bulletin,
+pointing out an advertisement for cattlemen on the steamboat, _South Sea
+King_, about to take a cargo of steers from Queensland to Taku, province
+of Pechi-li, Northern China.
+
+"What are they sending cattle away up there for?"
+
+"Supplies for troops ... The Boxer outbreak, you know ... go down to the
+number given in the advertisement, and I'm sure they'll sign you on as
+cattleman, if you want the job."
+
+"All right. I'll go now."
+
+"No," looking me over dubiously, "you'd better not go there or anywhere
+else, in your present rig ... you're too ragged to apply even for such
+work ... hang around till morning, and I'll go home to-night and bring
+you a decent coat, at least. Your coat is worse than your trousers ...
+though _they_ are ravelled at the bottoms and coming through in the left
+knee ... every time you take a step I can see a glint of white through
+the cloth, and," walking round me in a tour of inspection, "the seat
+might break through at any moment." All this was said without a glint of
+humour in his eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next morning the sky-pilot came down very late. It was twelve. But he
+had not forgotten me. "Here's the coat," and he solemnly unwrapped and
+trailed before my astonished gaze a coat with a long, ministerial tail.
+I put it on. The tail came below the bend of my knees. I laughed. The
+sky-pilot did not.
+
+Finally he stepped back, cracked a solemn smile, and remarked, "You _do_
+look rather odd!"
+
+The intonation of his voice, his solemn almost deprecatory smile, set me
+off and I laughed till the tears ran down my face.
+
+"I say, what's so funny?"
+
+"Me! I am!... in your long-tailed coat."
+
+"If I was on the rocks like you I wouldn't see anything to laugh
+about."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the shipping office, the place mentioned in the advertisement, in the
+dimly lit, grey-paned room, there sat one lone, pasty-faced,
+old-youngish clerk on the traditional clerk's high stool. But he proved
+lively beyond his appearance.
+
+"My God! do look who's here!" he exclaimed facetiously, and then,
+rapidly, without giving me room for a biting word in return, "no,
+there's no use now, my boy ... we took on all the cattlemen we needed by
+ten o'clock this morning."
+
+I walked away, disconsolate. I bore on my back my swagman's blanket. In
+the blanket I carried a change of shirts the sky-pilot had given me, a
+razor, a toothbrush, a Tennyson, and a Westcott and Hort's Greek New
+Testament with glossary, that I had stolen from a bookstall in Sydney.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found out where the dock was, nevertheless, where the men were loafing
+about in groups, waiting to be taken out to the _South Sea King_ ...
+which lay in the harbour.
+
+At the entrance to the pier I met a powerful, chunky lad who was called
+"Nippers," he said. He, too, was going with the _South Sea King_ ... not
+as a cattleman, but as stowaway. He urged me to stow away along with
+him. And he gave me, unimaginatively, my name of "Skinny," which the
+rest called me during the voyage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We strolled up to the men and joined them.
+
+"Hello, kids!"
+
+"Hello, fellows! Are you the cattlemen for the _South Sea King_?"
+
+"Right you are, my lad ... we are that!"
+
+The men went on with their arguing. They were fighting the Boer War all
+over again with their mouths. Some of them had been in it. Many of them
+had tramped in South Africa. They shouted violently, profanely, at each
+other at the tops of their voices, contending with loud assertions and
+counter-assertions, as if about to engage in an all-round fight.
+
+Several personal altercations sprang up, the points of the debate
+forgotten ... I couldn't discover what it was about, myself ... only
+that one man was a fool ... another, a silly ass ... another, a bloody
+liar!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The launch which was to carry them to the _South Sea King_ at this
+moment started nosing into the dock, on a turbulent zig-zag across the
+harbour; and the men forgot their quarrelling. It brought up at the foot
+of a pile and made fast.
+
+"Come on, Skinny," Nippers urged me aggressively, "it's front seats or
+nothing. Act as if you owned the boat." We thrust ahead of the others
+and swarmed down the ladder ... heaping, swearing, horse-playing, the
+cattlemen filled the launch from stern to bow.
+
+Nippers had been a professional stowaway since his tenth year. He had
+gone all over the world in that fashion, he had informed me. He was now
+sixteen. I was almost eighteen.
+
+His six years of rough life with rough men had brought him to premature
+manhood, taught him to exhibit a saucy aplomb to everybody, to have at
+his finger-ends all the knockabout resourcefulness and impudence that
+the successful vagrant must acquire in order to live at all as an
+individual....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were the first on deck.
+
+"Where are the cattlemen's bunks?" Nippers asked of an oiler who stood,
+nonchalant, somewhat contemptuous, looking over the side at the
+seething, vociferous cattlemen.
+
+Not wasting a word on us, the oiler pointed aft over his shoulder, with
+a grimy thumb.
+
+We found a dark entrance like the mouth to a cave, that led down below.
+In our hurry we lost our footing on the greasy ladder and tumbled all
+the way to the bottom.
+
+We had not time to rub our bruises. We plumped down and under the lower
+tier of bunks ... just in time ... the men came pouring down
+helter-skelter ... the talking, arguing, voluble swearing, and obscenity
+was renewed ... all we could see, from where we lay, was a confusion of
+legs to the knee, moving about....
+
+They settled down on the benches about the table. They slackened their
+talk and began smacking their lips over ship-biscuit, marmalade, and
+tea.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Still we lay in silence. The screw of the propeller had not started
+yet. We dared not come out or we would be put ashore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were hungry. We could hear their tin plates clattering and clinking
+as the cattlemen ate supper, and smell the smell of cornbeef and boiled
+potatoes. Our mouths ran from hunger.
+
+--"wish I had something to scoff, I'm starvin'," groaned Nippers, "but
+we'll hafta lay low till the bloody tub pulls out or we'll get caught
+an' dumped ashore."
+
+Supper done with, the men were sitting about and smoking. They were
+soon, however, summoned up on deck, by a voice that roared down to them,
+from above, filling their quarters with a gust of sound.
+
+We were alone now, perhaps,--it was so still.
+
+With an almost imperceptible slowness, Nippers thrust his head out, as
+cautiously as a turtle ... he emerged further.
+
+He made a quick thrust of the arm for a platter of beef and potatoes,
+that stood, untouched, on the table ... someone coughed. We had thought
+we were alone. Nippers jerked back. The tin came down with a clatter,
+first to the bench, then to the floor. A big friendly potato rolled
+under to where we were. We seized on it, divided it, ate it.
+
+Contrary to our conjecture, some of the men must have stayed below.
+Someone jumped out of a bunk.
+
+"There's rats down here!"
+
+"--mighty big rats, if you arsks me."
+
+"It's not rats," and I could hear a fear in the voice that quavered the
+words forth, "I tell you, buddy, this ship is haunted."
+
+"--haunted!" boomed the voice of a man coming down the ladder, "you stop
+this silly nonsense right now ... don't spread such talk as that ...
+it's stowaways!"
+
+We saw a pair of legs to the knees again. We lay still, breathless. A
+watch chain dangled down in a parabolic loop. Then followed a round
+face, beef-red with stooping. It looked under apoplectically at us.
+
+"Ah, me b'yes, c'm on out o' there!"
+
+And out we came, dragged by the foot, one after the other, as I myself
+in my childhood have pulled frogs out from a hole in a brook-bank.
+
+"I've been hearing them for hours, Mister," spoke up the little,
+shrivelled, leathery-skinned West Indian negro, who spoke English
+without a trace of dialect, "and I was sure the place was haunted."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We stood before the captain, cap deferentially in hand.
+
+But he looked like anything but a man in charge of a ship. He was short.
+In outward appearance, moreover, he was like a wax doll. He had
+waxen-white cheeks with daubs of pink as if they had been put there from
+a rouge pot. His hair was nicely scented, oiled, and patted down. His
+small hands were white and perfectly manicured.
+
+Nippers began to snicker openly at him. But the sharp variety and
+incisiveness of the oaths he vented at us, soon disabused us of any
+opinion we might have held that he was sissified....
+
+"What's wrong with _you_, you young ---- ---- ---- ---- you?" began the
+captain. The snicker died slowly from Nipper's lips, and in his face
+dawned an infinite, surprised respect....
+
+Then, after he had subdued us:
+
+"So you're stowaways, eh?... and you think you're going to be given a
+free ride to Brisbane and let go ashore, scot free?... not much! You'll
+either go to jail there or sign up here, as cattlemen for the trip to
+China--even though I can see that your mouths are still wet from your
+mothers' tits!" And he ended with a blasphemous flourish.
+
+Nippers and I looked at each other in astonishment. Of course we wanted
+to sign on as cattlemen. No doubt some of the men hired at Sydney had
+failed to show up at the wharf.
+
+The ship's book was pushed before us.
+
+"Sign here!" I signed "John Gregory" with satisfaction. Nippers signed
+after, laboriously.
+
+"And now get aft with you, you ----!" cursed the captain, dismissing us
+with a parting volley that beat about our ears.
+
+"Gawd, but the skipper's a _right_ man enough!" worshipped Nippers.
+
+We hurried down the ladder to gobble up what was left of the cornbeef
+and potatoes.... Nippers looked up at me, with a hunk of beef sticking
+from his mouth, which he poked in with the butt-end of his knife....
+"Say, didn't the old man cuss wonderful, and him lookin' like such a
+lady!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was plenty of work to do in the few days it took to reach
+Brisbane, where the cattle were to be taken aboard. The boat was an
+ordinary tramp steamer, and we had to make an improvised cattleboat out
+of her. Already carpenters had done much to that effect by erecting
+enclosures on the top deck, the main deck, by putting up stalls in the
+hold. Every available foot was to be packed with the living flesh of
+cattle.
+
+We gave the finishing touches to the work, trying to make the boarding
+and scantling more solid--solid enough to withstand the plunging,
+lurching, and kicking of fear-stricken, wild Queensland steers unused to
+being cooped up on shipboard....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We had made fast to a dock down the Brisbane River, several miles out
+from Brisbane ... nearby stood the stockyards, with no cattle in them
+yet.
+
+In a day's time of lusty heaving and running and hauling we had taken on
+the bales of compressed fodder that were to feed the cattle for the
+twenty-day trip to Taku, China.
+
+Then the little, fiery, doll-like skipper made the tactical error of
+paying each man a couple of bob advance on his forthcoming wages.
+
+In a shouting, singing mob we made for Brisbane, like schoolboys on a
+holiday.
+
+Two shilling apiece wasn't much. But a vagabond can make a little silver
+go far. And there are more friends to be found by men in such a
+condition, more good times to be had--of a sort--than a world held by
+more proper standards can imagine.
+
+In both brothel and pub the men found friends. There were other sailors
+ashore, there were many swagmen just in from the bush--some with
+"stakes" they had earned on the ranches out in the country ... and in
+their good, simple hearts they were not averse to "standing treats."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As if by previous appointment, one by one we drifted together, we
+cattlemen of the _South Sea King_--we drifted together and found each
+other in the fine park near the Queensland House of Parliament.
+
+We had, all of us, already over-stayed our shore-leave by many hours.
+We grouped together in informal consultation as to what should be
+done--should we go back to the ship or not?
+
+"We might run into a typhoon ... with all them crazy cattle on board!"
+voiced one....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nevertheless, perhaps because it was, after all, the line of least
+resistance, because there regular meals awaited us, and a secure place
+of sleep, by twos and threes we drifted back, down the long, hot, dusty
+road, to where the _South Sea King_ lay waiting for us ... the mate, the
+captain, and the cattle-boss furious at us for our over-stayed
+shore-leave....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The cattle had been there these many hours, bellowing and moving
+restlessly in their land-pens, the hot sun blazing down upon them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our cattle-boss, it seems, knew all about the handling of his animals on
+land. But not on sea. When, the following morning, we started early,
+trying to drive the cattle on board ship, they refused to walk up the
+runway. In vain the boss strewed earth and sod along its course, to make
+it seem a natural passage for them ... they rushed around and around
+their pens, kicking up a vast, white, choking dust,--snorting,
+bellowing, and throwing their rumps out gaily in sidelong gallopades ...
+all young Queensland steers; wild, but not vicious. Still full of the
+life and strength of the open range....
+
+Then we scattered bits of the broken bales of their prepared food, along
+the runway, to lure them ... a few were led aboard thus. But the captain
+cried with oaths that they didn't have time to make a coaxing-party of
+the job....
+
+At last the donkey-engine was started, forward. A small cable was run
+through a block, and, fastened by their halters around their horns, one
+after the other the steers, now bellowing in great terror, their eyes
+popping for fear--were hoisted up in the air, poised on high, kicking,
+then swung down, and on deck.
+
+You had to keep well from under each one as he descended, or suffer the
+befouling consequences of his fear ... we had great laughter over
+several men who came within the explosive radius ... till the mate hit
+on the device of tying each beast's tail close before he was jerked up
+into the air.
+
+What a pandemonium ... shouting ... swearing ... whistles blowing
+signals ... the chugging respiration of the labouring donkey-engine ...
+and then the attempted stampede of each trembling, fear-crazy animal as
+soon as he rose four-footed, on deck, after his ride through the sky....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ship was crammed as full as Noah's ark. In the holds and on the main
+deck stood the steers, in long rows....
+
+On the upper deck, exposed to all the weather, were housed the more
+tractable sheep, who had, without objection, bleated their way aboard
+docilely up the runway--behind their black ram ... that the cattle-boss
+had to help on a bit, by pulling him the few first yards by his curly
+horns.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we swam by in the fading day, a pale ghost of a moon was already up.
+Ghostly rows of knee-ing trees stood out like live things in the
+river....
+
+Under the night, off at sea, what with the mooing and baaing through all
+the ship, it seemed like an absurd farmyard that had somehow got on the
+ocean.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were two quarters for the men ... a place under the forecastle
+head, forward--as well as the after-quarters. Nippers and I had been
+separated--he staying aft, while I took up my bunk forward.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the men on the boat, the few that stick in my memory as distinct
+personages:
+
+There was the bloated, fat Scotch boy, whom we called just Fatty, a
+sheepherder by calling. He had signed on for the trip, to take care of
+the sheep on the upper deck;
+
+There was a weak, pathetic cockney, who died of sun-stroke;
+
+The ex-jockey, a bit of a man with a withered left arm--made that way
+from an injury received in his last race, when his mount fell on him;
+
+There was the West Indian Negro, a woolly, ebony wisp of a creature, a
+great believer in ghosts (he who thought we stowaways were ghosts when
+we hid under the bunk). The Irish cattle-boss gave him the job of
+night-watchman, "to break him of his superstitious silliness";
+
+There was the big, black Jamaica cook ... as black as if he was polished
+ebony ... a fine, big, polite chap, whom everyone liked. He had a white
+wife in Southampton (the sailors who had seen her said she was pretty
+... that the cook was true to her ... that she came down to the boat the
+minute the _South Sea King_ reached an English port, they loved each
+other so deeply!) ...
+
+Then there was the giant of an Irishman ... who, working side by side
+with me in the hold, shovelling out cattle-ordure there with me,
+informed me that I looked as if I had consumption ... that I would not
+be able to stand the terrific heat for many days without keeling over
+... but, his prediction came true of himself, not of me.
+
+One morning, not many days out, the little West Indian watchman,
+bringing down the before-daylight coffee and ships-biscuits and rousing
+the men, as was his duty,--found the big fellow, with whom he used to
+crack cheery jokes, apparently sound asleep. The watchman shook him by
+the foot to rouse him ... found his big friend stiff and cold.
+
+The watchman let out a scream of horror that woke us right and proper,
+for _that_ day....
+
+The next day was Sunday. It was a still, religious afternoon.
+
+We men ranged in two rows aft. The body had been sewn up in coarse
+canvas, the Union Jack draped over it.
+
+The captain, dapper in his gold-braided uniform, stood over the body as
+it lay on the plank from which it was to descend into the sea. In a
+high, clear voice he read that beautiful burial-service for the dead ...
+an upward tilt of the board in the hands of two brown-armed seamen, the
+body flashed over the side, to swing feet-down, laden with shot, for
+interminable days and nights, in the vast tides of the Pacific.
+
+No one reached quickly enough. The Union Jack went off with the body,
+like a floral decoration flung after....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We drank the coffee brought to us before dawn, in grouchy, sleepy,
+monosyllabic silence. Immediately after, the cattle were to water and
+feed ... and a hungry lot they were ... but despite their appetites,
+with each day, because of the excessive heat of the tropics, and the
+confined existence that was theirs--such an abrupt transition from the
+open range--they waxed thinner and thinner, acquired more of large-eyed
+mournfulness and an aspect of almost human suffering in their piteous,
+pleading faces....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If the big chap who succumbed to heart failure that night had lived a
+few days longer, he would have wondered still more at me or anyone else
+surviving a day's work in the hold.
+
+For the thermometer ran up incredibly ... hotter and hotter it grew ...
+and down there in the hold we had to shovel out the excrement every
+morning after breakfast. It was too infernal for even the prudish
+Anglo-Saxon souls of us to wear clothes beyond a breechclout, and shoes,
+to protect our feet from the harder hoof.
+
+Our eyes stung and watered from the reek of the ammonia in the
+cattle-urine. What with the crowding, the bad air (despite the canvas
+ventilators let down) and the sudden change from green pasturage to
+dry, baled food, most of the beasts contracted "the skitters." This
+mess was what we had to shovel out through the portholes ... an
+offensive-smelling, greenish, fluidic material, that spilled, the half
+of it, always, from the carefully-held scoop of the shovel.
+
+Cursing, with the bitter sweat streaming off our bodies and into our
+eyes, and with an oblique eye to guard from heat-maddened, frantic
+steer-kicks,--each day, for several hours, we suffered through this hell
+... to emerge panting, like runners after a long race; befouled ... to
+throw ourselves down on the upper deck, under the blue, wind-free sky
+and feel as if we had come into paradise....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I wish I had never come back to this hell-ship, at Brisbane!"
+
+"I wish I had never come aboard at all at Sydney!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At such times, and at other odd ends of leisure, I brought my Westcott
+and Hort's Greek New Testament from my bunk, and with the nasty smell of
+sheep close-by, but unheeded through custom--I studied with greater
+pleasure than I ever did before or since.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I said before, it was not long before these poor steers were
+broken-spirited things.
+
+But there was one among them whose spirit kept its flag in the air,
+"The Black Devil," as the cook had named him fondly ... a steer, all
+glossy-black, excepting for a white spot in the center of his forehead.
+He behaved, from the first, more like a turbulent little bull than a
+gelding. The cook fed him with tid-bits from the galley.
+
+He had evidently been someone's pet before he had been sold for live
+meat, to be shipped to China.
+
+When we took him on board by the horns he showed no fear as he rode in
+the air. And, once on his feet again, and loose on deck, he showed us
+hell's own fight--out of sheer indignation--back there in Brisbane. He
+flashed after us, with the rapid motions of a bullfight in the movies.
+Most of us climbed every available thing to get out of his reach. He
+smashed here and there through wooden supports as if they were of
+cardboard.
+
+The agile little ex-jockey kept running in front of him, hitting him on
+the nose and nimbly escaping--in spite of his wing-like, wasted arm,
+quicker than his pursuer ... that smashed through, while he ducked and
+turned....
+
+"I'll be God-damned," yelled the captain from the safe vantage of the
+bridge, "fetch me my pistol," to the cabin boy, "I'll have to shoot the
+beast!"
+
+All this while the big black Jamaica cook had been calmly looking on,
+leaning fearlessly out over the half-door of the galley ... while the
+infuriated animal rushed back and forth.
+
+The cook said nothing. He disappeared, and reappeared with a bunch of
+carrots which he held out toward "The Black Devil."...
+
+In immediate transformation, the little beast stopped, forgot his anger,
+stretched forth his moist, black nuzzle, sniffing ... and walked up to
+the cook, accepting the carrots. The cook began to stroke the animal's
+nose....
+
+"_You_ little black devil," he said, in a soft voice, "you're all right
+... they don't understand you ... but we're going to be pals--us
+two--aren't we?"
+
+Then he came out at the door to where the steer stood, took "The Black
+Devil," as we henceforth called him, gently by the under-jaw,--and led
+him into a standing-place right across from the galley.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we struck further north under vast nights of stars, and days of
+furnace-hot sunshine, the heat, confinement, and dry, baled food told
+hideously on the animals ... the sheep seemed to endure better, partly
+because they were not halted stationary in one spot and could move about
+a little on the top deck.... But they suffered hardships that came of
+changing weather.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Especially the cattle in the lower hold suffered, grew weak and
+emaciated.... We were ever on the watch to keep them from going down ...
+there was danger of their sprawling over each other and breaking legs in
+the scramble. So when one tried to lie down, his tail was twisted till
+the suffering made him rise to his feet ... sometimes a steer would be
+too weak to regain his feet ... in such a case, in a vain effort to make
+the beast rise, I have seen the Irish foreman twist the tail nearly off,
+while the animal at first bellowed, then moaned weakly, with anguish ...
+a final boot at the victim in angry frustration....
+
+Last, a milky glaze would settle over the beast's eyes ... and we would
+drag him out and up by donkey-engine, swing him over and out, and drop
+him, to float, a bobbing tan object, down our receding ocean-path.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The coast of Borneo hovered, far and blue, in the offing, when we struck
+our first, and last, typhoon. The mate avowed it was merely the tail-end
+of a typhoon; if that was the tail-end, it is good that the body of it
+did not strike down on us.
+
+The surface of the ocean was kicked up into high, ridge-running masses.
+The tops of the waves were caught in the wind and whipped into a wide,
+level froth as if a giant egg-beater were at work ... then water, water,
+water came sweeping and mounting and climbing aboard, hill after
+bursting hill.
+
+The deck was swept as by a mountain-torrent ... boards whirled about
+with an uncanny motion in them. They came forward toward you with a
+bound, menacing shin and midriff,--then on the motion of the ship, they
+paused, and washed in the opposite direction.
+
+Here and there a steer broke loose, which had to be caught and tethered
+again. But in general the animals were too much frightened to do
+anything but stand trembling and moaning ... when they were not
+floundering about....
+
+Down below was a suffocating inferno. For the hatches that were
+ordinarily kept open for more air, had to be battened down till the
+waves subsided.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the very height of the storm, we heard a screaming of the most abject
+fear.
+
+The jockey had passed, in forgetful excitement, too close to his enemy,
+The Black Devil--who had not forgotten, and gave him a horn in the side,
+under the withered arm.
+
+Several sailors carried the bleeding man aft to the captain ... who
+dressed his wound with fair skill. The jockey was not so badly injured,
+all things considered. The thrust had slanted and made only a flesh
+wound ... which enabled the fellow to loaf on a sort of sick-leave,
+during the rest of the trip.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The storm over, frantically we tore off the hatches again ... to find
+only ten steers dead below. The rest were gasping piteously for air. It
+was a day's work, heaving the dead stock overboard ... including the two
+more which died of the after-effects....
+
+When we went to look the sheep over, we found that over a third of them
+had been washed overboard. The rest were huddled, in frightened,
+bleating heaps, wondering perhaps what kind of an insane world it was
+that they had been harried into.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The story of this cattleboat unfolds freshly before me again, out of the
+records of memory ... the pitiful suffering of the cattle ... the lives
+and daily doings of the rowdy, likeable men, who were really still
+undeveloped children, and would so go down to the grave ... with their
+boasting and continual vanity of small and trivial things of life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All the time I was keeping a diary of my adventures ... in a large,
+brown copybook, with flexible covers. I carried it, tightened away,
+usually, in the lining of my coat, but occasionally I left it under the
+mattress of my bunk.
+
+Nippers observed me writing in it one day.
+
+That night it was gone. I surmised who had taken it.
+
+Seeking Nippers, I came upon him haltingly reading my diary aloud to an
+amused circle of cattlemen, in his quarters aft.
+
+"Give me that book back!" I demanded.
+
+He ignored me.
+
+"Give him a rap in the kisser, Skinny!"
+
+I drew back, aiming a blow at Nippers. He flung the book down and was on
+me like the tornado we had just run through ... he was a natural-born
+fighter ... in a twinkling I was on the floor, with a black eye, a
+bleeding mouth.
+
+I flung myself to my feet, full of fury ... then something went in my
+brain like the click of a camera-shutter ... I had an hallucination of
+Uncle Landon, coming at me with a club....
+
+I plumped into a corner, crouching. "Don't hit me any more ... please
+don't, Uncle Lan!"
+
+"He's gone crazy!"
+
+"Naw, he's only a bloody, bleedin' coward," returned another voice, in
+surprise and disgust.
+
+Someone spat on me. I was let up at last.... I staggered forward to my
+bunk. My book had been handed back to me. It's a wonder I didn't throw
+myself into the sea, in disgust over the queer fit that had come over
+me. I lay half the night, puzzling ... was I a coward?
+
+Not unless an unparalleled change had occurred in me. I had fought with
+other children, when a boy ... had whipped two lads at once, when
+working in the Composite factory, that time they spit into my book.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day a fishing-junk hove into sight, just as if it had sailed out of
+a Maxfield Parrish illustration,--swinging there in the mouth of a
+blood-red sunset ... then, like magic, appeared another and another and
+another....
+
+"Fishing-junks," ejaculated the mate, "--pretty far out, too, but a
+Chink'll risk his life for a few bleedin' cash ... and yet he won't
+fight at all ... an' if you do him an injury he's like as not likely to
+up an' commit suicide at your door, to get even!"
+
+"That's a bally orful way to get even with a henemy!" exclaimed a
+stoker, who sat on the edge of the forward hatch.
+
+"I should say so, too!"
+
+Then, far and faint, were heard a crew of Chinese sailors, on the
+nearest junk, singing a curious, falsetto chantey as they hauled on a
+bamboo-braced sail....
+
+"A feller wot never travelled wouldn't bloody well believe they was
+such queer people in the world," further observed the philosophic
+coal-heaver.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next morning the coast of China lay right against us, on the starboard
+side ... we ran into the thick of a fleet of sampans, boats fashioned
+flat like overgrown rowboats, propelled each by a huge sculling oar,
+from the stern ... they were fishers who manned them ... two or three to
+a boat ... huge, bronze-bodied, fine-muscled, breech-clouted men ... as
+they sculled swiftly to give us sea-room each one looked fit to be a
+sculptor's model.
+
+Their bodies shone in the sun like bronze. Several, fearing we might run
+them down, as we clove straight through their midst, raised their arms
+with a shout full of pleading and fright.
+
+"What's the matter? are they trying to murder some of these poor chaps?"
+I asked.
+
+"No ... we're just having a little fun ... what's the life of a Chink
+matter?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I say, if the Chinks up where the Boxers are fighting are big and
+strong as them duffers, here's one that don't want no shore-leave!"
+commented someone, as we stood ranged by the side.
+
+"I always thought Chinamen was runts."
+
+"Oh, it's only city Chinks--mostly from Canton, that come to civilized
+countries to run laundries ... but these are the real Chinamen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the cattle had been unladen, the crew were to be taken down to
+Shanghai and dumped ashore ... as it was an English Treaty port, that
+would be, technically, living up to the ship's articles, which
+guaranteed that the cattlemen aboard would be given passage back to
+English ground....
+
+But I was all excitement over the prospect of making my way ashore to
+where the Allied troops were fighting....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dawn ... we were anchored in Taku Bay among the warships of the Allied
+nations ... grey warships gleaming in the sun like silver ... the sound
+of bugles ... flags of all nations ... of as many colours as the coat of
+Joseph.
+
+"Well, here we are at last!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next day the work of unloading the cattle began ... hoisted again by the
+horns from our boat of heavy draught to the hold of a coasting steamer,
+that had English captain and mates, and a Chinese crew.
+
+Some of the steers were so weak that they died on deck ... as they were
+dying, butchers cut their throats so their beef could be called fresh.
+
+The only one who desired to go ashore there, I made my way, when it was
+dark and the last load of steers was being transferred to shore, down
+below to the hold of the coaster. I stood in a corner, behind an iron
+ladder, so that the cattle couldn't crush me during the night ... for
+the Chinese had turned them loose, there, in a mass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I stumbled ashore at Tongku, a station up a way on the banks of the Pei
+Ho river.
+
+My first night ashore in China was a far cry from the China of my dreams
+... the Cathay of Marco Polo, with its towers of porcelain.... I crept,
+to escape a cold drizzle, under the huge tarpaulin which covered a great
+stack of tinned goods--army supplies. A soldier on guard over the stack,
+an American soldier, spotted me.
+
+"Come, my lad," lifting up the tarpaulin, "what are you doing there?"
+
+"--Trying to keep from the wet!"
+
+"--run off from one of the transports?"
+
+"Yes," was as good an answer as any.
+
+"You're pretty cold ... your teeth are chattering. Here, take a swig o'
+this."
+
+And the sentinel reached me a flask of whiskey from which I drew a nip.
+Unaccustomed as I was to drink, it nearly strangled me. It went all the
+way down like fire. Then it spread with a pleasant warmth all through my
+body....
+
+"Stay here to-night ... rather uncomfortable bed, but at least it's dry.
+No one 'ull bother you ... in the morning Captain ----, who is in charge
+of the commissariat here, might give you a job."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That next morning Captain ---- gave me a job as mate, eighty dollars
+Mex. and a place to sleep, along with others, in a Compound, and find my
+food at my own expense....
+
+Mate, on a supply-launch that went in and out to and from the
+transports, that were continually anchoring in the bay. Our job was to
+keep the officers' mess in supplies....
+
+"And, if you stick to your job six months," I was informed, "you'll be
+entitled to free transportation back to San Francisco."
+
+My captain was a neat, young Englishman, with the merest hint of a
+moustache of fair gold.
+
+Our crew--two Chinamen who jested about us between themselves in a
+continuous splutter of Chinese. We could tell, by their grimaces and
+gestures ... we rather liked their harmless, human impudence ... as long
+as they did the work, while we lazed about, talking ... while up and
+down the yellow sweep of the Pei-ho the little boat tramped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It's too bad you didn't arrive on the present scene a few weeks,
+sooner," said my young captain ... "it was quite exciting here, at that
+time. I used to have to take the boathook and push off the Chinese
+corpses that caught on the prow of the boat as they floated down, thick
+... they seemed to catch hold of the prow as if still alive. It was
+uncanny!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We slept, rolled up in our blankets, on the floor of a Chinese compound
+... adventurers bound up and down the river, to and from Tien-Tsin and
+Woo-shi-Woo and Pekin ... a sort of caravanserai....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though it was the fall of the year and the nights were cold enough to
+make two blankets feel good, yet some days the sun blazed down
+intolerably on our boat, on the river....
+
+When we grew thirsty the captain and myself resorted to our jug of
+distilled water. I had been warned against drinking the yellow,
+pea-soup-like water of the Pei-ho....
+
+But one afternoon I found our water had run out.
+
+So I took the gourd used by the Chinese crew, and dipped up, as they
+did, the river water.
+
+The captain clutched me by the wrist.
+
+"Don't drink that water! If you'd seen what I have, floating in it,
+you'd be afraid!"
+
+"What won't hurt a Chinaman, won't hurt me," I boasted....
+
+The result of my folly was a mild case of dysentery....
+
+In a few days I was so weak that I went around as if I had no bones left
+in my body. And I wanted to leave the country. And I repaired to Captain
+---- who had given me the job, and asked him for my pay and my
+discharge. He lit into me, disgusted, upbraiding me for a worthless
+tramp....
+
+"I might have known that you were of that ilk, from the first, just by
+looking at you!"
+
+He handed me the eighty dollars in Mexican silver, that was coming to
+me.... I repaid the captain the forty I had borrowed, for food.
+
+"Sick! yes, sick of laziness!"
+
+Captain ---- was partly right. I had an uncontrollable distaste for the
+monotony of daily work, repeated in the same environment, surrounded by
+the same scenery ... but I was also quite weak and sick, and I am
+persuaded, that, if I had stayed on there, I might have died.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I sat on one of the wharves and played host to a crowd of romantic
+thoughts that moved in their pageant through my brain ... now I would go
+on to Pekin and see the great Forbidden City. Now I would dress in
+Chinese clothes and beg my way through the very heart of the Chinese
+Empire ... and write a book, subsequently, about my experiences and
+adventures ... and perhaps win a medal of some famous society for it ...
+and I had a dream of marrying some quaintly beautiful mandarin's
+daughter, of becoming a famous, revered Chinese scholar, bringing
+together with my influence the East and the West....
+
+I reached so far, in the dream, as to buy several novels of the Chinese,
+printed in their characters, of an itinerant vendor....
+
+The everyday world swung into my ken again.
+
+Three junks, laden with American marines, dropping down the river from
+Pekin, cut across my abstracted gaze ... the boys were singing.
+
+They marched off on the dock on which I sat. They were stationed right
+where they deployed from the junks. Men were put in guard over them.
+
+At Tien Tsin they had behaved rather badly, I was told by one of
+them,--had gone on a Samshu jag ... a Chinese drink, worse than the
+worst American "rot-gut." ...
+
+"Wisht I c'd git off the dock an' rustle up another drink somewheres."
+
+"They wouldn't let us off this dock fer love nor money," spoke up a
+lithe, blue-shaven marine to me--the company's barber, I afterward
+learned him to be....
+
+"Yah, we got ter stay here all afternoon, an' me t'roat's es dry es
+san'paper."
+
+"Where are they taking you to, from here?"
+
+"Manila!... the _Indiana's_ waitin' out in th' bay fer us."
+
+"--Wish I could get off with you!" I remarked.
+
+"Wot's the matter? On th' bum here?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Immediately the barber and two others, his pals, became intensely,
+suspiciously so, interested in my desire to sail with them....
+
+"--Tell you wot," and the company barber reached into his pocket with a
+surreptitious glance about, "if you'll take these bills an' sneak past
+to that coaster lyin' along the next dock, the Chinese steward 'ull sell
+you three bottles o' whiskey fer these," and he handed me a bunch of
+bills ... "an' w'en you come back with th' booze, we'll see to it that
+you get took out to the transport with us, all right ... won't we,
+boys?"
+
+"--betcher boots we will."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"God, but this is like heaven to me," exclaimed the barber, as he tilted
+up his bottle, while the two others stood about him, to keep him from
+being seen. The three of them drank their bottles of whiskey as if it
+was water.
+
+"That saved me life...."
+
+"An' mine, too. You go to Manila wit' us, all right,--kid!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Toward dusk came the sharp command for the men to march aboard the
+coaster that had drawn up for them. The boys kept their word. They
+loaded me down with their accoutrements to carry. I marched up the
+gangway with them, and we were off to the _Indiana_.
+
+I was the first, almost, to scamper aboard the waiting transport in the
+gathering dusk ... and, to make sure of staying aboard, I hurried down
+one ladder after the other, till I reached the heavy darkness of the
+lowermost hold. Having nothing to do but sleep, I stumbled over some
+oblong boxes, climbed onto one, and composed myself for the night, using
+a coil of rope for a pillow.
+
+I woke to find a grey patch of day streaming down the ladder-way. My
+eyes soon adjusted themselves to the obscurity.
+
+And then it was that I gave a great, scared leap. And with difficulty I
+held myself back from crying out.
+
+Those curious oblong boxes among which I had passed the night--they were
+hermetically sealed coffins, and there were dead soldiers in them.
+Ridges of terror crept along my flesh. Stifling a panic in me, I forced
+myself to go slow as I climbed the iron rungs to the hold above ...
+where living soldiers lay sleeping in long rows....
+
+Still undetected, I scrambled along an aisle between them and put myself
+away in a sort of life-preserver closet. Not till I had heard the
+familiar throb of the propeller in motion for a long time, did I come
+forth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the voyage of, I believe, eight days, I loafed about, lining up
+for rations with the boys ... no one questioned me. My engineer's
+clothes that I had taken, in lieu of part of my wages, from the
+slop-chest of _The South Sea King_, caused the officers of the marines
+to think I belonged to the ship's crew ... and the ship-officers must
+have thought I was in some way connected with the marines ... anyhow, I
+was not molested, and I led a life much to my liking ... an easy-going
+and loafing and tale-telling one ... mixing about and talking and
+listening ... and reading back-number magazines.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day my friend the barber called me aside:
+
+"Say, kid, I've been delegated to tell you that you've got lice." I
+flamed indignant.
+
+"That's a God-damned lie! and whoever told you so is a God-damned liar,
+too! I never had a louse in my life."
+
+"Easy! Easy!... no use gittin' huffy ... if it ain't lice you got, wot
+you scratchin' all the time fer? Look in the crotch of yer pants and the
+seams of your shirt, an' see!"
+
+I _had_ been scratching a lot ... and wondering what was wrong ... my
+breast was all red ... but I had explained it to myself that I was
+wearing a coarse woolen undershirt next my skin ... that I had picked up
+from the slop-chest, also.
+
+The barber walked jauntily away, leaving me standing sullenly alone.
+
+I sneaked into the toilet, looking to see if anyone was about. I turned
+my shirt back. To my horror, my loathing,--the soldier's accusation was
+true!... they were so thick, thanks to my ignorant neglect, that I could
+see them moving in battalions ... if I had been the victim of some
+filthy disease, I could scarcely have felt more beyond the pale, more a
+pariah. I had not detected them before, because I was ignorant of the
+thought of having them, and because their grey colour was exactly that
+of the inside of my woolen shirt.
+
+I threw the shirt away, content to shiver for a few days till we had
+steamed to warmer weather ... I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed
+myself.... I had, up to now, had experience with head-lice only ... as a
+child, in school....
+
+I look back with a shudder even yet to that experience. During my
+subsequent tramp-career I never could grow callous to vermin, as a few
+others that I met, did. Once I met a tramp who advised me not to bother
+about 'em ... and you would soon get used to 'em ... and not feel them
+biting at all ... but most tramps "boil up"--that is, take off their
+clothes, a piece at a time, and boil them--whenever they find
+opportunity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Manila. A brief adventure there ... a bum for a few weeks, hanging
+around soldiers' barracks, blacking shoes for free meals ... till
+Provost Marshal General Bell, in an effort to clear the islands of boys
+who were vags and mascots of regiments, gave me and several other rovers
+and stowaways free transportation back to America....
+
+A brief stop at Nagasaki to have a broken propeller shaft mended: a long
+Pacific voyage ... then hilly San Francisco one golden morning....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All these ocean days I peeled potatoes and helped to dish out rations
+to the lined-up soldiers at meal-times ... one slice of meat, one or two
+potatoes, to a tin plate ...
+
+For long hours I listened to their lying tales and boasting ... then
+lied and boasted, myself....
+
+My most unique adventure aboard the _Thomas_; making friends with a
+four-times-enlisted soldier named Lang, who liked army life because, he
+said, outside of drills and dress parade, it was lazy and easy ... and
+it gave him leisure to read and re-read his Shakespeare. He was a
+Shakespearean scholar....
+
+"It's the best life in the world ... no worries or responsibilities
+about food and lodging--it spoils a fellow for any other kind of life
+... the officers are always decent to a fellow who respects himself as a
+soldier and citizen."
+
+Lang and I became good pals. Day after day I sat listening to him, as,
+to the accompaniment of the rumble and pulse of the great boat a-move,
+he quoted and explained Shakespeare to me, nearly always without the
+book.
+
+His talk was fascinating--except when he insisted on repeating to me his
+own wretched rhymes ... in which he showed he had learned nothing about
+how to write poetry from his revered Shakespeare ... it was very bad
+Kiplingesque stuff ... much like my own bad verse of that period....
+
+Once Lang recited by heart the whole of _King Lear_ to me, having me
+hold a copy of the play, to prove that he did not fumble a single line
+or miss a single word ... which he did not....
+
+Lang was a prodigious drunkard. At Nagasaki I rescued him from the
+water-butt. Coming back drunk on rice wine, he had stuck his head down
+for a cool drink, as a horse does. And in he had tumbled, head-first. If
+I had not seen his legs wiggling futilely in the air, and drawn him
+forth, dripping, he would have drowned, as the butt was too solid for
+his struggles to dump, and he couldn't make a sound for help.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we neared San Francisco several of the boys spoke to me of taking up
+a purse for my benefit. Soldiers are always generous and
+warm-hearted--the best men, individually, in the world.
+
+I said no to them, that they must not take up a collection for me ... I
+did not really feel that way, at heart, but I liked better seeming proud
+and independent, American and self-reliant....
+
+Later on, at the very dock, I acceded ... but now I was punished for my
+hypocrisy. The boys were so eager to be home again, they only threw
+together about five dollars for me ... when, if I hadn't been foolish, I
+might have had enough to loaf with, say a month, at San Francisco, and
+do a lot of reading in the Library, and in books of poetry that I might
+have picked up at second-hand book stores....
+
+However, I gathered together, before I went ashore, two suits of khaki
+and two army blankets, and a pair of good army shoes that afterwards
+seemed never to wear out.
+
+And a young chap named Simmons, who had been sergeant, had joined the
+army by running away from home, took me to an obscure hotel as his valet
+... he wanted to "put on dog," as the Indians say.
+
+He had parents of wealth, back in Des Moines.
+
+I served him as his valet for the two weeks he stayed at the hotel. He
+had been shot through the left foot so that a tendon was severed, and he
+had to walk with a cane, with a foot that flopped at every step.
+
+He gave me fifteen dollars for wages. After he had departed I rented a
+cheap room for a week.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Standing in front of a store on Kearney Street, one afternoon, dressed
+in my suit of soldier's khaki, looking at the display in the window, I
+got the cue that shaped my subsequent adventures in California....
+
+"Poor lad," I heard one girl say to another, standing close by, "he
+looks so sick and thin, I'm sorry for him."
+
+They did not notice that my soldier's uniform had cloth buttons. Simmons
+had made me put cloth buttons on, at the hotel,--had furnished them to
+me--
+
+"I don't want you going about the other way ... you're such a nut, you
+might get into trouble."
+
+Mule-drivers and others in subsidiary service were allowed khaki with
+cloth buttons only ... at that time ... I don't know how it goes now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The girls' taking me for a sick, discharged soldier made me think. I
+would travel in that guise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With a second-hand Shakespeare, in one volume, of wretched print, with a
+much-abused school-copy of Caesar, in the Latin (of whose idiomatic Latin
+I have never tired), an extra suit of khaki, a razor, tooth-brush, and
+tooth-powder--and a cake of soap--all wrapped up in my army blankets, I
+set forth on my peregrinations as blanket-stiff or "bindle-bum."
+
+Where I saw I could escape without awkward questioning, I played the
+convalescent ex-soldier ... I thrived. My shadow-thinness almost turned
+to fatness. It would have, had there been any disposition toward obesity
+in me....
+
+At times I was ashamed of doing nothing ... queer spurts of American
+economic conscience....
+
+Once I worked, plowing ... to drive the horses as far as a tall tree for
+shade, at the end of the third day, sneak back to the house ... and out
+to the highway with my bundle and my belongings, kicking up my heels
+ecstatically, glad to be freed from work.
+
+I plumped down in a fence corner and did not stir till I had read a
+whole play of Shakespeare, and a snatch of my Caesar.
+
+Once or twice, sheriffs who were bent on arresting me because I had no
+visible means of support, let me go, because it awed them to find a
+tramp reading Shakespeare....
+
+"It's a shame, a clever lad like you bein' a bum!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tramps, though anti-social in the larger aspects of society (as, for
+that matter, all special classes are, from millionaires down--or up),
+are more than usually companionable among themselves. I never lived and
+moved with a better-hearted group of people.
+
+By "jungle" camp-fires--("the jungles," any tramp rendezvous located
+just outside the city limits, to be beyond police jurisdiction), in
+jails, on freights ... I found a feeling of sincere companionship ... a
+companionship that without ostentation and as a matter of course, shared
+the last cent the last meal ... when every cent _was_ the last cent,
+every meal the _last_ meal ... the rest depending on luck and
+Providence....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tramps often travel in pairs. I picked up a "buddy" ... a short,
+thick-set man of young middle age, of Scandinavian descent ... so blond
+that his eyebrows were white in contrast with his face, which was ruddy
+with work in the sun. He, like me, was a "gaycat" or tramp who is not
+above occasional work (as the word meant then--now it means a cheap,
+no-account grafter). He had recently been working picking oranges ...
+previous to that, he had been employed in a Washington lumber camp.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Together we drifted along the seacoast south to San Diego ... then back
+again to Santa Barbara ... for no reason but just to drift. Then we
+sauntered over to San Bernardino--"San Berdu," as the tramps call it....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It struck chilly, one night. So chilly that we went into the freightyard
+to put up in an empty box-car till the sun of next day rose to warm the
+world.
+
+We found a car. There were many other men already there, which was good;
+the animal heat of their bodies made the interior warmer.
+
+The interior of the car sounded like a Scotch bagpipe a-drone ... what
+with snoring, breaking of wind in various ways, groaning, and muttering
+thickly in dreams ... the air was sickeningly thick and fetid. But to
+open a side door meant to let in the cold.
+
+Softly my buddy and I drew off our shoes, putting them under our heads
+to serve as pillows, and also to keep them from being stolen. (Often a
+tramp comes along with a deft enough touch to untie a man's shoes from
+his feet without waking him. I've heard of its being done.) We wrapped
+our feet in newspapers, then. Our coats we removed, to wrap them about
+us ... one keeps warmer that way than by just wearing the coat....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The door on each side crashed back!
+
+"Here's another nest full of 'em!"
+
+"Come on out, boys!"
+
+"What's the matter?" I queried.
+
+"'stoo cold out here. We have a nice, warm calaboose waitin' fer ye!"
+
+Grunting and grumbling, we dropped to the cinders, one after the other.
+A posse of deputies and citizens, had, for some dark reason, rounded us
+up.
+
+One or two made a break for it, and escaped, followed by a random shot.
+After that, no one else cared to be chased after by a bullet.
+
+They conducted us to what they had termed "the calaboose," a big,
+ramshackle, one-roomed barn-like structure. Piled in so thick that we
+almost had to stand up, there were so many of us--we were held there
+till next morning.
+
+But we were served, then, a good breakfast, at the town's expense. The
+owner of the restaurant was a queer little, grey-faced, stringy fellow.
+He fed us all the buckwheat cakes and sausages we could hold, and won
+every hobo's heart, by giving all the coffee we could drink ... we held
+our cups with our hands about them, grateful for the warmth.
+
+"Say, you're all right, mister!" ventured a tramp to the proprietor, as
+he walked by.
+
+"Bet your God-damned life I'm all right!... because I ain't nothin' but
+a bum myself ... yes, an' I'm not ashamed of it, neither ... before I
+struck this burg an' started this "ham-and" and made it pay, I was on
+the road same es all o' you!"
+
+"Kin I have more pancakes, boss, an' another cup of coffee?"
+
+"You sure can, bo!... es I was sayin', I'm a bum myself, an' proud of it
+... and I think these here damn bulls (policemen ... who were sitting
+nearby, waiting for us to finish) have mighty little to 'tend to,
+roundin' up you boys, now the orange-pickin' season's over with, an'
+puttin' you away like this ... why, if any one of them was half as
+decent as one o' you bums--"
+
+"Sh! fer Christ's sake!" I admonished, "they're hearing you."
+
+"That's jest what I want 'em to do ... I don't owe nothin' to no man,
+an' it's time someone told 'em somethin'."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Breakfast over, we were marched off to the courthouse. We were turned
+loose together in a large room. We felt so good with the sausage, cakes
+and coffee in our bellies, that we pushed each other about, sang,
+jigged, whistled.
+
+As we had walked in, I had asked, of the cop who walked by my side--who
+seemed affable....
+
+"Say, mister, after all what's the idea?"
+
+"We had to make an example," he returned, frankly.
+
+"I don't quite get you!"
+
+"Last week a bunch of bums dropped off here at our town, and they
+almost ran the diggings for about twenty-four hours ... insulted women
+on the streets ... robbed ice-boxes ... even stole the clothes off the
+lines."
+
+"In other words, you mean that a bunch of drunken yeggs dropped in on
+the town, gutted it, and then jumped out ... and we poor harmless bums
+are the ones that have to pay."
+
+"--guess that's about how it is."
+
+I passed the word along the line. My companion tramps cursed the yegg
+and his ways....
+
+"They're always raisin' hell ... an' we git the blame ... when all we
+want is not loot, but hand-outs and a cup o' coffee ... and a piece of
+change now and then."
+
+The yegg, the tiger among tramps--the criminal tramp--despises the
+ordinary bum and the "gaycat." And they in turn fear him for his
+ruthlessness and recklessness.
+
+He joins with them at their camp-fires ... rides with them on the road
+... robs his store or house, or cracks his safe, then flies on, taking
+the blinds or decking on top of a "flyer." The law, missing the right
+quarry, descends on the slower-moving, harmless bum. And often some poor
+"fall-guy" gets a good "frame-up" for a job he never thought of ... and
+the majesty of the law stands vindicated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The charge against us was vagrancy. We were tried by twos.
+
+"Come on, buddy!... you an' your pal."
+
+My companion and I were led in before, I think, a justice of the peace.
+The latter was kindly-disposed toward me because I was young and looked
+delicate.
+
+When I began my plea for clemency I appropriated the name, career, and
+antecedents of Simmons, the young soldier whose body-servant I had been,
+back in San Francisco. The man on the bench was impressed by my story of
+coming of a wealthy family ... my father was a banker, no less.
+
+The justice waved me aside. He asked my buddy to show his hands. As the
+callouses on the palms gave evidence of recent hard work, he was set
+free along with me. We were the only two who were let off. The rest were
+sent up for three months each, I am told....
+
+And, after all that, what did my buddy do but up and steal my blanket
+roll, with all in it--including my Caesar and Shakespeare--and my extra
+soldier uniform--the first chance he got!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An American who had married a Mexican girl gave me work sawing and
+chopping wood. I stayed with him long enough to earn a second-hand suit
+of clothes he owned, which was too small for him, but almost fitted me
+... civilian clothes ... my soldier clothes were worn to tatters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I picked up another pal. A chunky, beefy nondescript. I was meditating a
+jump across "the desert." The older hoboes had warned me against it,
+saying it was a cruel trip ... the train crews knew no compunction
+against ditching a fellow anywhere out in the desert, where there would
+be nothing but a tank of brackish water....
+
+My new chum, on the other hand, swore, that, to one who knew the ropes,
+it was not so hard to make the jump on the Southern Pacific ... through
+Arizona and New Mexico, to El Paso. He said he would show me how to
+wiggle into the refrigerator box of an orange car ... on either end of
+the orange car is a refrigerator box, if I remember correctly ... access
+to which is gained through the criss-cross bars that hold up a sort of
+trap-door at the top. It was in the cold season, so there was now no ice
+inside. These trap-doors are always officially sealed, when the car is
+loaded. To break a seal is a penitentiary offense.
+
+I stood off and inspected the place I was supposed to go in at. The
+triangular opening seemed too small for a baby to slide through. I
+looked my chunky pal up and down and laughed.
+
+"--think I can't make it, eh?... well, you watch ... there's an art in
+this kind of thing just like there is in anything."
+
+Inch by inch he squeezed himself in. Then he stood up inside and called
+to me to try ... and he would pull me the rest of the way, if I stuck.
+He was plump and I was skinny. It ought to be easy for me. Nevertheless,
+it was the hardest task I ever set myself ... I stuck half-way. My pal
+pulled my shirt into rags, helping me through,--I had handed my coat in,
+previously, or he would have ripped that to pieces, too. It seemed that
+all the skin went off my hips, as I shot inside with a bang. And none
+too soon. A "shack" (brakeman) passed over the tops of the cars at
+almost that very moment. We lay still. He would have handed me a
+merciless drubbing if he had caught me, with my nether end hanging
+helplessly on the outside.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We squatted on the floor of the refrigerator box. When we reached Yuma
+my pal rose to his feet.
+
+"Ain't yer goin' ta throw yer feet fer a hand-out?" he asked me.
+
+"No, I'm going to stick in here till I reach El Paso, if I can."
+
+"What's the fun bein' a bum, if you're goin' ter punish yerself like
+that!"
+
+"I want to find a country where there's growing green things, as soon as
+I can."
+
+"So long, then."
+
+"So long.. don't you think you'd better stick till we reach Tuscon? Some
+of the boys told me the 'bulls' (officers) here have been 'horstile'
+(had it in for the tramp fraternity) ... ever since a yegg bumped off a
+deputy, a while back."
+
+"Naw, I'll take my chances."
+
+As I rode on, alone, I stood up and took in the scenery like a tourist
+... there danced away, and gathered in, the shimmering, sun-flooded
+desert ... an endless flat expanse of silver sage and sentinel cactus. I
+saw bleached bones and a side-cast skull with whitened horns, poking up
+into the sky ... I saw a sick steer straggling alone, exactly like some
+melodramatic painting of Western life ... the kind we see hanging for
+sale in second-rate art stores.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I stuck till Tuscon was reached. There I was all in for lack of food and
+water....
+
+A woman gave me a good "set-down" at her kitchen table. I was as hungry
+for something to read as I was for something to eat. When she walked out
+of the kitchen, leaving me alone for a moment, I caught sight of a
+compact little Bible that lay on the leaf of her sewing machine. Two
+steps, and I had it stowed in my hip pocket, and was back innocently
+eating ... the taking of the Bible was providential. I believe that it
+served as the main instrument, later on, in saving me from ten years in
+the penitentiary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was glad enough to hop to the cinders at El Paso. But El Paso at that
+time was "unhealthy" for hoboes. They were holding twenty or thirty of
+us in the city jail, and mysterious word had gone down the line in all
+directions, that quick telegraph by word-of-mouth that tramps use among
+themselves, to avoid the town--that it was "horstile."...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again rolling miles of arid country. But this time, like a soldier on a
+long march, I was prepared: I had begged, from door to door, enough
+"hand-outs" to last a week ... throwing away most of the bread ...
+keeping the cold meats and the pie and cake. I sat in my open box-car,
+on a box that I had flung in with me, reading my Bible and eating my
+"hand-outs" and a millionaire had nothing on me for enjoyment.
+
+I was half-way to San Antonio when I fell in with as jolly a bunch of
+bums as I ever hope to see in this world ... just outside a little town,
+in the "jungles."
+
+These tramps were gathered together on a definite plan, and I was
+invited to join them in it: the plan was, to go, _en masse_, from town
+to town, and systematically exploit it; one day one man would go to the
+butcher shops, the next, another man would take them, and the first
+would, let's say, beg at the baker's ... and each day a different man
+would take a different section among the houses. Then all the food so
+procured would be put together and shared in common.
+
+As usual, there was among them an individual who held them together--the
+originator of the idea. He was a fat, ruddy-faced alcoholic ex-cook, who
+had never held a job for long because he loved whiskey so much.
+
+Besides being the presiding genius of the gang, he also did all the
+cooking. He loved to cook. Each day he jumbled all the mixable portions
+of the food together, and, in a big tin wash-boiler which he had rescued
+from "the dump" outside of town, he stewed up quite a palatable mess
+which we called "slum" or "slumgullion," or, more profanely,
+"son-of-a-b----."
+
+For plates we used old tomato cans hammered out flat ... for knives and
+forks, our fingers, pocket-knives, and chips of wood.
+
+It was a happy life.
+
+One afternoon mysteriously our leader and cook disappeared--with a broad
+grin on his face. Soon he returned, rolling a whole barrel of beer which
+he had stolen during the night from the back of a saloon ... and had
+hidden it nearby in the bushes till it was time to bring it forth....
+
+We held a roaring party, and had several fights. ("Slopping up" is what
+the tramps call a drinking jamboree.) This was the first time I got
+drunk in my life. It took very little to set me off ... I burned a big
+hole in my coat. I woke lying in the mud near the willows ... and with a
+black eye ... a fellow tramp affectionately showed me his finger that I
+had bitten severely ... for a day we had bad nerves, and lay about
+grumbling....
+
+We kept quite clean. The tramp is as clean as his life permits him to be
+... usually ... the myth about his dirtiness is another of the myths of
+the newspaper and magazine world ... though I have seen ones who were
+extraordinarily filthy....
+
+We "boiled up" regularly ... and hung our shirts and other articles of
+apparel on the near-by willows to dry....
+
+After about ten days of scientific exploitation of them, the "natives"
+of the town on the verge of which we were encamping, began to evidence
+signs of restlessness.
+
+So we moved on to another town by means of a local freight.
+
+Settled there in "the jungles," we hilariously voted to crown the cook
+our king. We held the ceremony, presenting him with a crown made out of
+an old tin pan, which one of the more expert among us hammered into a
+circlet and scoured bright with sand....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But soon I grew tired of the gang and started on alone.
+
+"You'd better beat it on out of the South as quick as you can," an old
+tramp had warned me, "they're hell on a bum down here, and harder yet on
+a Yankee ... no, they haven't forgot _that_ yet--not by a damn sight!"
+
+I was soon to wish that I had listened to the old tramp's wisdom.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the chill grey dip of an early spring dawn I dropped off a freight in
+the yards of the town of Granton.
+
+I drew my threadbare coat closer as I made my way up the track, on the
+look-out for some place to go into and warm myself. Usually, in chilly
+weather, each railroad station throughout the country has a stove a-glow
+in the waiting room ... I found the railroad station, and the stove,
+red-hot, was there ... it was good to be near a fire. In the South it
+can be at times heavily cold. There is a moisture and a rawness in the
+weather, there, that hurts.
+
+I was not alone. Two negro tramps followed me; like myself, seeking
+warmth and shelter. Then came a white tramp.
+
+We stood around the stove, which shone red in the early half-light of
+dawn. We shivered and rubbed our hands. Then we fell into tramps' gossip
+about the country we were in.
+
+The two negroes soon left to catch a freight for Austin. My fellow tramp
+and I stretched ourselves along the benches. He yawned with a loud noise
+like an animal. "I'm worn-out," he said, "I've been riding the bumpers
+all night." I noticed immediately that he did not speak tramp argot.
+
+"And _I_ tried to sleep on the bare boards of a box car."
+
+We had disposed ourselves comfortably to sleep for the few hours till
+wide day, in the station, when the station master came. He poked the
+fire brighter, shook it down, then turned to us. "Boys," not unkindly,
+"sorry, but you can't sleep here ... it's the rules."
+
+We shuffled to our feet.
+
+"Do you mind if we stand about the stove till the sun's high enough to
+take the chill off things?"
+
+"No."
+
+But, standing, we fell to talking ... comparing notes....
+
+"I've been through here once before," remarked my companion, whom I
+never knew otherwise than as "Bud."
+
+"There's a cotton seed mill up the tracks a way toward town, and we can
+sleep there, if you want ... to-day's Sunday, and no one will be around,
+working, to disturb us. In the South it's all right for a tramp to sleep
+among cotton seed, provided he doesn't smoke there."
+
+"Come on, then, let's find a place. I can hardly hold my head up."
+
+We slumped along the track. A cinder cut into my foot through the broken
+sole of one shoe. It made me wince and limp.
+
+Soon we came to the cotton seed house and looked it over from the
+outside. It was a four-square building, each side having a door. All the
+doors but one were locked. That one, when pushed against, tottered over.
+We climbed in over the heavy sacks, seemingly full of cement, with which
+the unlocked door had been propped to. It also was unhinged.
+
+It was dark inside. There were no windows.
+
+We struck matches and explored. We found articles of heavier hardware
+scattered and piled about, some sacks of guano, and about a dozen wired
+bales of hay.
+
+"I thought this was a cotton seed mill," commented Bud, "because I saw
+so many niggers working around it, when I passed by, the other time."
+
+"Well, and what is it, then?"
+
+"Evidently a warehouse--where they store heavier articles of hardware."
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"Twist the wires off a couple of these bales of hay, use it for bedding,
+and have a good sleep anyhow."
+
+"But--suppose we're caught in here?"
+
+"No chance. It's Sunday morning, no one will be here to work to-day, and
+we'll be let alone."
+
+With a little effort we twisted the bales apart and made comfortable
+beds from the hay.
+
+It seemed I had slept but a moment when I was seized by a nightmare. I
+dreamed some monstrous form was bending over me, cursing, breathing
+flames out of its mouth, and boring a hot, sharpened implement into the
+centre of my forehead. I woke, to find, that, in part, my dream was
+true.
+
+There straddled over me an excited man, swearing profusely to keep his
+courage up. He was pressing the cold muzzle-end of a "forty-four-seventy"
+into my forehead.
+
+"Come on! Get up, you ---- ---- ----! Come on out of here, or I'll blow
+your ---- ---- ---- brains out, do you hear?"
+
+Then I caught myself saying, as if from far away, perfectly calm and
+composed, and in English that was almost academic--"my dear man, put up
+your gun and I will go with you quietly. I am only a tramp and not a
+desperado."
+
+This both puzzled and at the same time reassured my captor ... and made
+him swear all the louder,--this time, with a note of brave certainty in
+his tone.
+
+His gun poked me in the back to expedite my exit. I stepped out at the
+open door into streaming daylight that at first dazzled my eyes. I saw
+waiting on the track outside a posse of about fifteen citizens.
+
+"Good work, McAndrews," commended one of them, deep-voiced. The others
+murmured gruff approval.
+
+McAndrews, from conversation that I gathered, was night-watchman in the
+yards. He had one red-rimmed eye. The other was sightless but had a
+half-closed leer that seemed to express discreet visual powers.
+
+"Now go on in an' fetch out the other bum," commanded the deep-voiced
+member of the posse, speaking with authority.
+
+"There wasn't but only this 'un," McAndrews replied, with renewed
+timidity in his voice, scarcely concealed, and jerking his thumb toward
+me.
+
+"But the little nigger said they was--ain't that so, nigger?"
+
+"Yassir, boss--I done seen two o' dem go in dar!" replied a wisp of a
+negro boy, rolling wide eye-whites in fright, and wedged in among the
+hulking posse.
+
+"Well, this 'un's all I seen!" protested the night watchman, "an' you
+betcher I looked about mighty keerful ... wot time did you see 'um break
+in?" turning to the negro child.
+
+"Jes' at daylight, boss!"
+
+"An' wot was you-all a-doin' down hee-ar?"
+
+"He was a-stealin' coal f'um the coalkiars," put in one of the posse,
+"in cohse!"
+
+All laughed.
+
+"Anyhow, I done seed two o' dem," protested the boy, comically, "wot
+evah else I done!"
+
+Everybody was now hilarious.
+
+"Whar's yoah buddy?" I was asked.
+
+"Did unt you-all hev no buddy wit' you?"
+
+"Yes, I did have a buddy with me, but--" trying to give Bud a chance of
+escape,--"but he caught a freight West, just a little bit ago."
+
+"You're a liar," said the one in authority, who I afterward heard was
+the head-clerk of the company that ran the warehouse. The negro boy had
+run to his house and roused him. He had drawn the posse together....
+
+"You're a liar! Your buddy's still in there!"
+
+"No, I'll sweah they haint nobuddy else," protested McAndrews.
+
+But prodded by their urging, he climbed in again over the sacks of
+guano, and soon brought out Bud, who had waked, heard the rumpus, and
+had been hiding, burrowed down under the hay as deep as he could go.
+
+There was a burst of laughter as he stood framed in the doorway, in
+which I couldn't help but join. He had such a silly, absurd, surprised
+look in his face ... a look of stupefied incredulity, when he saw all
+the men drawn up to receive him. From a straggled lock of hair that fell
+over one eye hung several long hay-wisps. His face looked stupid and
+moon-fat. He rolled his big, brown eyes in a despairful manner that was
+unconsciously comic. For he was, instinctively, as I was not, instantly
+and fully aware of the seriousness of what might come upon us for our
+innocent few hours' sleep.
+
+"Come on, boys. Up with your hands till we go through your pockets."
+
+On Bud's hip they found a whiskey flask, quarter-full. In my inside
+pocket, a sheaf of poor verse--I had barely as yet come to grips with my
+art--and, in an outside pocket, the Bible I had filched from the woman's
+sewing machine in Tuscon.
+
+The finding of the Bible on my person created a speechless pause.
+
+Then--
+
+"Good Gawd! A bum with a Bible!"
+
+Awe and respect held the crowd for a moment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The march began.
+
+"Where are you taking us to?"
+
+"To the calaboose."
+
+Down a long stretch of peaceful, Sunday street we went--small boys
+following in a curious horde, and Sunday worshippers with their women's
+gloved hands tucked in timidly under their arms as we passed by. They
+gave us prim, askance glances, as if we belonged to a different species
+of the animal kingdom.
+
+Buck negroes with their women stepped out into the street, while, as is
+customary there,--the white men passed, taking us two tramps to jail. We
+came to a high, newly white-washed board fence. Within it stood a
+two-story building of red brick. On the fence was painted, in big black
+letters the facetious warning, "Keep out if you can." A passage in
+through the gate, and McAndrews first knocked at, then kicked against
+the door.
+
+The sleepy-faced, small-eyed jailer finally opened to us. The wrinkled
+skin of the old man hung loosely from his neck. It wabbled as he talked.
+
+"What the hell's the mattah with you folks?" protested McAndrews, the
+night watchman, "slep' late," yawned the jailer, "it bein' Sunday
+mawhnin'."
+
+By this time the sheriff, summoned from his house, had joined us. A big
+swashbuckler of a man with a hard face, hard blue eyes with quizzical
+wrinkles around them. They seemed wrinkles of good humour till you
+looked closer.
+
+"--s a damn lie ... you 'en Jimmy hev bin a-gamblin' all night,"
+interjected the sheriff, in angry disgust.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They marched us upstairs. The whole top floor, was given over to a huge
+iron cage which had been built in before the putting on of the roof. A
+narrow free space--a sort of corridor, ran all around it, on the
+outside.
+
+Eager and interested, the prisoners already in the cage pushed their
+faces against the bars to look at us. But at the sheriff's word of
+command they went into their cells, the latter built in a row within the
+cage itself, and obediently slammed their doors shut while a long iron
+bar was shot across the whole length, from without ... then the big door
+of the cage was opened, and we were thrust in. The bar was drawn back,
+liberating the others, then, from their cells.
+
+The posse left. Our fellow prisoners crowded about us, asking us
+questions ... what had we done?... and how had we been caught?... and
+what part of the country were we from?... etc. etc....
+
+From the North ... yes, Yankee ... well, when a fellow was both a Yank
+and a tramp he was given a short shrift in the South.
+
+They talked much about themselves ... one thing, however, we all held in
+common ... our innocence ... we were all innocent ... every one of us
+was innocent of the crime charged against us ... we were just being
+persecuted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon a negro preacher, short and squat, who, innocent, was yet
+being held for Grand Jury, delivered us a fearful half-chanted sermon on
+the Judgment Day. I never heard so moving, compelling a sermon. I saw
+the sky glowing like a furnace, the star-touching conflagration of the
+End of Things rippling up the east in increasing waves of fire, in place
+of the usual dawn ... I heard the crying of mankind ... of sinners ...
+for mountains to topple over on them and cover them from the wrath of
+the Lord....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"In co'hse I nevah done it," explained the preacher, "I had some hawgs
+of mah own. Mah hawgs had an under-bit an' an ovah-bit in dere eahs, an'
+de ones I's 'cused o' stealin', dey had only an ovah-bit. But heah dey's
+got me, holdin' me foh de pen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little grey-faced pickpocket--caught at his trade at the Dallas
+Fair, told me how easy it was to add an under-bit to an over-bit to the
+ears of the two hogs stolen, "Sure that sneakin' niggah pahson did it,"
+he averred--but all the while he likewise averred that _he_ hadn't
+picked the pocket of the man from whom he was accused of stealing a
+wallet....
+
+"Yes, I'll admit Ah've done sech things. But this taime they was sure
+wrong. Ef I git framed up," he added, "I mean tuh study law ... pull foh
+a job in th' prison libery an' read up ... an' take up practice when I
+serve my term."
+
+Beside the hog-stealing parson and the little grey-faced pickpocket
+there were also:
+
+A big negro youth, black as shiny coal, who was being held over on
+appeal. He'd been sentenced to ninety-nine years for rape of a negro
+girl ... if it had been a white girl he would have been burned long ago,
+he said ... as it was, the sheriff's son, who was handling his case,
+would finally procure his release--and exact, in return, about ten
+years' of serfdom as payment. And there was a young, hard-drinking
+quarrelsome tenant-farmer, who was charged with having sold two bales of
+cotton not belonging to him, to get money for drinking....
+
+There was another negro, hanging-handed, simous-faced, who had, in a fit
+of jealousy, blown two heads off by letting loose both barrels at once
+of his heavily charged shotgun ... the heads were his wife's ... and her
+lover's. He caught them when their faces were close together ... and
+they were kissing. But he seemed a gentle creature, tractable and
+harmless.
+
+On the outside of the cage in which we were cooped like menagerie
+animals, a negro girl had her cot. She slept and lived out there by the
+big stove which heated the place. She was a girl of palish yellow
+colour. She was a trusty. She had been caught watching outside of a
+house while two grown-up negro women went within to rob.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Monday morning "kangaroo court" was called ... that court which
+prisoners hold, mimicking the legal procedure to which they grow so
+accustomed during their lives. We were arraigned for trial--the charge
+against us, that of "Breaking Into Jail."
+
+The cotton thief served as prosecuting attorney. The negro youth in for
+rape of one of his own colour,--the sergeant-at-arms; while the negro
+preacher in for hog-stealing defended us ... and he did it so well that
+we were let off with ten blows of the strap a-piece. We had no money to
+be mulcted of, nor were we able to procure from friends, as the custom
+is, funds for the buying of whiskey and tobacco.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a few days Bud and I had settled down into the routine of jail-life.
+Every morning we swept our cells, and all the prisoners took turns
+sweeping the corridor. The fine for spitting on the floor was ten lashes
+laid on hard. And each day before breakfast we soaked the seams of our
+clothes in vile-smelling creosote to kill off the lice and nits. We had
+no chance to bathe, and were given but little water to wash our face and
+hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I wonder what they are going to do with us?"
+
+"Anything they please," answered Bud gloomily.
+
+"From thirty to ninety days on the county farm, I suppose?"
+
+"We'll be lucky if we don't get from four to ten years in the pen."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Burglary--didn't we break into that warehouse?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our meals were passed in to us through an open space near the level of
+the floor, at the upper end of the cage, where a bar had been removed
+for that purpose. We'd line up and the tin plates would be handed in,
+one after the other ... two meals a day. For breakfast a corn pone of
+coarse, white corn meal, and a bit of fried sow-belly. For dinner, all
+the water we could drink. For supper, breakfast all over again, with
+the addition of a dab of greens. On rare occasions the sheriff's son or
+the jailer went hunting ... and then we'd have rabbit. The sheriff had
+the contract, at so much per head, for feeding the prisoners.
+
+Each morning I used to ask the jailer for the occasional newspaper with
+which he covered the basket in which he brought our food to us. One
+morning my eyes fell upon an interesting item:
+
+The story of how two young desperadoes had been caught in the warehouse
+beside the railroad track, in the act of committing burglary ... the
+tale of our capture was briefly told ... the bravery of the night
+watchman and the posse extolled ... and the further information was
+conveyed, that, having waved preliminary examination (and we had, for
+they told us the justice was continually too drunk to examine us) we
+were being held over for Grand Jury ... on a charge of burglary.
+
+Though he had predicted this, the actuality of it struck Bud all of a
+heap. He paced up and down the cage for the full space of an hour,
+hanging his ungainly head between his shoulders in abandonment to
+despair.
+
+My reaction was a strange one. I wanted to sing ... whistle ... dance
+... I was in the midst of adventure and romance. I was a Count of Monte
+Cristo, a Baron von Trenck. I dreamed of linguistic and philosophic
+studies in the solitude of my cell at the penitentiary till I was master
+of all languages, of all wisdom, or I dreamed of escape and of rising to
+wealth and power, afterwards, so that I would be pardoned and could come
+back and magnanimously shame with my forgiveness the community that had
+sent me up.
+
+Bud stopped his pacing to and fro to stand in our cell-doorway. I was
+sitting on a stool, thinking hard.
+
+"We can't do a thing," said Bud, "we're in for it, good and proper."
+
+"--tell you what _I'll_ do," I responded, "I'll write a letter to the
+owner of the warehouse and appeal to his humanity."
+
+"You romantic jack-ass," yelled Bud, his nerves on edge. He walked away
+angry. He came back calmer.
+
+"Look here, Gregory, I want you to excuse that outburst--but you _are_ a
+fool. This is _real life_ we're up against now. You're not reading about
+this in a book."
+
+"We'll see what can be done," I returned.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the extreme end of the big cage, the end furthest from the entrance
+door, stood two cells not occupied. The last of these I had chosen for
+my study, a la Monte Cristo. The sheriff's son had lent me a dozen of
+Opie Reid's novels, a history of the Civil War from the Southern
+viewpoint, an arithmetic, and an algebra. Here all day long I studied
+and wrote assiduously. And it was here I went to sit on my stool and
+write the letter to the owner of the warehouse ... a certain Mr.
+Womber....
+
+In it I pointed out the enormity of sending to the penitentiary two
+young men, on a merely technical charge of burglary. For if we had gone
+into the place to rob, why had we so foolishly, then, gone to sleep? And
+what, at the final analysis, could we have stolen but bales of hay,
+sacks of guano, and plowshares? All of them too unwieldy to carry away
+unless we had other conveyance than our backs. It was absurd, on the
+face of it.
+
+Furthermore, I appealed to him, as a Christian, to let us go free ... in
+the name of God, not to wreck our lives by throwing us, for a term of
+years, into contact with criminals of the hardened type--to give us one
+more chance to become useful citizens of our great and glorious country.
+
+Bud laughed sneeringly when I read the letter aloud to him ... said it
+was a fine effort as a composition in rhetoric, but I might expect
+nothing of it--if the perpetually drunk jailer really brought it to its
+destination--except that it would be tossed unread into the
+wastebasket....
+
+I pleaded with the jailer to deliver it for me ... told him how
+important it would be to our lives ... adjured him to consider our
+helpless and penniless state. He promised to deliver it for me.
+
+"I have nothing to give you, now," I ended, "but, if I ever get free,
+I'll send you twenty-five dollars or so from up home, when I reach the
+North."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A prisoner's first dream is "escape." Voices outside on the street, the
+sight of the tops of green trees through bars, dogs barking far away,
+the travels of the sun as shown by moving bands of light on the walls
+and in the cells--all remind him of the day when he was, as he now sees
+it, happy and free ... he forgets entirely, in the midst of the jail's
+black restraints, the lesser evils of outside, daily life. Even the
+termagant wife is turned into a domestic angel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Under the smoky prison lamp made of a whiskey bottle filled with oil,
+and a shred of shirt drawn through a cork, we planned to cut out.
+
+"The way to do it is easy," said the little pickpocket, "in the sole of
+every good shoe is a steel spring. I'll take the steel from my shoe.
+There's already one bar removed from the chuck-hole (No use trying to
+reproduce the dialect). If we saw out another bar, that will give us
+enough room for going through. Then it will be easy to dig out the
+mortar between the bricks, in the jail wall. Once out, we can make for
+the river bottoms, and, by wading in the water, even their bloodhounds
+can't track us."
+
+"And once I get over into Indian Territory or Arkansas, you'll never see
+me in Texas again," I muttered.
+
+"How'll we conceal where we've been sawing?" Bud asked.
+
+"By plugging up the grooves with corn bread blackened with soot that we
+can make by holding the wick of this smoky lamp against the
+cage-ceiling."
+
+"And how'll we keep folks from hearing the sawing?"
+
+"By dancing and singing while Baykins here" (alluding to a "pore white"
+fiddler who had almost killed a man at a dance) "while Baykins here
+plays 'whip the devil.'"
+
+The very next day we began dancing and singing and taking turns at the
+chuckhole bar.
+
+"Whip the Devil" is an interminable tune like the one about the "old
+woman chasing her son round the room with a broom."...
+
+The mistake was, that in our eagerness we "whipped the devil" too long
+at a time. Naturally, the jailer grew suspicious of such sudden and
+prolonged hilarity. But even at that it took almost a week for them to
+catch on. We knew it was all up when, one morning at breakfast, the
+sheriff came in with the jailer.
+
+"Boys, all back into your cells!" he growled.
+
+The long bar was thrown over our closed doors.
+
+The sheriff stooped down and inspected the chuck-hole.
+
+"Why, Jesus Christ, they'd of been through in two more nights. It's good
+we caught them in time or they'd of been a hell of a big jail-delivery
+... do you mean to tell me," turning to the jailer, "you never noticed
+this before?" and with one finger he raked out the blackened corn bread.
+
+"You see, I'm a little near-sighted, Mistah Jenkins."
+
+"Too damned near-sighted, an' too damned stupid, too."
+
+The big iron door of the cage was locked again, the long bar thrown off
+our cell doors.
+
+"Now, you sons of b---- can come out into the cage again; but, mind you,
+if any of you try such a thing again, I'll take you out one by one and
+give you all a rawhiding."
+
+We received the abuse in sullen silence. For three days our rations
+lacked cornpone, for punishment.
+
+We decided among ourselves that the negro preacher, to stand in well
+with the authorities, had given us away....
+
+And if he had not, panic-stricken, pleaded with the sheriff to be taken
+out and put in a separate cell, I believe we would have killed him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was one more way. It was so simple a way that we had not thought
+of it before. The mulatto girl, who slept by the big stove, on a cot,
+just outside the cage ... a trusty and the jailer's unwilling concubine
+... this slim, yellow creature was much in love with the lusty young
+farmer who had stolen the bales of cotton and sold them for a drunk. And
+it was he who suggested that, through her, we get possession of the
+keys. For, every day, she informed us, she passed them by where they
+hung on a nail, downstairs, as she swept and cleaned house for the
+jailer.
+
+It was not a difficult matter to procure them. She would bring them up
+to us and hand them in through the chuck-hole, which the village
+blacksmith had repaired and once more reinforced with extra bars, "so
+them bastards won't even think of sawing out again," as the jailer had
+expressed it.
+
+The evening she handed the keys in to us we were so excited we wanted to
+have "Whip the Devil" played again for our singing and dancing. But this
+might have once more awakened suspicion. Before, we had raised such a
+row as to have caused pedestrians to stop and listen in groups,
+wondering what made the men inside so happy....
+
+There were three separate locks on the great cage door. One, two of them
+went back with an easy click. For the third we could find no key. There
+was nothing else to do now but to have recourse to singing and dancing
+again. Baykins started sawing his fiddle furiously while the big negro
+in for rape hammered and hammered on the lock to break it, with one
+prison stool after another, till all were tossed aside, broken as
+kindling wood is broken. It was good that the jailer was either deaf,
+or, like the heathen gods in the Old Testament, away on a journey.
+Finally, we gave up in despair. The big negro collapsed with a wail. The
+first sign of weakness I ever detected in him.
+
+"Now it's shore either ninety-nine yeahs in de pen foh me, or ten yeahs
+for th' sheriff's son foh lawyah fees ... an' the footprints in de
+flowah bed ... of the man what done de rape was two sizes biggah dan
+mine."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day the jailer, of course, missed the keys. Panic-stricken, the
+mulatto girl was afraid to slip them back to their accustomed nail, for
+fear she'd be seen at it; or was it out of vindictiveness against the
+jailer that she had now actually hidden them somewhere (for, finding
+them of no use, we had handed them back to her)!
+
+That same afternoon the sheriff, with his son and the little,
+shrivelled, stuttering, half-deaf jailer, came in at the door of the big
+room. It was easy to see what they wanted. They wanted the keys and they
+were going to make the girl confess where they were ... as she was the
+only other person, beside the prison authorities, that was in the way to
+come at them.
+
+"Martha, we want them keys! Show us where they is, like a good girl!"
+
+"'Deed, Ah don' know where dey is a-tall, Marse Sheriff!"
+
+"Come on, gal, you was the only one downstairs exceptin' Jacklin heah!"
+pointing to the jailer.
+
+The jailer nodded his head asseveratingly.
+
+"Yes, Martha, tell us whar the keys air," urged the latter, with
+caressing softness and fright in his voice. He didn't want his mistress
+whipped.
+
+
+"If you don't, by God, I'll whup the nigger hide clean off yore back,"
+and the sheriff reached for the braided whip which his son Jimmy handed
+him.
+
+"I sweah Ah don' know where dey is!"
+
+"You dirty liah," taking out a watch; "I'll give you jest five minutes
+t' tell, an' then--" he menaced with the up-lifted whip.
+
+In stubborn silence the girl waited the five minutes out.
+
+"Jimmy!... Jacklin!... throw her down an' hold her, rump up, over that
+cot." They obeyed. With a jerk the sheriff had her dress up and her bare
+buttocks in view.
+
+"I'm a-goin' to whup an' whup till you confess, Martha."
+
+Crack! Crack! Crack! the whip descended, leaving red whelts each time.
+The mulatto girl writhed, but did not cry quits. Beads of perspiration
+glistened on the jailer's face. The girl shook off his lax grip on her
+arms ... the sheriff's son was holding her legs. We were crowded against
+the bars, angry and silent. We admired the girl's hopeless pluck. We saw
+she was holding out just to, somehow, have vengeance on the jailer for
+her being held in unwilling concubinage by him, hoping he would catch it
+hard for having let the keys hang carelessly in open view, and so,
+stolen.
+
+"Damn you, Jacklin," shouted the sheriff, "I believe you're a little
+soft on the gal ... come here ... you swing the whip an' I'll hold her
+arms."
+
+In mute agony Jacklin obeyed ... whipping the woman of whom he was fond.
+
+"Harder, Jacklin, harder," and the sheriff drew his gun on him to
+emphasise the command.
+
+Under such impulsion, a shower of heavy blows fell. The girl screamed.
+
+"I'll give up ... Oh, good Lordy, I'll give up."
+
+And she dug the keys out from under the mattress across which they had
+whipped her.
+
+After they had gone she lay crying on her face for a long while. When
+night came she still lay crying. Nothing any of us could say would
+console her. Not even the little white cotton thief had power to allay
+her hurt....
+
+At last we began cursing and railing at her. That made her stop, after a
+fashion. But still she occasionally gave vent to a heart-deep, dry,
+racking sob.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Locked in there behind bars and forced to be impotent onlookers, the
+whipping we had witnessed made us as restless as wild animals. That
+night, under the dim flare of our jail-made lamps, the boys gambled as
+usual, for their strips of paper,--and as eagerly as if it were real
+currency. I, for my part, drew away to the vacant cell at the far end of
+the cage to study and read and dream my dreams....
+
+As I sat there I was soon possessed with a disagreeable feeling that a
+malignant, ill-wishing presence hovered near. I shifted in my seat
+uneasily. I looked up. There stood, in the doorway, the lusty young
+farmer who was in for stealing the bales of cotton. He wore an evil,
+combative leer on his face. He was "spoiling" for a quarrel--just for
+the mere sake of quarrelling--that I could see. But I dissembled.
+
+"Well, Jack?" I asked gently.
+
+"You're a nice one," he muttered, "you pale-faced Yankee son of a b----
+... think you're better 'n the rest of us, don't ye?... readin' in yore
+books?"
+
+"Nonsense, what are you picking at me for? I'm not harming anybody, am
+I?"
+
+"No, but you're a God damned fool!"
+
+"Look here, what have I ever done to you?"
+
+"Nothin', only you're a white-livered stinker, an' I'm jest a-spoilin'
+foh a fight with you-all."
+
+"But I don't want to fight with you."
+
+"I'll make you," he replied, striding in; and fetching me a cuff on the
+ear ... then, in a far-away voice that did not seem myself, I heard
+myself pleading to be let alone ... by this time all the other boys had
+crowded down about the cell to see the fun.
+
+I was humiliated, ashamed ... but, try as I would, the thought and
+vision of my uncle came on me like a palsy.
+
+Bud stepped up. He had always been so meek and placid before that what
+he did then was a surprise to me.
+
+"_I'll_ fight!"
+
+"What! you?" glowered the young farmer, surprised.
+
+"Yes, I'll give you all the fighting you want, you dirty cotton thief!"
+
+Instantly the farmer made at him. Bud ran in, fetched him two blows in
+the face, and clinched.
+
+It was not going very well for the desperado. From somewhere on his
+person he whipped forth a knife, and, with a series of flashes through
+the air, began stabbing Bud again and again in the back.
+
+I thank God for what came over me then. Too glad of soul to believe it,
+I experienced a warm surge of angry courage rushing through me like an
+electric storm. All the others were panic-stricken for the moment. But I
+burst through the group, rushed back to the toilet, and, with frenzied
+strength, tore loose a length of pipe from the exposed plumbing. I came
+rushing back. I brought down the soft lead-pipe across "Jack's" ear,
+accompanying the blow with a volley of oaths in a roaring voice.
+
+The farmer whipped about to face his new antagonist, letting Bud drop
+back. Bud sank to the iron floor. The farmer was astonished almost to
+powerlessness to find facing him, with a length of swinging pipe in his
+hand, the boy who had a few minutes before been afraid.
+
+But he rapidly recovered and came on at me, gibbering like an incensed
+baboon.
+
+By this time all the humiliations I had suffered in the past, since
+succumbing to the fear-complex that my uncle had beaten into me--all the
+outrage of them was boiling in me for vengeance. I saw the blood bathing
+the torn ear of my antagonist. It looked beautiful. I was no longer
+afraid of anything. Yelling my uncle's name I came on ... I beat the
+knife out of the other's hand and bloodied his knuckles with the next
+blow. I beat him down with rapid blows, threshing at him, shouting and
+yelling exultantly.
+
+The other men thought me gone crazy. I had, for the time, gone crazy.
+The fellow lay at my feet, inert. I stopped for the moment.
+
+In that moment the gang began to close in on me, half frightened
+themselves. I threatened them back.
+
+"By hell, I've had enough of bullying," I shouted wildly; "I'm not
+afraid of anything or anybody any more ... if there's anyone else here
+that wants a taste of this pipe, let them step up."
+
+"We ain't a-tryin' to fight you-all," called out the big negro who was
+in for rape, "we jest don' want you to kill him an' git hung foh
+murduh."
+
+At the word "murder" I stepped quickly back.
+
+"Well, don't let him come bothering me or my pal for a fight any more
+when we've done nothing to him."
+
+"Don' worry, he won't no moh!" assured the fiddler....
+
+I threw down the lead pipe. It had seemed to me that all the while it
+was my Uncle Landon who had received the blows.
+
+The rough-neck farmer was in bad shape; he was bloodied all over like a
+stuck pig. The mulatto girl on the outside had for the last five minutes
+been occupied in calling out of the window for help. She managed to
+attract the attention of a passerby-by.
+
+"What's the matter?" was called up to her....
+
+"The jailer ain't downstairs ... an' de boys is killin' each other up
+heah!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By the time the angry-faced sheriff came with his son, the jailer, and a
+couple of doctors, we had quieted down.
+
+Bud and the farmer were taken out; by the side of each a pail of water
+was placed ... they were seated on stools, stripped to the waist. The
+surgeons dressed their wounds as if on a battlefield. "Jack" needed ten
+stitches in his scalp.... Bud had four knife wounds that demanded sewing
+up. Both the boys went pale like ghosts and spewed their bellies empty
+from weakness and loss of blood....
+
+"Mind you, you chaps in there have raised 'bout enough hell ... ef I
+hear o' any more trouble, I'll take you all out one by one an' treat
+each one o' you-all to a good cowhidin', law or no law!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was let alone after that. My cowardice had gone forever. I was now a
+man among men. I was happy. I saw what an easy thing it is to fight, to
+defend yourself. I saw what an exhilaration, a pleasure, the exchanging
+of righteous blows can be.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Always my dream was of being a big man when I got out--some day. Always
+I acted as if living a famous prison romance like that of Baron Von
+Trenck's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I collected from the living voices of my fellow prisoners innumerable
+jail and cocaine songs, and rhymes of the criminal world. I wrote them
+down on pieces of wrapping paper that the jailer occasionally covered
+the food-basket with in lieu of newspaper.
+
+  "Oh, coco-Marie, and coco-Marai,
+  I'se gon' ta whiff cocaine 'twill I die.
+  Ho! (sniff) Ho! (sniff) baby, take a whiff of me!"
+
+(The sniffing sound indicating the snuffing up into the nostril of the
+"snow," or "happy dust," as it is called in the underworld.)
+
+Then there was the song about lice:
+
+  "There's a lice in jail
+  As big as a rail;
+  When you lie down
+  They'll tickle your tail--
+  Hard times in jail, poor boy!..."
+
+And another, more general:
+
+  "Along come the jailer
+  About 'leven o'clock,
+  Bunch o' keys in his right hand,
+  The jailhouse do'h was locked....
+  'Cheer up, you pris'ners,'
+  I heard that jailer say,
+  'You got to go to the cane-brakes
+  Foh ninety yeahs to stay!'"
+
+As you can guess, most of these jail songs and ballads of the underworld
+could only be printed in asterisks. I was hoping, in the interests of
+folklore, to preserve them for some learned society's private printing
+press.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A fresher green came to the stray branches of the trees that crossed our
+barred windows. The world outside seemed to waken with bird-song. It was
+spring, and time for the sitting of the grand jury that was to decide
+whether we were, each of us, to be held over for trial by petty jury ...
+days of fretful eagerness and discontent ... from the windows the yellow
+trusty-girl said she could see lines of buggies driving in to town. It
+was the custom of farmers for miles around to drive in to their county
+seat during the court assizes ... a week or so of holidays like a
+continuous circus for them.
+
+When the sheriff would have occasion to come into the room in which
+stood our big cage, the boys would crowd up to the bars, each one hoping
+for news favourable to his case ... the prevailing atmosphere was one of
+hope.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The negro who had murdered his wife and her sweetheart with a shotgun
+had already had his trial. He was--and had been--but waiting the arrival
+of the prison contractor, as the latter went from county jail to county
+jail, gathering in his flock, and taking them away, chained together, to
+the penitentiary and the cane brakes ... "where only a big buck nigger
+can live," the little pickpocket had told me, with fear in his voice....
+
+He came ... the contractor ... to our jail at midnight. All of us leaped
+from our mattresses to witness the dreary procession of neck-chained and
+be-manacled convicted men. In the light of the swinging lanterns, a
+lurid spectacle. Our man was taken out and chained in with the gang.
+They clanked away down the stairs, leaving us who remained with heavy
+chains on our hope instead of on our necks and hands and legs ...
+because of the sight we had just seen. For the passing day or so we were
+so depressed that we wandered about saying nothing to each other, like
+dumb men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One after the other the men had true bills found against them, and
+little slips of folded paper were thrust in to them through the bars of
+their cells. And shyster lawyers who fatten on the misfortunes of the
+prison-held being, began to hold whispered conversations (and
+conferences) from without, mainly to find out just how much each
+prisoner could raise for fees for defence....
+
+Bud and I were the only ones left. All the others had had true bills
+found against them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But there came an afternoon when the big, hulky sheriff, with the cruel,
+quizzical eyes, came to the back bars of our cell and summoned us up
+with a mysterious air....
+
+"Well, boys," he began, pausing to squirt a long, brown stream of
+tobacco juice, "well, boys--" and he paused again.
+
+My nerves were so on edge that I controlled with difficulty a mad
+impulse to curse at the sheriff for holding us in such needless
+suspense....
+
+Taking another deliberate chew off his plug, he told us that after
+mature deliberation the grand jury had decided that there was not enough
+grounds for finding a true bill against us, and, as a consequence, we
+were to be let go free.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following morning I had the satisfaction of hearing from old
+Jacklin, the jailer, that Womber, the owner of the warehouse, had
+himself gone before the grand jury and informed them that he did not
+wish to press the charge of burglary against us....
+
+Womber, Jacklin said, had received my letter and at first had tossed it
+aside ... even thrown it contemptuously into the wastebasket. But his
+wife and daughter had raked it out and read it and had, day and night,
+given him no peace till he had promised to "go easy on the poor boys."
+
+This was my triumph over Bud--the triumph of romance over realism.
+
+"I'm glad we're getting out, but there's more damn fools in the world
+than I thought," he remarked, with a sour smile of gratification.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now, with new, trembling eagerness, we two began waiting for the
+hour of our release. That very afternoon it would be surely, we thought
+... that night ... then the next morning ... then ... the next day....
+
+But until a week more had flown, the sheriff did not let us go. In order
+to make a little more profit on his feeding contract, averred our
+prisoners.
+
+But on Saturday morning he came to turn us loose. By this time we seemed
+blood brothers to the others in the cage ... negro ... mulatto ... white
+... criminal and vicious ... weak, and victims of circumstance ...
+everything sloughed away. Genuine tears stood in our eyes as with strong
+hand-grips we wished the poor lads good luck!
+
+We stumbled down the jail stairway up which, three months before, we had
+been conducted to our long incarceration in the cage. The light of free
+day stormed in on our prison-inured eyes in a blinding deluge of white
+and gold ... we stepped out into what seemed not an ordinary world, but
+a madness and tumult of birds, a delirious green of trees too beautiful
+for any place outside the garden of Paradise.
+
+"Come on," said Bud, "let's go on down the main street and thank Womber
+for not pressing the case--"
+
+"To hell with Womber!"
+
+"Well, then, I'm going to thank him."
+
+"I'm grateful enough.... I might write him a letter thanking him ...
+but I'm not anxious to linger in this neighbourhood."
+
+So Bud and I parted company, shaking hands good-bye; he headed west ...
+to China and the East, finally, he said ... I never knew his real name
+... neither of us gave his right name to the town's officials....
+
+As I sought the railroad tracks again, the good air and my unwonted
+freedom made me stagger, so that several negroes laughed at me heartily,
+thinking I was drunk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I sat down on a railroad tie and tenderly and solicitously took a brown
+package out of my inside pocket--the brown paper on which I had
+inscribed with enthusiasm the curious songs of jail, cocaine, criminal,
+and prostitute life I had heard during my three months' sojourn behind
+bars.
+
+I looked them over again. With all their smut and filth, they were yet
+full of naive folk-touches and approximations to real balladry. I was as
+tender of the manuscript as a woman would be with her baby.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sky grew overcast. A rain storm blew up. A heavy wind mixed with
+driving wet ... chilly ... I found shelter under a leaky shed ... was
+soggy and miserable ... even wished, in a weak moment, for the
+comparative comfort of my cell again....
+
+The fast freight I was waiting for came rocking along. I made a run for
+it in the rapidly gathering dusk. I grabbed the bar on one side and made
+a leap for the step, but missed, like a frantic fool, with one
+foot--luckily caught it with the other, or I might have fallen
+underneath--and was aboard, my arms almost wrenched from their sockets.
+
+Not till I had climbed in between the cars on the bumpers did I realise
+that my coat had been torn open and my much-valued songs jostled out.
+
+Without hesitation I hurled myself bodily off the train. My one idea to
+regain the MSS. I landed on my shoulders, saw stars, rolled over and
+over. I groped up and down. And tears rained from my eyes when I
+understood those rhymes were lost forever....
+
+It was midnight before I caught another freight. I climbed wearily into
+an empty box car while the freight was standing still. I was seen. A
+brakeman came to the door and lifted up his lantern, glancing within, I
+was crouching, wet and forlorn, in a corner of the car, waiting for the
+freight to be under way.
+
+"Come on out with you! Hit the grit!" commanded the "shack" grimly.
+
+I rose. I came to the door. I hated him in my heart, but quite simply
+and movingly I recited the story of my imprisonment, ending by asking
+him to let me ride, in the name of God.
+
+He crunched away down the path, his lantern bobbing as he went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All night long I rode ... bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump! All
+night long my head was a-ferment with dreams of the great things I would
+achieve, now that I was free of the shadow of imprisonment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I walked down the streets of Haberford once more, though I was
+leathery and stronger-looking, my adventures had added no meat to my
+bones. I was amused at myself as I walked along more than usually erect,
+for no other reason than to keep my coat-tail well down in back in order
+not to show the hole in the seat of my trousers. As I came down the
+street on which my father and I had lived, an anticipatory pleasure of
+being recognised as a sort of returned Odysseus beat through my veins
+like a drum. But no one saw me who knew me. It hurt me to come home,
+unheralded.
+
+I came to the house where I had dwelt. I pulled the bell. There was no
+answer. I walked around the corner to the telegraph office. I was
+overjoyed to see lean, lanky Phil, the telegraph operator, half
+sleeping, as usual, over the key of his instrument.
+
+"Hel-lo, John Gregory!" he shouted, with glad surprise in his voice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He telephoned my father ... who came over from the works, running with
+gladness. I was immediately taken home. I took three baths that
+afternoon before I felt civilised again....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father had returned to the Composite Works. I was alone in my little
+room, with all my cherished books once more. They had been, I could
+plainly observe, kept orderly and free of dust, against cay home-coming.
+I took down my favourite books, kissing each one of them like a
+sweetheart. Then I read here and there in all of them, observing all the
+old passages I had marked. I lay in all attitudes. Sprawling on the
+floor on my back, on my belly ... on my side ... now with my knees
+crossed....
+
+Whitman, Shakespeare, Scott, Shelley, Byron ... Speke, Burton, Stanley
+... my real comrades!... my real world! Rather a world of books than a
+world of actuality!...
+
+I was so glad to be among my books again that for a month I gave no
+thought to the future. I did nothing but read and study ... except at
+those times when I was talking to people prodigiously of my trip and
+what I had seen and been through. And naturally and deftly I wove huge
+strips of imagination and sheer invention into the woof of every tale or
+anecdote....
+
+I captained ships, saw Chinese slaughtered by the thousands, fought
+bandits on the outskirts of Manila, helped loot the palace of the
+empress in the Sacred City at Pekin ... tales of peril and adventure
+that I had heard others relate at camp-fires, in jail, in the
+forecastle, on the transport, I unhesitatingly appropriated as my own
+experiences.
+
+All the papers printed stories about me. And I was proud about it. And I
+became prouder still when I sold a story in two parts to a New York
+Sunday paper ... I liked the notoriety....
+
+But as usual, the yarns I retailed struck in upon my own imagination,
+too ... just as had my earlier stories of killing Indians. Particularly
+the tale I had related of having seen dead Chinamen in heaps with their
+heads lopped off. A nightmare of this imaginary episode began to come to
+me. And another dream I had--of a huge Boxer, with a cutlass, standing
+over me. And he was about to carve me piecemeal while I lay bound and
+helpless before him. The dream persisted so strongly that, after I
+awoke, I still seemed to see him standing in a corner of my room. And I
+cried aloud. And felt foolish when it brought my father in. So I stopped
+making up adventures, especially the disagreeable ones, because they
+eventually had more effect on me than they did on my auditors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father had changed boarding places ... but, as usual, it was not
+better food, but a little, dark widow that attracted him to that
+boarding house.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+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
+mediaeval 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Barton was a strange, strong-minded, ignorant man. Hardly able to
+compose a sentence in correct English, he employed educated, but
+unresourceful assistants who furnished the good grammar, while he
+supplied the initiative and original ideas, and increased the influence
+and circulation of his magazine. Also he lived strenuously up to the
+doctrines he taught; fasting, for instance.
+
+Soon after I reached "Perfection City" he launched on his two weeks'
+annual fast. Up in the big house where he lived, in the next town of
+Andersonville (he himself would have been gladder of a mere shack or
+tent like the rest of us--but his wife negated any such idea) Mrs.
+Barton used to taunt and insult him by putting out the best food under
+his nose, during this time.
+
+Mrs. Barton was a terror. She was ever inviting to her house that kind
+of people who know somebody "worth while" or are related to somebody
+who, in their turn, are, perhaps, related to--somebody else!...
+
+In their presence she would patronise Barton by calling him "Stevie!" in
+her drawling, patronising manner....
+
+When the woman came in among the tents and shacks of our "city" she
+would, in speaking with any of us, imply all sorts of mean, insinuating
+things about her reformer-husband....
+
+Barton, they said, met her while on one of his lecture tours....
+
+Their baby ... a little, red object like a boiled lobster ... the
+anonymous, undistinguished creatures all babies are at that time--the
+mother used to bring it in among us and coo and coo over it so
+ridiculously that we made her behaviour a joke among us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Barton's secretary was a beautiful, gentle, large-eyed girl ... wholly
+feminine ... soft-voiced ... as a reaction from the nagging of his wife,
+from her blatancy and utter lack of sympathy with any of his projects,
+he insensibly drifted into a relationship closer and closer, with this
+girl ... they used to take long walks into the pines together ... and be
+observed coming back slowly out of the sunset ... hand in hand ... to
+drop each other's hands, when they considered that the observing line of
+vision had been reached.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lying under my huge army tent, by the shore of pretty little Lake Emily,
+I dreamed long and often, in the hush of starry midnight, of
+reconstructing the life of the whole world--especially the love-life
+between men and women.
+
+Shelley was my God, not Christ. Shelley's notes to _Queen Mab_ were my
+creed, as his poetry and Whitman's furnished me my Bible. Through them I
+would reform the world!
+
+I had not realised then (as Shelley did not till his death), the
+terrific inertia of people, their content, even, with the cramping and
+conventional ideas and beliefs that hold them in unconscious slavery....
+
+I think that summer I learned Shelley and Whitman by heart.
+
+And Keats was more than my creed. He comprised my life!
+
+Day by day I took care of my body, gaining in weight, filling out the
+hollows in my face, till I had grown into a presentable young man. For
+the first time in my life I knew the meaning of perfect health. Every
+atom of my blood tingled with natural happiness as I have felt it in
+later days, under the stimulation of good wine.
+
+No coffee, no tea, no beefsteak, no alcohol....
+
+On that summer's ideal living I built the foundation of the health and
+strength, that, long after, I finally acquired as a permanent
+possession.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Stephen Barton and I had many interesting talks together. With the
+cultural background of Europe he might have been a Rousseau or a
+Phalanisterian. As it was, he ran a "natural life" magazine which,
+though crude, benefited hundreds of people. What though it showed
+pictures of stupid men and women revealing, in poses rivalling the
+contortionist, their physical development acquired through his methods.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We would collect many people about us, to serve as a nucleus from which
+the future society of men and women would expand ... we would all live
+together as nearly naked as possible, because that was, after all, the
+only pure thing ... as Art showed, in its painting and sculpture. We
+would make our livings by the manufacture of all sorts of exercising
+apparatus and health-foods....
+
+And so the world would be leavened with the new idea ... and men and
+women and little children would wander forth from the great, unclean,
+insanitary cities and live in clusters of pretty cottages ... naked, in
+good weather,--in bad, clothed for warmth and comfort, but not for
+shame. And the human body would become holy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile the petty, local fight had started which was to disrupt this
+hope of Barton's, and thwart its fulfillment forever.
+
+The town of Andersonville became jealous of the town of Cottswold
+because the latter handled most of the mail of our city and thereby had
+achieved the position of third or fourth class postoffice--I don't know
+exactly which.
+
+The struggle commenced when the two lone policemen of Andersonville
+began to arrest us--men and women--when we walked into their town for
+provisions, clad in our bathing suits ... later on, we were forbidden to
+run for exercise, in our bathing suits, on the fine, macadamised road
+that passed not far from our dwellings ... it shocked the motorists.
+
+Yet people came from far and near, just to be shocked. That seems to be
+the chief, most delightful, and only lawfully indulged emotion of the
+Puritan.
+
+Barton summoned us to a meeting, one night, and we held a long palaver
+over the situation. We decided to become more cautious, in spite of a
+few hotheads who advised defiance to the hilt....
+
+And the beautiful girl that possessed such fine breasts could no longer
+row about on our little lake, naked to the waist. And we were requested
+to go far in among the trees for our nude sun-baths.
+
+The more radical of us moved entirely into the woods, despite the sand
+flies....
+
+Then the affair simmered down to quietness--till the New York _World_
+and the New York _Journal_ sent out their reporters.... After that, what
+with the lurid and insinuating stories printed, the state authorities
+began to look into the matter--and found no harm in us.
+
+But the Andersonville officials were out for blood. Cottswold was
+growing too fast for their injured civic pride and vanity.
+
+"Can't you divide your mail between the two towns, and make them both
+third or fourth class or whatever-it-is postoffice towns?" I asked
+Barton, after he had given me the simple explanation of the whole
+affair.
+
+"No--for if I took anything away from Cottswold and added it to
+Andersonville, then the Cottswold authorities would become my
+adversaries, too ... the only thing I can do," he added, "is what I
+meant to do all along,--as soon as our 'city' has grown important
+enough--have 'Perfection City' made a postoffice."
+
+"And then make enemies of both towns at once?"
+
+He threw up his hands in despair and walked away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having quit work with the gang that was laying out the streets of the
+future city through the pines, I was entirely out of the few dollars my
+several weeks' work had enabled me to save ... though but little was
+needed to exist by, in that community of simple livers ... my procuring
+my tent free had rendered me quite independent....
+
+One afternoon Barton met me on the dam-head.
+
+"Come on in swimming with me ... I have something to talk with you
+about," he said.
+
+We swam around and talked, as nonchalantly as two other men would have
+done, sitting in their club.
+
+"How would you like to work for me again?"
+
+"What is it you want me to work at?"
+
+"I need a cook for my nature restaurant ... can you cook?"
+
+I thought. I knew his present cook, MacGregor, the Scot, and I didn't
+want to do him out of a job. Besides, I didn't know how to cook.
+
+The first objection Barton read in my face.
+
+"MacGregor is quitting ... I'm not firing him."
+
+"All right ... I'll take the job."
+
+Our conference over, we had climbed out to the top of the dam, slid
+over, and were now standing beneath. The water galloped down in a snowy
+cataract of foam, as we topped off our swim with the heavy "shower-bath"
+that was like a massage in its pummelling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MacGregor good-naturedly stayed an extra week, saying he'd show me the
+run of things. Secretly he tried to teach me how to cook....
+
+As the cooking was not all of the "nature" order, but involved preparing
+food for a horde of people we called "outsiders" who were employed in
+Barton's publishing plant, I would have to prepare meat and bake bread
+and make tea and coffee....
+
+Barton confessed to me that a food-compromise was distasteful to him.
+But he could not coerce. While lecturing about the country it was often,
+even with him, "eat beefsteaks or starve!"
+
+MacGregor was a professional Scotchman, just as there are professional
+Irishmen, Englishmen and professional Southern Gentlemen ... every
+Scotchman is a professional Scotchman ... but there is always something
+pleasant and poetic about his being so ... it is not as it is with the
+others--whose "professionalism" generally bears an unpleasant reek.
+
+MacGregor had sandy, scanty hair, a tiny white shadow of a moustache,
+kindly, weak eyes, a forehead prematurely wrinkled with minute,
+horizontal lines. Burns ... of course ... he knew and quoted every line
+to me. And _Sentimental Tommy_ and _Tommy and Grizel_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a week I was left in full possession of the nature restaurant.
+
+Barton had been rendered slightly paring and mean, in matters of
+money,--by smooth individuals who came to him, glowing with words of
+what they could effect for him, in this or that project--individuals who
+soon decamped, leaving Barton the poorer, except in experience.
+
+In return he had to retrench. But the retrenchments fell in the place
+where the penny, not the dollar, lay.
+
+He practised economy on me. He gave me only ten dollars a week, board
+and room free, as cook; and also I was to wait on the diners, as well as
+prepare the meals.
+
+Nevertheless the fault for having two jobs at once thrust on me, rested
+partly with me: when he asked me if I was able to do both, I fell into a
+foolish, boasting mood and said "yes."
+
+MacGregor figured out my menu for me a week ahead, the day he left:
+"Anyhow, you'll only last a week," he joked.
+
+The night before the first breakfast I lay awake all night, worrying ...
+hadn't I better just sneak away with daylight?... no, I must return to
+Mt. Hebron in the fall. Though all I wanted to return for was to show
+the school, that, in spite of my spindly legs, I could win my "H" in
+track athletics.
+
+I must make good at this job, and save ... my grandmother, who had sent
+me money the previous year, I must not call on her again. And I did not
+count on my father ... for he was strenuously in the saddle to a grass
+widow, the one who had lured him to change boarding houses, and she was
+devouring his meagre substance like the Scriptural locust.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That first breakfast was a nightmare. I "practised breakfast" from three
+o'clock till six ... by six I had started another breakfast, and by
+seven, after having spoiled and burned much food, I was tolerably ready
+for customers ... who seemed, at that hour, to storm the place.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is not necessary to go into detail. In three days I was through. And
+I had my first fight with Barton.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was back in my army tent once more, free, with my Shelley, my Keats,
+my manuscript....
+
+In despair of ever returning to Hebron, once more I lay under starry
+nights, dreaming poetry and comparing myself to all the Great Dead....
+
+With the top of the tent pulled back to let the stars in, I lay beneath
+the gigantic, marching constellations overhead--under my mosquito
+netting--and wrote poems under stress of great inspiration ... at times
+it seemed that Shelley was with me in my tent--a slight, grey form ...
+and little, valiant, stocky Keats, too.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After my quarrel with Barton, he tried to oust me from that desirable
+site the Bishop's wife had turned over to me ... indeed, he tried to
+persuade me to leave the colony. But I would not stir.
+
+There was a young fellow in the "City" named Vinton.... Vinton was the
+strong man of the place. He spent three hours every morning exercising,
+in minute detail, every muscle of his body ... and he had developed
+beautiful muscles, each one of which stood out, like a turn in a rope,
+of itself.
+
+Vinton was sent to oust me, by force if need be.
+
+I really was afraid of him when he strode up to me, as I lay there
+reading the _Revolt of Islam_ again.
+
+With a big voice he began to hint, mysteriously, that it would be wise
+for me to clear out. I showed him that I held a clear title and right to
+sojourn there till Christmas, if I chose to, as the bishop's wife had
+paid for the site till that time, and had then transferred the use of
+the location to me. I showed him her letter ... with the Tallahassee
+postmark.
+
+His only answer was, that he knew nothing about that ... that Barton
+wanted the place, and, that if I wouldn't vacate peaceably--and he
+looked me in the eyes like some great, calm animal.
+
+Though my heart was pounding painfully, against, it seemed, the very
+roof of my mouth, I compelled my eyes not to waver, but to look fiercely
+into his....
+
+"Are you going to start packing?"
+
+"No, I am not going to start packing."
+
+"I can break your neck with one twist," and he illustrated that feat
+with a turn of one large hand in the air.
+
+He came slowly in, head down, as if to pick me up and throw me down.
+
+I waited till he was close, then gave him an upward rip with all my
+might, a blow on the forehead that made the blood flow, and staggered
+him with consternation. To keep myself still at white heat, I showered
+blows on him. To my surprise, he fell back.
+
+"Wait--wait," he protested in a small voice, "I--I was just fooling."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Vinton left, my blood still pouring through my veins in a
+triumphant glow, I sat on the ground by the side of my tent-floor and
+composed a poem....
+
+That afternoon Barton's office boy was sent to me, as an emissary of
+peace.
+
+"The boss wants to see you in his office."
+
+"Tell your boss that my office is down here. If he wants to see me he
+can come here."
+
+The boy scurried away. I was now looked upon as a desperate man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And I was happy. I sang at the top of my voice, an old ballad about
+Captain John Smith, so that Barton could hear it through the open window
+of his office....
+
+  "And the little papooses dig holes in the sand ...
+  _Vive le Capitaine John!_..."
+
+I leaped into the lake, without even my gee-string on, and swam far out,
+singing....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Late that evening, Barton came to my tent ... very gently and sweetly
+... he no longer called me John or Johnnie ... I was now Mr. Gregory. He
+asked me, if he rented the plot back from me, would I go in peace? I
+replied, no, I meant to stay there till the middle of September, when
+the fall term opened at Mt. Hebron.
+
+Then he asked me, would I just join forces with him,--since we must put
+the movement above personalities....
+
+We had a long talk about life and "Nature" ideals. The man showed all
+his soul, all his struggles, to me. And I saw his real greatness and was
+moved greatly. And I informed him I would antagonise him no longer,
+that, though I would not give up the desirable site, otherwise, I would
+help him all I could.
+
+Then he said he would be glad to have me stay, and we shook hands
+warmly, the moisture of feeling shining in our eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As the time for my return to school drew near, I was in fine physical
+condition, better than ever before in my life. I was still somewhat
+thin, but now it could be called slenderness, not thinness. And I was
+surprised at the laughing, healthy, sun-browned look of my face.
+
+I felt a confidence in myself I had never known before....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had a flirtation with a pretty, freckle-faced girl. She worked in
+Barton's "factory," and she used to come down to my tent where I sat
+reading, with only my trunks on,--during the noon hour,--and ask me to
+read poetry aloud to her. And I read Shelley. She would draw shyly
+closer to me, sending me into a visible tremour that made me ashamed of
+myself.
+
+At times, as we read, her fair, fine hair would brush my cheek and send
+a shiver of fire through me. But I still knew nothing about women. I
+never even offered to kiss her.
+
+But when she was away from me, at night specially, I would go into long,
+luxurious, amorous imaginations over her and the possession of her, and
+I would dream of loving her, and of having a little cottage and
+children....
+
+But words and elegant, burning phrases are never enough for a woman.
+
+In a week I noticed her going by on the arm of a mill-hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And, broke again, I wrote to my grandmother that I must have fifty
+dollars to get back to school on. And, somehow, she scraped it together
+and sent it to me. My first impulse was to be ashamed of myself and
+start to return it. Then I kept it. For, after all, it was for poetry's
+sake.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the train to Hebron, as I walked up the car to my seat, health
+shining in my smooth, clear face and skin, the women and girls gave me
+approving, friendly glances, and I was happy.
+
+A summer of control from unhealthy habits had done this for me, a summer
+of life, naked, in the open air, plus exercise. I had learned a great
+lesson. To Barton I owe it that I am still alive, vigorously alive, not
+crawlingly ... but I suffered several slumps before I attained and held
+my present physique. For the world and life afford complications not
+found in "Perfection City."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The school hill lay before my eyes again. From it spread on all sides
+the wonderful Connecticut valley. Up and down the paths to the dining
+hall, the buildings in which classes were held, the Chapel crowning the
+topmost crest, wandered groups of boys in their absurd, postage-stamp
+caps, their peg-top trousers, their wide, floppy raglan coats.
+
+I was a senior now. At first my change in bodily build and bettered
+health rendered me hardly recognisable to my friends.
+
+The very first day I reached Hebron again I was out on the wide, oval
+field, lacing around the track. In a month would come the big track-meet
+and I was determined this time, to win enough points to earn me my "H."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Principal Stanton sent for me, the second day after my arrival.
+
+"I wanted to have a long talk with you before you got settled, Gregory."
+
+His steely, blue eyes gleamed through his gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
+
+"Sit down."
+
+And we had a talk lasting over an hour ... about religion mainly. He was
+surprised to learn that I knew a lot about the early Church fathers, had
+read Newman, and understood the Oxford controversy ... had read many of
+the early English divines....
+
+"Gregory," he cried, putting his hand on my knee, "what a power for God
+you would be, if you would only give over your eccentricities and
+become a Christian ... a chap with your magnetism--in spite of your
+folly!--"
+
+He impressed on me the fact, that, now I was a senior, more would be
+expected of me ... that the younger boys would look up to me, as they
+did to all seniors, and I must be more careful of my deportment before
+them ... my general conduct....
+
+He asked me what I intended making of myself.
+
+"A poet!" I exclaimed.
+
+He spread his hands outward with a gesture of despair.
+
+"Of course, one can write poetry if necessary ... but what career are
+you choosing?"
+
+"The writing of poetry."
+
+"But, my dear Gregory, one can't make a living by that ... and one must
+live."
+
+"Why must one live?" I replied fervently, "did Christ ever say 'One must
+live'?"
+
+"Gregory, you are impossible," laughed Stanton heartily, "but we're all
+rather fond of you ... and we want you to behave, and try to graduate.
+Though we can't tell just what you might do in after-life ... whether
+you'll turn out a credit to the School or not."
+
+"Professor Stanton, I have a favour to ask of you before I go," I asked,
+standing.
+
+"Yes?" and he raised his eyebrows.
+
+"I want to know if I can have that room alone, over the platform, in
+Recitation Hall."
+
+"You'll have to ask Professor Dunn about that ... he has charge of
+room-transfers ... but why can't you room as the other students do?... I
+don't know whether it is good for you, to let you live by yourself ...
+you're already different enough from the other boys ... what you need is
+more human companionship, Gregory, not less."
+
+"I want to do a lot of writing. I want to be alone to think. I plan to
+read Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament all through, again, this
+winter." ... This was a sop to his religious sentiment. I related how I
+had first read the New Testament in the Greek, while on a cattle-boat,
+in the China Seas....
+
+"Gregory, you're quite mad ... but you're a smooth one, too!" his eyes
+gleamed, amused, behind his glasses....
+
+"And I want to write a lot of poems drawn from the parables of the New
+Testament"--though, not till that minute had such an idea entered my
+head....
+
+When I was admitted to the study of Professor Dunn and sat down waiting
+for him among his antique busts and rows of Latin books, I had
+formulated further plans to procure what I desired....
+
+He came in, heavily dignified, like a dark, stocky Roman, grotesque in
+modern dress, lacking the toga.
+
+I told him of my New Testament idea ... and added to it, as an
+afterthought, that I also wanted to prosecute a special study of the
+lyrics of Horace. Though he explained to me that Horace belonged to the
+college curriculum, his heart expanded. Horace was his favourite
+poet--which, of course, I knew....
+
+I got my room.
+
+I borrowed a wheelbarrow from the barn, and wheeled my trunk down to
+Recitation Hall, singing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What a hypocrite I had been! But I had obtained what I sought--a room
+alone. But now I must, in truth, study the Greek Testament and
+Horace....
+
+I figured out that if I enrolled for several extra Bible courses the
+Faculty would be easier on me with my other studies, and let me cut some
+of them out entirely.
+
+To make myself even more "solid," I gave out that I had been persuaded
+to Christianity so strongly, of a sudden, that I contemplated studying
+for the ministry. I even wrote my grandmother that this was what I
+intended to do. And her simple, pious letter in return, prayerful with
+thanks to God for my conversion so signal--in secret cut me to the
+heart....
+
+But it gave me a temporary pleasure, now, to be looked upon as "safe."
+To be openly welcomed at prayer-meetings ... I acted, how I acted, the
+ardent convert ... and how frightened I was, at myself, to find that, at
+times, I believed that I believed!...
+
+My former back-sliding was forgiven me.
+
+And the passage of Tennyson about "one honest doubt" being more than
+half the creeds, was quoted in my favour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Field-day!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I entered for the two-mile, to be run off in the morning ... for the
+half-mile, the first thing in the afternoon ... the mile, which was to
+be the last event, excepting the hammer-throw. My class, in a body, had
+urged me to enter for all the "events" I could ... when the delegation
+came, I welcomed them, with gratified self-importance, to my solitary
+room. I invited them in, and they sat about ... on my single chair ...
+my bed ... the floor....
+
+"You see, Gregory, if you win two of these races, we'll get the banner
+that goes to the class that makes the greatest number of points ... you
+must do it for us ... we have never yet won the banner, and this is our
+last chance."
+
+They left, solemnly shaking my hand, as over a matter of vast
+importance....
+
+Hurrying into my track suit, I went out to the Oval. It was three days
+before the meet.
+
+Dunn was there, with several others, measuring out distances and
+chalking lanes.
+
+With all the delicate joy of an aesthete I took my slim, spiked running
+shoes. I patted them with affection as I pushed my feet into them. I
+removed the corks from the shining spikes....
+
+I struck out with long, low-running, greyhound strides ... around and
+around ... the wind streamed by me....
+
+I knew I was being watched admiringly. I could see it out of the tail of
+my eyes. So I threw forward in a final sprint, that brought me up, my
+eyes stinging with the salt of sweat, my legs aching ... my chest
+heaving....
+
+"Good boy," complimented Dunn, coming up to me, and patting me on the
+back ... Gregory, I'm _for_ you. I'm so glad you've come out a clean,
+fine, clear-cut Christian."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For the two-mile, the half, and the mile, each--a single athlete was
+training, his heart set on the record. It seemed impossible that I
+should win all three races. Yet I did.
+
+I was all nerves and sinews for the two-mile. The night before I had
+lain awake. I could not sleep so I read a poor translation of the odes
+of Pindar. But behind the bad verbiage of the translator, I fed on the
+shining spirit of the poetry. With Pindar's music in me, I was ready for
+the two-mile.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tensely we leaned forward, at the scratch. I had my plan of campaign
+evolved. I would leap to the fore, at the crack of the pistol, set a
+terrific pace, sprint the first quarter, and then settle into my long,
+steady stride, and trust to my good lung power ... for I had paid
+special attention to my lung-development, at "Perfection City."
+
+I felt a melting fire of nervousness running through my body, a
+weakness.
+
+I bowed my face in my hands and prayed ... both to Christ and to Apollo
+... in deadly seriousness ... perhaps all the gods really were....
+
+The gun cracked. Off I leapt, in the lead ... in the first lap the field
+fell behind.
+
+"Steady, Gregory, steady!" advised Dunn, in a low voice, as I flashed
+into the second....
+
+I thought I had distanced everybody ... but it chilled me to hear the
+soft swish, swish of another runner ... glancing rapidly behind, I saw a
+swarthy lad, a fellow with a mop of wiry, black hair, whom we called
+"The Hick" (for he had never been anywhere but on a farm)--going stride
+for stride, right in my steps, just avoiding my heels....
+
+Run as I might, I couldn't shake him off....
+
+Every time I swept by, the crowd would set up a shout ... but now they
+were encouraging "The hick" more than me. This made me furious, hurt my
+egotism. My lungs were burning with effort ... I threw out into a longer
+stride. I glanced back again. Still the chap was lumbering along ... but
+easily, so easily ... almost without an effort....
+
+"Good God, am I going to be beaten?" I sensed a terrific sprinting-power
+in the following, chunky body of my antagonist.
+
+There were only two more laps ... the rest of the field were a lap and a
+half behind, fighting for third place amongst themselves ... jeered at
+by the instinctive cruelty of the onlookers....
+
+My ears perceived a cessation of the following swish, the tread.
+Simultaneously I heard a great shout go up. I dared not look back,
+however, to see what was happening--I threw myself forward at that
+shout, fearing the worst, and ran myself blind....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Take it easy, you have it!"
+
+"Shut up! he's after the record."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The shrill screaming of the girls who had come over, in a white,
+linen-starched wagon load, from Fairfield, gave me my last spurt.
+Expecting every moment to hear my antagonist grind past me, on the
+cinders, I sped up the home-stretch.
+
+The air was swimming in a gold mist. I felt arms under mine, and I was
+carried off to the senior tent, by my class-mates....
+
+Yet I am convinced that I would have been beaten, if my rival had not
+had the string that held his trunks up, break. He had sunk down on the
+track, when they had fallen, not to show his nakedness ... and, pulling
+them up, and holding them, amid great laughter, he had still won second
+ribbon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I won the second race--the half-mile, without the humour of such a
+fateful intervention. It was my winning of the first that won me the
+second. I had just equalled the two-mile record, in the first....
+
+I ran that half, blindly, like a mad man. I was drunk with joy over my
+popularity ... for when I had gone into the big dining room for lunch,
+all the boys had shouted and cheered and roared, and pounded the dishes
+with their knives.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Now, Gregory, you've just got to take the mile away from Learoyd ...
+he's a junior ... you've just _got_ to!... besides, if you don't ...
+there's Flammer has lost the broad jump ... and we won't win the class
+banner after all."
+
+Learoyd was a smallish, golden-faced, downy-headed boy ... almost an
+albino.... I had seen him run ... he ran low to the ground, in flashes,
+like some sort of shore-bird.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the class-tent, alone. Dunn had driven my class out, where they had
+been massaging and kneading my legs ... which trembled and tottered
+under me, from the excessive use they had already undergone.
+
+I sat down and put my head between my knees, and groaned. Then I
+straightened out my right leg and rubbed it, because a cramp was
+knotting it.
+
+"Hello, Gregory!"
+
+The tent-flap opened. The athletic director poked his head in.
+
+"Come on, Gregory, we're waiting for you."
+
+"Wait a minute, Smythe ... I want to pray," I replied simply. Reverently
+he withdrew ... impressed ... awed....
+
+I flung myself on my face.
+
+"Look here, God, I'll really believe in you, if you give me this last
+race ... it will be a miracle, God, if you do this for me, and I will
+believe in your Bible, despite my common sense ... despite history ...
+despite Huxley and Voltaire," then, going as far as I could--"yes, and
+despite Shelley ... dear God, dear Christ, please do what I have asked."
+
+My hand struck on a bottle of witch hazel as I rose. Impulsively, I
+drank off half the contents. It sent a warmth through me. I straightened
+up, invigorated.
+
+"Come on, Gregory ... what's the matter?" it was Dunn, protesting,
+"we'll have to run off the mile without you, if you don't come."
+
+"I'm ready ... I'm coming."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All that I had in my head, when the pistol cracked, was to _run!_ ...
+all I felt about me was only a pair of mad legs.
+
+I licked out, neither seeing nor caring ... almost feeling my way along
+the rim of the track with my toes, as I ran--as if I had racing eyes in
+them. There was a continuous roar that rose and fell like the sea. But I
+neither saw nor heeded. I just ran and ran.
+
+On the home-stretch a fellow came breast to breast with me. It was
+Learoyd ... running low like a swallow skimming the ground. But it
+didn't worry me. I was calm, just floating along, it seemed to me.
+
+I saw Dunn throwing his camera into the air, in the forefront of the
+seething crowd. He was crying for me to come on. The camera fell in a
+smashed heap, unregarded.
+
+Barely, with my chest flung out, I took the tape ... trailing off ... I
+ran half a lap more, with my class leaping grotesquely and shouting,
+streaming across field after me--before I had my senses back again, and
+realised that the race was over.
+
+"Did I win? Did I win? Did I win?" I asked again and again.
+
+"Yes, you won!"
+
+I was being carried about on their shoulders.
+
+"A little more, and we'd have to take you over to the hospital,"
+commented Smythe, as he looked at me, while I lay prone on my back,
+resting, under shelter of the tent.
+
+"Who--who used up all this witch-hazel?" he asked of the rubbers....
+
+I hid my face in the grass, pretending to groan from the strain I had
+just undergone. Instead, I was smothering a laugh at myself ... at the
+school ... at all things....
+
+"God and witch-hazel," I wanted to shout hysterically, "hurrah for God
+and witch-hazel."
+
+Then I rose shakily to my feet, and, flinging myself loose from those
+who offered to help me, I ran at a good clip, in my sneakers, dangling
+my running shoes affectionately--to my solitary room ... with a bearing
+that boasted, "why, I could run all those three races over again, one
+right after the other, right now ... no, I'm not tired ... not the least
+bit tired!"
+
+That night, in the crowded dining hall, the ovation for me was
+tremendous.
+
+"I'll smash life just like those races," I boasted, in my heart.
+
+But my triumph and eminence were not to last long.
+
+To be looked up to at Mt. Hebron you had to lead a distasteful,
+colourless life of hypocrisy and piety such as I have seldom seen
+anywhere before. Under cover of their primitive Christianity I never
+found more pettiness. First, you prayed and hymn-sung yourself into
+favour, and then indulged in sanctimonious intrigue to keep yourself
+where you had arrived.
+
+I could not stand my half self-hypnotised hypocrisy any longer. A spirit
+of mischief and horseplay awoke in me. I perpetrated a hundred
+misdemeanours, most of them unpunishable elsewhere, but of serious
+import in schools and barracks, where discipline is to be maintained. I
+stayed out of bounds late at night ... I cut classes continually. I
+visited Fairfield ... and a factory town further south, where I lounged
+about the streets all day, talking with people.
+
+Professor Stanton, not to my surprise, sent for me again.
+
+Yet I was amazed at what he knew about me, amazed, too, to discover the
+extent of the school's complicated system of pious espionage that
+checked up the least move of every student.
+
+Stanton brought out a sheet of paper with dates and facts of my
+misbehaviour that could not be controverted....
+
+"So we will have to ask you to withdraw from the school, unless you
+right-about-face ... otherwise, we have had enough of you ... in fact,
+if it had not been for your great promise--your talents!--"
+
+I waved the compliment aside rather wearily.
+
+"I think that if this school has had enough of me, I have had about
+enough of the school."
+
+I expressed, in plain terms, my opinion of their espionage system.
+
+"Your omnipotent God must be hard put to it when He has to rely on the
+help of such sneakiness to keep His Book (and I couldn't help laughing
+at the literary turn I gave to my denunciation) before the public!"
+
+Stanton's eyes flamed behind their glasses.
+
+"Gregory, I shall have to ask you to leave the Hill as soon as you can
+get your things together," he shouted.
+
+"--which can hardly be soon enough for me," I replied.
+
+"Come, my boy," continued Stanton, as if ashamed at himself for his
+outburst, and putting his hand on my shoulder, "you're a good sort of
+boy, after all ... you have so much in you, so much energy and power ...
+why don't you put it to right uses?... after your father has made such
+sacrifices for you, I hate to see you run off to a ravelled edge like
+this.
+
+"Even yet, if you'll only promise to behave and preserve a proper
+dignity in the presence of the other students--even yet we would be glad
+to have you stay and graduate ... and we might be able to procure you a
+scholarship at Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Brown. Lang says you put
+yourself into the spirit of Homer like an old Greek, always doing more
+work than the requirements,--and Dunn says, that you show him things in
+Vergil that he never saw before."
+
+Moved, I shook my head sadly. I hated myself for liking these people.
+
+"If you mean that I should be like other people ... I just can't ...
+it's neither pose nor affectation." (He had intimated that some of the
+professors alleged that as the core of the trouble.) "I guess I don't
+belong here ... yes, it would be better for me to go away!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night, unobserved, I stole into the chapel that stood on the Crest
+of the hill, against the infinite stars.
+
+I spent nearly all the night in the chapel, alone. The place was full of
+things. I felt there all the gods that ever were worshipped ... and all
+the great spirits of mankind. And I perceived fully how silly, weak,
+grotesque, and vain I was; and yet, how big and wonderful, it would be
+to swim counter, as I meant, to the huge, swollen, successful currents
+of the commercial, bourgeois practicality of present-day America.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I pinned up a sign on the bulletin board in the hall, in rhyme,
+announcing, that, that afternoon, at four o'clock, John Gregory would
+hold an auction of his books of poetry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My room was crowded with amused students. I mounted the table, like an
+auctioneer, while they sat on my cot and on the floor, and crowded the
+door.
+
+At first the boys jeered and pushed. But when I started selling my copy
+of Byron and telling about his life, they fell into a quiet, and
+listened. After I had made that talk, they clapped me. Byron went for a
+dollar, fetching the largest price. I sold my Shelley, my Blake, my
+Herrick, my Marvell, my Milton ... all....
+
+My Keats I could not bring myself to sell. I kept that like a treasure.
+What I could not sell I gave away.
+
+My entire capital was ten dollars ... one suit of clothes ... a change
+of underwear ... two shirts. I discarded my trunk and crammed what
+little I owned into my battered suitcase.
+
+That night, the story of my dismissal from school having travelled about
+from mouth to mouth, and the tale of my poets' auction--the boys
+cheered me, as I came into the dining hall--cheered me partly
+affectionately, partly derisively.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning mail I received a letter from the New York _Independent_,
+a weekly literary magazine. Dr. Ward, the editor, informed me that I
+possessed genuine poetic promise, and he was taking two of the poems I
+had recently submitted to him, for publication in his magazine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Like the vagrant I was, I considered myself indefinitely fixed, with
+that ten dollars. I went to Boston ... hung about the library and the
+waterfront ... stayed in cheap lodging houses for a few days--and found
+myself on the tramp again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I freighted it to New York, where I landed, grimy and full of coal-dust.
+And I sought out my uncle who lived in the Bronx.
+
+I appeared, opportunely, around supper time. I asked him if he was not
+glad to see me. He grimaced a yes, but wished that I would stop tramping
+about and fit in, in life, somewhere.... He observed that my shirt was
+filthy and that I must take a bath immediately and put on a clean one of
+his.
+
+In Boston I had ditched everything but the clothes I wore ... and my
+suit was wrecked with hard usage.
+
+"Get work at anything," advised my Uncle Jim, "and save up till you can
+rig yourself out new. You'll never accomplish anything looking the way
+you do. Your editor at the _Independent_ will not be impressed and think
+it romantic, if you go to see him the way you are ... ragged poets are
+out of date."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At "Perfection City" I had made the acquaintance of a boy, whom,
+curiously enough, I have left out of that part of the narrative that has
+to deal with the Nature Colony. He was a millionaire's son: his father,
+a friend of Barton's, had sent him out to "Perfection City" with a
+tutor. His name was Milton Saunders. He was a fine, generous lad, but
+open as the weather to every influence ... especially to any which was
+not for his good.
+
+One morning I saw him actually remove his own shoes and give them to a
+passing tramp who needed them worse than he.
+
+"That's nothing, dad's money will be sufficient to buy me a new pair,"
+he explained, going back to his tent, in his bare feet, his socks in his
+hand--to put on his sneakers while he hastened to the shoe store in
+Andersonville.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Milton had urged me to be sure to come and see him if I chanced to be in
+New York.
+
+I now called him on the telephone and was cordially invited to visit
+him, and that, immediately.
+
+The servants eyed me suspiciously and sent me up by the tradesmen's
+elevator. Milton flew into a fury over it. His friend was his friend, no
+matter how he was dressed--he wanted them to remember that, in the
+future!
+
+He brought out a bottle of wine, had a fine luncheon set before me. I
+went for the food, but pushed the wine aside. He drank the bottle
+himself. I was still, for my part, clinging to shreds of what I had
+learned at "Perfection City." ...
+
+He rushed me to his tailor. I had told him of my first poems' being
+accepted.
+
+"Of course, you must be better dressed when you go to see the editor."
+
+The tailor looked me over, in whimsical astonishment. He vowed that he
+could not have a suit ready for me by ten the next morning, as Milton
+was ordering.
+
+"Then you have a suit here for me about ready."
+
+"It is ready now."
+
+"Alter it immediately to fit Mr. Gregory ... we're about the same
+height."
+
+The tailor said _that_ could be done.
+
+For the rest of the day Milton and I peregrinated from one saloon
+back-room to another ... in each of which the boy seemed to be well
+known. He drank liquor while I imbibed soft drinks ... the result was
+better for him than for me. I soon had the stomach-ache, while he only
+seemed a little over-exhilarated.
+
+At his door-step he shoved a ten dollar bill into my hand. I demurred,
+but accepted it.
+
+"I'd hand you more," he apologised, "but the Old Man never lets me have
+any more than just so much at a time ... says I waste it anyhow ... but
+I manage to do a lot of charging," he chuckled.
+
+"Have you a place to stay to-night?"
+
+"Yes ... I have an uncle who lives uptown."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I showed up at my uncle's, that night, I showed him my new rig-out,
+and explained to him how I came into possession of it. But he did not
+accept my explanation. Instead, he shook his head in mournful
+dubiousness ... indicating that he doubted my story, and insinuating
+that I had not come by my suit honestly; as well as by the new dress
+suitcase Saunders had presented me with, and the shirts and
+underclothing.
+
+"God knows where you'll end up, Johnny."
+
+After supper Uncle Jim grew restive again, and he came out frankly with
+the declaration that he did not want me to stay overnight in the house,
+but to pack on out to Haberford to my father ... or, since I must stay
+in town to see my editor (again that faint, dubious smile), I might stay
+the night at a Mills Hotel ... since my rich friend had given me money,
+too ... besides my aunt was not so very strong and I put a strain on
+her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Mills Hotel I was perched in a cell-like corner room, high up.
+The room smelt antiseptic. Nearby, Broadway roared and spread in
+wavering blazons of theatric gold. I looked down upon it, dreaming of my
+future fame, my great poetic and literary career ... my plays that would
+some day be announced down there, in great shining sign-letters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sound of an employee's beating with a heavy stick, from door to iron
+door, to wake up all the Mills Hotel patrons, bestirred me at an early
+hour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I meditated my next move, and now resolved on another try at community
+life.... The Eos Artwork Studios, founded in the little New York State
+town of Eos, by the celebrated eccentric author and lecturer, Roderick
+Spalton.
+
+I was in such impatience to reach Eos that I did not cross over to
+Haberford, to drop in on my father. I feared also that my leaving school
+the second time, "under a cloud," would not win me an enthusiastic
+welcome from him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By nightfall I was well on my way to Eos, sitting in an empty box-car. I
+had with me my new clothes--which I wore--and my suitcase, a foolish way
+to tramp. But I thought I might as well appear before Roderick Spalton
+with a little more "presence" than usual. For I intended spending some
+time in his community.
+
+Characteristically, I had gone to the office of the _Independent_, had
+not found the editor in, that morning, and had chafed at the idea of
+waiting till the afternoon, when I might have had a fruitful talk with a
+man who was interested in the one real thing in my life--my poetry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I reached Rochester safely. It was on the stretch to Buffalo that I paid
+dearly for being well-dressed and carrying a suitcase ... as I lay
+asleep on the floor of the box-car I was set upon by three tramps, who
+pinioned my arms and legs before I was even fully awake. I was forced to
+strip off my clothes, after wrestling and fighting as hard as I could. I
+floated off into the stars from a blow on the head....
+
+When I came to, I was trembling violently both with cold and from the
+nervous shock. My assailants had made off with my suitcase ... I was in
+nothing but my B.V.D.'s and shirt. Even my Keats had been stolen. But
+beside me I found the ragged, cast-off suit of one of the tramps ... and
+my razor, which had dropped out of my coat pocket, while the tramp had
+changed clothes, and not been noticed. Gingerly, I put on the ragged
+suit....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I stood in front of the Eos Artwork Studios.
+
+I saw a boy coming down the path from one of the buildings.
+
+"Would you tell me please where I can find the Master?" I asked,
+reverently.
+
+The boy gave me a long stare.
+
+"Oh, you mean Mr. Spalton?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's him ... there ... choppin' wood."
+
+There was a young man and an older one, both chopping wood, in the back
+of a building, but in fairly open view.
+
+I walked to where they worked with both inward and outward trepidation,
+for, to me, Spalton was one of the world's great men.
+
+Just as I reached the spot, the younger of the two threw down his axe.
+
+"So long, Dad! now I'll go into the shop and tend to those letters."
+
+I stood in the presence of the great Roderick Spalton himself, the man
+who, in his _Brief Visits to the Homes of Famous Folk_, had written more
+meatily and wisely than any American author since Emerson ... the man
+whose magazine called _The Dawn_, had rendered him an object of almost
+religious veneration and worship to thousands of Americans whose spirits
+reached for something more than the mere piling of dollars one on the
+other....
+
+I stood before him, visibly overwhelmed. It was evident that my silent
+hero-worship was sweet to him. He bespoke me gently and courteously.
+
+"So you want to become an Eoite?"
+
+"Yes," I whispered, bending my gaze humbly before his.
+
+"And what is your name, my dear boy."
+
+"John Gregory, Master!"
+
+"What have you brought with you? where is your baggage?"
+
+"I--I lost my baggage ... all I have with me is a-a r-razor."
+
+He leaned his head back and laughed joyously. His lambent brown eyes
+glowed with humour. I liked the man.
+
+"Yes, we'll give you a job--Razorre!" he assured me, calling me by the
+nickname which clung to me during my stay....
+
+"Take that axe and show me what you can do."
+
+I caught up the axe and fell to with enthusiasm. The gospel of the
+dignity and worth of labour that he preached thrilled in me. It was the
+first time I ever enjoyed working....
+
+As we worked the Master talked ... talked with me as if he had known me
+for years--as if I, too, were Somebody.
+
+There was nothing he did not discuss, in memorable phrase and trenchant,
+clever epigram. For he saw that I believed in him, worshipped
+whole-heartedly at his shrine of genius, and he gave me, in return, of
+his best. For the first time I saw what human language is for. I thought
+of Goethe at Weimar ... Wilde's clever conversation in London....
+
+Never since did I see the real man, Spalton, as I saw him then, the man
+he might always have been, if he had had an old-world environment,
+instead of the environment of modern, commercial America--the spirit of
+which finally claimed him, as he grew more successful....
+
+Modern, commercial America--where we proudly make a boast of lack of
+culture, and where artistic and aesthetic feeling, if freely expressed,
+makes one's hearers more likely than not, at once uneasy and restive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night, at supper, I caught my first glimpse of the Eoites in a
+body. The contrast between them and my school-folk was agreeably
+different. I found among them an atmosphere of good-natured greeting and
+raillery, that sped from table to table. And when Spalton strode in,
+with his bold, swinging gait (it seemed that he had just returned from a
+lecture in a distant city early that afternoon), there was cheering and
+clapping.
+
+Guests and workers joined together in the same dining hall, with no
+distinctive division.... I sat next to Spalton's table, and a warm glow
+of pleasure swept through me when he sent me a pleasant nod.
+
+"Hello, Razorre," he had greeted me; then he had turned to the group at
+his table and told them about me, I could see by their glances--but in a
+pleasant way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning I was at work in the bindery, smearing glue on the
+backs of unbound books. My wage was three dollars a week and "found," as
+they say in the West. Not much, but what did it matter? There was a fine
+library of the world's classics, including all the liberal and
+revolutionary books that I had heard about, but which I could never
+obtain at the libraries ... and there were, as associates and
+companions, many people, who, if extremely eccentric, were,
+nevertheless, alive and alert and interested in all the beautiful things
+Genius has created in Art and Song....
+
+Derelicts, freaks, "nuts" ... with poses that outnumbered the silver
+eyes in the peacock's tail in multitude ... and yet there was to be
+found in them a sincerity, a fineness, and a genuine feeling for
+humanity that "regular" folks never achieve--perhaps because of their
+very "regularness."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here, at last, I had found another environment where I could "let loose"
+to the limit ... which I began to do....
+
+In the first place, there was the matter of clothes. I believed that men
+and women should go as nearly naked as possible ... clothing for warmth
+only ... and, as one grew in strength and health through nude contact
+with living sun and air and water, the body would gradually attain the
+power to keep itself warm from the health and strength that was in it.
+
+So, in the middle of severe winter that now had fallen on us, I went
+about in sandals, without socks. I wore no undershirt, and no coat ...
+and went with my shirt open at the neck. I wore no hat....
+
+Spalton himself often went coatless--in warm weather. His main sartorial
+eccentricity was the wearing of a broad-brimmed hat. And whenever he
+bought a new Stetson, he cut holes in the top and jumped on it, to make
+it look more interesting and less shop-new ... of course everybody in
+the community wore soft shirts and flowing ties.
+
+We addressed each other by first names and nicknames. Spalton went under
+the appellation of "John." One day a wealthy visitor had driven up.
+Spalton was out chopping wood.
+
+"Come here, John, and hold my horses."
+
+Spalton dropped the axe and obeyed.
+
+Afterward he had been dismissed with a fifty cent tip.
+
+He told the story on himself, and the name "John" stuck.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Working in the bindery, I began to find out things about the community
+of Eos that were not as ideal as might be ... most of the illumination
+of the books was done by girls, even by children after school hours. The
+outlines of the letters and objects to be hand-illumined were printed in
+with the text, the girls and children merely coloured them between the
+lines.
+
+In each department, hidden behind gorgeous, flowing curtains, were
+time-clocks, on which employees rang up when they came to work, and when
+they left. Also, each worker was supposed to receive dividends--which
+dividends consisted in pairs of mittens and thick woolen socks
+distributed by the foremen at Christmas time ... or maybe an extra
+dollar in pay, that week.
+
+"Two dollars a week less than a fellow would draw at any other place
+that ran the same sort of business," grumbled a young bookbinder who was
+by way of being a poet, "and a pair of woolen mittens or socks, or an
+extra dollar, once a year, as dividends!"
+
+However, I think that the artworkers had finer lodgings and board than
+most workers could have supplied for themselves ... and the married
+couples lived in nicer houses ... and they heard the best music, had the
+best books to read, lived truly in the presence of the greatest art and
+thought of the world ... and heard speak in the chapel, from time to
+time, all the distinguished men of the country ... who came, sooner or
+later, to visit Spalton and am? community....
+
+What though the wages were not so big, what though you rang up the time
+of arrival at work and the time of departure from it, on hidden
+time-clocks, what though every piece of statuary, every picture, every
+stick of furniture, had, on the bottom of it, its price label, or,
+depending from it, its tag that told the price at which it might be
+bought!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Spalton had begun his active career as a business man, had swung out
+from that, his fertile mind glimpsing what worlds of thought and
+imagination lay beyond it!
+
+But now Big Business was calling him back again, using him for its
+purposes.
+
+Oftener and oftener magnificently written articles by him began to
+appear in his remarkable little magazine, _The Dawn_. And the Ingersoll
+of Dollar Watch fame crowded out the Ingersoll of brave agnosticism ...
+and when he wrote now of artists and writers, it was their thrifty
+habits, their business traits, that he lauded.
+
+"A great man can be practical and businesslike, in fact the greatest of
+them always are," he defended. "There was Voltaire, the successful
+watchmaker at Ferney ... and there was Shakespeare, who, after his
+success in London, returned to Avon and practically bought up the whole
+town ... he even ran a butcher shop there, you know."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"The people expect startling things ... and, as the winds of genius blow
+where they list--when they refuse to blow in the direction required,
+divine is the art of buncombe," he jested.
+
+I suppose this applied to his musician-prodigy, a girl of eight, who
+worked, in the afternoons, in the bindery. And when a visiting party
+swept through that department, it was part of her job to rise as if
+under the impulse of inspiration, leave her work, and go to a nearby
+piano and play ... the implication being that the piano was placed there
+for the use of the workers when melody surged within them....
+
+But she was the only one who played. And she never played except when
+she was tipped the wink. And it was only one thing--a something of
+Rubenstein's ... which she had practised and practised and practised to
+perfection; and _that_ rendered, with haughty head like a little sibyl,
+she would go back to her work-bench. And if urged to play more, she
+would answer, lifting her great, velvet eyes in a dreamy gaze, "no, no
+more to-day. The inspiration has gone." And, awed, the visitors would
+depart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Back of the bindery stood the blacksmith shop, where MacKittrick, the
+historian-blacksmith, plied the bellows and smote the anvil.
+
+MacKittrick took a liking to me. For one day we began talking about
+ancient history, and he perceived that I had a little knowledge of it,
+and a feeling for the colour and motion of its long-ago life.
+
+"I want you to come and work for me," he urged, "my work is mostly
+pretty," he apologised, with blacksmith sturdiness, "--not making
+horseshoes, but cutting out delicate things, ornamental iron work for
+aesthetic purposes, and all that ... all you'll have to do will be to
+swing the hammer gently, while I direct the blows and cut put the dainty
+filigree the "Master" sells to folk, afterward, as art."
+
+"Well, isn't it art?" I asked.
+
+"I suppose it is. But I like the strong work of blacksmithing best. You
+see, I was born to be a great historian. But destiny has made me a
+blacksmith," he continued irrelevantly ... "do come out and work for me.
+I'm hungry for an intelligent helper who can talk history with me while
+we work."
+
+My transfer was effected. And I was immediately glad of it. "Mac," as we
+called him, was a fine, solid man ... and he did know history. He knew
+it as a lover knows his mistress. He was right. He should have been a
+great historical writer--great historian he _was_!
+
+For two glorious months I was with him. And during those two months, I
+learned more about the touch and texture of the historic life of man
+than three times as many years in college could have taught me.
+
+"Mac" talked of Caesar as if only yesterday he had shaken hands with him
+in the Forum ... and he was shocked over his murder as if it had
+happened right after....
+
+"Ah, that was a bad day for Rome and the future of the world, when those
+mad fellows struck him down there like a pig!" he cried.
+
+And Mary, Queen of Scots, was "a sweet, soft body of a white thing that
+should have been content with being in love, and never tried to rule!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Can you cook?" asked Spalton of me one day, just as Barton had done at
+"Perfection City."
+
+"No," I replied honestly, thinking back to that experience.
+
+"Fine!" was the unexpected rejoinder, "I'm going to send you put to the
+camp to cook for my lumber-jacks for a few weeks."
+
+"But I said I couldn't cook."
+
+"You know how to turn an egg in the pan? you know enough not to let ham
+and bacon burn?... you know water won't scorch, no matter how long it
+stands over the fire?...
+
+"You'll make an excellent cook for lumber-jacks ... so long as it's
+something to eat that's stuck under their noses, they don't give a
+damn!... they're always hungry enough to eat anything ... and can digest
+anything....
+
+"Get ready! I'm sending you out on one of the waggons by noon."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perched on the high seat of the waggon by the side of the driver! The
+latter was bundled up to the chin ... wore a fur cap that came down over
+the ears ... was felt-booted against the cold ... wore heavy gloves.
+
+It was so cold that the breath of the horses went straight up into the
+air like thick, white wool. As we rode by, the passing farmers that were
+driving into town almost fell off their seats, startled, and staring at
+me. For there I perched ... coatless and hatless ... sockless feet in
+sandals ... my shirt flung open, a la Byron, at the neck.
+
+It is true that the mind can do anything. I _thought_ myself into being
+composed and comfortable. I did not mind, truly I did not mind it.
+
+The driver had protested, but only once, laconically:
+
+"Whar's y'r coat an' hat?"
+
+"I never wear any," I explained, beginning a propagandistic harangue on
+the non-essentiality of clothes....
+
+He cut in with the final pronouncement:
+
+"Damn fool, you'll git pneumony."
+
+Then he fell into obdurate, contemptuous silence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The snow was deep about our living shanty and cook-shack in one, but
+hard-frozen enough to bear a man's weight without snow-shoes. Over the
+crust had fallen a powdery, white, new snow, about four inches deep.
+
+Every morning, after the "boys" had eaten their breakfast and left for
+the woods, I went through my exercises, stripped, out in the open ... a
+half hour of it, finished by a roll in the snow, that set me tingling
+all over.
+
+One morning I made up my mind to startle the "boys" by running,
+mother-naked, in a circle, whooping, about them, where they were sawing
+up fallen trees and felling others.
+
+It was a half mile to where they worked.
+
+For more bizarre effect, I clapped on a straw hat which I found in the
+rafters--a relic of the preceding summer....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Gosh a'mighty, what's this a-comin!"...
+
+Everybody stopped working. Two neighbour farmers, who had come over for
+a bit of gossip, stooped, their hands on their knees, bowed with
+astonishment, as if they had beheld an apparition.
+
+One of the "boys" told me the two held silence for a long time--till I
+was entirely out of sight again, and after.
+
+Then one exclaimed, "air they any more luny fellers like thet, back at
+them Artwork shops?"
+
+The incident gave birth to the legend of a crazy man under Spalton's
+care, whose chief insanity was running naked through snowdrifts.
+
+Spalton had three sons. Roderick was the eldest: named after his father.
+Level-headed and businesslike, he followed his father's vagaries because
+he saw the commercial possibilities in them ... though he did so more as
+a practical man with a sense of humour than as a man who was on the
+make. Spalton, who knew men thoroughly and quickly appraised their
+individual natures, had installed Roderick in the managing end of
+things,--there with the aid of an older head--one Alfoxden, of whom
+Spalton made too much of a boast, telling everyone he had rescued him
+from a life of crime; Alfoxden, when younger, forged a check and had
+served his term for it. Coming out into the world again, no one would
+trust him because of that one mistake, Spalton, at this juncture, took
+him in and gave him a new chance--but--as I said unkindly, in my mind,
+and publicly, he made capital of his generous action.
+
+But Alfoxden was a soul of rare quality. He never seemed to resent
+"John's" action. He was too much of a gentleman and too grateful for the
+real help Spalton had extended to him.
+
+Alfoxden was a slight, Mephistophelian man ... with bushy, red eyebrows.
+And he was totally bald, except for the upper part of his neck, which
+was fiery with red hair. He had a large knowledge of the Rabelaisan in
+literature ... had in his possession several rather wild effusions of
+Mark Twain in the original copy, and a whole MSS. volume of Field's
+smutty casual verse....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But I was in the lumber camp, cooking for the "boys."...
+
+"Hank," Spalton's youngest son (there was a second son, whose name I
+forget ... lived with his mother, Spalton's divorced wife, in Syracuse,
+and was the conventional, well-brought-up, correct youth)--Hank worked
+in the camp, along with the other lumber-jacks.
+
+The boy was barely sixteen, yet he was six feet two in his stocking feet
+... huge-shouldered, stupendous-muscled, a vegetarian, his picture had
+appeared in the magazines as the prodigy who had grown strong on "Best
+o' Wheat," a prepared breakfast food then popular.
+
+I asked him if the story that he had built his growth and strength on it
+was a fake.
+
+"Yes. I never ate 'Best o' Wheat' in my life, except once or twice," he
+answered, "I like only natural food ... vegetables ... and lots of milk
+... but I draw the line at prepared, pre-digested stuff and baled
+breakfast foods."
+
+"Then why did you lend them the use of your name?"
+
+"Oh, everybody that has any prominence does that ... for a price ... but
+I really didn't want to do it. 'John' made me ... or I wouldn't have."
+
+"And now you have your hair cropped close, why is that?"
+
+"I suppose it's all right to wear your hair long ... but, last summer,
+it got so damned hot with the huge mop I had, that I always had a
+headache ... so one day I went down town to the barber and slipped into
+his chair. 'Hello, Hank,' says he, 'what do you want, a shave?' (joking
+you know--I didn't have but one or two cat-hairs on my face)....
+
+"'No, Jim, I want a hair-cut.' At first he refused ... said 'The
+Master' would bite his head off ... but then he did it--
+
+"John wouldn't speak to me that night, at table ... but the other
+fellows shouted and clapped....
+
+"I don't exactly get dad's idea all the time ... he's a mighty clever
+man, though....
+
+"Books? Oh, yes ... the only ones I care about are those on Indians and
+Indian lore ... I have all the Smithsonian Institution books on the
+subject ... and I have a wigwam back of the bindery--haven't you noticed
+it?--where I like to go and sit cross-legged and meditate ... no, I
+don't want to study regular things. Dad always makes me give in, in
+fact, whenever I act stubborn, by threatening to send me off to a
+regular school....
+
+"No, I want nothing else but to work with my hands all my life."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But, with all his thinking for himself, "Hank" was also childishly
+vulgar. He gulped loudly as he ate, thinking it an evidence of hearty
+good-fellowship. And he deliberately broke wind at the table ... then
+would rap on wood and laugh....
+
+I, on my dignity as cook, and because the others, rough as they were,
+complained to me in private about this behaviour, but did not openly
+speak against it because "Hank" was their employer's son. I took
+exception to the good-natured "lummox's" behaviour.
+
+One morning he was the last to climb out from over the bench at the
+rough, board table....
+
+"Hank ... wait. I want to speak to you a minute."
+
+"Yes, Razorre, what is it?" he asked, waiting....
+
+"Hank, the boys have delegated me to tell you that you must use better
+manners than you do, at meals."
+
+"The hell you say! and what are you going to do if I don't?"
+
+"I--why, Hank, I hadn't thought of that ... but, since you bring up the
+question, I'm going to try to stop you, if you won't stop yourself."
+
+"--think you can?--think you're strong enough?"
+
+"I said '_try_'!"
+
+"Listen, Razorre," and he came over to me with lazy, good-natured
+strength, "I'll pick you up, take you out, and roll you in the snow, if
+you don't keep still."
+
+"And I'll try my best to give you a good whipping," replied I, setting
+my teeth hard, and glaring at him.
+
+He started at me, grinning. I put the table between us, and began taking
+deep breaths to thoroughly oxygenate my blood, so it would help me in my
+forthcoming grapple with the big, over-grown giant.
+
+He toppled the table over. We were together. I kept on breathing like a
+hard-working bellows, as I wrestled about with him.
+
+He seized me by the right leg and tried to lift me up, carry me out. I
+pushed his head back by hooking my fingers under his nose, like a prong.
+
+Then I grabbed him by the seat of the britches and heaved. And they
+burst clean up the back like a bean pod....
+
+Unexpectedly Hank flopped on the bench and began to shout with
+laughter....
+
+My heavy, artificial breathing, like a bellows, for the sake of
+oxygenating more strength into my muscles, had struck him as being so
+ludicrous, that he was in high good humour. I joined in the laughter,
+struck in the same way.
+
+"I surrender, Razorre, and I'll promise to be decent at the table--you
+skinny, crazy, old poet!"
+
+And he rumbled and thundered again with Brobdingnagian mirth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Back from the lumber camp. Comparatively milder weather, but still the
+farmers we passed on the road were startled by my summery attire. But by
+this time the lumber-jacks and I were on terms of proven friendship ...
+I had told them yarns, and had listened to their yarns, in turn ... the
+stories of their lives ... and their joys and troubles....
+
+I was reported to Spalton as having been a first-rate cook.
+
+I went to work in the bindery again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Every day seemed to bring a new "eccentric" to join our colony. I have
+hardly begun to enumerate the prime ones, yet....
+
+But when I returned to the little settlement a curious man had already
+established himself ... one who was called by Spalton, in tender
+ridicule, Gabby Jack ... that was Spalton's nickname for him ... and it
+stuck, because it was so appropriate. Jack was a pilgrim in search of
+Utopia. And he was straightway convinced, wholly and completely, that
+he had found it in Eos. To him Spalton was the one and undoubted prophet
+of God, the high priest of Truth.
+
+Gabby Jack was a "j'iner." From his huge, ornate, gold watch-chain hung
+three or four bejewelled insignia of secret societies that he was a
+member of. He wore a flowered waistcoat ... an enormous seal-ring,
+together with other rings.
+
+He had laid aside a competence, by working his way from journeyman
+carpenter to an independent builder of frame houses, in some thriving
+town in the Middle West ... where, in his fifty-fifth year, he had
+received the call to go forth in quest of the Ideal, the One Truth.
+
+His English was a marvel of ignorant ornateness, like his vest and his
+watch-chain and rings. He had, apparently, no family ties. Spalton
+became his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, almost his God.
+There was nothing the Master said or did that was not perfect ... he
+would stand with worship and adoration written large on his swarthy,
+great face, listening to Spalton's most trivial words....
+
+Otherwise, he was Gabby Jack ... talking ... talking ... talking ...
+with everybody he met ... enquiring ... questioning ... taking notes in
+a large, crude, misspelling hand ... trying himself to write....
+
+We ran away from him ... Spalton ran away from him ... "this fellow will
+be the death of me," he remarked to me, one afternoon, with a light of
+pleasure and pride in his eyes, however, at being so worshipped. "Ah,
+Razorre, beware of the ignorant disciple!"
+
+There was nothing Jack would not do for Spalton. He sought out
+opportunities and occasions for serving him.
+
+And he would guide visitors over the establishment. And, coming to the
+office where Spalton usually sat and worked, he was heard to say once,
+with a wide-spread, reverential sweep of the hand--"and this, ladies and
+gents, is the (his voice dropping to a reverential whisper) 'Sancta
+Sanctoria.'"
+
+Jack could not see so well with one eye as he could with the other. A
+cataract was there which gave that eye the appearance of a
+milky-coloured, poached egg....
+
+Coming home from Buffalo one evening, he stepped down on the wrong side
+of the train, in the dusk ... perhaps from his eagerness to sit by his
+prophet at supper again that night--there being too long a line leaving
+at the station, ahead of him.
+
+A freight was drawing out on the track opposite. And Gabby was so huge
+that he was rolled like a log in a jam, between the two moving trains
+... when the freight had passed, he rose and walked. He took a cab to
+the Artwork Studios.
+
+All in tatters, he hurried to his room and put on another suit. He
+appeared at supper by the side of the Master. He narrated what had
+happened, amid laughter and joking. When Spalton wanted to send for his
+old, frail, white-headed father, the elder Spalton, who was the
+community doctor, Jack waved the idea aside.
+
+"Oh, no, Master!" (Master he called Spalton, and never the familiar,
+more democratic John) "Oh, no, I'm all right."...
+
+The next morning Jack did not show up for breakfast.
+
+At ten o'clock Spalton, solicitous, went up to his room....
+
+He shouted for help. He had found his disciple there, huge and dead,
+like a stranded sea-thing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Gabby Jack's will ... for they found one, together with a last word
+and testament for humanity,--it was asked of Spalton that he should
+conduct the funeral from the Chapel ... and read the funeral oration,
+written by the deceased himself ... and add, if the Master felt moved, a
+few words thereto of his own ... if he considered that so mean a
+disciple deserved it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All work was suspended the day of Jack's funeral.
+
+Spalton eloquently read the curious, crude composition of his disciple
+... which had fine flashes, as of lightning in a dark sky, here and
+there, in it.
+
+Then Spalton began adding words of his own, in praise of the deceased--
+
+"You all know this dear comrade of ours," he began, "this dear friend
+whose really fine soul, while in the body--went under the appellation of
+Gabby Jack--"
+
+Here Spalton broke down. He unashamedly dropped into the chair behind
+the reading-desk and wept aloud. He could say no more....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In _The Dawn_ for the ensuing month he put a wonderful and beautiful
+tribute to his disciple ... who had thoroughly loved, and believed in
+him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On a cold day of blowing snow, "Pete" came tramping in to town ... his
+high boots laced to the knees, a heavy alpaca coat about him ... he had
+come all the way from Philadelphia on foot, to add his portrait to our
+gallery of eccentrics ... but he was not so unusual after all ... there
+was too much of the hungry hardness of youth in him, the cocksureness of
+conceit which he considered genius.
+
+Immediately he put Spalton to question ... and everything and everybody
+to question....
+
+He irritated Spalton most by attacking doctors ... (though Spalton
+himself did so in his magazine) ... Spalton's father was an old family
+practitioner....
+
+But the Master's revenge came.
+
+"Pete" fell sick. Spalton sent for his father to doctor him. And made
+the old man use a strong horse-medicine on him ... which he himself
+brought up from the stables....
+
+"The boy is such an ass ..." Spalton told me laughingly, "that it's a
+veterinarian he needs, not a doctor."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was Speedwell, the young naturalist ... a queer, stooping, gentle,
+shy thing, who talked almost as an idiot would talk till he got on his
+favourite topic of bird and beast and flower. In personal appearance he
+was a sort of Emerson gone to weed ... he walked about with a quick,
+perky, deprecative step....
+
+"--queer fish," John remarked of him, "but, Razorre, you ought to come
+on him in the woods ... there he is a different person ... he sits under
+a tree till he seems to become part of the vegetation, the landscape ...
+when I had him out to camp with me last summer he would go off alone and
+stay away till we thought he had got lost, or had walked into a pond, in
+his simpleness, and drowned...."
+
+We followed him, and watched him....
+
+There he sat ... in his brown corduroys ... his lock of hair over his
+eyes ... that simple, sweet, idiotic expression, like sick sunshine, on
+his mouth....
+
+And after a while the birds came down to him ... pecked all around him
+... and a squirrel climbed up on his shoulder ... he seemed to have an
+attraction for the wild things ... it wasn't as if they just accepted
+him as a part of the surroundings ... the man sat there like a stump
+till we grew tired watching, and returned to camp....
+
+Each day he spent most of the day, immobile, like that....
+
+"Say Razorre," the Master continued, after a thoughtful pause, "you know
+you nuts are teaching me a lot of things....
+
+"The trouble with the educated, regular folks is that they lose so much
+by drawing the line ... often everything that is spontaneous and
+fine.... This thing called God, you know, draws the line nowhere....
+
+"If 'Crazy' Speedwell fell heir to a large sum of money, his relatives
+could find a commission of physicians anywhere, who would honestly have
+him into custody for lunacy ... yet, in some respects, he is the wisest
+and kindest man I have ever known ... though, in others, he is often
+such a fool as to try my patience very hard, at times."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most of us who had arrived at "The Studios" from "foreign" parts, slept
+in the common dormitory.
+
+We held frequent "roughhouses" there, the younger of us ... to the
+annoyance of Speedwell. Spalton finally gave him permission to sleep and
+live, alone, in the shed where the fire-truck and hose was stored....
+
+One night, for malicious fun, a beak-nosed young prize-fighter, and
+several others (including myself) sneaked into his abode while he slept
+... thoughtlessly we turned the gas on and tiptoed out again....
+
+Not long after he came staggering forth, half-suffocated....
+
+Everybody laughed at the tale of this ... at first Spalton himself
+laughed, our American spirit of rough joking and horse-play gaining the
+uppermost in him ... but then he recalled to mind the seriousness of our
+practical joke, and burned with anger at us over what we had done. And
+he threatened to "fire" on the spot anyone who ever again molested
+"Crazy" Speedwell....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Old Pfeiler" we called him....
+
+Pfeiler had attended one of Spalton's lectures at Chicago.
+
+Afterward, he had come up front and asked the lecturer if he could make
+a place for him at Eos ... that he was out of a job ... starving ... a
+poor German scholar ... formerly, in better days, a man of much wealth
+and travel....
+
+He had spent his last nickel for admission to Spalton's lecture. Spalton
+brought him back to the Eos Artwork Studios.
+
+There he found that the queer, gentle, old man was as helpless as a
+child ... all he could be trusted to do was to write addresses on
+letters ... which he was set at, not too exactingly....
+
+I never saw so happy a man as Pfeiler was that winter.
+
+He was a Buddhist, not by pose, but by sincere conviction. He thought,
+also, that the Koran was a greater book than the Bible ... and more
+miraculous ... "one man, Mohammed, who left a work of greater beauty
+than the combined efforts of the several hundred who gave us that
+hodge-podge, the Bible."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pfeiler had been left a fortune by his father, a wealthy German merchant
+... so, like Sir Richard Burton, he had made off to the Near East ...
+where he had lived among the Turks for ten years ... till, what with his
+buying rare manuscripts and Oriental and Turkish art, he had suddenly
+run upon the rocks of bankruptcy ... and had returned from the Levantine
+a ruined, helpless scholar, who had never been taught to be anything
+else but a man of culture and leisure....
+
+By steerage he made his way to America ... to Chicago ... all his works
+of art, his priceless manuscripts sold ... the money gone like water
+through the assiduities of false friends and sycophants....
+
+On the bum in Chicago ... a hotel clerk, discharged as incompetent--he
+had forgotten to insist that a man and woman register always as man and
+wife ... "because it was such hypocrisy" ... finally a dishwasher, who
+lived in a hall bed-room ... no friends because of his abstractedness,
+his immersion in oriental scholarship ... his only place of refuge, his
+dwelling place, when not washing dishes for a mere existence, the Public
+Library....
+
+"Old Pfeiler" drank coffee by the quart, as drunkards drink whiskey. He
+had a nervous affliction which caused him to shake his head continually,
+as if in impatience ... or as a dog shakes his head to dislodge
+something that has crept into his ear....
+
+He was as timid as a girl....
+
+The common dormitory was no place for him ... I am sorry to confess
+that, for a while, I helped to make his life miserable for him ... each
+night the beak-nosed pugilist-lad and I raised a merry roughhouse in the
+place.... Pfeiler was our chief butt. We put things in his bed ... threw
+objects about so they would wake him up. One night I found him crying
+silently ... but somehow not ignobly ... this made me shift about in my
+actions toward him, and see how miserable my conduct had been....
+
+So the next time "Beak-horn," as I called my plug-ugly friend, started
+to tease the old man, I asked him to stop ... that we had tormented
+Pfeiler long enough. "Beak-horn" replied with a surprised, savage stare
+... and the next moment he was on me, half in jest, half in earnest. I
+boxed with him as hard and swift as I was able ... but a flock of fists
+drove in over me ... and I was thrown prone across the form of the old
+man ... who stuttered with fright and impotent rage, swearing it was all
+a put-up game between us to torment him further, when I protested that I
+had not tried to do it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning Spalton sent for me.
+
+"Look here, Razorre, if _you_ were not the biggest freak of them all, I
+could understand," he remarked severely....
+
+I tried to explain how sorry I was for the way I had joined in Pfeiler's
+persecution ... but the master would have none of it ... he told me to
+look better to my conduct or he would have to expel me from the
+community....
+
+"Gregory," he ended, calling me by my name, "somehow I never quite _get
+you_ ... most of the time you are refined and almost over-gentle ... you
+know and love poetry and art and the worthwhile things ... but then
+there's also the hoodlum in you ... the dirty Hooligan--" his eyes
+blazed with just rebuke.... I trod out silently, sick of myself, at
+heart ... as I have often, often been.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After that, Pfeiler avoided me. I went up to him in apology. Most
+contritely I said I was sorry.
+
+"You are a fraud," he cried at me, spluttering, almost gnashing his
+teeth in fury, "you go around here, pretending you are a poet, and have
+the soul of a thug, a brute, a coward and bully ... please don't speak
+to me any more as long as I'm here ... you only pretend interest in
+spiritual and intellectual things, always for some brutal reason ...
+even now you are planning something base, some diabolical betrayal of
+the Master, perhaps, or of all of us.... I myself have advised Mr.
+Spalton, for the good of his community to send you back to the tramps
+and jail-birds from whom you come ... you scum! you filthy pestilence!"
+
+His head was shaking like an oscillating toy ... his eyes were starting
+from his head through force of his invective ... he was jerking about,
+in his anger, like a dancing mouse....
+
+I hurried out of his word-range, overwhelmed with greater shame than I
+can ever say.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The editor of the _Independent_, Dr. William Hayes Ward, had, so far,
+not found room in his magazine for the two poems of mine he had bought.
+I was chagrined, and wrote him, rather impetuously, that, if he didn't
+care for the poems he might return them. Which he did, with a rather
+frigid and offended reply. I was rendered unhappy by this.
+
+I spoke to Spalton about it.
+
+"Why Razorre, so you _have_ come that near to being in print?" I showed
+him the poems. "Yes, you have the making of a real poet in you!"
+
+A day or so after he approached me with--"I'm writing a brief visit to
+the home of Thoreau ... how would you like to compose a poem for me, on
+him--for the first page of the work?"
+
+"I would like it very much," I said. In a few days I handed him the
+poem. A "sonnet," the form of which I myself had invented, in fifteen
+lines.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For days I lived in an intoxication of anticipation ... just to have one
+poem printed, I was certain, would mean my immediate fame ... so
+thoroughly did I believe in my genius. I was sure that instantly all of
+the publishers in the world would contend with each other for the
+privilege of bringing out my books.
+
+Spring had begun to give hints of waking green, when _The Brief Visit_
+was issued from the press. I rushed to procure a copy before it was
+bound. I was surprised and dumbfounded to find that the Master had used
+the poem without my name attached ... just as if it, with the rest of
+the book, was from his own pen.
+
+My first impulse was to rush into the dining hall, at breakfast, Waving
+the sheets, and calling "John" to account for his theft, before
+everybody ... then I bethought myself that, perhaps, some mistake had
+been made ... that the proofreader might have left my name out.
+
+Spalton looked up quickly as I passed by his table. He read in my face
+that I had already discovered what he had done. He blushed. I nodded him
+a stiff greeting. I ate in silence--at the furthest table.
+
+In a few minutes he did me an honour he had never shown me before. He
+came over to where I sat. "Razorre," he invited, "how would you like to
+take a hike with me into the country, this morning?"
+
+I gave him a swift glance. "I would like it very much."
+
+"Then as soon as you are through, meet me in the library."
+
+I drank a second cup of coffee with studied deliberation--in spite of
+myself, I was thrilled with the notice that had been shown me before all
+the others. Already my anger had somewhat lessened.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Never had the master been so eloquent, so much his better self, since
+that first day, at the wood-pile. He strove to throw the magic of his
+spirit over me with all his power. For hours we walked, the light, pale
+green of the renewing year about us. But through it all I saw what he
+was trying to effect ... to impress me so deeply that I would not only
+forgive him for having stolen my poem, but actually thank him, for
+having used it--even consider it a mark of honour ... which his
+eloquence almost persuaded me to do.
+
+Indeed I saw the true greatness in "John" ... but I also saw and
+resented the petty, cruel pilferer--stealing helpless, unknown, youthful
+genius for his own--resented it even more because the resources of the
+man's nature did not require it of him to descend to such pitiful
+expedients. He was rich enough in himself for his own fame and glory.
+
+And why should he rob a young poet of his first fame, of the exquisite
+pleasure of seeing his name for the first time in print? ... than which
+there is no pleasure more exquisite ... not even the first possession of
+a loved woman!...
+
+We had almost returned to the "Artworks" before I tried to let loose on
+him ... but even then I could not. Gently I asked him why he had not
+affixed my name to my poem.
+
+He looked at me with well-simulated amazement.
+
+"Why, Razorre, I never even thought of it ... we are all a part of one
+community of endeavour here ... and we all give our efforts as a
+contribution to the Eos Idea ... I have paid you a higher compliment
+than merely giving you credit ... instead, I have incorporated your
+verse into the very body of our thought and life."
+
+His effrontery struck me silent. I told him sadly that I must now go
+away.
+
+"Nonsense," he replied, "this is as good a place in which to develop
+your poetic genius as any place in the world. I may say, better. Here
+you will find congenial environment, ready appreciation .. come, let us
+walk a little further," and we turned aside from the steps of the dining
+room and struck down the main street of the town.
+
+"I mean bigger things for you, Razorre, than you can guess.... I will
+make you the Eos Poet--look at Gresham, he is the Eos Artist, and, as
+such, his fame is continent-wide ... just as yours will become ... and I
+will bring out a book of your poetry ... and advertise it in _The
+Dawn_."
+
+His eloquence on art and life, genius and literature, had enthralled and
+placated me ... his personal wheedling irritated and angered.
+
+"A book of my poems ... without my name on the title page, perhaps," I
+cried, impassioned, looking him deep in the eyes. He shifted his glance
+from me--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I threw my few belongings together.
+
+Everybody, in saying good-bye, gave me a warm hand-clasp of friendship
+(excepting Pfeiler), including Spalton, who assured me--
+
+"Razorre, you'll be back again ... despite its faults, they all come
+back to Eos."
+
+"Yes," I responded, sweeping him off his feet by the unexpectedness of
+my reply, "yes, in spite of all, Eos is a wonderful place ... it has
+given me something ... in my heart ... in my soul ... which no other
+place in the world could have given ... and at the time I needed it most
+... a feeling for beauty, a fellowship--"
+
+"Razorre," he cut in, moved, "we all have our faults,--God knows _you_
+have--mutual forgiveness--" he murmured, pressing my hand warmly again;
+his great, brown eyes humid with emotion ... whether he was acting, or
+genuine ... or both ... I could not tell. I didn't care. I departed
+with the warmth of his benediction over my going.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This time I did not freight it. I paid my fare to New York.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father ... I must pay him a visit, before lifting my nose in the air
+like a migrating bird. Where I would go or what I would do that spring
+and summer, I hadn't the vaguest idea....
+
+It seemed but the day before that I had left Haberford. The fat
+policeman who leaned against the iron railing of the small park near the
+station was there in the same place. The same young rowdies pushed each
+other about, and spat, and swore, near the undertaker shop and the
+telegraph office.
+
+But as I walked past the Hartman express office--the private concern
+which Hartman, the thin, wiry shock-haired Swede, had built up through
+arduous struggle, beginning with one wagon--
+
+Hartman saw me through the window, and beckoned vigorously for me to
+step in....
+
+"--just got home from another hobo-trip, Johnny?"
+
+"You're almost right, Mr. Hartman."
+
+"A pause....
+
+"--been to see your father yet?"
+
+"No, sir, I'm on the way there now ... just arrived this minute, on the
+train from New York."
+
+"I'm glad I caught sight of you, then, to prepare you." A longer pause
+... mysteriously embarrassing, on his part.
+
+"I have something to tell you about him ...--guess you're old enough to
+stand plain talk ... sit down!"
+
+I took a chair.
+
+"You see, it's this way," and he leaned forward and put his hand on my
+knee.. "it's women--a woman" ... he paused, I nodded to him to go on,
+feeling very dramatic and important....
+
+"It's Mrs. Jenkins, the widow, that has her hooks in him ... around
+where he boards ... and, to be frank with you, he's going it so strong
+with her that he's sick and rundown ... and not so right, at times, _up
+here_!" and Hartman tapped his forehead with his forefinger
+significantly....
+
+"Now, you're the nearest one to him around here," he went on, "and I'll
+tell you what we were going to do ... his lodge, of which I'm a member,
+was going to give him a trip, to separate him from her, and cure him ...
+you come back just pat....
+
+"Has your daddy any relatives that can afford to entertain him, out in
+the West, where you came from?"
+
+"Yes, one of my uncles, his brother, is very well off, and would be glad
+to take him in ... in fact any of the folks back home would," my voice
+sounded hollow and far off as I answered.
+
+"You're a pretty smart lad ... do you want to go back with him when he
+goes?"
+
+"No, Mr. Hartman."
+
+"Well, we can tip the porter to take care of him ... but why don't you
+want to go with him, we will foot your expenses?"
+
+"I have other things to do," I answered vaguely.
+
+He gave a gesture of impatience....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a hush in the house, as I stepped softly up the stairs. The
+catch of the front door was back....
+
+First I went to my room and found all my books intact ... in better
+condition even, than when I was home with them ... there was not a speck
+of dust anywhere. Evidently my father was not too sick to keep the place
+clean ... but then, I meditated he would attend to that, with his last
+effort.
+
+My books were my parents, my relatives. I had been born of them, not of
+my own father and mother. My being born in the flesh was a mere accident
+of nature. My father and mother happened to be the vehicle.
+
+But the place was so quiet it perturbed me.
+
+"Pop!" I called, going toward his bed-room.
+
+The door leading into it slowly opened. The little, dark widow was in
+there with him.
+
+"Hush! your father is asleep."
+
+A hatred of both him and her shot up quick in my heart. I sensed their
+abandonment to the sheerly physical, till it took in their whole
+horizon. It was utterly ignoble. I had a vision of all humanity, living,
+for the most part, merely for food and sex, letting art and poetry and
+beauty and adventure pass by, content if they only achieved the bare
+opportunity of daily wallowing in their mire.
+
+I was bad and mean enough, but the conception of a single poem in my
+brain, till it found birth on paper, was, I swore, bigger and finer
+than all this world-mess at its best. Also there was in me somewhat the
+thwarted, sinister hatred of the celibate....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You mustn't bother your father now," little Mrs. Jenkins interposed, as
+I started in, "you must let him rest for awhile, and not wake him."
+
+Through the door, half open, I caught a glimpse of a hollow, wax-white
+face ... he looked as if all the blood had been let out of his body,
+little by little. The little, pretty, dark woman looked like a crafty
+animal ... there was a beady shine of triumph, which she could not
+conceal, in her eyes, as she opposed my entering. I smelt the pungent
+smell of her physical womanhood. There was a plumpness about her body, a
+ruddiness to her lips, that gave me the phantasy that, perhaps, the
+moment before, she had drunk of my father's blood, and that she was
+preventing me from going in to where he lay till a certain tiny, red
+puncture over his jugular vein had closed.
+
+"You forget, Mrs. Jenkins, that he is my father."
+
+"You shan't go in ... please, Johnnie ... let him sleep just a little
+longer ... as soon as he wakes he asks for another drink!"
+
+"And who put him in this state?" I charged directly, vividly remembering
+what Hartman had said....
+
+"What, you don't mean to insinuate?"--she gasped.
+
+"I mean nothing, only that I have come home to take care of my father,
+till his lodge takes charge of him, and that, for the present, I want
+you to please leave me alone with him."
+
+Her small, black pupils dilated angrily. But she did not press the point
+of her staying. She had put her hand on my arm cajolingly, but I had
+shook it off with such evident disgust--founded partly and secretly on a
+horror of physical attraction for her--that drew my morbid, starved
+nature--
+
+"Very well!... but I'll be back this afternoon, early. When he wakes up
+and asks for a drink of whiskey ... starts out to get one ... draw him a
+glass of water from the faucet, and take your oath that it's whiskey ...
+he'll believe you and drink it!"
+
+And she departed, an odor of strong perfume in her wake.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Had this planet of earth been populated from without?... there were
+evidently two races on it--the race of men--the race of women--men had
+voyaged in from some other world in space women had done the like from
+their world ... to this world, alien to both of them. And here a
+monstrous thing had brought them together like an interlocking
+fungus--their sex-union ... a function that monstrously held together
+two different species of animals that should not even be on meeting
+terms.
+
+Thus my morbid fancy ran, as I entered slowly my father's room.
+
+He slept.
+
+On a chair by his bed lay a copy of _Hamlet_, his favourite
+Shakespearean play. I picked it up, read in it, waiting for him to wake,
+while he breathed laboriously.
+
+I became absorbed in the play ... I must write a poem, some time, called
+"Hamlet's Last Soliliquy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father was awake.
+
+I did not know how long he had been so, for his breathing had not
+changed and the only difference from his sleeping state was that his
+eyes stared, wide and glassy, at the ceiling, as if they comprehended
+nothing.
+
+A feeling of horror crept over my body. This was more than I had counted
+on.. my father, helpless on his back and his wits off gathering wool....
+
+"Father!" I put my hand on a talon of his.
+
+He turned his head slightly. Smiled vacuously.
+
+"Father!"
+
+A perturbation clouded his eyes ... that painful struggle toward
+comprehension observed in an infant's face.
+
+"Who are you? What do you want?"
+
+"I'm your son--Johnnie!... and I've come back to take care of you."
+
+"Johnnie is away ... far off ... on the sea ... in a ship."
+
+And he sighed and turned his face to the wall as if the thought troubled
+him, and he wished to dismiss it. Then, in a moment, he whirled about,
+changed and furious. He rose to a sitting posture ... swung his legs
+out, bringing the bed-clothes a-wry with him....
+
+"You are an impostor ... you are not my son ... I tell you again, he is
+away ... has been away for years ... as long as I can remember ...
+perhaps he is dead ... you are an impostor."
+
+He leaped up, full of madness, and seized hold of me.
+
+"Stop, Father, what are you trying to do?"
+
+As I grappled with him, trying to keep him from hurting me--and he was
+quite strong, for all his emaciation--the horror of my situation made me
+sick at the stomach, quite sick ... and my mind went ridiculously back
+to the times when my father and I had eaten oyster-fries together ...
+"that is the only thing you and this man have in common ...
+oyster-fries," remarked my mind to me. All the while I was pinning his
+wrists in my grasp ... re-pinning them as he frantically wrested them
+loose ... swearing and heaping obscenities on my head ... all the while,
+I thought of those oyster-fries ... we had saved up a lard-tin full of
+bacon grease to fry them in ... and fry after fry had been sizzled to a
+rich, cracker-powdered brown in that grease ... a peculiar smell waxed
+in the kitchen, however ... which we could never trace to its source ...
+"a dead rat somewhere, maybe," suggested my father.
+
+When we had used a third of the bacon grease, the dead rat's foot stood
+up ... out of that can.
+
+We discharged the contents of our stomachs in the sink.
+
+This was the ridiculous incident that possessed my imagination while I
+struggled with my father.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had my father over on the bed. He fought to a sitting posture again
+... got his finger in my eye and made me see a whorl of dancing sparks.
+With irritation and a curse ... then both laughing hysterically and
+sobbing ... I bore him back to his pillow....
+
+The strength had gone entirely out of him ... now it came into his mind
+that I was there trying to rob or kill him.
+
+"Spare me, spare me!" he pleaded, "you can have everything in the house
+... only don't kill me! My God!"
+
+"Good Christ!" I groaned, as he beat upward, fighting again.
+
+I let him rise, almost palsied with horror.
+
+He perched on the edge of the bed, exhausted,--began groping with one
+hand, in the air, idly.
+
+"What is it? What do you want?"
+
+"Give me my pants! I don't trust you. I want to go to the corner and get
+a drink ... give me my pants!"
+
+"Pop, look at me ... stop this nonsense ... you're safe ... I'm your
+son, Johnnie!"
+
+"That's all very well," he assented with an air of reserved cunning.
+
+"Please believe me," I pleaded.
+
+"All right ... you are my son ... only don't kill me," he responded
+craftily.
+
+"Father!... good God!"
+
+He perceived by the emotion of my last exclamation, that at least I was
+not ill-disposed toward him.
+
+He clutched at the advantage.
+
+"Promise to take care of me till Johnnie comes--he's just around the
+corner," slyly.
+
+"Pop, what is it you want? What can I do for you?"
+
+"A curious greed flickered in his eyes.
+
+"Get me a drink!"
+
+"All right! I'll get it for you!"
+
+"Let me think! There's none in the house ... none left, Emily said."
+
+"But I brought some with me ... wait a minute." I went into the kitchen,
+turned on the tap softly, filled a glass half full of water, brought it
+back to him.
+
+"Here it is."
+
+"I don't like the colour of it."
+
+"Why, it has a nice, rich colour."
+
+"What is it?--Scotch?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He sipped of it. Made a rueful face. "I don't like the taste of it ...
+it tastes too much like water," he commented, with a quiet, grave,
+matter-of-fact grimace that set me laughing, in spite of myself....
+
+"Drink it down! I swear it's all right."
+
+He tossed off the water.
+
+"Give me my pants. I want to get out of here."
+
+"Why, wasn't that whiskey that I just gave you?"
+
+"Yes, yes ... but not very good stuff. I know where I can get better."
+
+Humouring him, I helped him into his trousers ... painfully he put on
+his shirt, neatly tied his tie, while I steadied him. This manual
+function seemed to better his condition straightway. He startled me by
+turning to me with a look of amused recognition in his eyes. He was no
+longer off his head, just a very sick man.
+
+"Well, Johnnie, so you're back again?"
+
+"Yes, Pop--back again!"
+
+"What are you going to do next?" he queried wearily, seating himself
+laboriously in an armchair.
+
+"Stay, and take care of you!"
+
+"That will be unnecessary. I have had a rather severe attack of malaria
+... that is all ... left me rather weak ... but now I'm getting over it
+... had to take a lot of whiskey and quinine, though, to break it up!
+
+"Malaria comes on me, every spring, you know ... harder than usual, this
+spring, though ... it's made me dotty ... made me say things, at times,
+I'm afraid!"
+
+We sat silent.
+
+"--need any money?" he was reaching into his pocket.
+
+"No, I don't want a cent!"
+
+"Then take this five dollar bill and go around to the corner saloon and
+buy me a pint ... what I had is all used up, and the chills are not
+quite out of me yet."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the way to the saloon I stopped at Hartman's express office ...
+related the foregoing story....
+
+"H'm! yes!... I see!" ... Hartman braced his thumbs together
+meditatively, "--from what you say it's pretty serious ... something
+will have to be done this very day....
+
+"Yes, go and get the pint ... let him have a drink of it. And--and keep
+close to him all the time ... don't," he added significantly, "leave the
+lady in question in the room alone with him for a single moment."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Have you got the pint, Son?"
+
+"Yes, Father. Here it is ... but just a little!"
+
+"I know what I'm doing!"
+
+He took most of it down at a gulp.
+
+Noticing the anxious look in my eyes.
+
+"Don't worry about me, Johnnie. I can take it or leave it alone ...
+--always could!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before Mrs. Jenkins could come back, Hartman anticipated her with a
+nurse and a doctor. As Mrs. Jenkins came in, chagrin and indignation
+showed on her face. But she bowed perforce to the situation. She was too
+wise not to.
+
+"His lodge-brothers are taking care of Mr. Gregory now, Mrs. Jenkins,"
+explained Mr. Hartman suavely, warning her off, at the same time, with a
+severe, understanding look in his eyes.
+
+She dropped her eyelashes--though with a bit of instinctive coquetry in
+them--under his straight-thrusting glance.
+
+"Well, I suppose professional care _would_ be better than anything I
+could do for him ... but," sweetly, "I'll drop in from time to time to
+see if there's any little thing I can do."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Deprived of the loving care of Emily Jenkins, though he called for her
+many times, my father mended his condition rapidly. And, after a long,
+mysterious conference with Hartman and other members of his fraternal
+order, he consented to allow himself to be sent West on a visit. But not
+till they had promised to keep his job as foreman in the Composite
+Works, open for him, till he was well enough to come back.
+
+After I had seen my father off, I stayed in the silent rooms only long
+enough to pack up my books, which I left in care of Hartman.
+
+I had at last arrived at a definite plan of action.
+
+My grandfather was transacting some sort of business in Washington, as
+my uncle, Jim, had informed me. There he was living in affluence,
+married again, in his old age ... just like his former wife.
+
+I had evolved a scheme which seemed to me both clever and feasible, by
+which to extract from him a few hundred or a thousand dollars with which
+to prosecute my studies further, and enter, eventually, say, Princeton
+or Harvard ... perhaps Oxford.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found my grandfather holding forth in a swell suite of offices in the
+business district of Washington.
+
+Near his great desk, with a little table and typewriter, sat a girl,
+very pretty--he would see to that!... evidently his stenographer and
+private secretary.
+
+As I stood by the railing, she observed me coldly once or twice, looking
+me over, before she thrust her pencil in her abundant hair and sauntered
+haughtily over to see what I was after.
+
+Despite the fact that I informed her who I was, with eyes impersonal as
+the dawn she replied that she would see if Mr. Gregory could see me ...
+that at present he was busy with a conference in the adjoining room.
+
+I sat and waited ... dusty and derelict, in the spick-and-span office,
+where hung the old-fashioned steel engravings on the wall, of Civil War
+battles, of generals and officers seated about tables on camp
+stools,--bushy-bearded and baggy-trousered.
+
+Finally my grandfather Gregory walked briskly forth. He looked about,
+first, as if to find me. His eyes, after hovering hawklike, settled, in
+a grey, level, impersonal glance, on me.
+
+"Come in here," he bade, not even calling me by name.
+
+I stepped inside, trying hard to be bold. But his precision and
+appearance of keen prosperity and sufficiency made me act, in spite of
+myself, deprecative. So I sat there by him, in his private room, keying
+my voice shrill and voluble and high, as I always do, when I am not sure
+of my case. And, worse, he let me do the talking ... watching me keenly,
+the while.
+
+I put to him my proposition of having my life insured in his name, that
+I might borrow a thousand or so of him, on the policy, to go to college
+with....
+
+"Ah, if he only lets me have what I ask," I was dreaming, as I pleaded,
+"I'll go to England ... to some college with cool, grey mediaeval
+buildings ... and there spend a long time in the quiet study of poetry
+... thinking of nothing, caring for nothing else."
+
+"No! how absurd!" he was snapping decisively. I came to from my vision.
+
+"My dear Johnnie, your proposition is both absurd and--" as if that were
+the last enormity--"very unbusinesslike!"
+
+"But I will then become a great poet! On my word of honour, I will! and
+I will be a great honour to the Gregory family!"
+
+He shook his head. He rose, standing erect and slender, like a small
+flagpole. As I rose I towered high over the little-bodied, trim man.
+
+"Come, you haven't eaten yet?"
+
+"No!"
+
+Well, he had a sort of a heart, after all ... some family feeling.
+
+Walking slightly ahead, so as not to seem to be in my company, old
+Grandfather Gregory took me to a--lunch counter ... bowing to numerous
+friends and acquaintances on the way ... once he stepped aside to a
+hurried conference, leaving me standing forlorn and solitary, like a
+scarecrow in a field.
+
+I grew so angry at him I could hardly bridle my anger in.
+
+"--like oyster sandwiches?" he asked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He didn't even wait to let me choose my own food.
+
+"Two oyster sandwiches and--a cup of coffee," he barked.
+
+While I ate he stepped outside and talked with another friend.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Good-bye," he was bidding me, extending a tiny hand, the back of it
+covered with steel-coloured hairs, "you'd better go back up to
+Jersey--just heard your daddy is very sick there ... he might need your
+help."
+
+I thought cautiously. Evidently he knew nothing of my father's having
+been sent home by his lodge. I affected to be perturbed....
+
+"In that case--could you--advance me my fare to Haberford?"
+
+I'd wangle a _few_ dollars out of him.
+
+My grandfather's answer was a silent, granite smile.
+
+"--just want to see what you can cajole out of the old man, eh? No,
+Johnnie--I'll leave you to make your way back in the same way you've
+made your way to Washington ... from all accounts railroad fare is the
+least of your troubles."
+
+My whole hatred of him, so carefully concealed while I thought there was
+some hopes of putting through my educational scheme, now broke out--
+
+"_You"_--I began, cursing....
+
+"I knew that's the way you felt all along ... better run along now, or
+I'll say I don't know you, and have you taken up for soliciting alms."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before nightfall I was well on my way to Philadelphia. For a while I
+resigned myself to the life of a tramp. I hooked up with another gang of
+hoboes, in the outskirts of that city, and taught them the plan of the
+ex-cook that we'd crowned king down in Texas....
+
+I kept myself in reading matter by filching the complete works of
+Sterne (in one volume) and the poetry of Milton--from an outside stand
+of a second hand book store....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+--left that gang, and started forth alone again. I became a walking bum,
+if a few miles a day constitutes taking that appellation. I walked ahead
+a few miles, then sat down and studied my Milton, or dug deep into
+_Tristram Shandy_. Hungry, I went up to farmhouse or backdoor of city
+dwelling, and asked for food....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found myself in the outskirts of Newark again.
+
+I took my Sterne and Milton to Breasted's, hoping to trade them for
+other books. I stood before the outside books, on the stand, hesitating.
+I was, for the moment, ashamed to show myself to "the perfesser,"
+because of the raggedness that I had fallen into.
+
+While I was hesitating, a voice at my elbow--
+
+"Any books I can show you?--any special book you're looking for?"
+
+The voice was the voice of the tradesman, warning off the man unlikely
+to buy--but it was the familiar voice of my friend, "the perfesser,"
+just the same. I turned and smiled into his face, happy in greeting him,
+losing the trepidation my rags gave me.
+
+"Why, Johnnie Gregory!" he shook my hand warmly as if I were a prince. I
+was enchanted.
+
+"I want to exchange two books if I can--for others!"
+
+"Come right into the back. Breasted, the boss, is out for the day....
+I'm having my lunch sent in, won't you have some with me?"
+
+He acted just as if he hadn't noticed my dilapidation.
+
+I said I'd gladly share his lunch.
+
+He drew my story out of me,--the story of my life, in fact, before the
+afternoon wore to dusk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Do you think I'm crazy?" I asked him.
+
+"No ... far from it ... " adding gently, with a smile, "sometimes an
+awful fool, though, Johnnie--if I may say it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Won't you stay overnight?"
+
+"No, thanks just the same, 'Perfesser.'"
+
+"I have room enough ... better hang around a few days and look for a job
+here."
+
+"It's too near Haberford."
+
+"But I know you'd take a couple of fresh books, if I gave them to you,
+now wouldn't you?"
+
+My eyes lit up as with hunger.
+
+"This Milton and Sterne are too used-up to be worth a nickel a-piece.
+Maybe, if I'd keep them, they might be worth something, some day, when
+you're famous," he joked.
+
+"If you want to give me a couple of books ... how about this Keats and
+this Ossian? I want the Keats for myself. It will renew my courage.
+And--the Ossian--will you mail that book on for me, to Eos, to old
+Pfeiler?"
+
+I had told him, in the course of my talking, about them both.
+
+Pfeiler used often to talk of the greatness of Ossian's poetry ... and
+how he'd like to possess a volume of it again ... that is, before he
+grew to hate me.
+
+Maybe if I sent him the book, with a letter, he would think less harshly
+of me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I tramped through New England. My whole life had settled back into
+tramping ... only my Keats remained. I read and re-read his poems, not
+caring to write a line myself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I worked as a dish-washer or pearl-diver for several weeks in Boston,
+and bought a very cheap second-hand suit.
+
+I shifted my mind like a weather vane and decided against shipping to
+England, with the forlorn hope of, somehow attending Oxford or
+Cambridge, and studying English literature there. My old ideal of being
+a great adventurer and traveller had vanished, and, in its stead, came
+the desire to live a quiet life, devoted entirely to writing poetry, as
+the poet Gray lived his.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I drifted inland to Concord, a-foot, as a pilgrim to the town where
+Emerson and Thoreau had lived. I was happy in loitering about the haunts
+of Thoreau; in sitting, full of thought, by the unhewn granite tombstone
+of Emerson, near the quiet of his grave.
+
+Toward evening I realised that I had gone without food all day....
+
+On a hill mounting up toward the West, outside of Concord, I stopped at
+the house of a market-gardener and asked for something to eat. A
+tottering old man leaned forward through the half-open door. He asked me
+in, and set before me a plate of lukewarm beans and a piece of jelly
+roll. But he delighted the tramp in me by setting before me, also, a cup
+of excellent, hot, strong coffee.
+
+Afterward when he asked me if I wanted a job, I said yes.
+
+The old man lit my way upstairs to a bed in the attic.
+
+It was hardly dawn when he woke me....
+
+A breakfast of soggy pancakes and more beans, which his equally aged
+wife had prepared. And we were out in the fields, at work. And soon his
+wife was with us, working, too.
+
+When Sowerby, this market gardener, told me that he was almost ninety I
+could believe him. He might have added a few more years, with credence.
+
+He went actively about his toil, but yet shaky like a bicycle till it
+fully starts, when it runs the steadier the more it is speeded. It was
+work that kept him on his feet, work that sustained life in him. His
+whole life and pleasure was senseless work.
+
+And yet he was not a bookless man. He possessed many books, mostly the
+old religious classics. Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, Baxter's _Saint's
+Rest_, Blair, _On the Grave_ ... Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living_ and _Holy
+Dying_, that gave me a shock almost of painful remembrance--Keats had
+read the latter when he was dying in Rome ... and there were the New
+England Divines, the somber Jonathan Edwards whose sermon on the day of
+doom and the tortures of hell made his auditors faint ... I thought back
+to the terrifying sermon of the illiterate negro preacher in the Texas
+jail.
+
+But now old Sowerby read nothing. "I have no time left for a book."
+
+I never met the old man's equal for parsimony. "The last man--the man
+who worked for me before you came--he was a Pole, who could hardly speak
+English. He left because he didn't like the food ... yes, that was what
+he had the impudence to announce ... and you can see that I am not so
+bad ... don't I give you a slice of jelly roll with your beans, every
+other night?"
+
+I assented to what the old man said. He had been the milkman to the
+Emerson and Thoreau families, and, in that capacity, had known both the
+great men. And I was more eager to hear what he had to say about them,
+than to draw wages for my work.
+
+But he had little to say about them, except that they were as great
+fools as the outside world esteemed them great men.
+
+"They talked a lot about work and a man's being independent, earning his
+living with his own hands, from the soil, but,--did they follow their
+teachings?... that's the test....
+
+"And I saw them, often, strolling out a-field together, talking and
+talking a lot of nonsense about philosophy, and going on, regardless,
+across their neighbours' crops."
+
+And that was the only information I could get of these famous men from
+their milkman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sowerby kept pigs under the barn.... For economy's sake the cows' dung
+was shovelled down to them. And over them the outhouse was also built,
+so that our human efforts might not be wasted....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One night, despite a hard day's work, I could not sleep. So I went out
+on the hillside to enjoy the moonlight.
+
+On my way back to the attic I observed a light in the barn. I stopped in
+to see who was there. It was Sowerby, cleaning out the stable, to the
+plain disgust of the horses and cows.
+
+I asked him if anything was the matter. I learned that he had risen in
+the middle of the night and gone to work ... because that was his
+happiness, his only happiness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Driven by an impulse of distaste for him and his house and market
+garden, I started to leave in secret. What money was coming to me for my
+two weeks' work I did not care about--in the face of the curious
+satisfaction it would give me just to quit, and to have the old man call
+up to me and find me missing....
+
+I heard him pottering back to his bedroom again.... I waited till he was
+quiet and back to sleep--then I stole forth in the quiet moonlight near
+dawn.
+
+It gave me a pleasure to vanish like smoke. I thought of the time when I
+had that job plowing in Southern California; that time I had driven the
+horses to the further end of the field, and left them standing there
+under the shade of a tree and then made off, wishing to shout and sing
+for the sheer happiness of freedom from responsibility and regular work.
+
+Each time I have made off that way, from a multitude of varying
+employments, it has not been, surely, to the detriment of my successive
+employers. I have always decamped with wages still owing me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I swung a scythe for a week for another Yankee farmer, on a marsh where
+the machine couldn't be driven in--which I was informed was King
+Phillip's battle ground.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I visited the inn where Longfellow was supposed to have gotten his
+inspiration for _Tales of a Wayside Inn_.
+
+I must see all the literary landmarks, even those where I considered the
+authors that had caused the places to be celebrated, as dull and third
+rate....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With gathering power in me grew my desire to attend college. I would
+tramp, as I was doing, through the country, and end up at some western
+university for the fall term.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The art workers' community lay in my way at Eos.
+
+I dropped off a freight, one morning, in the Eos yards....
+
+The gladdest to see me again was the Buddhist, Pfeiler. He rushed up to
+me, in the dining hall, that night, and took both my hands in his ...
+thanking me for my kind thought of him in sending him my Ossian ...
+avowing that he had made a mistake in his opinion of me and asking my
+indulgence ... for he was old and a failure ... and I was young and
+could still look forward to success.
+
+My unexpected dropping-in at Eos created quite a stir.
+
+Spalton welcomed me back, and stood, that evening, before the fire in
+the sitting room, with his arm about my shoulder ... even as he did so I
+remembered the picture taken of him and the celebrated poet L'Estrange,
+together ... their arms about each other's shoulders ... and the current
+Eos proverb, that Spalton always quarrelled not long after with anyone
+about whose shoulder he first cast his arm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Already a change was manifest in the little community. Tabled off by
+themselves sat the workers and the folk of the studios, that night.
+While the guests who stayed at the inn occupied separate tables.
+
+And there were many secret complaints about a woman they referred to as
+"Dorothy" ... Dorothy had done this ... Dorothy had done that ...
+Dorothy would be the ruination of "the shop" ... it would have been
+better if she had never shown up at the Eos Studios....
+
+I asked who was Dorothy....
+
+"Don't you know ... we thought you did ... Spalton's new wife ... the
+one his first wife got a divorce from him for?"
+
+And I heard the story, part of which I knew, but not the final details.
+
+Spalton's first wife had been an easy-going, amiable creature ... fair
+and pretty in a soft, female way ... a teacher in the local Sunday
+school ... one who accepted all the conventions as they were ... who
+could not understand anyone not conforming to them ... life was easier
+and more comfortable that way....
+
+Spalton's originality and genius would in the end have of itself
+produced a rupture between them ... few women are at home with genius,
+much as they clasp their hands in ecstasy over it, as viewed on the
+lecture and concert platform....
+
+But the wedge that drove them apart was entered when his first wife,
+Anne, brought into their married life, Dorothy, a fellow teacher, a
+visiting friend.
+
+Dorothy was so thin as to be stringy of body. She had a sharp
+hatchet-face, eyes with the colour of ice in them ... a cold, blue-grey.
+
+She was a woman of culture, yet at the same time she was possessed of a
+great instinct for organisation and business enterprise--just what was
+needed for the kind of thing Spalton was trying to inaugurate at Eos.
+She fell in readily with the Master's schemes ... even with his
+price-tags on objects of art, his egregious overvaluation of hand
+illumined books ... which his wife, with old-fashioned honesty, rebuked
+him for.
+
+An affinity of like-mindedness grew up between Spalton and this intense,
+homely woman, Dorothy ... whose face, like that of all clever, homely
+women, grew to a beauty in his eyes, that mere beauty which plastic form
+can never attain.
+
+There was a local busybody of a minister, and it was he who first
+intimated to the then Mrs. Spalton that her dear and intimate friend,
+was betraying her....
+
+There followed the usual spying and publicity ... Mrs. Spalton won her
+divorce....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But this was after several years. Long before the divorce was granted
+John and Dorothy were aware of a tangible fruit of their love.... I had
+often wondered why the Master so ardently, so often, wrote eloquently in
+defense of the superior qualities of illegitimate children....
+
+Dorothy bore their child ... a girl ... and went away to teach in a
+smart school somewhere in the East, under an assumed name....
+
+Now, after many years, Spalton and she married.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I saw in the sitting room a wonderful girl. She had shining, abundant
+hair, and a face rendered superlatively beautiful by the glowing of
+vivacity, understanding, feminine vitality behind it and through it,
+like a lamp held up within. She was absorbed in the new exhibit of
+Gresham's that hung on the walls of the guest room ... she wore a short,
+bouncing, riding skirt, and carried a quirt in her hand.
+
+I walked up to her, fascinated. Without letting her know who I was I
+quoted Poe's _To Helen_ to her. She stood, smiling sweetly, as if it
+were the most usual thing in the world, to have a lean, wild-faced
+stranger address her with a poem.
+
+"That's the way I feel about you!" I ended.
+
+She gave a lovely laugh ... held out both her hands, dropping the quirt
+on the floor ... took my hands and leaned back gaily, like a child.
+
+"Oh, I know who you are ... you're Razorre ... father wrote me a lot
+about you ... when I lived East ... you were one of his pet 'nuts'!"
+
+We sat there and conversed a long time. She talked of Socrates and Plato
+as if she had broken bread with them ... she discussed science, history,
+art as if wisdom and understanding were nearer her desire than anything
+else....
+
+She was the child of "John" and Dorothy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again Spalton asked me to stay, "we need a poet for Eos!"
+
+But I insisted that I must go on and acquire a college education ...
+which he maintained would be a hindrance, not a help--"they will iron
+you out, and make you a decent member of society--and then, Razorre, God
+help the poet in you ... poets and artists should never be decent ...
+only the true son of Ishmael can ever write or paint," he waved.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There came to the artworkers one day a young Southern woman, a six
+months' widow ... she was gentle and lily-coloured and lovely. She had
+great, swimming, blue eyes, a sensitive red bow of a mouth ... and the
+lashes of her eyes lay far down on her cheeks. She was the first woman I
+had met who approximated my poet's ideal of what a woman should be.
+
+I was working for Spalton during my stay, which I meant to make a brief
+one. I was shovelling coal for him, and firing a furnace.
+
+Wash as I might, I could not remove a faint blackness that clung to the
+edges of my eyes. This made my eyes glow and seem larger than they were.
+On such an extraneous and whimsical exterior circumstance hinged the
+young widow's interest in me.
+
+And I decided that I'd stay a little longer at the Eos Studios ... all
+winter, if she stayed all winter. And I no longer asked for an easier
+job. For I wanted my eyes to remain large-seeming, since, half in jest,
+she admired their present appearance.
+
+She manifested a close and affectionate friendship for me, and all day
+long all I thought of, as I kept the furnace going, was the evening
+after dinner, when I could sit close by her reading poetry in a low
+voice to her.
+
+I leaned over her on every pretext to smell her hair,--her body, through
+her low-necked dress--to breathe in giddily that delicate fragrance that
+emanates from the bodies of beautiful women, as perfume from flowers.
+
+Once, in spite of my timidity, I dared place my arm about her shoulders,
+there in the dark. There was a lecture on over in the "chapel" and
+mostly everybody had gone to it. Spalton, in passing through where we
+sat together, asked her if she was coming. "No, she was too tired." She
+remained sitting by me. Spalton shot me a glance of scarcely concealed
+resentment and went on. We were left alone.
+
+She began telling me of her deceased husband ... of their devotion to
+each other ... she applied a dainty thing of lace to her eyes, pausing a
+moment....
+
+"John? may I call you by your name, not by the odious name they have for
+you here?..."
+
+She leaned her head against my shoulder.
+
+"Johnnie, you are a fine, sensitive soul, and I know you'll be a great
+poet some day ... but why don't these people take you more seriously?
+
+"I think it must be your childlikeness ... and your spirit of
+horse-play, that breaks through at the most inopportune moments, that
+encourages these fools to treat you with levity."...
+
+"Dear woman," I began, "dearest woman," and my throat bunched queerly so
+that I could not speak further.
+
+She stroked my hair....
+
+"How old are you?"
+
+"Twenty-three."
+
+"I am just a year younger."
+
+"May I kiss you?" I asked, stumblingly.
+
+"Yes, Johnnie, you may kiss me"....
+
+"Why, you dear child, you ... you kiss just like a small boy ..." in a
+lower voice, "can it be possible that you, with all your tramping, your
+knowledge of life in books, of people?--"
+
+I bent my head, ashamed, silently acknowledging my inexperience of
+women.
+
+"No, it's nothing to be ashamed of, dearest boy ... I think you are a
+fine man--to have gone through what you have--and still--"
+
+Her voice trailed off. She put her arm around my neck, drew me to her,
+and kissed me!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we sat close together, a brooding silence. Then, with a transition of
+thought to the practical, she remarked....
+
+"I'm angry with these people ... they over-charge for everything."
+
+"Just think of it--I--I feel I may speak of it to you ... we seem to
+have come so near to each other to-night--"
+
+"They brought my laundry back yesterday, and for one piece of silk
+lingerie I was charged--guess?"
+
+I couldn't imagine how much.
+
+"Seventy-five cents--think of that!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As the Eoites came tramping back from the lecture, they found us still
+seated there. At the first footstep we had swiftly moved apart.
+
+I had been half-reclining, my head in her lap, strangely soothed and
+happy as she ran her fingers through my hair. For a long time neither of
+us had said a word.
+
+Now I sat apart from her, awkward and wooden.
+
+Spalton did not speak, inclined his head icily, as he strode by.
+
+"He's mad because I didn't come to his talk," she whispered.
+
+"I see my finish," I replied.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, Spalton was as much in love with Dorothy, his second wife, as I
+have ever known a man to be in love with a woman. But that could not
+entirely exclude his jealousy over my sympathetic relation with the
+"Southern Lady," as the artworkers termed her. And he feared for her on
+another score. She was, to use a constantly recurring phrase of the
+Master's, whenever he wished to describe anyone as being wealthy, "lousy
+with money," and he suspected, not without good cause, that I would warn
+her against paying exorbitant prices for books and objects of art....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One night I was the cause of an accident which gave him a handle to
+seize on.
+
+We were having a musicale. A new musician had come to Eos. The former
+Eos musician, Von Hammer, the father of the prodigy who played the
+piano, had quarrelled with the Master and had retired to Buffalo. Where,
+after a brief struggle as teacher of music, he had turned to playing for
+the movies. It must have nearly slain the man, for he was a sincere
+artist, a lover of classical music ... and now compelled to play ragtime
+and popular melodies for a living.
+
+All that I held of him, despite myself, was an unkind remembrance--his
+breath had been charnel-foul, and always, when discussing anything, he
+insisted on taking the lapel of his listener's coat and talking directly
+into his nose....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But his successor was playing at an introductory musicale....
+
+A tall, alert, dark young man ... Italian-dark ... his eyes shone behind
+his gold-rimmed glasses, swimming large and distorted under the
+magnification of the lenses ... his lips were full and red, his
+moustache of a heavy, bristly black that made them look redder and
+fuller still, almost negroid.
+
+He played the piano with violent, expert energy ... his favourite work
+was the "Turkish Patrol," which, Spalton exclaimed, as he applauded
+vigorously, he would now adopt as the Eos anthem.
+
+The drawing-room was crowded ... a few visiting celebrities ... Eoites,
+too, but only the quasi-celebrities among them. The mass of the workers
+was as rigidly excluded now, under the new regime, as ordinary retainers
+ever are.
+
+I stood by my "Southern Lady." She was in evening dress ... wore a
+lorgnette ... I trembled as I leaned over her, for I could see the firm,
+white-orbed upper parts of her breasts ... I was trying to be lightly
+playful, and was clumsy at it. I took up her lorgnette and toyed with
+it. I sat on the edge of a table ... and where I sat stood a supposed
+Greek vase of great antiquity and value.
+
+It is a law that prevails in three-dimensional space that two objects
+cannot occupy the same place at one time. I dislodged the vase. It came
+to the floor in a crash ... which stopped the music ... which stopped
+everything. There fell a dead silence. I looked down at the fragments,
+hardly knowing what to do....
+
+Spalton came over to me ... intensely ... his eyes blazing.
+
+"Razorre, come out into the lobby ... I want to speak to you." I
+willingly followed him ... he wheeled on me when he had me alone.
+
+"Do you know why we have these paintings of Gresham's hung high up there
+on the wall?" he asked rhetorically, with an eloquent, upward sweep of
+his arm, "it's so bums like you ... dirty tramps ... can't wipe their
+feet on them."
+
+"I am so sorry, so very sorry," I murmured, contrite.
+
+Thinking my contrition meekness, and possibly fear of him, he went to
+take me by the shoulders. I knocked his hands away promptly and quickly
+stepped back, on the defensive ... all my reverence for him swallowed up
+in indignation, rising at last, against his vulgar chiding.
+
+At that moment, my widow, Mrs. Tighe, arrived ... she was weeping....
+
+"Don't be hard on the poor boy," she pleaded ... "anyhow, it was all my
+fault ... and I want to pay you for your vase ... whatever it cost."...
+
+A momentary flicker of greed lighted the Master's eyes. But he
+perceived as instantly how unmagnanimous he would appear if he accepted
+a cash settlement.
+
+"I am not thinking of my financial loss ... beauty cannot be valued that
+way!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Then you must not blame the boy."
+
+"He is clumsy ... he is a terrible fool ... he is always doing the wrong
+thing. Oh, my beautiful vase!" and he wrung his hands, lost in the pose.
+Out he strode through the front door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The musicale had been broken up.
+
+"My poor, dear Johnnie, I am so sorry," murmured the young woman. I was
+sitting in the large armchair where she had sat the memorable night of
+the lecture that neither of us attended. She had seated herself on one
+of the arms.
+
+"You mustn't be despondent!" She was patting my hand.
+
+She mistook my rage at the gratuitous insults Spalton had heaped on me
+as despondency. She leaned closer against me ... quickly I caught her
+into my arms, drew her into my lap ... held her little, quiet, amazed
+face in my hands firmly, as I kissed and kissed her.... I knew how to
+kiss now....
+
+She rose presently. I stood up and caught her in my arms. Slowly and
+firmly she disengaged herself ... silently she slid away. She stopped in
+the shadow a moment before going up the long, winding stairs.
+
+"Good night, my dear poet," she whispered.
+
+She had no sooner disappeared than I started out, my heart beating like
+a drum to a charge in me. Spalton frequently wrote till late, in his
+office. I would go over there and, if he was there, call him to account
+for his insults. There was a light lit within, and I could see him
+through the window at his desk.
+
+"Come in!" in answer to my knock. "Oh, it's you, Razorre!" and his eyes
+snapped with fresh resentment. "What do you want? Don't you know that
+I'm busy on _A Brief Visit_?"
+
+"You know why I'm here!"
+
+"Well?" challengingly.
+
+"I've come for two reasons. I want to apologise to you for breaking that
+vase ... and I demand an equal apology from you, in turn, for the way
+you insulted me in Mrs. Tighe's presence."
+
+"You deserved everything I said to you," he replied, rising quietly
+from his chair.
+
+"I may have deserved it ... but that doesn't alter in the least my
+intention of smashing your face flat for the way you spoke to me, unless
+you tell me you're sorry for it."
+
+"My dear Gregory, don't be a fool."
+
+"A fool?" I replied, inflamed further by the appellation applied to
+quiet me in such a superior tone, "if you'll come on out into the street
+and away from your own property, I'll show you who's a fool ... you'll
+find you can't treat me like a dog, and get away with it!"
+
+"Why, Razorre ... my dear, dear boy," calling me by my nickname and
+taking another tack ... he laid his hand gently on my shoulder and gave
+me a deep, burning look of compassionate rebuke ... though I saw fear
+flickering back of it all....
+
+"Look here, John," I burst out, never able to hold my wrath long, "I
+like you ... think you're a great man--but you humiliated me before
+other people ... and I've come to such a pass in my life that I wouldn't
+let God Himself get away with a thing like that!"
+
+"Then I apologise ... most humbly!"
+
+"That was all I wanted. Good-night!" But I could not bring myself to
+leave so abruptly.
+
+"John," I wavered, "you _are_ a great man ... a much greater man than
+you allow yourself to be ... I'm--I'm going away from here forever, this
+time ... and I--I want you to know how I reverence and love the bigness
+in you, in spite of our--our differences."
+
+He was pleased.
+
+"And so you're going to college somewhere?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Where?"
+
+I had talked much of college being my next aim.
+
+"Either the University of Chicago, or further west."
+
+"I can give you commutation as far as Chicago."
+
+"I cannot accept it."
+
+"You must, Razorre."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A week from then I left.
+
+I went up to Mrs. Tighe's room to say good-bye. Awkwardly and with the
+bearlike roughness of excessive timidity I put my arms about her, drew
+her to me tentatively.
+
+"Be careful, poet dear, or you'll hurt me," she warned, giving me a look
+of fondness. Her left arm was in a sling. She had fallen on the steps a
+few days before and had broken a small bone in the wrist. "My sweet
+poet!"
+
+The bandaged arm being in the way, I put my head down in her lap again,
+as she sat there on the edge of the great, white bed.
+
+She leaned over, turned my face up with her free hand, kissed me full in
+the mouth....
+
+"My sweet poet," she repeated, "good-bye!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While at Mt. Hebron I had chosen German as my modern language. And it
+was a Professor Langworth's grammar and exercise book that we used as a
+text-book. Langworth, I learned from the title page, was professor of
+Germanic languages in Laurel University, at Laurel, Kansas.
+
+And now I bethought me that it would be much better to go to college in
+Kansas than attend the University at Chicago, where, I felt, education
+was made an industry, just like pork-packing and the hundred other big
+concerns in that city. Kansas would encourage individuality more, be
+less appallingly machine-like.
+
+The great, roaring city bewildered me, and the buildings of the
+University of Chicago (for I got so far as to ask for the registrar's
+office) overwhelmed me with their number. And I fled. With the exception
+of a few days I put in washing dishes in a restaurant there, I stayed no
+longer, but freighted it southwest to Kansas City ... from whence I rode
+a freight further to Laurel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the evening twilight I climbed out of a box car in the railroad yards
+at Laurel....
+
+I enquired my way to the university.
+
+"Up on the hill."
+
+I veered off from the main street of the town ... a length of marching
+telegraph poles and flat-roofed Western houses. I struck across lots in
+the cold and dark. I floundered through half-hardened puddles of mud,
+over vacant lots that afterward seemed to have been conjured up for my
+impediment by some devil of piquaresque romance....
+
+The hill, the very top of it, I had laboriously attained. On all sides
+the college buildings gloomed in dusky whiteness of architecture.
+
+One of them was lit inside with the mellow glow of electric lights. As I
+stepped into the vestibule timidly, to enquire my way to Professor
+Langworth's house (for it was his I decided to seek out first), a group
+of fragrant, white-clad girls herded together in astonished tittering
+when they saw me. And I surely looked the tramp, dusty and soiled from
+my long ride.
+
+I asked them the direction to Langworth's house, but they ignored me,
+and scattered. Turning in confusion, I ran into a man-student bodily ...
+excused myself ... the girls, standing further off, tittered again.
+
+"Can you direct me to Professor Gustav Langworth's house?"
+
+The student looked me over curiously. But he was of the right sort.
+
+"Certainly. Come with me. I'm going that way. I'll show you where it
+is...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In silence we descended the hill....
+
+"That house, in there a bit, under the trees ... that is where the
+professor lives."
+
+My knock set a dog barking inside ... the quick, insistent bark of a
+collie that romped against me, putting up its paws on me when the door
+was opened by a slim-bodied man of middle height. The man was dressed in
+a grey suit ... he had a kindly, smooth-shaven face except for a
+close-cropped pepper-and-salt moustache ... and grey-blue, quizzical,
+but kindly eyes.
+
+"Here, Laddie, come here!" called the voice of a frail, little woman
+whose hair was white like wool, and like wool in texture. She sat
+crumpled up by an open gas fire of imitation logs. She Was wry-backed,
+her right shoulder thrust out into a discernible hunch.
+
+She flung her arm tenderly about the dog, when it came to her. She was,
+I figured, the professor's mother.... He held a hurried, whispered
+consultation with her--after I had told him that studying his German
+book at Mt. Hebron had impelled me to come to Laurel. Which story I
+could see pleased and flattered him.
+
+I was waiting in the storm porch.
+
+He returned. He thrust his hand into his pocket and fetched forth a
+two-dollar bill.
+
+"Go downtown to one of the restaurants you will find on the main street.
+You can get a square meal in one of them for a quarter or, at the most,
+fifty cents ... a bed for the same price ... climb the hill again in the
+morning, say about ten o'clock, and ask for me at the German Department
+... I am sorry I can't invite you to stay here for the night ... but we
+have no room ..." and he glanced timidly at the woman whom I had taken
+to be his mother, but who, I afterward learned, was his wife.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found a restaurant-hotel, as he had directed me, and procured my
+supper for a quarter ... fried potatoes and a cold slab of steak ... and
+a big Westerner who wore a sombrero and had a stupid, kindly, boyish
+face, showed me to a bed ... which also cost but a quarter for the night
+... with a scattered ambuscade of bedbugs thrown in for good measure.
+
+In the morning, fried pork chops, pancakes and two cups of coffee--and I
+set out for the hill.
+
+The place buzzed with activity. The fall term was already in full swing,
+and students poured in lines up and down both sides of the steep street
+that led to the college ... girls and boys both, for it was
+co-educational. They were well dressed and jolly, as they moved in the
+keen windy sun of autumn.
+
+I was not a part of this. I felt like an outcast, but I bore myself with
+assumed independence and indifference. I thought everybody was looking
+at me. Most of them were.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Langworth enrolled me as a special student. He himself paid my tuition
+fee, which was a nominal one. I enrolled in Philosophy, Economics,
+German, Latin.
+
+My patron, furthermore, slipped a ten-dollar bill into my hand. "For the
+books you will need."
+
+He directed me to the Y.M.C.A. employment bureau. "They will see that
+you get work at something, so you can be sure of board and room ... in
+the early days we did not have things so well arranged. I worked my way
+through college, too. I nearly perished, my first year. After you
+settle somewhere, come and see me once in a while and let me hear how
+you're getting on."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My first job was milking a cow and taking care of a horse, for board and
+room.... The man for whom I worked was an old, retired farmer.
+
+The disagreeable part of taking care of horses and cows is the smell. My
+clothes, my room, even the skin of my body, soon reeked with the faint
+yet penetrating odour of stable and barn.
+
+But I was happy. Many great men had done as I was doing. Always trust me
+to dramatise every situation!
+
+I arranged my meagre row of text-books on the shelf in my attic. I set
+Keats apart in a sacred nook by himself.
+
+I sat humming softly to myself, studying my first lessons.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Look," cried a girl, her voice vibrating with the hard sarcasm of
+youth, "look, there goes Abe Lincoln," to another girl and two boys, who
+lolled with her on the porch of the house next mine.
+
+I was stabbed with a bitter pang of resentment. For my face was thin and
+weather-beaten ... my sharp, bent knees never straightened as I walked
+along, like a man going through snow drifts. Yet I held my head erect,
+ridiculously erect ... and my chest was enormous through
+over-development, as my arms and legs were thin.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My first few days at Laurel University brought me that beginning of
+newspaper notoriety that has since followed me everywhere as a shadow
+goes with a moving object. And then originated the appellation which has
+since clung to me, that of "The Vagabond Poet."
+
+One morning, when I was hardly awake, there came a knock at my door.
+
+"Just a moment," I called, getting into my shirt and trousers, "who is
+it?"
+
+"A reporter to interview you."
+
+I opened the door to admit a pale, young chap, who expertly flirted the
+ashes off a cigarette as he said, leaning his head sidewise, that he
+represented the Kansas City _Star_. As he spoke his keen grey eyes
+looked me over impartially, but with intelligent, friendly interest.
+Though he was dressed in the student's conventional style, even to the
+curiously nicked and clipped soft hat then predominant, there was still
+about him an off-handedness, an impudent at-homeness that bespoke a
+wider knowledge, or assumed knowledge, of the world, than the average
+student possesses.
+
+The interview appeared the next afternoon.
+
+           "VAGABOND POET ARRIVES.
+
+        LAUREL ENROLLS BOX-CAR STUDENT."
+
+It made me a nine days' wonder with the students. I caught the men
+staring at me, the girls shyly observing me, as I strode from class room
+to class room....
+
+But the reek of the stable. It went with me like a ghost everywhere.
+Maybe it was because I had no change of suits ... I saw that it was
+noticeable to others, and I sat 'way back, in a seat apart, by myself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Langworth watched my progress narrowly the first few weeks.
+
+One afternoon as I was passing his house he beckoned me in.
+
+"You're making good, and I'm glad of it ... because they're looking on
+you as my protege ... holding me responsible for you. Munday, in the
+Schiller class, tells me you sometimes bring in your daily lesson in
+_Wilhelm Tell_, translated into blank verse ... and good stuff, too....
+And King says he turns over the most difficult lines in Horace in class
+for you to translate and construe."
+
+Langworth had only half the truth from King.
+
+Whenever the latter came upon a passage a little off colour, he put me
+on it, chuckling to himself ... he knew I would go right through with it
+without hesitation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About this time I received a letter from William Hayes Ward, editor of
+the New York _Independent_. He informed me that he had taken a poem of
+mine. And, as indubitable proof, he enclosed a check for five dollars.
+
+Professor Langworth was himself a poet of no mean ability: he was
+pleased to hear that I had sold a poem to the _Independent_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was sick of being shunned because I carried stable smells about with
+me wherever I went.
+
+Also, sanguinely, with the sale of my first poem, I was sure that my
+literary career had begun, and that from now on I would be enabled to
+earn my living by my pen, and pay my way as a student, too. So I threw
+up the job that made me smell so unpleasantly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The city of Laurel had been, in the early days, in the memory of
+settlers yet living a hale life, a pioneer outpost. Through it flowed a
+great, muddy river. The flat roofs of its main street still preserved a
+frontier appearance. It was surrounded by high, wind-swept bluffs.
+
+They still talked of the Quantrell raid and repeated the story of it ...
+and of how the six men were lynched under the bridge that swung over the
+dam....
+
+At the time of the slavery agitation its citizens had encouraged the
+negroes to escape, had petted them, idealised them as no human beings of
+any race should be idealised ... had run schools specially for them
+where it was considered an honour for the women of the settlers to
+teach.
+
+Now, the great negro population, at first so encouraged, was crowded
+into a festering multitude of dilapidated buildings that stood on the
+flats close by the region where the river coiled through level acres of
+low-lying country. This place was known as the "Bottoms."
+
+I am trying to give you the flavour of the town.
+
+They had prohibition there, too ... long before it won nation-wide power
+... consequently the negroes drove a vast trade in bootlegging ... and a
+concomitant prostitution of coloured women and girls throve. One or two
+students on the hill had, to my knowledge, negro mistresses of whom they
+were fond....
+
+The drug stores did a thriving business in the sale of spiritus
+frumenti--for "snake bite" and "stomach trouble," which seemed to be
+prevalent and epidemic throughout the community.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Saturday was market day for the farmers who lived in the adjoining
+countryside ... and the livery stables where they put up their horses
+were also resorts for gambling and the selling of "bootleg" booze....
+
+These farmers were a wild lot ... something like European peasants in
+their smacking of the soil and the country to which they belonged, but
+with a verve and dash of their own distinctly American.
+
+There were three or four cheap restaurants that catered solely to their
+trade ... "a square meal for a quarter" ... and a square meal they
+served ... multitudes of fried stuff ... beefsteak, potatoes, boiled
+ham, cabbage, heaps of white bread constantly replenished as it was
+voraciously devoured ... always plenty of hot, steaming coffee. Where
+these restaurants profited I could never see ... unless by a little
+bootlegging on the side.
+
+It was to one of them that I repaired when I left my malodorous job. The
+same one where I had spent my first night in town.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Langworth sent for me one day.
+
+"I have heard wild tales about you, Johnnie. I don't usually listen to
+gossip, but these tales are so recurrent and persistent ... about your
+going about with the degraded people who live in the Bottoms, that I
+considered I ought to see you about it."
+
+I confessed that, though I did not drink their bootleg booze, I did have
+a wide acquaintanceship with the folk of the Bottoms, and that I knew
+all the rowdies among the farmers ... that I passed a lot of time about
+the livery stables talking with them. That I often rode out to their
+farms in the hills and spent Saturdays and Sundays there. I avowed that
+there people were more interesting to me than the carefully tailored
+professors and students.
+
+My schoolmates had met me on the streets in company with these
+wild-looking yokels, sometimes taking them to their waggons when they
+were too drunk to pilot themselves effectively. And they had applied to
+me the proverb of "birds of a feather."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before I left, Langworth drew from me the admission that I was away
+behind in my board bill at the Farmers' Restaurant. My hopes of making
+immediate money as a writer of poems for the magazines had so far been
+barren of fruit.
+
+"Sh! sit down a minute and wait." His wife was coming downstairs,
+querulously, waveringly; her eyes red from weeping.
+
+"Laddie has just died."
+
+"The shepherd dog?" I enquired; for she had spoken as of a human demise.
+
+"Yes, the dog ... but he was human, if anyone was." There was an
+acidulous resentment in the tone of her answer that indicated that she
+wanted her husband to send me away.
+
+"She wants you to go," whispered Langworth, humouring his wife like a
+sick child. He escorted me into the storm porch. "You have no idea," he
+apologised defensively, "how human a dog can be, or how fond of one you
+can become...."
+
+"What's this?" I asked, taken aback. He had thrust a check into my hand
+as he shook hands good-bye.
+
+"It's a check I've just endorsed over to you. Royalties on a recent
+text-book. Please do take it." I had intimated that I would probably be
+compelled to quit college and go on the tramp again ... confessing
+frankly, also, that a stationary life got on my nerves at times.
+
+"I want you to keep on, not go back to the tramp life ... we'll make
+something of you yet," he jested, diffidently, steering me off when he
+noticed that I was about to heap profuse thanks on him.
+
+"How can I ever thank you--"
+
+"By studying hard and making good. By becoming the great poet I wanted
+to be."
+
+"But how can I pay this back? It will take a long time--"
+
+"When you arrive at the place where you can afford to pay me back, pass
+it on to someone else who is struggling as you are now, and as I myself
+have struggled."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Always, always I wrote my poetry and kept studying in my own fashion ...
+marks of proficiency, attendance at class went by the board. My studying
+was rather browsing among the multitudes of books in the college
+library. I passed hours, back in the stacks, forgetting day and night
+... recitations ... meals....
+
+I was soon in trouble with my professors ... I was always up, and even
+ahead, with my studies, but I was a disrupting influence for the other
+students, because of my irregularity.
+
+I discovered wonderful books back there in the "stack" ... the works of
+Paracelsus, who whispered me that wisdom was to be found more in the
+vagabond bye-ways of life than in the ordered and regulated highways.
+That the true knowledge was to be garnered from knocking about with
+vagrants, gipsies, carriers ... from corners in wayside inns where
+travellers discoursed....
+
+And there was Boehmen, the inspired German shoemaker, who was visited
+by an angel, or some sort of divine stranger, and given his first
+illumination outside his shop ... and later walked a-field and heard
+what the flowers were saying to each other, seeing through all creation
+at one glance, crystal-clear.
+
+And there were the unusual poets ... old Matthew Prior, who wrote
+besides his poems, the Treaty, was it, of Utrecht?... hobnobbed with the
+big people of the land ... yet refused all marks of honour ... the best
+Latinist of the day ... at a time when Latin was the diplomatic language
+of Europe.
+
+When he wasn't hobnobbing with the aristocracy or writing treaties he
+was sitting in inns and drinking with teamsters ... had a long love
+affair with a cobbler's wife, and married the lady after the cobbler
+died....
+
+There was Skelton and his rough-running, irregular rhythmic rather than
+strictly metrical verses ... mad and ribald ... often tedious ... but
+with wild flashes of beauty interwoven through his poems ... the poem
+about his mistress's sparrow ... the elegy on its death ... where he
+prayed God to give it the little wren of the Virgin Mary, as a wife, in
+heaven--"to tread, for _solas_!"
+
+And Gay, the author of many delightful fables ... who must wait still
+longer for his proper niche, because he showed gross levity on the
+subject of death and life ... he who wrote for his own epitaph:
+
+  "Life is a jest, and all things show it;
+  I thought so once, but now I know it."
+
+For all those who would not keep step, who romped out of the regular
+procedure and wantoned by the way, picking what flowers they chose, I
+held feeling and sympathy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _Annual_, a book published by the seniors each spring, now
+advertised a prize for the best poem submitted by any student ... a
+prize of twenty-five dollars. I had no doubt but that the prize was mine
+already. Not that I had become as yet the poet I desired, but that the
+average level of human endeavour in any art is so low that I knew my
+assiduity and application and fair amount of inspiration would win.
+
+I wrote my poem--_A Day in a Japanese Garden_, ... only two lines I
+remember:
+
+  "And black cranes trailed their long legs as they flew
+  Down to it, somewhere out of Heaven's blue,"
+
+descriptive of a little lake ... oh, yes, and two more I remember,
+descriptive of sunset:
+
+  "And Fujiyama's far and sacred top
+  Became a jewel shining in the sun."
+
+The poem was an over-laquered, metaphor-cloyed thing ... much like the
+bulk of our free verse of to-day ... but it was superior to all the rest
+of the contributions.
+
+The prize was declared off. After an evening's serious discussion the
+committee decided that, though my effort was far and away the best, it
+would not do to let me have the prize, because I was so wild-appearing
+... because I was known as having been a tramp. And because seniors and
+students of correct standing at the university had tried. And it would
+not be good for the school morale to let me have what I had won.
+
+They compromised by declaring the prize off.
+
+A year after, Professor Black, assistant professor in English
+literature, who served on the judging board, told me confidentially of
+this ... though he declared that he had fought for me, alleging how I
+needed the money, and how I had honestly won the award.
+
+I thought of the couplet of Gay:
+
+  "He who would without malice pass his days
+  Must live obscure and never merit praise."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outwardly I maintained a bold and courageous rudeness. Inwardly a panic
+had swept over me ... not the panic of deep solitude when a man is alone
+at night in a boundless forest ... I have known that, too, but it is
+nothing to that which comes to a man who knows all society, by its very
+structure, arrayed against him and his dreams.
+
+When the ancient Egyptians had finished the building of a pyramid, they
+began polishing it at the top, proceeding downward. And it has been said
+that on the finished, hard, smooth exterior even a fly would slip....
+
+Huge, granite, towering, the regularised life appeared to me, the life
+that bulked on all sides ... I saw that it was the object of education,
+not to liberate the soul and mind and heart, but to reduce everything to
+dead and commonplace formulae.
+
+On all sides, so to speak, I saw Christ and Socrates and Shelley valeted
+by society ... dress suits laid out for them ... carefully pressed and
+creased ... which,--now dead,--it was pretended their spirits took up
+and wore ... had, in fact, always worn....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And my mind went back to those happy days at Eos ... happy despite the
+fly in the ointment....
+
+I thought of my Southern widow, Mrs. Tighe.
+
+"Poet," she had once said, "come to my place in the South. I have a
+bungalow back of my house that you may live in ... write your poems
+unmolested ... I won't be going there for awhile yet, but I will give
+you a letter to the caretaker, and you can use the place. And my pantry
+and ice box will be at your service ... so you'll need do nothing but
+write."
+
+Now, fed full of rebuffs, I wished I had accepted her offer. And I wrote
+her, care of the Eos Artworks ... an ingenuous letter, burning with
+naive love....
+
+She had once told me how she had scandalised the neighbours by painting
+a little boy, in the nude, in that same bungalow ... the story being
+carried about by the servants ... and if it had not been for her social
+prestige!--
+
+I thought there could be nothing pleasanter than living in her place,
+perhaps becoming her lover....
+
+I imagined myself posing, nude, for her canvases....
+
+But my brief hope fell to earth. A curt note from a married sister of
+hers ... who first apologised for having read my letter.... But Mrs.
+Tighe was abroad, painting in Spain.
+
+The shock of having someone else, indubitably with a hostile eye, read
+my letter, in which I had poured forth all my heart, made me almost
+sick. I was chagrined inexpressibly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The truth was, spring was coming on. Spring affects me as it does
+migratory fowls. With its first effort of meadow and bough toward
+renewed flowers and greenness, the instinct for change and adventure
+stirs anew in me.
+
+The school year was not yet up, but I didn't want to graduate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At that time I had a passion for meeting well-known people.
+
+It was then my only avenue of literary publication, so to speak. The
+magazines were steadily returning my deluge of poems--I sent at least
+three a week to them ... but to those who had established themselves I
+could show my work, and get their advice and notice....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Walking along the main street, I ran into Jack Travers, the young
+reporter who had dubbed me the "Vagabond Poet," the "Box-car Bard."...
+
+"Well, what are you up to now, Gregory?"
+
+"Nothing, only I'm thinking of a trip south to Osageville to pay a visit
+to Mackworth, the Kansas novelist."
+
+"That's the stuff ... I need another good story for the _Era_."
+
+"I'm going to make it a sort of pilgrimage a-foot."
+
+"Great! 'Vagabond Poet' Pilgrims to Home of Celebrated Kansan. It's only
+ninety miles to Osageville from here ... still rather cold of nights ...
+but you'll find plenty of shelter by the way ... start to-day and I can
+get the story in in time for this Sunday's _Era_...."
+
+Travers got a camera from a fraternity brother.
+
+"Come on, we'll walk up an alley and I'll snap you just as if you were
+on the way...."
+
+"No, I won't do that!"
+
+--"won't do what?"
+
+--"won't fake it ... if you want a picture of me on the way, it will
+have to be on the way!"
+
+"Of all the fools! Ain't the alleys muddy enough to be like the gumbo
+you'll have to plough through?" he teased. But I wouldn't allow him to
+take a fraudulent picture. He had to come with me, through the mud,
+grumbling, to the edge of town.
+
+There, on the country road that led in the direction of Osageville, my
+feet rooted in gumbo, a sort of thick composite of clay and mud that
+clings to the feet in huge lumps, I had my photograph taken ... actually
+on the march toward my destination ... no hat on ... a copy of Keats in
+my hand.
+
+Travers waved me good-bye. "You'll see the story in the _Era_ Sunday
+sure," he shouted, in a tone half affection, half irony. I was nettled
+at the irony. I wanted it to be looked on as a quest entirely heroic.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It began to rain. Far off, like a high, great ship riding on the
+horizon, rode the hill, with its cluster of university buildings.
+
+My first impulse was to turn back, to quit. That is always my first
+impulse. The instincts of my bourgeois ancestry against the unusual, the
+impractical,--the safe-and-sane conservatism of the farmers and clerks
+and small business men bred in my people for generations!...
+
+I pushed on through the clinging, maddening gumbo, slithering and
+sliding. Fortunately, I wore an overcoat, which, after it had reached
+the saturation point, shed most of the steady, oblique-driving rain that
+came for miles over the plains in a succession of grey, windy sheets.
+But my wrists and hands were aching, wet, and my thin, plying legs, to
+my knees. And the "squash-squish!" of my soaked feet in the mud plodded
+a steady refrain of misery.
+
+My Keats, at least, was dry. I kept the volume under my belt and against
+my naked belly.
+
+And I was happy and buoyed up by the thought, which lessened my
+discomfiture, that Sunday morning thousands of readers in comfortable
+homes would be reading about me, would gaze upon my photograph.
+
+People looked out of their farmhouse windows at me as if an insane man
+were stalking by.
+
+It darkened rapidly.
+
+My first night's shelter was in a leaky outhouse. The farmstead to which
+it belonged had burned down. I might have been taken in at any number of
+places, but my access of timidity was too great ... it might on the
+following dawn be followed by as great an effrontery. My year in college
+had disorganized me, pulled me out of my tramp character. It was no more
+a usual thing to beg or ask for shelter.
+
+I could not sleep. My muscles were already overstrained from the
+excessive effort of struggling along in the tenacious mud, like a fly
+escaping from the edge of spilled molasses.
+
+I had brought a box of small candles for just such an emergency. I lit
+one after the other, sat on the seat, and read Keats all night ... in
+an ecstasy, forgetting my surroundings, my pitiful poverty, my
+pilgrimage that would seem ridiculous to most.
+
+The rain increased. Outside it drummed and drummed. Inside it dripped
+and dripped.
+
+And as I sat there, upright, to escape the drip from the leaks, I
+climbed to a high, crystal-clear state of spirit.
+
+Again I burned through Keats' life as if remembering that it was what I
+had myself suffered ... as if suddenly I awoke to the realisation that
+_I_ was Keats, re-born in America, a tramp-student in Kansas....
+
+And now Severn, my true, faithful friend, was with me.... Severn, who
+had given up his career as painter to be near me in my last days ... we
+were on the _Maria Crowther_ ... we were still off the coast of England,
+and I had gone ashore for the last touching of my foot on English
+soil....
+
+There hung the great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment
+of twilight, before any other of the stars had come forth....
+
+  "Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
+  Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
+  And watching, with eternal lids apart,
+  Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
+  The moving waters at their priestlike task
+  Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,..."
+
+The evening star made me dream of immortality and love--my love for
+Fanny Brawne....
+
+Now we, Severn and I, were journeying across the country to Rome ...
+voyaging, rather, through fields of flowers ... like my procession of
+Bacchus in _Endymion_ ... that was a big poem, after all....
+
+Now the fountain played under the window ... where I was to die....
+
+"Severn, I feel the daisies growing over me."
+
+"Severn, I--I--Severn ... I am dying ... Severn, lift me up--I--"
+
+"Here lies one whose fame was writ in water." (How they cruelly laughed
+at that--for a time!)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I gave a start, almost a scream of agony ... the candle, somehow, had
+served me a ghastly trick ... it had cast my shadow backward on the wall,
+like that shadow cast by the head of the dying poet, as Severn had
+sketched it.... I ran my hand over my face ... it was hollow and
+tight-drawn like the face of a consumptive.
+
+The mass of resistance I had to face, for poetry's sake, was too
+enormous ... my country's motto was not "beauty is truth, truth beauty,"
+but "blessed be that man who can make two hills of corn grow where one
+bank of violets grew before," ... and my pilgrimage, in that hour of
+vision, it disgusted me ... for I was making it not to some grand poet
+like L'Estrange, but to the home of the chief exponent of the
+"Honest-to-God, No-Nonsense-About-Me Hick School of Literature" ... and
+associated with him was the syndicate poet, William Struthers, called
+familiarly Uncle Bill, whose daily jingles run together as prose, were
+now making him a fortune.
+
+With the coming of dawn the day cleared, the sun glistened on a thousand
+puddles, making them silver and gold....
+
+By walking carefully on the side of the road, I made progress less
+muddy. I was used to the squashing of the water in my shoes. The weather
+turned warmer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found myself on the usual long one-street called Main Street, in the
+prosperous little city of Osageville. It was Sunday. A corner loiterer
+directed me to Jarvis Alexander Mackworth's house.
+
+A habitation of sequestered quiet ... as I stood before the door I heard
+the sunrise song of Rossini's _Wilhelm Tell_ ... a Red Seal record ...
+accompanied by the slow, dreamy following of a piano's tinkle ... like
+harp sounds or remote, flowing water.
+
+I halted, under a charm. I waited till the melody was at an end before I
+knocked. A small, pale-faced, pretty little woman answered.
+
+"Does Mr. Jarvis Mackworth live here?"
+
+"Yes. Come in. We have been expecting you. You are the poet, aren't
+you?"
+
+"Yes, I am the poet."
+
+"You're a good walker ... we didn't expect you before Monday or
+Tuesday.... Jarvis, here's the poet-boy from the university."
+
+My host, unseen within, turned off another Red Seal record he had just
+started, again to the accompaniment of the piano.... Kreisler's _Caprice
+Viennoise_....
+
+Jarvis Alexander Mackworth came forth like a leisurely duck, waddling.
+He was very, very fat. He extended me a plump, white hand ... a slack
+hand-shake ... but not an unhearty one, rather a grip of easy welcome.
+
+A kind, rubicund, moon-round face, full of large blue eyes smiling a
+gentle and kindly welcome ... if the face of Shelley's father, plump and
+methodic-oracular, could have been joined to the wild, shining ecstasy
+of Shelley's countenance itself--you would have had Mackworth's face
+before its time. I never beheld such spirituality in a fat man. His
+stoutness was not unpleasing.
+
+"My boy ... come in ... my God, you're all wet ... you look frail, too."
+A pity shone in his eyes. "Minnie, call up Ally Merton ..." turning to
+me, "I have, as you can see, no clothes to fit you ... but Ally might
+have ... he's about your size, but he carries a trifle more meat on his
+bones....
+
+"Come in and dry yourself before the fire till he gets over."
+
+We sat before the gas-fire of artificial logs.
+
+"Minnie, will you make a cup of tea for this--poor boy," and he lowered
+his voice at the last two words, realising that I was hearing, too.
+
+"Yes, Jarv!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I sat at the table in the dining room. Jarvis Alexander Mackworth sat on
+the piano-stool, again playing the piano in rhythm rather than in
+accompaniment with the records ... it was Caruso now....
+
+"A glorious voice, isn't it, young man?" Mackworth asked, as I ate
+voraciously of the cold roast set before me ... of the delicious white
+bread and fresh dairy butter, just from the churn of some neighbouring
+farmer.
+
+"I know nothing much about music," he continued, "--just appreciate it
+... --seems to me that's what we need now, more than anything else ...
+appreciation of the arts.... I like to sit here and pick out the
+melodies on the piano as the tune runs on. It inspires me. The precious
+people, the aesthetic upstarts, make fun of Edison and his 'canned
+music,' as they call it ... but I say Edison is one of the great forces
+for culture in America to-day. Everybody can't go to New York, London,
+Paris, Bayreuth ... not to Chicago even....
+
+"Beauty must come to Osageville, since Osageville cannot come to
+Beauty."
+
+I was charmed.
+
+"Mr. Mackworth, you are a great man," I said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A ring at the bell. Ally Merton....
+
+"Ally, this is Mr. John Gregory, poet at large, Villon of American
+Literature ... let us hope, some day a little more of the Whittier ...
+Ally--" and the speaker turned to me, "Ally Merton is my right hand man
+... my best reporter...."
+
+He took Merton aside, in private talk.... Ally looked me over with a
+keen, swift glance that appraised me from head to foot instantly ...
+sharply but not hostilely ... as one who takes in a situation in a
+comprehensive instant.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Mackworth, I can do it easily ... if they'll fit him."
+
+There was an impersonality, however, about Merton's cryptic words that
+annoyed me.
+
+"You are going home with Ally, John," Mackworth said to me, using my
+familiar name for the first time, "and borrow a suit of his clothes ...
+and you are coming back with him to dinner ... where you'll meet a very
+famous person--Miss Clara Martin."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ally's blue serge suit was too short in the legs and arms for me ...
+otherwise it fitted. His gentleness and unobtrusive quietness entered
+into me, along with the putting on of his apparel. He led me upstairs in
+his house.
+
+"Mr. Mackworth has asked me to put you up while you are in town ...
+because his own house is full at present, otherwise he would accommodate
+you there ... I guess we can make shift to entertain you properly.
+
+"Here is the bathroom ... if you don't mind my saying it, when you throw
+the toilet seat up, let the water run from the tap over the wash basin
+... my mother and sisters!" he trailed off in inaudible, deprecative
+urge of the proprieties.
+
+Ally was anything but a small-town product. Suave, socially adroit, an
+instinctive creature of Good Form....
+
+He came into the room he had given me to stay in. I looked like a
+different man, togged out in his clothes. Ally was surprised that I
+could wear his shoes ... he had such small feet ... I informed him
+proudly that I, too, had small feet....
+
+"No, no, that is not the way to tie a tie ... let me show you ... you
+must make both ends meet exactly ... there, that's it!" and he stepped
+back, a look of satisfaction on his face ... he handed me a pearl stick
+pin.
+
+"This is a loan, not a gift," he murmured.
+
+I returned a quick, angry look.
+
+"I don't want your pin."
+
+"No offence meant," he deprecated, "and you must wear it" (for I was
+putting it aside) "Mr. Mackworth and I both want you to look your best
+when you meet Miss Martin at dinner to-night".... I angrily almost
+decided to take his pin with me when I left, just to fulfill his
+pre-supposition.
+
+"No, that's not the place to stick it ... let me show you ... not in the
+body of the tie, but further down," and he deftly placed the pin in the
+right spot. Then he stepped back like an artist who is proud of having
+made a good job of bad materials....
+
+"You look almost like a gentleman."
+
+I was about to lick into Merton and lend him a sample of a few strong
+objurgations of road and jail, when I saw myself in the glass. I stood
+transfixed. He had not meant to be ironic. The transformation was
+startling....
+
+"If you would only keep yourself tidy all the time that way!... it's
+easy."
+
+"Not for me ... everything material that I touch seems to fall apart....
+I lose my shirts inexplicably ... my socks ... holes appear overnight in
+my clothes. Books are the only things I can keep. I am always cluttered
+up with them."
+
+"Appearances mean everything ... then, if you have the rest, the goods
+to deliver, there is no place a man might not go nor attain."
+
+I looked the small town reporter over in surprise. I studied him closely
+for the first time. He belonged to the world, not to Osageville ... the
+world of fashion, of smartness ... a world I despised. My world and his
+would always be like separate planets. He would consort with people for
+the mere pleasure of social life with them. The one thing I did not like
+about him was his small mouth ... but then I did not like my own mouth
+... it was large, sensual, loose and cruel.
+
+And his walk ... it was almost dainty mincing. But then my walk was a
+loose, bent-kneed method of progression....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss Martin, the celebrated exposer of corrupt millionaires and captains
+of industry, was dark and tall. She had been good-looking in girlhood.
+She had fine eyes in a devastated face.
+
+I found myself petted, mothered by her. As soon as she saw me she
+removed a thread that hung to my coatsleeve.
+
+At supper I was told of a new project. A group of writers, especially of
+writers who were in revolt against big business and the corruption of
+the trusts, were about to effect a combination and start what was to be
+called the _National Magazine_; for it was to be no less than that, a
+magazine embracing all America, to serve as a re-invigorant and
+re-corroborant for new national ideals ... really only a tilting against
+the evils of big combinations, in favour of the earlier and more
+impossible ideals of small business units--the ideal of a bourgeois
+commercial honesty and individual effort that could no more be
+re-established than could the big shoe factory be broken up and returned
+to the shanty of the village shoemaker.... Bryan's dream ... the last
+effort of the middle classes to escape their surely destined
+strangulation ... which gave birth to the abortive progressive party.
+
+I was assured by Miss Martin and Mackworth that a poet who could sing
+American ideals and dreams was needed by them.... Ray Stannard Baker,
+Peter Finley Dunne, Upton Sinclair, were all to write for them....
+
+I saw clearly that their revolution was a backward-working one. That the
+country's business could never again be broken up into a multitude of
+small shops and individual competitors.
+
+Of course, I was at that time a Socialist of the violent, fiery
+type--with a strong cast toward the anarchism of Emma Goldman.
+
+But it flattered me to be taken, as it were, into the inner councils of
+such great folk....
+
+"Send us some of your poetry, with the right American ring to it,
+Johnnie," suggested Miss Martin, "and we will make you the poet of the
+group."
+
+I think that Ally Merton's clothes on me, and his correct tie, made my
+good impression, as much as my after-talk around the fireplace, where I
+spun yarns of my strange life and adventures.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You made a hit," commented Ally, as he conducted me back to his house,
+"it's a great opening for you. Follow it up!"
+
+"I will!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night I could not sleep. My blood made a tumult through my body.
+Before dawn I had written two poems on national themes; didactic verses,
+each with a moral of democracy tagged to it, and much about the worth of
+simplicity in it, and the dignity of honest labour.
+
+Yes, I would be their poet. And America's poet....
+
+And visions of a comfortable, bourgeois success took me ... interminable
+Chautauquas, with rows of women listening to my inspiring verses ...
+visits as honoured guest to the homes of great popular leaders like
+Roosevelt ... dignity and rides in parlour cars, instead of dusty, dirty
+box cars ... interviews of weight and speeches of consequence ... and
+the newspapers would drop their undercurrent of levity when I was
+written about in them, and treat me with consideration.
+
+Finally, I would possess a home like Mackworth's, set back amid shade
+trees, a house not too large, not too small ... a cook and maid ... a
+pretty, unobtrusive wife devoted to me....
+
+And I would wear white linen collars every day, tie the ends of my tie
+even ... and each year would see a new book of mine out, published by
+some bookseller of repute ... and I could afford Red Seal records ...
+and have my largest room for a library....
+
+Middle-class comfort was upon me ... good plumbing ... electric light
+... laundry sent out ... no more washing of my one shirt overnight and
+hanging it up to dry on the back of a chair, while I slept ... and
+putting it on, next morning, crinkly and still damp.
+
+I was already seduced, if there hadn't been that something in me which I
+myself could not control!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was when I caught Mackworth on the streets of his town and in his
+newspaper office that I discovered the man himself.
+
+In our country, especially in the Middle West, everybody watches
+everybody else for the least lapse in the democratic spirit.
+
+Though he was truly democratic at heart, Mackworth laid it on in
+theatric outward appearance, in true line with the Kansas tradition of a
+sockless Jerry Simpson, who went without socks, as the adjective
+implies, and made Congress on that one platform of his sartorial lack
+... of William Roscoe Stubbs, who rode into the office of governor
+partly on the fact that his daughter could make salt-rising bread ... a
+form of bread-making cultivated by the hardy pioneers of the state, and
+now no longer necessary.
+
+Mackworth was "in-legged" ... that is, his legs on the insides rubbed
+together from the crotch to the knees ... and he wore old patches,
+hanging there actually in strips ... and, I think, had his trouser-seat
+patched, too ... and though he could have afforded a car, he drove
+about, he and his family, in a rickety old two-seated rig, deliberately
+kept, it seemed, in ill-repair ... and it was such an old ex-plow horse
+that dragged it about!
+
+His fellow townsmen laughed, but they liked it. "Jarv's all right! No
+nonsense about Jarv, even ef he is one o' them lit'rary fellers!"
+
+To call everybody by the first name--that was the last word in honest,
+democratic fellowship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whether this exterior appearance of Mackworth was sincere or affected in
+him I never could quite tell. I am almost inclined to believe it was not
+done for effect,--but out of an Assisian simplicity of heart, as a sign
+manual of Bourgeois integrity.
+
+If it was an affectation, his personal attitude toward the people with
+whom he came into contact was not ... in his office everybody loved him,
+and worked for him with that easy efficiency that comes of good will and
+respect....
+
+Unostentatiously and affectionately he went about helping people.
+
+"We've got a wonderful town here ... very little vice, except that which
+always will be in every community because it is inherent in human nature
+... we have a fine college of our own ... a fine electric plant ...
+everybody's lawn is well-kept ... nobody in this town need be out of a
+job ... for miles around us the land is rich in real wealth of waving
+corn and wheat....
+
+Kansas will be the centre, the Athens, of our civilisation, one day....
+
+We have a fine Harvey Eating House at our railway station, managed by a
+hustler ... you must have Ally take you there for dinner before you go
+back to Laurel."
+
+The idealisation of small comfort ... in a case like Mackworth's, fairly
+unobjectionable ... but in most cases insufferably stodgy ... the
+dry-rot of art, literature, life ... leading to a smug conceit that in
+turn ends in that school of "two hills of corn where one cluster of
+violets grew before."
+
+No wonder that the _National Magazine_, starting with a splendid
+flourish of knight-errantry, degenerated into the mere,
+"let-well-enough-alone" thrift-crier it is.... "'How I Became an Expert
+Tombstone Salesman' ... 'How I collected Tin Foil After Work-Hours and
+Added Three Hundred a Year Extra to My Salary as Stenographer.'..."
+
+Rather, far rather, the Rockefeller, that shrewd manipulator of
+businesses ... with all his parsimony in personal economics ... his diet
+of bread and milk ... and his giving away of millions to missions and
+scientific institutions....
+
+Rather the big Morgan, who knew the old masters as well as he knew the
+weaknesses of men ... who hobnobbed, not as a democrat, but as
+aristocratic as the best of them, with princes, kings, emperors, in his
+grim, forbidding dignity.
+
+This at least presented bigness and romance!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Want to meet Uncle Bill?" and Mackworth led me into a close-shut room
+blue-thick with smoke....
+
+I coughed and choked. A fire extinguisher should have preceded our
+entry.
+
+There sat--the lumbering trot of his typewriter heard long before he
+assumed visible, hazy outline--William Struthers, known to the newspaper
+world as "Old Uncle Bill," the writer of daily prose-verse squibs on the
+homely virtues, the exalter of the commonplaces of life, the deifier of
+the ordinary.
+
+Uncle Bill's head of strong, black hair stood upright like thick wire.
+His thick, stubby fingers trotted like cart horses on and on. He stopped
+and drew up a chair for me.
+
+"Of course I ain't calling my stuff poetry," he began deprecatingly,
+"but I do a lot of good for folks ... folks read my stuff when they
+ain't got time to read the real poets."
+
+Instead of flattering him, I gave him, frankly but gently, my opinion
+of the cornfed school of literature, easing the sting by inferring that
+he without doubt had bigger things up his sleeve than his so-called
+prose poems.
+
+What I said struck the right chord.
+
+"Of course a fellow has to make a living first."
+
+(But, in my heart, I thought--it is just as vile for a man to send his
+wife out as a street-walker, and allege the excuse about having to live,
+as it is for a poet to prostitute his Muse.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nevertheless, Mackworth, Uncle Bill and I stood together, in the sunny
+street outside, posing for the photographer. And I swelled with
+inordinate pride. Though I knew I was bigger than both of them put
+together, yet, in the eyes of the world, these men were big men--and
+having my photograph taken with them was an indication to me, that I was
+beginning to come into my own.
+
+Perhaps our picture would be reproduced in some Eastern paper or
+magazine ... perhaps even in the _Bookman_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Uncle Bill Struthers is an example of what Kansas can do for a man...."
+said Mackworth, when we were alone. "Bill, in the old days, was a sort
+of tramp printer ... clever, but with all his ability in him unexpressed
+... he was always down and out ... and drink! It verged on dipsomania.
+He never held a job long ... though he was a good compositor, he was
+always on the move from place to place....
+
+"Then he came to Kansas where we have prohibition ... and it has panned
+out in Uncle Bill's case pretty fine.
+
+"He came to work for me ... fell by chance into his prose-poetry vein.
+It took; was instantly copied in all the newspapers ... of course, I
+could do it as well, or anyone else with a rhyming turn ... but he was
+the originator ... and people liked his sturdy common sense, his
+wholesome optimism.
+
+"Now Bill is happy; his stuff's syndicated--in thousands of households
+wherever English is spoken his name is a familiar word. He gives whole
+communities strength to go on with the common duties of life."
+
+"And his drinking?"
+
+"He has conquered that entirely ... once every so often the fit comes
+over him--the craving for it--then, when Uncle Bill turns up missing, as
+the Irishman puts it, none of us worries....
+
+"We all know he has hitched up his horse and buggy and is off, driving
+and driving and driving across country, to work the fit out ... no, he
+never touches anything stronger than tobacco and coffee now....
+
+"In a few days he comes back ... no one says a word ... we all know ...
+and love and respect him....
+
+"He's happy now, is Uncle Bill ... married a young wife ... has a home
+all his own ... money piling up in the bank."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ally Merton smiled quizzically when I spoke of Uncle Bill to him....
+
+"Yes, Uncle Bill's a fine, quaint old chap ... whenever he has a tiff
+with his wife--of course, never anything serious--he locks himself in
+the kitchen ... closes all the windows ... smokes up terrifically with
+his corncob ... and plays and plays for hours on end ... his Red Seal
+records of classical music of which he is so fond.
+
+"This behaviour of his is a well-known joke among us, a joke with his
+wife, to!" ... the speaker paused, to continue--
+
+"He has a good library and quite a large knowledge of the English
+poets."
+
+"That makes it all the more terrible," I replied, "for if he wrote his
+verse-prose out of ignorance, he might be somewhat forgiven ... but he
+knows better."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I gave a lecture on Keats to a woman's club. They paid me thirty dollars
+for the lecture....
+
+"Well, you surely made a killing ... those old birds will worship you
+for life," sniggered Ally.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mackworth and I had a farewell talk before I returned to Laurel. We
+stood again in front of his office, on the sunny street ... he had come
+out to bid me good-bye.
+
+
+We talked of the folk poetry of America.... Mackworth recited to me
+several of the songs and ballads which I have since seen in Lomax's book
+of Cowboy Songs.... I repeated the tale of how I had collected the
+jail-songs that I subsequently lost while jumping a freight....
+
+"There's lots of poetry in American life ... Stephen Foster Collins
+scratched the surface of it ... but he was a song writer....
+
+"There's poetry on farm, ranch, in small town, big city, all waiting for
+the transmuting touch of the true singer ... not newspaper rhymes ...
+neither the stock effusions on Night, Love, Death and Immortality
+inserted as tail-piece to stories and articles in magazines....
+
+"There's the negro mind ...--ought to hear them sing, making up songs as
+they load and unload boats along the Mississippi ... nobody's ever dug
+back into the black mind yet--why don't you do these things?"...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Good-bye, Mister Mackworth--I've had a fine time!"
+
+"Good-bye, my boy ... be a good boy ... God bless you!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Harvey Eating House the manager brought me out a cardboard box
+neatly packed, full of all manner of good things to eat....
+
+"Good-bye, Ally! thanks for your hospitality, Ally! thank your folks for
+me again!"
+
+"I will. See you up at Laurel some day soon!"
+
+For Merton was coming to study there, in the fall.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Back in Laurel I resumed my studies again in my intense though haphazard
+way. Doctors' degrees and graduation certificates did not interest me. I
+meditated no career in which such credentials would stand me in stead.
+But the meat and substance of what the world had achieved, written,
+thought--it was this that I sought to learn and know.
+
+Already the professors were beginning to row about me and report me for
+cutting recitations. On the score of my scholarship and my knowing my
+subject they had no complaint. It was that I disrupted their classes and
+made for lax discipline.
+
+But I seldom cut class deliberately.... I would find myself lost in a
+book back in the "stack" as the big room that housed the tiers of books
+was called. The day would be dusking, the lights of evening glimmering
+below in town, to my bewildered eyes! The day gone, when I had stepped
+back among the books at nine o'clock, intending to while away a half
+hour between classes! (Once it was Sidney's Arcadia that entranced me
+so).
+
+Or I would set out for class ... hatless ... my hair tousled and long
+... in my sandals that were mocked at by my colleagues ... my books
+under arm ... and fall into a reverie that would fetch me up, two miles
+or so away, a-stray up a by-road flanked with a farmhouse and young
+cornfields.
+
+Then it would be too late for my schoolday, and I would make a day of it
+... would perhaps get acquainted with some farmer and his family, have
+dinner and supper at his house, and swap yarns with him and the rest of
+his people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jack Travers was as proud of my foot-trip to Osageville as if he had
+accomplished it himself.
+
+"The boys out at the Sig-Kappa house expect three or four kegs of beer
+in from Kansas City ... come on out and help us to celebrate."
+
+"But I don't drink."
+
+"Go on! you've told me about the time you did what you called 'slopping
+up' down in Texas!"
+
+"That was only once ... and since then I've become a physical
+culturist."
+
+"Well, come and join the party anyhow ... it won't hurt you to look on."
+
+My curiosity impelled me to accept the invitation to the "keg party" as
+such a jamboree was known among the students.
+
+The kegs of beer waited us at the station ... disguised with misleading
+labels ... "chemicals, handle with care." Tenderly we loaded them on the
+waggon that had been hired. The driver sat smiling as the solicitious
+students heaved them up and secured them firmly....
+
+We sat dignified and quiet, till the outskirts of the town were reached
+... then the whip was brought down and away we whooped, bouncing along
+the country road....
+
+We whipped off down the road into the open country with a roar of
+singing and shouting. We sat on the kegs to keep them from jumping out,
+as we urged the driver to ply the whip.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a corner in a cornfield that bent inward, hidden from the
+casual passer-by by a grove of Osage orange trees. Here we drew up,
+jumped out, tenderly conveyed the kegs forth ... the ground we had
+chosen, in the corner of the field, was too rocky for planting. It was
+sultry early afternoon, of a late spring day.
+
+The driver was offered a drink.
+
+"Nope," he shook his head, grinning wisely, "I'm a teetotaler."
+
+"Be back for us at dark," we shouted, as he jee-d about, heading toward
+town again.
+
+"Here's to old Gregory and his first drunk!"
+
+Tin cups had been produced, and the bung of one of the barrels started
+... the boys lifted their full, foaming cups in unison.
+
+"Bottoms up!"
+
+I joined in the drinking, despite my previous protestation that I would
+not....
+
+"Where's the old boy that runs this farm?"
+
+"All the family's probably in town, this being Saturday afternoon."
+
+"Let's whoop 'er up, then!"
+
+We sang and shouted at the top of our voices.
+
+The cups had been four times filled.
+
+Though I had poured half of mine on the ground, I already felt dizzy.
+But also a pleasant tingling, a warmth, was slowly increasing in my
+nerves and veins and body ... an increased sense of well-being permeated
+me. I stopped spilling my beer on the ground and drank it eagerly.
+
+Someone proposed races up and down the cornfield. We rolled up our
+trousers, to make it more hilarious, and ran, smashing through the
+tender spring growth ... yelling and shouting....
+
+Then the game unaccountably shifted into seeing who could pull up the
+most corn stalks, beginning at an equal marked-off space out in each row
+and rushing back with torn-up handfuls....
+
+The afternoon dropped toward twilight and everybody was as mellow as the
+departing day--which went down in a riot of gold....
+
+A great area of the field looked as if it had fallen in the track of a
+victorious army, or had been fallen upon by a cloud of locusts.
+
+A chill came in with twilight, and we built a fire, and danced about it.
+
+I danced and danced ... we all danced and howled in Indian disharmony
+... wailing ... screeching ... falling ... getting up again ... when I
+danced and leaped the world resumed its order ... when I stood still or
+sat down plump, the trees took up the gyrations where I had left off,
+and went about in solemn, ringing circles ... green and graceful minuets
+of nature....
+
+"Here's to good old Gregory, drink 'er down, drink 'er down!" I heard
+the boys, led by Jack Travers, bray discordantly.
+
+"Want 'a hear some songs?" I quavered, interrogating.
+
+"What kind o' songs?" asked a big, hulking boy that we called 'Black
+Jim,' because of his dark complexion.
+
+"Real songs," I replied, "jail songs, tramp songs, coacaine songs!"
+
+All those Rabelaisan folk-things I had lost while hopping the freight,
+came surging back, each not in fragments, but entire. Drunk, I did then
+what my brain since, intoxicated or sober, cannot do ... I rendered them
+all, one after the other, just as I had copied them down....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And more! Gregory, more!" the boys kept shouting.
+
+I sat down and began to cry because I had lost the script. It had all
+gone out of my head again as quickly as it had come, so that I could not
+even repeat one they'd asked for.
+
+"Hell, he's got a crying drunk the first thing!"
+
+"Cheer up, old scout ... here's another cupful."
+
+"No ... I don't want any more ... I'm never going to drink again."
+
+And I knocked the cup out of Travers' hand with a violent drunken sweep
+of negation.
+
+"No use getting huffy about it," someone put in belligerently.
+
+"If anybody wants to fight," it was Black Jim, huge and menacing and
+morose, advancing....
+
+Fight! knives! jails!...
+
+Ah, yes, I was still in jail ... and Bud and the burly cotton thief were
+at it....
+
+I staggered to my feet.
+
+"Wait a minute, Bud ... I'm coming." I gave a run toward a barrel, sent
+it a violent kick, a succession of kicks....
+
+"Wait a minute! I'm coming!"
+
+"So am I!" grinned Black Jim belligerently, thinking I meant him and
+advancing slowly and surely.
+
+The barrel burst asunder, the beer sumped and gurgled about my ankles as
+I stooped and picked up a stave.
+
+"The damn fool's ruined a whole keg."
+
+I was going to lick everybody in the jail, if I must.
+
+"Put that stave down Gregory! put it down, for Christ's sake!"
+
+"Good God! Grab Jim, someone!"
+
+"Don't be a fool ... hold Gregory ... he's got the stave!"
+
+"He'll kill Jim!"
+
+"Or Jim'll kill him!"...
+
+Then came a shout from nearby.
+
+"I'll heve the law on ye, I will! destroyin' a man's cornfield like a
+lot o' heathens!"
+
+Yelling and menacing, the farmer and his big, raw-boned son were upon
+us. They evidently thought that we were all in such a drunken condition
+that they could kick us about as they choose. They had just driven home
+from market-day in Laurel.
+
+Everything was mixed up in my head ... but one thing out-stood: I must
+do my duty by my barrel stave ... as the farmer leaped into the circle
+he did not notice me staggering on the outskirts. I rushed up and let
+him have the barrel stave full across the head.
+
+At the same time Black Jim had turned his attention to the rangy boy,
+felling him at a blow. The boy leaped to his feet and ran away to a safe
+distance.
+
+"Paw!" he called out, 'I'll run back to th' house an' 'phone th'
+p'lice."
+
+"Come on, boys, we'd better dig out!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We straggled along in silent, rolling clusters, like bees smoked out,
+down the road ... we heard the rumble of a waggon ... when we recognised
+that it was our teetotaler coming back for us....
+
+"God, if my old man hears of this I'm done for at Laurel."
+
+"So'm I!"
+
+"If we only lay low and don't go spouting off about it, things will be
+all O.K."
+
+"We'll send Travers back with a little collection, to fix it up with the
+farmer, and blarney him out of taking any action."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning I had a roaring headache ... as long as I lay quiet there
+was only the slow, deep regular pulse of pain driving through my head,
+but when I made an effort to get up, my eyeballs throbbed with such
+torment that they seemed to be starting out of my head....
+
+I fell asleep in the broad day again, waking to find Jack Travers
+standing by my bed, pale and cynical, dusting off the ashes from the end
+of his eternal cigarette.
+
+"How are you feeling this morning?"
+
+"Rotten," I answered. I sat up and triphammers of pain renewed their
+pounding inside my racked head.
+
+--"thought you would, so's soon as I got up, I came down to see you."
+
+--"lot of good that'll do."
+
+He whipped a flask out of his hip pocket. "Take a nip of this and it
+will set you right in a jiffy."
+
+"No, I'll never drink another drop."
+
+"Don't be a fool. Just a swallow and you'll be on your feet again."
+
+I took a big swallow and it braced me up instantly.
+
+"Now, come on with me, Johnnie, I'm taking you in tow for to-day! A
+fellow who's not used to getting drunk always mopes around after a good
+time like we had.... I'm seeing you through _the day after_ ... you're
+going to lunch with me at the frat-house and this afternoon there's a
+sacred concert on in Aeolian Hall that I have two tickets for."
+
+"I'll never drink another drop as long as I live."
+
+"That's what they all say."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Sig Kappas I met Black Jim, the first one, at the door. He shook
+hands shyly, laughingly.
+
+"You sure fetched that rube a wallop ... he let one croak out of him and
+flopped flat ... it would have made a good comic picture."
+
+"Lunch is ready, boys!"
+
+I was made into a sort of hero--"a real, honest-to-God guy."
+
+"You'll have to come to some of our frat jamborees ... Jack'll bring you
+up."
+
+"We and the Sigma Deltas are Southern fraternities ... we have a hell of
+a sight more fun than the others ... there's the Sigma Pis--though they
+have some live birds, they're mostly dead ... and the Phi Nus put on too
+much side ... the Beta Omicrons are right there with the goods, though."
+
+"I see."
+
+A little freshman made an off-colour remark.
+
+"You'd better go and see Jennie!" advised a genial young senior, who,
+for all his youth, was entirely bald.
+
+"Jennie, who's Jennie?" I asked, curious.
+
+"Our frat woman!" answered Travers casually.
+
+"Frat woman?" I was groping for further information, puzzled.
+
+"Yes, often a fraternity keeps a woman for the use of its members ...
+when a kid comes to us so innocent he's annoying, we turn him over to
+Jennie to be made a man of."
+
+"This innocence-stuff is over-rated. It's better to send a kid to a
+nice, clean girl that we club in together and keep, and let him learn
+what life is, once and for all, than to have him going off somewhere and
+getting something, or, even worse, horning around and jeopardizing
+decent girls, as he's bound to otherwise."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were signs of failure at the Farmers' Restaurant. The curious
+farmer-family that ran it were giving it up and moving back into the
+country again. I was soon to have no place to board, where I could
+obtain credit.
+
+But it was summer by now, and I didn't care. I meditated working in the
+wheat harvest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The editors of the _National Magazine_ had given a new impulsion to my
+song--and a damned bad one. Already they had accepted and printed
+several of my effusions.
+
+I was to sing for them the life of present-day America, the dignity of
+labour, the worth of the daily, obscure endeavour of the world around
+me.....
+
+In other words, instead of flattering one man of influence and power
+with a dedication, as was done by the poets of the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries, I was to install Demos as my patron, must warp the
+very tissue of my thought to inform the ordinary man that the very fact
+that he wore overalls, acquired callouses on his hands, and was ignorant
+and contemptuous of culture--somehow made him a demigod! I was
+continually to glorify the stupidity of the people, and always append a
+moral.
+
+For a time I even succeeded in working myself up into a lathering
+frenzy of belief in what I was doing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The bedrock of life in the Middle West is the wheat harvest.
+
+There was a man named Carl Bonton who owned a threshing machine. I heard
+he was in need of hands for the season.
+
+I nailed my few books up in a drygoods box and left them in care of
+Professor Langworth's housekeeper, the former having gone away to
+Colorado for the summer. As for clothes, tramp-life had taught me the
+superfluity of more than a change of shirts and b.v.d's.
+
+Bonton looked me over.
+
+"You don't look strong enough ... the work is mighty hard."
+
+"I'm pretty wiry. Try me out, that is all I ask. If I buckle in, I won't
+mind walking back to town."
+
+Bonton's buckboard carried us the matter of five miles to where his
+machine, separator and cook-shack stood ... lurking behind a grove of
+Osage orange trees.
+
+Bonton had brought two other men besides me, as accessories to his gang.
+We found the gang just tumbling forth from the cook waggon, a small,
+oblong sort of house on wheels ... a long table in it, with benches ...
+much like the lunch waggons seen standing about the streets in cities.
+
+"Hello, boys, is it dry enough to begin loadin' yet?"
+
+"Naw; the dew's still as heavy as rain on the bundles."
+
+"We'd best wait a little longer, then."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though it seemed that half the day had wheeled by already, by seven
+o'clock we rode a-field, and the less experienced of us were hard at it,
+tossing up bundles to the loaders, who placed them swiftly here and
+there till the waggons were packed tight and piled high.
+
+I pitched up bundles from below, to an old man of sixty, who wore a
+fringe of grey beard, like a Mennonite.
+
+"I don't see why Bonton ever hired you," he remarked unsympathetically,
+peering over the top at me from his high-piled load. Several times I had
+missed the top and the bundle of wheat had tumbled back to me again....
+
+"I can't be reaching out all the time to catch your forkfuls."
+
+"Just give me time till I learn the hang of it."
+
+I was better with the next load. The waggons came and went one after
+the other ... there was a light space of rest between waggons. It was
+like the rest between the rounds of a prizefight.
+
+From the cloudless sky the sun's heat poured down in floods. A
+monotonous locust was chirr-chirr-chirring from a nearby cottonwood ...
+and in the long hedge of Osage oranges moaned wood doves....
+
+By noon I had achieved a mechanical swing that helped relieve the
+physical strain, a swinging rhythm of the hips and back muscles which
+took the burden off my aching and weaker arms.
+
+That afternoon, late, when the old man drove his waggon up to me for the
+hundredth time it seemed, he smiled quizzically.
+
+"Well, here you are still, but you're too skinny to stand it another day
+... better draw your two bucks from the boss and strike out for Laurel
+again."
+
+--"that so, Daddy!" and I caught three bundles at once on the tines of
+my fork and flung them clear to the top, and over. They caught the old
+man in the midriff.... I heard a sliding about and swearing ... the next
+moment he was in a heap, on the ground ... on the other side of the
+waggon.
+
+"What th' hell did ye do that for?"
+
+I looked innocent. "Do what?"
+
+--"soak me in the guts with three bundles to onct an' knock me off'n the
+top of the load?"
+
+"Ever since morning you've been kidding me and telling me I went too
+slow for you.... I thought I'd speed up a bit."
+
+After surveying me scornfully for a minute, he mutely reascended the
+load, and we finished the job in silence together....
+
+We laboured on after sunset till the full moon swung over the tree-tops.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Usually they did not use the cook-shack much ... it was used while on
+the road from one wheat farm to another. Usually the farmers' wives and
+daughters in the valleys and on the hillsides vied with each other as to
+heaping food before the threshers ... every morning saw mountains of
+pancakes ... bacon ... eggs ... ham ... beefsteak ... we laboured like
+giants, ate like hogs, slept like senseless stocks.
+
+I climbed to my bed in the haymow that first night. It was chill enough
+for the use of my blanket.
+
+I drowsed off, to wake with a jump of all my body from a dream that a
+giant was pressing down on me, that he had my legs doubled up over me
+and was breaking them into my breast....
+
+The cramps....
+
+I stood up and rubbed my legs till the taut tendons softened and
+stretched ... but when I dared bend them the littlest, the tautening and
+drawing twisted them again. And so I suffered half the night through,
+till, in wrathful agony, I stumbled to the watering trough and stood
+naked-white in the flood of the full moon, rubbing the icy water over my
+body....
+
+The dutiful house dogs ... barking furiously, the two of them rushed at
+my apparition as I stood up in the trough and splashed. They embayed me
+as a quarry. I jumped out of the trough and threw stones at them. They
+backed from my attack and bit at the stones. I stepped back in the water
+and rubbed myself more. The dogs squatted on their haunches at a safe
+distance and bayed lugubriously at me and the moon in common.
+
+The rest of the night I lay preternaturally awake, hearing the snoring
+and murmuring of my fellows in the mow ... hearing the horses as they
+crunched and whickered ... all the noises of the outside night came in
+at the open door of the mow. Even the hay began to annoy me as it
+continually rustled in my ear.
+
+I took my blanket and went to lie on the hard ground, under the water
+waggon. There I heard the multitudinous insects of the night, and the
+whippoorwill.
+
+Ordinarily I do not have an appetite for breakfast. That morning I
+thought I would eat little, but I ended by devouring six eggs, two dozen
+pancakes, drinking three cups of coffee ... all of which immediately lay
+like a lump of rock in me....
+
+No, I could not keep it up! It was too much of an effort, such frightful
+labour, for sixteen hours of the day. But I thought of the old man who
+had jeered at me, and I trudged a-field with the rest, my fork slung
+over my shoulder ... sore ... I ached in every muscle ... muscles I
+never knew existed before talked to me with their little voices of
+complaint.
+
+But after the first load I began to be better....
+
+And by noon I was singing and whistling irrepressibly.
+
+"You'll do ... but you'll have to put a hat on or you'll drop with
+sun-stroke," Bonton remarked.
+
+"I never wear a hat."
+
+"All right. It's your funeral, not mine," and the boss walked away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Have a nip and fortify yourself against the sun ... that's the way to
+do," suggested the old driver. He proffered his whiskey flask.
+
+"Nope ... I've plenty of water to drink."
+
+The water boy kept trailing about with his brown jug. I tipped it up to
+my mouth and drank and drank ... I drank and drank and worked and worked
+and sweated and sweated ... the top of my head perspired so that it felt
+cool in the highest welter of heat.
+
+In the hot early afternoon I saw the old man lying under a tree.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+--"too hot!"
+
+"Where's your whiskey now?"
+
+--"'tain't the whiskey. _That_ keeps a fellow up ... it's because I'm
+old, not young, like you," he contested stubbornly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These men that I worked with were unimaginably ignorant. One night we
+held a heated argument as to whether the stars were other worlds and
+suns, or merely lights set in the sky to light the world of men by ...
+which latter, the old man maintained, was the truth, solemnly asserting
+that the Bible said so, and that all other belief was infidelity and
+blasphemy. So it was that, each evening, despite the herculean labour of
+the day, we drew together and debated on every imaginable subject....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the third day of my employment by him, Bonton put me at the mouth of
+the separator, where the canvas ran rapidly in, carrying the bundles
+down into the maw of the machine. My job was feeding the bundles to it
+... up in the air in the back the threshed straw was kicked high, and
+the chaff whirled in dusty clouds ... from a spout in the side of the
+separator the threshed grain poured in an unending stream....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was difficult to keep the horses from the straw stacks that the daily
+threshing built up.
+
+Also Bonton speeded so terrifically that much of the grain was shot out
+into the straw....
+
+One night three of the horses made their way to the straw and ate and
+gorged ... in the morning one of them was dead and the other two were
+foundered....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The cramps bothered me no more.
+
+The boss came up to me and slapped me on the back.
+
+"--thought you'd sag under," but, putting his hand on my back, "you've
+got powerful back muscles, though your arms and legs are like beanpoles
+... a fellow never can tell about a man, till he's tried out."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After nearly a month of the work, Bonton began acting glum toward me....
+
+"Gregory, I'm going to pay you off to-day!"
+
+"--pay me off to-day?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What's the matter? ain't I working hard enough?"
+
+"I've no fault to find with your work ... you're a better worker than
+most of the men ... in fact they complain that you set too hard a pace
+at the separator....
+
+"But you argue too much ... keep the men up o' nights debating about
+things they never even considered before. And it upsets them so, what
+with the arguing and the sleep they lose, that they ain't up to the
+notch, next day.
+
+"No, that's the only fault I have to find in you," he continued, as he
+counted out sixty dollars into my hand ... "but," and he walked with me,
+disquieted to the road, "but if you'll wait around till this afternoon,
+I'll drive you back to town."
+
+"No. It's not over ten miles. I'll walk."
+
+I was glad to be paid off. I was missing my books and my leisure,
+longing for the cool alcoves of books in the university "stack."
+
+"You understand me, I hope ... business is business and work is work.
+I've found it doesn't do to argue ... only stirs up trouble....
+
+"I hope you don't think all this debating will end after you're gone?...
+Oh, no,--for the next week or so the boys will continue shooting their
+mouths off ... the Baptist will fight the Methodist, and both will join
+against the Seventh Day Adventist ... and the one Catholic will be
+assailed by all hands....
+
+"Before you came, no one knew what the other fellow believed, and no
+one cared ... but now you've started something."
+
+"I'm sorry, Mr. Bonton."
+
+"It can't be helped now ... don't fail to let me know in what magazines
+your poems on threshing and the harvest will appear."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I trudged townward, light-hearted ... a poem began to come to me before
+I had gone a mile ... at intervals I sat down and wrote a few lines....
+
+That fall the _National Magazine_ printed _The Threshers_ and _The
+Harvest_ and _The Cook-Shack_, three poems, the fruit of that work. All
+three written on the road as I walked back to town ... and all three
+didactic and ridiculous in their praise of the worker.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frank Randall, tinsmith and plumber, who ran his shop on the main
+street, rented me a back room over his store, for two dollars a week. It
+had been occupied by big Sam, the negro shoemaker, and it was neither in
+order, nor did it smell very sweet. But I cleaned and aired it, and
+sprinkled disinfectant about that I had bought at the drug store.
+
+Then I fetched my books down from Langworth's in a wheelbarrow, and I
+set them up in several neat rows.
+
+I lay back on my cot and looked at them in satisfaction and happiness. I
+had enough for food and lodging for nearly three months, if I cooked for
+myself. Two dollars a week for food and two for rent, and I'd do my own
+washing ... say five a week at the most! that would mean twelve weeks of
+doing nothing but reading and writing and studying.
+
+The first day of my sojourn over the tinsmith's shop, Sunday, I drew
+down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks
+I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive
+study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness,
+such effectiveness of epigrammatic expression.
+
+I opened the _Buch der Lieder_ at the poem in his preface--the song of
+the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the
+poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his
+soul with kisses. And the nightingale was singing....
+
+  "O, shoene Sphinx, O loese mir
+  Das Raetsel, das wunderbare!
+  Ich hab' darueber nachgedacht
+  Schon manche tausand Yahre."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Monday morning ... by six or seven o'clock a rustling below, in the
+shop, by eight, the day's work in full blast ... a terrific pounding and
+hammering on sheets of tin and pieces of pipe. The uproar threw my mind
+off my poetry.
+
+I went down to speak with Randall about it....
+
+"Frank, I can't stand this, I must leave."
+
+"Nonsense; stay; you'll get used to it."
+
+"No, I must go if the noise keeps up continually like this."
+
+"Well, it won't ... we have a special job to finish ... tin-roofing ...
+but if you want a place to stay where it is quiet, I have a camp, not
+far out, on the Ossawatomie, where I go for week-ends...."
+
+"Where is it? That would be fine. I'd like to stay there."
+
+"You know where old Farmer Brown lives, by the abandoned church, just
+outside of Perthville?"
+
+"Yes. That's seven miles out on the Osageville road."
+
+"Take the first turn to the right from his house, going west. It's an
+unused bye-road and it runs plumb into my cabin. There's a frying pan
+there ... and some flour ... and bacon ... tell you what ... it's been
+broken into several times. I'll consider it worth while if you go and
+live there, and I get no rent from you for it nor the room upstairs ...
+you'll be alone, God knows--excepting Saturdays and Sundays."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I packed my Heine in a bundle ... with my Bible and my Josephus in the
+Greek, along with Whiston's English version ... and I included a bundle
+of books on New Testament times that made me groan under their weight.
+For I planned to begin a four-act play on Judas, and must study for
+writing that, as well as learn the "how" of the lyric....
+
+The stupendousness of the silence of absolute solitude! At first the
+thoughts run on with a tangle and jangle, a turmoil almost of madness
+... then they quiet down into the peace that only a hermitage gives and
+the objects of life are seen in their true relativity and perspective.
+
+My diet was one of sow-belly, bread, and coffee, and what fish I caught
+in the sluggish, muddy stream....
+
+Saturday, toward sunset, I heard a whooping in the woods. It was Randall
+coming with a few friends for his week-end, as he had warned. With him,
+his wild brother, Jack; and Bill, his assistant plumber and
+man-about-shop.
+
+The drinking had begun before they were in sight of the shack. And it
+was kept up till late Sunday night ... around a big fire in a cleared
+space they sang and gambled and drank.
+
+Randall served great hilarity to the party by trying to breed his gelded
+horse to his mare ... the mare kicked and squealed, indignant at the
+cheat, looking back, flattening her ears, and showing the vicious whites
+of her eyes. Several times the infuriated beast's heels whished an inch
+or so from Randall's head, as he forced the gelding to advance and
+mount. We rolled on the grass, laughing ... myself included.
+
+Then all stripped to the buff for a swim in the stream ... a treacherous
+place where the bottom was at times but two or three feet from the
+surface, and the mud, soft and semi-liquid for five feet more. And there
+were snags, and broken beer and whiskey bottles all over the bottom
+where it was decent and gravelly.
+
+Bill, with his solemn dundreary whiskers, leaped high in the air like a
+frog, kicking his legs and yelling drunkenly as he took off.
+
+"Look out, Bill," I shouted, "it's nothing but mud there!"
+
+But Bill didn't heed me. He hit with a swish and a thud instead of a
+splash, and didn't come up.
+
+We put out in our rickety boat.
+
+By that luck that favours the drunkard and fool, we laid hold on Bill's
+feet sticking out, just under the water. We tugged mightily and brought
+him forth, turned into a black man by the ooze ... otherwise, unharmed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was not till two hours after midnight that they whisked away townward
+and left me alone, so that the graciousness of silence could enfold me
+again. I looked forward to a week's peace, before they descended on the
+camp again. But I had a premonition that there was to be no peace for me
+there. For Randall had said to me before he drove away....
+
+"You know Pete Willets? Well, he's liable to come here for a few days,
+during the week ... a nice quiet fellow though ... won't disturb you."
+
+The thought of another visitor did disturb me. Though I knew Pete
+Willets as a quiet, gentle shoemaker in whom seemed no guile, I wanted
+to be alone to think and read and write.
+
+Wednesday noon Pete Willets drove up, accompanied by a grubby Woman whom
+at first glance I did not relish.
+
+"Hello, Johnnie, Frank said we could use the shack for a day or two."
+
+"Forever, as far as I'm concerned," I answered, beginning to tie up my
+books in a huge bundle as big as a peddler's pack, and as heavy.
+
+Impatiently tying the horse to a post, they were in the shack and
+immediately prone on my bunk.
+
+As I shouldered my load their murmuring voices full of amorous desire
+stung me like a gadfly. I hurried off toward Laurel, angry at life.
+
+I explained to Randall why I had left his camp so soon. He was gravely
+concerned.
+
+"I didn't tell Willets he could have my shack to take Gracie there. This
+is a bit too thick."
+
+"Who's Gracie?"
+
+"--a bad lot ... a girl that's been on the turf since she was in knee
+skirts--as long as I've known her. He loves her. She can twist him
+around her little finger. She's going to get him into something bad some
+day. He'll do anything she wants. And she's capable of putting him up to
+anything."
+
+"Willets is weak, when it comes to women ... don't drink much ... a hard
+worker ... everybody likes him....
+
+"Did you ever notice his limp ... only slight ... scarcely noticeable,
+isn't it?... he's a corking mechanic as well as shoemaker ... mighty
+clever ... now for instance, you wouldn't ever have known, unless I told
+you, that his left leg is made of wood?"
+
+"I wouldn't even suspect it."
+
+"--lost his left leg when he was a brakeman ... made that wooden leg for
+himself ... it works so smoothly that he's thinking of taking out a
+patent on it."
+
+"Why does a woman take to a man with a wooden leg?"
+
+"--makes good money ... and he has a way about him with the girls ...
+he goes about so quietly. He's so gentle and considerate ... acts, but
+doesn't say much, you know! that's what they like!"
+
+"--damned sorry for his wife and two kids, though; when Willets comes to
+town again I'm not going to let him have my shack any more ... might be
+some trouble ... divorce or something."
+
+There was trouble and very shortly. In a month Willets had poisoned his
+wife ... with rough-on-rats ... and the quiet little shoemaker went to
+the penitentiary for life ... a life-time of shoe-making.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I rented a tent and pitched it on an island in the middle of the Kaw, or
+Kansas River. There I was alone. I rented a boat to take out my
+possessions.
+
+I lived naked till I grew brown all over. I studied and read and wrote
+to my full desire, there in the grateful silence of trees and waters--a
+solitude broken only by an occasional train streaming its white trail of
+smoke as it whistled and raced round the curve of shining track toward
+Laurel.
+
+I read Josephus entirely through, haltingly, line by line, in the Greek.
+I read all the books the "stack" at the university could afford me on
+New Testament life and times, in preparation for my play on Judas.
+
+My only companions were a flock of tiny mud-hens with their dainty proud
+little rooster. I heard them talking in bird-language, saw them paddling
+with diminutive gravity up and down in the mud, on the island mud-bank
+just beneath the high place on which my tent was pitched.
+
+When I grew lonesome for company, human company, I swam ashore, my
+clothes tied on top of my head to keep them dry, and, dressing, walked
+into Laurel. Where I lounged about for the day on the streets, or in the
+stores, or in the livery stables ... I knew everybody and everybody knew
+me, and we had some fine times, talking.
+
+I had access to the local Carnegie Library as well as to the university
+"stack".
+
+My food did not cost me above a dollar a week. For I went on a whole
+wheat diet, and threw my frying pan away.
+
+I was the tramp, as ever, only I was stationary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The opening days of the fall term came round again. Summer weather, hot
+and belated, lingered on. I was now more native to the river than to
+life in a four-walled room and on street pavements.
+
+I debated seriously whether I should return to classes, or just keep on
+studying as I was, staying in my tent, and taking books out at the two
+libraries. I knew that they'd allow me to continue drawing out books at
+the university, even though I attended classes no longer--Professor
+Langworth would see to that.
+
+Also, most of the professors would whisper "good riddance" to
+themselves. I camped at their gates too closely with questions. I never
+accepted anything as granted. The "good sports" among them welcomed this
+attitude of mine, especially the younger bunch of them--who several
+times invited me to affairs of theirs, behind closed blinds, where good
+wine was poured, and we enjoyed fine times together....
+
+I was invited on condition that I would not let the student-body know of
+these _sub rosa fiestas_. Which were dignified and unblameworthy ...
+only, wine and beer went around till a human mellowness and
+conversational glow was reached.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A trifling incident renewed my resolve to continue as a student
+regularly enrolled....
+
+Though considered a freak and nut, I was generally liked among the
+students, and liked most of them in turn....
+
+They used frequently to say--"'s too bad Johnnie Gregory won't act like
+the rest of the world, he's such a likeable chap...."
+
+As the boys came back to school I went about renewing acquaintances.
+
+The afternoon of the day of the "trifling incident" I was returning from
+a long visit to Jack Travers and the Sig-Kappas.
+
+It was about ten o'clock when I reached the river-bank opposite my
+island. There was a brilliant moon up. If daylight could be
+silver-coloured it was day.
+
+I stood naked on the water's edge, ready to wade out for my swim back to
+my island. My clothes were trussed securely, for dryness, on my head.
+
+A rustling, a slight clearing of the throat, halted me.
+
+I glanced through a vista of bushes.
+
+There sat a girl in the full moonlight. She had a light easel before
+her. She was trying to paint, evidently, the effects of the moon on the
+landscape and the river. Painters have since told me that it is
+impossible to do that. It is too dark to see the colours. Nevertheless
+the girl was trying.
+
+I stopped statue-still to find if I had been seen. When assured that I
+had not, I slowly squatted down, and, naked as I was, crept closer,
+hiding behind a screen of bushes. And I fastened my eyes on her, and
+forgot who I was. For the moon made her appear almost as plain as day.
+And she was very beautiful. And I was caught in a sudden trap of love
+again.
+
+Here, I held no doubt, was my Ideal. I could not distinguish the colour
+of her hair. But she was maiden and slenderly wonderful.
+
+I lay flat, hoping that she would not hear my breath as she calmly
+painted. My heart beat so hard it seemed to shake the ground beneath me.
+
+She, too, was original, what the world would call "eccentric" ... out
+here, three miles from town, with the hours verging toward midnight ...
+seated on the river bank, trying to capture the glory of the moon on
+canvas.
+
+But, unusual as her action was, there was nothing mad about her mode of
+dressing ... her white middy blouse, edged with blue ... her flowing tie
+... her dainty, blue serge skirt and dainty shoes.
+
+I lay there, happy in being near her, the unknown.
+
+After a long time she rose ... gave a sigh ... brushed her hand over her
+hair.
+
+Fascination held me close as she stooped over ... began leisurely to
+untie her shoes ... set them, removed, aside, toe to toe and heel to
+heel, equal, as if for mathematical exactness ... paused a moment ...
+lifted her skirts, drew off her garters with a circular downward sweep
+... drew down her stockings....
+
+She sat with her stockings off, stuffed into her shoes,--her skirt up to
+her hips, gazing meditatively at her naked legs held straight before
+her.
+
+I was close enough to hear her breathing--or so keen in my aroused
+senses that I thought I heard it. She wiggled her toes to herself as she
+meditated.
+
+She paused as if hesitating to go on with her undressing. A twig
+snapped. She came to her knees and looked about, startled, then
+subsided again, tranquil and sure of her solitude.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She stood in the moonlight, naked. My gaze grew fat with pleasure as it
+fed on her nakedness....
+
+She stepped down to the water's edge, dabbling her outstretched toes in
+the flow.
+
+Ankle-deep, she stood and stooped. She scooped up water and dashed it
+over her breasts. She rose erect a moment and gazed idly about.
+
+Then, binding her hair in a careful knot, she went in with a plunge and
+I saw that she could swim well.
+
+My heart shook and thundered so that its pulse pervaded all my body with
+its violence. I held in curb a mad, almost irresistible impulse to rush
+in after her, crying out that I was a poet ... that this was the true
+romance ... that we must throw aside the conventions ... that no one
+would ever know.
+
+Then I thought of my skinniness and ugliness in comparison with her
+slight but perfect beauty. And I knew that it would repel her. And I
+held still in utter shame, not being good-looking enough to join her in
+the river.
+
+I lay prone, almost fainting, dizzy, not having the strength to creep
+away, as I now considered I must do.
+
+I saw her return and watched her as she slowly resumed her clothes,
+piece by leisurely piece. She folded her camp stool, packed her small
+easel in a case and started off toward town.
+
+Shouldn't I now intercept her, explain who I was, and offer to escort
+her along the tracks back to town? For it was surely dangerous for her
+to come so far into the night, alone. There were tramps ... and the
+stray criminal negro from the Bottoms ... God knows what else, in her
+path!
+
+But my timidity let her pass on alone.
+
+I needed the coolness of the water about me, as I swam out to my tent. I
+forgot my clothes on my head and they soused in the water as I swam. All
+night I tossed, sleepless. I lay delirious with remembrance of her ...
+imagined myself with her as I lay there, and whispered terms of love and
+endearment into the dark.
+
+Who was she? One thing I knew--she must be a student, and an art
+student under Professor Grant in the Fine Arts Department.
+
+This was the incident that decided me to enroll again as regular
+student, and to fold my tent, leave my solitary island, and return to
+town ... where I sought out Frank Randall, and he again offered me the
+room I had given up. And he gave me work as his bookkeeper, several
+hours of the day ... which work I undertook to perform in return for my
+room. In addition he gave me two dollars a week extra.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon soon after my enrollment, I met Ally Merton coming down
+hill.
+
+"Well, here I am, as I said I'd be," said he.
+
+He was, as usual, dressed to perfection--not a minute ahead of the
+style, not a minute behind ... gentle-voiced and deferential, learning
+to be everywhere without being noticed anywhere.
+
+"I see you're still eccentric in dress ... sandals ... shirt open at the
+neck ... denim too ... cheap brown socks ... corduroys...."
+
+"Yes, but look," I jested in reply, "I wear a tie ... and the ends pull
+exactly even. That's the one thing you taught me about correct dressing
+that I'll never forget."
+
+"If I could only persuade you, Johnnie, of the importance of little
+things, of putting one's best foot forward ... of personal appearance
+... why create an initial prejudice in the minds of people you meet,
+that you'll afterward have to waste valuable time in trying to remove?"
+
+"Where are you putting up, Ally?"
+
+"At the Phi Nus" (the bunch that went in the most for style and society)
+"I'm a Phi Nu, keep in touch with me, Johnnie."
+
+"Keep in touch with me," was Merton's stock phrase....
+
+"Mr. Mackworth asked me particularly to look you up, and 'take care of'
+you ... you made a hit with him ... but he's very much concerned about
+you--thinks you're too wild and erratic."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The tinshop was a noisy place, as I have said before. It was as
+uproarious as a boiler factory. All day long there was hammering,
+banging, and pounding below ... but I was growing used to it ... as you
+do to everything which must be.
+
+Keeping Randall's books occupied a couple of hours each morning or
+afternoon, whenever I chose. All the rest of the day I had free....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had almost come to the conclusion that the girl I had seen in the
+moonlight had been an apparition conjured up by my own imagination, when
+I glimpsed her, one afternoon, walking toward Hewitt Hall, where the art
+classes held session, in the upper rooms. I followed the girl, a long
+way behind. I saw her go in through the door to a class where already a
+group of students sat about with easels, painting from a girl-model ...
+fully clothed ... for painting from the nude was not allowed. They had
+threshed that proposition out long before, Professor Grant explained to
+me, once,--and the faculty had decided, in solemn conclave, that the
+farmers throughout the state were not yet prepared for that step....
+
+I sought Grant's friendship. He had studied in the Julian Academy at
+Paris, in his youth. He invited me to his house for tea, often; where I
+met many of his students, but never, as I had hoped, the girl of the
+moonlight....
+
+But by careful and guarded inquiry I found out who she was ... a girl
+from the central portion of the state, named Vanna Andrews.
+
+When Grant asked me to pose for his class, sandals, open shirt,
+corduroys, and all ... I agreed ... almost too eagerly ... he would pay
+me twenty-five cents an hour.
+
+My first day Vanna was not there. On the second, she came ... late ...
+her tiny, white face, crowned with its dark head of hair ... "a star in
+a jet-black cloud," I phrased, to myself. She sailed straight in like a
+ship.
+
+When she had settled herself,--beginning to draw, she appraised me
+coolly, impartially, for a moment ... took my dimensions for her paper,
+pencil held at arm's length....
+
+Slowly, though I fought it back, a red wave of confusion surged over my
+face and neck. I turned as red as ochre. I grew warm with perspiration
+of embarrassment. I gazed fixedly out through the window....
+
+"You're getting out of position," warned Professor Grant.
+
+Vanna still observed me with steadfast, large, blue eyes. She started
+her sketch with a few, first, swift lines.
+
+"Excuse me," I rose, "I feel rather ill." I posed, "I've been up all
+night drinking strong coffee and writing poems," I continued, my voice
+rising in insincere, noisy falsetto.
+
+"Step down a minute and rest, then, Mr. Gregory," advised Professor
+Grant, puzzled, a grimace of distaste on his face.
+
+"Isn't he silly," I overheard a girl student whisper to a loud-dressed
+boy, whose easiness of manner with the female students I hated and
+envied him for....
+
+I resumed my pose. I blushed no more. I endured the cool, level,
+impersonal glances of the girl I had fallen in love with....
+
+"The model's a little wooden, don't you think, professor?" she observed,
+to tease me, perhaps. She could not help but sense the cause of my
+agitation. But then she was used to creating a stir among men. Her
+beauty perturbed almost the entire male student body.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I noticed that her particular chum was a very homely girl. I straightway
+found charms in this girl that no one had ever found before. And Alice
+and I became friends. And, while posing, I came before the time, because
+she, I discovered, was always beforehand, touching up her work.
+
+Alice was a stupid, clumsy girl, but she adored Vanna and liked nothing
+better than to talk about her chum and room-mate. She took care of Vanna
+as one would take care of a helpless baby.
+
+"Vanna is a genius, if there ever was one ... she doesn't know her hands
+from her feet in practical affairs ... but she's wonderful ... all the
+boys," and Alice sighed with as much envy as her nature would
+allow--"all the boys are just crazy about her ... but she isn't in love
+with any of them!"
+
+My heart gave a great bound of hope at these last words.
+
+"Professor Grant's students--about two-thirds of them--have enrolled in
+his classes, because she's there."
+
+And then I went cold with jealousy and with despair ... one so popular
+could never _see_ me ... if it were only later, when my fame as a poet
+had come!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Vanna has to be waited on hand and foot. I don't mind though,"
+continued Alice, "I hang up her clothes for her ... make her bed ...
+sweep and dust our rooms ... it makes me happy to wait on anything so
+beautiful!" and the face of the homely girl glowed with joy....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was poor and miserable. I bent my head forward, forgetful of my
+determination to walk erect and proud, with a pride I did not possess.
+
+Langworth was coming behind me. He slapped me on the back. I whirled,
+full of resentment. But changed the look to a smile when I perceived who
+it was....
+
+"Why, Johnnie, what's the matter? you're walking like an old man. Brace
+up. Is anything wrong?"
+
+"No, I was just thinking."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first cold blasts of winter howled down upon us. No snow yet, but
+winds that rushed about the buildings on the hill, full of icy rain, and
+with a pushing strength like the shoulders of invisible giants out of
+the fourth dimension ... we men kept on the sidewalks when we could ...
+but the winds blew the girls off into the half-hardened mud, and, at
+times, were so violent, that the girls could not extricate themselves,
+but they stood still, waiting for help, their skirts whirling up into
+their very faces.
+
+It was what the boys called "a sight for sore eyes."
+
+They stood in droves, in the sheltered entrances of the halls, and
+occasionally darted out by ones and twos and threes to rescue distressed
+co-eds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Down in the room over the tin and plumbing shop in which I lived, I
+found it cold indeed. I could afford no heat ... and, believing in
+windows open, knew every searching drop in the barometer.
+
+But never in my life was I happier, despite my secretly cherished love
+for Vanna. For I assured myself in my heart of certain future fame, the
+fame I had dreamed of since childhood. And I wore every hardship as an
+adornment, conscious of the greatness of my cause.
+
+Isolation; half-starvation; cold; inadequate clothing;--all counted for
+the glory of poetry, as martyrs had accepted persecution and suffering
+for the glory of God.
+
+My two hours of daily work irked me. I wanted the time for my writing
+and studying ... but I still continued living above the din of the shop
+that I had grown accustomed to, by this time.
+
+Rarely, when the nights were so subarctic as to be almost unbearable,
+did I slip down through the skylight and seek out the comparative warmth
+of the shop ... and there, on the platform where the desk stood so that
+it could overlook all the store, I wrote and studied.
+
+But Randall said this worried the night watchman too much, my appearing
+and disappearing, all hours of the night. He didn't relish coming every
+time to see if the store was being burglarised.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The outside world was beginning to notice me. My poems, two of which I
+had sold to the _Century_, two to _Everybody's_, and a score to the
+_Independent_, were, as soon as they appeared in those magazines,
+immediately copied by the Kansas newspapers. And the Kansas City _Star_
+featured a story of me at Laurel, playing up my freaks and oddities ...
+but accompanied by a flattering picture that "Con" Cummins, our college
+photographer, had taken.
+
+Also I was receiving occasional letters from strangers who had read my
+poems. But they were mostly letters from cranks ... or from girls very,
+very young and sentimental, or on the verge of old-maidhood, who were
+casting about for some escape from the narrow daily life that environed
+them....
+
+But one morning a letter came to me so scrawlingly addressed that I
+marvelled at the ability of the postal authorities in deciphering it.
+The writer of it hailed me as a poet of great achievement already, but
+of much greater future promise.... Mr. Lephil, editor of the _National
+Magazine_, for whom he was writing a serial, had showed him some of my
+verse, and he must hasten to encourage me ... I puzzled long over the
+writer's signature.... It could not be possible! but it seemed to be
+inscribed with the name of a novelist famous for his investigations of
+capitalistic abuses of the people ... the author of the sensational
+novel, _The Slaughter House_, which was said to out-Zola Zola--Penton
+Baxter.
+
+I hurried downstairs from my attic, to intercept some friend who would
+confirm me in my interpretation of the signature.
+
+It was Travers I ran into. I showed the letter to him.
+
+"By Jove! It _is_ Baxter!" he cried.
+
+He was as overwhelmed as I had been.
+
+"Say, Johnnie, you must really amount to something, with all these
+people back East paying such attention to you ... come on into Kuhlman's
+and have a "coke" with me."
+
+In Kuhlman's, the college foregathering place, the ice cream and
+refreshment parlour of the town, we joined with Jimmy Thompson, our
+famous football quarterback. The room was full of students eating ice
+cream and drinking coco-cola and ice cream sodas.
+
+"Say, let me print this."
+
+"No, but you may put an item in the _Laurelian_, if you want to."
+
+"I must write a story for the _Star_ about it."
+
+It would have pleased my vanity to have had Jack put the story in the
+papers, but I was afraid of offending Baxter ... afterward I learned
+that it would not have offended him ... he had the vanity of a child, as
+well as I.
+
+I answered his letter promptly, in terms of what might have seemed, to
+the outside eye, excessive adulation. But Penton Baxter was to me a
+great genius ... and nothing I could have written in his praise would
+have overweighed the debt I owed him for that fine letter of
+encouragement.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So at last I was reaping the fruits of my years of struggle for the
+poetic ideal--my years of poverty and suffering.
+
+A belated student at college, twenty-five years of age ... a tramp for
+the sake of my art ... as I sat in my cold room ... propped up by my one
+overturned chair ... in bed ... betaking myself there to keep from
+freezing while I wrote and dreamed and read and studied,--I burst out
+singing some of my own verses, making the tune to the lines as I went
+along.
+
+"John Gregory, you are a great man, and some day all the world shall
+know and acknowledge it!" I said over and over again to myself....
+
+"And now, Vanna, my love, my darling," I cried aloud, so that if anyone
+overheard, the auditor would think I was going mad, "now, Vanna, you
+shall see ... in a year I shall have my first book of poetry out ... and
+fame and money for royalties will be mine ... then I will dare speak to
+you boldly of my love for you ... and you will be glad and proud of it
+... and be happy to marry me and be my wife!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the meantime Vanna Andrews was daily seen driving down the streets
+with Billy Conway, whose father was Governor of a Western State ... as I
+saw her going by in her fragile beauty, I bowed my head to her, and in
+return came a slight nod of mere, passing acquaintanceship.
+
+I made friends with Billy, as I had done with Vanna's homely room-mate
+... who thought I was becoming interested in her--because I often spoke
+in Vanna's dispraise, to throw her off the track, and to encourage her
+to speak at greater length of the woman I loved and worshipped from
+a-far.
+
+Now I sought through Billy Conway a nearer opportunity for her favour.
+He approached me one day while we were out on the football field,
+practicing formations. I was on the scrub team--whose duty it was to
+help knock the big team into shape.
+
+"Johnnie, you know Vanna, don't you?... Vanna Andrews, the art student."
+
+"Slightly," I concealed, thanking God I hadn't blushed straightway at
+the mention of her name ... "--met her when I posed for Professor
+Grant's classes."
+
+"She's a beaut, ain't she?"
+
+"Everybody thinks so."
+
+"Don't you?"
+
+"She'd be perfect, if she weren't so thin," I answered, almost
+smothering from the thumping of my heart.
+
+"I've often wondered what makes you so cold toward the girls ... when
+you write poetry ... poets are supposed to be romantic."
+
+"We have a good imagination."
+
+"--wish you'd exercise your imagination a little for me ... I'd pay you
+for it."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"--writing poems on Vanna, for me."
+
+My heart gave a wild jump of joy at the opportunity.
+
+"I'll think it over. But if I do so, I won't take anything for it."
+
+Billy shook my hand fervently.
+
+"You're all right, Gregory ... it'll help me a lot ... I've got a case
+on her, I'll admit."
+
+"Come on!" roared Coach Shaughnessy, "get on the job."
+
+He began calling letters and numbers for a play.
+
+And just for a joke, he took "Barrel" Way, the two hundred pound
+fullback, aside, and "Rock-crusher" Morton ... he whispered them, I
+afterward learned, to give me rough stuff, go through me with a bang....
+
+"Rock-crusher" took the ball, with "Barrel" for interference ... they
+came flashing my way.
+
+I was so frenzied with joy over the prospect of getting my poems through
+to Vanna, even if it was in another man's behalf, that I flung myself
+forward and brought both stars down with only a yard gained.
+
+Shaughnessy gave a whoop of joyous amazement and the other boys shouted,
+and kidded "Barrel" and "Rock-crusher," the latter of whom won his
+nickname from the gentle way he had of hitting his antagonists with his
+hard knees as he ran into them, and bowling them over ... he was a
+recruit from the hurdles, who ran "high."
+
+Shaughnessy came over to me.
+
+"Gregory, I want to say right here, I wish you took enough studies, and
+you could make sub on the big team right off. You're skinny, but you've
+got the mettle I wish all my boys had."
+
+No sooner was I out of my football clothes than I hurried to Kuhlman's,
+drank three coco-colas to stimulate me, and went to my room, to write my
+first poem for Vanna....
+
+Nearly every day Billy received a poem from me. Henceforth, when I
+passed Vanna, I received a gentle, appreciative smile ... but I was too
+timid even to speak to her ... and too self-conscious of my clothes,
+which were worn and frayed....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were a few negro students at Laurel. One of them, a girl named
+Matty Smith, approached me in the library one day, introduced herself as
+one of the chairmen of the entertainment committee of the First African
+Methodist Church, and asked me if I would come and give them a talk the
+following Saturday night....
+
+The night came ... I found myself on the platform with the preacher by
+my side. They had seated me in the chair of honour.
+
+First the congregation prayed and sang ... such singing, so clear and
+soaring and melodious. It rocked the very church, burst out through the
+windows in great surges of melody.
+
+I was introduced as their friend, as the coloured man's friend.
+
+I spoke. I read my poems simply and unaffectedly.
+
+Afterward I shook hands all round.
+
+Matty Smith, the negro girl, as black as soot, and thoroughly African,
+stood by me as introducer. If I had shut my eyes, her manner of speech
+might not have been told from that of any cultured white woman's. She
+was as refined and sensitive a human being as I have ever met.
+
+As I walked back to my attic over the plumber shop, it was with head
+erect and heaving chest. I deemed myself a champion of the negro race. I
+was almost putting myself alongside of Lincoln and John Brown.
+
+Their reason for inviting me was that I had had a scathing poem printed,
+in the New York _Independent_, on the lynching of a negro in Lincoln's
+home State of Illinois.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within two days of my talk at the First Methodist African Church, I met
+simultaneously in front of the library, two women, each going in
+opposite directions....
+
+"Good afternoon, Mr. Gregory!"
+
+It was Matty Smith. She was hesitating for a cue from me. She wished to
+stop and thank me again for my speaking.
+
+But from the other side Vanna Andrews was passing.
+
+I ignored Matty with a face like a stone wall.
+
+"Good afternoon!" I bowed to Vanna ... who ignored me ... perhaps not
+seeing me.
+
+The fearful, hurt look in the negro girl's eyes made me so ashamed of
+myself that I wanted to run away and hide forever somewhere.
+
+That night I was so covered with shame over what I had done to another
+human soul, a soul perhaps as proud and fine as any in Laurel, that it
+was not till dawn that sleep visited me....
+
+So I was just as rotten, just as snobbish, just as fearful of the herd,
+as were these other human beings whom I made fun of as the bourgeoisie.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Speaking with Riley, one of the English professors, about the mixture of
+colours on the hill....
+
+"I must confess," he admitted sincerely, "that I feel awkward indeed
+when a negro student walks by my side ... even for a few steps...."
+
+Coach Shaughnessy declared himself boldly--
+
+"I'll admit frankly to you, Gregory, but don't, of course, repeat what
+I say--that I'll never let a nigger play on the football team ... when
+they sweat they stink too badly ... no, sir, John Brown's State or not,
+the negro was never meant to mix with the white on terms of equality."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was mainly out of consideration for Langworth, and desire to please
+him, that I now joined the Unitarian Church, of which all the old
+settlers of Laurel were members. This included a testy old gentleman
+named Colonel Saunders, who had been one of John Brown's company, had
+quarrelled with him,--and who now, every year, maintained, at the annual
+meeting of old settlers, that Brown had been a rogue and murderer ... a
+mad man, going about cutting up whole families with corn knives....
+
+At this juncture in his speech, which was made undeviatingly every year,
+a sentimental woman would rise and cry out--
+
+"John Brown, God bless him, whatever you say, Colonel Saunders, his soul
+still goes marching on--"
+
+"I grant that, madam--that his soul still goes marching on--I _never_
+contested that--but _where_ does it go marching on!"
+
+Then the yearly riot of protests and angry disputation would wake.
+
+And every spring, in anticipation of this melee, reporters from the
+Kansas City papers were sent to cover the story of the proceedings of
+the Old Settlers' Society.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bob Fitzsimmons stopped off at our town, with his show. Though I
+couldn't afford to attend the performance, I did race down to the
+station, go up to him, and ask the privilege of a handshake.
+
+His huge, freckled ham of a hand closed over mine in a friendly manner
+... which disappeared up to the wrist. He exchanged a few, simple, shy
+words with me from a mouth smashed to shapelessness by many blows. He
+smiled gently, with kind eyes.
+
+I was prouder of this greeting than of all my growing associations with
+well-known literary figures. And I boasted to the boys of meeting "Bob"
+... inventing what I said to "Bob" and what "Bob" said to me, _ad
+infinitum_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though the great athlete shared my admiration with the great writer,
+yet my staying awake at night writing, my but one meal a day,
+usually,--except when I was invited out to a fraternity house or the
+house of a professor--and my incessant drinking of coffee and coco-cola
+to keep my ideas whipped up--all these things incapacitated me from
+attaining any high place in athletic endeavour. I was fair at boxing and
+could play a good scrub game of football. But my running, on which I
+prided myself most--I entered for the two-mile, one field day, and won
+only third place. I had gone back in form since Hebron days.
+
+Dr. Gunning, head of our physical instruction, informed me that,
+exercise as I might, I could never hope to be stronger or put on more
+weight ... "you had too many hardships and privations in your growing
+years ... and you are of too nervous a temperament."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But my love for Vanna had regularised me somewhat. I discarded my
+sandals and bought Oxford ties. And I preserved a crease in my trousers
+by laying them, folded carefully, under my mattress every night. And I
+took to wearing shirts with white linen collars....
+
+And I kept a picture of the girl I adored, secretly, among my
+manuscripts--it was one I had begged of "Con" Cummins, frankly taking
+him into my confidence as to my state of heart toward Vanna. Which
+confidence "Con" never abused, though it might have afforded endless
+fields of fun.
+
+"Con" framed the picture for me.
+
+When alone with it, I often actually knelt to it, as to a holy image.
+And I kissed and kissed it, till it was quite faded away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emma Silverman, the great anarchist leader, came to Laurel, with her
+manager, Jack Leitman. I went to the Bellman House, the town's swellest
+hotel, to see her. I had never met her but had long admired her for her
+activities and bravery.
+
+I found her a thick-built woman, after the gladiatorial fashion ... as
+she moved she made me think of a battleship going into action. There was
+something about her face ... a squareness of jaw, a belligerency, that
+reminded me of Roosevelt, whom I had seen twice ... once, at Mt. Hebron,
+when he had made a speech from the chapel platform ... (when I had
+determined not to join in the general applause of one whom I considered
+a mere demagogue--but, before I knew it, found myself on my feet
+roaring inarticulately as he strode in) and again, after he had returned
+from his African expedition, and had come to Laurel to dedicate a
+fountain set up for the local horses and dogs by the S.P.C.A.
+
+Jack Leitman looked to me like a fat nincompoop. Such a weakling as
+great women must necessarily, it seems, "fall for." But he was an
+efficient manager. Possessed of a large voice and an insistent manner,
+he sold books by the dozen before and after Emma Silverman's
+lectures....
+
+Miss Silverman already knew of me through Summershire, the wealthy
+socialist editor and owner of _Summershire's Magazine_, and Penton
+Baxter. It thrilled me when she called me by my first name....
+
+Her first lecture was on Sex. The hall was jammed to the doors by a
+curiosity-moved crowd.
+
+She began by assuming that she was not talking to idiots and cretins,
+but to men and women of mature minds--so she could speak as she thought
+in a forthright manner. She inveighed against the double standard. When
+someone in the auditorium asked what she meant by the single standard
+she replied, she meant sexual expression and experience for man and
+woman on an equal footing ... the normal living of life without which no
+human being could be really decent--and that regardless of marriage and
+the conventions!
+
+"The situation as it is, is odious ... all men, with but few exceptions,
+have sexual life before marriage, but they insist that their wives come
+to them in that state of absurd ignorance of their own bodily functions
+and consequent lack of exercise of them, which they denominate 'purity.'
+...
+
+"I doubt if there is a solitary man in this audience--a married man--who
+has not had premarital intercourse with women."
+
+All the while I kept my eye on Professor Wilton, who sat near me, in the
+row ahead ... he was flushing furiously in angry, puritanic dissent ...
+and I knew him well enough to foresee a forthcoming outburst of protest.
+
+"Yes, I think I can safely say that there is not one married man here
+who can honestly claim that he came to his wife with that same physical
+'purity' which he required of her."
+
+Wilton leaped to his feet in a fury ... the good, simple soul. He was
+so indignant that the few white hairs on his head worked up sizzling
+with his emotion....
+
+"_Here's one!_" he shouted, forgetting in his earnest anger the
+assembled audience, most of whom knew him.
+
+There followed such an uproar of merriment as I have never seen the like
+before nor since. The students, of course, howled with indescribable joy
+... Emma Silverman choked with laughter. Jack Leitman rolled over the
+side table on which he had set the books to sell as the crowd passed
+out--
+
+After the deafening cries, cat-calls and uproars, Emma grew serious.
+
+"I don't know who you are," she cried to Professor Wilton, "but I'll
+take chances in telling you that you're a liar!"
+
+Again Wilton was on his feet in angry protest.
+
+"Shame on you, woman! have you no shame!" he shouted.
+
+This sally brought the house down utterly. The boys hooted and
+cat-called and stamped again....
+
+Emma Silverman laughed till the tears streamed down her face....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the four days she remained in Laurel her lectures were crowded.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Walking up the hill one day, I overtook Professor Wilton, under whom I
+had studied botany, and whom I liked, knowing he was sincere and had
+spoken the incredible though absolute truth.
+
+"That woman, that anarchist friend of yours, Gregory, is a coarse
+woman!"
+
+I rose to Emma's defence ... but he kept repeating ... "no, no ... she
+is nothing but a coarse, depraved woman."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At my instigation, the Sig-Kaps gave an afternoon tea for her. And I was
+proud to act as her introducer. The boys liked her. She was like a good
+gale of wind to the minds and souls of us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I saw Emma and Jack off at the train. I carried two of her grips for
+her.
+
+"Take Johnnie with you!" jovially shouted some of the boys--a motor car
+full of them--Phi Alphs--as we stepped to the station platform....
+
+She answered them with a jolly laugh, a wave of the hand....
+
+"No, I'll leave him here ... you need a few like him with you!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I have something on my conscience," remarked Miss Silverman to me,
+"Johnnie, do you really think that old professor was speaking the
+truth?"
+
+"I'm sure of it, Miss Silverman."
+
+"Why, then, I'm heartily sorry ... and it was rough of me ... and will
+you tell the professor for me that I sincerely apologise for having hurt
+his feelings ... tell him I have so many jackasses attending my lectures
+all over the country, who rise and say foolish and insincere things,
+just to stand in well with the communities they live in--that sometimes
+it angers me, their hypocrisy--and then I blaze forth pretty strong and
+lay them flat!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Professor Wilton was a Phi Alph. From that time he was spoken of as "the
+only Phi Alph Virgin."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The periods when I had rested secure in the knowledge of where my next
+meal was coming from, had been few. Life had pressed me close to its
+ragged edge ever since I could remember.
+
+Now I was accorded a temporary relief. Penton Baxter wrote me that he
+had procured me a patron ... Henry Belton, the millionaire Single-Taxer,
+had consented to endow me at fifteen dollars a week, for six months. I
+had informed Baxter, in one of my many letters to him--for we had
+developed an intimate correspondence--that I had a unique fairy drama in
+mind, but could not write it because of the harassment of my struggle
+for bread and life.... I had laid aside for the present my projected
+"Judas."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Singing all the time, I packed my books in a large box which the corner
+grocer gave me, and, giving up my noisy room over the tinshop, I was off
+to the Y.M.C.A., where I engaged a room, telling the secretary, who knew
+me well, of my good luck, and enjoining him not to tell anyone else ...
+which I promptly did myself....
+
+I selected one of the best rooms, a corner one, with three windows
+through which floods of light streamed. It was well-furnished. The bed
+was the finest I had ever had to sleep in.
+
+Immediately I went to Locker's, the smart students' clothier, and put
+on a ready-made suit of clothes, of blue serge. And I charged new shirts
+and little white collars ... and several flowing ties. And a fine, new
+pair of shoes.
+
+"You sure look nifty," commented Locker, who himself waited on me.
+
+Then I went to a bookstore and plunged recklessly, purchasing Gosse and
+Garnett's _Illustrated History of English Literature_, in four volumes,
+an expensive set.
+
+I charged everything on the strength of my endowment, and, of course, in
+order to gain the credit I sought, I showed Baxter's letter, and pledged
+each storekeeper not to spread the story....
+
+Before nightfall practically the whole student body knew of my good
+luck. And Jack Travers had found me, lying back, luxuriously clad in my
+newly acquired, big blue bathrobe, in my morris chair....
+
+He looked me over with keen amusement.
+
+Somehow, for several years, my one dream of luxury and affluence had
+been to own a flowered bathrobe to lounge in, and to wear on the
+athletic field. I had hitherto had to be content with a shabby overcoat.
+
+On my new sectional bookcase stood a statue of the Flying Mercury, that
+my eye might continually drink in my ideal of physical perfection.
+Opposite that, stood my plaster cast of Apollo Belvedere, as indicative
+of the god of song that reigned over my thoughts and life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Jack, I want you to come and have supper with me!"
+
+"Johnnie, you are just like a big baby ... all right, I'll dine with
+you, after I've shot in the story about your endowment to the _Star_."
+
+"Hurry up, then,--it's after five now. I've never had enough money
+before, to treat you ... it's you that have always treated me."
+
+"Where'll we dine?"
+
+"At the swellest place in town, the Bellman House ... Walsh will charge
+me." Walsh Summers was the proprietor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Big, fat Walsh welcomed me and Travers.
+
+"No, Johnnie, I won't charge you. Instead, you and Jack are dining as
+guests of the house."
+
+And he would have it no other way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ally Merton was right about appearances. To have your shirts laundered
+regularly makes a man a different being. People that only noticed me
+before with a sort of surreptitious mockery now began to treat me with
+surprised respect. Professors invited me even more--the more
+conservative of them--to dine at their homes.
+
+And it was delightful to have living quarters where there was both hot
+and cold running water. I took a cold bath, every morning, after my
+exercise, and a hot bath, every night, before going to bed.
+
+The place was well-heated, too. I no longer had to sit up in bed, the
+covers drawn to my chin to keep from freezing, while I read, studied,
+wrote. Nor did I need sit on my hands, in alternation, to keep one warm
+while I rhymed with the other, during those curious spells of
+inspiration, those times of ecstasy--occurring mostly in the night--when
+I would write and write so rapidly that morning would find me often not
+able to decipher the greater part of what I had written ... five or ten
+poems in a night ... scrawled madly almost like automatic writing....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+William Jennings Bryan came to talk to us at our school auditorium. His
+lecture, _The Prince of Peace_, soon degenerated into an old-fashioned
+attack on science and the evolutionary theory.
+
+The professors sat bored and mute on the platform beside him, while he
+evacuated the forty-year-old wheeze of "your great-great-great-grandfather
+might have been a monkey, but, thank God, mine was not!" he won the
+usual great response of handclapping and laughter with this....
+
+And then he held out a glass of water, to prove that miracles might
+happen, because God, being omnipotent, could, at will, suspend natural
+laws.
+
+"Look at this glass of water. I hold it out at arm's length, so. If I
+did not hold it, it would drop to the floor and shatter into pieces.
+Thus I, by a human act, suspend the law of gravitation ... so God!--"
+There was huzzaing and applause. Several professors uneasily shifted the
+crossing of their knees ... one or two stared diplomatically at the
+ceiling.
+
+I grew angry and sent forth several sharp hisses before I knew what I
+was doing ... the effect was an electric stillness for the moment. Then
+a roar of indignant applause drowned my protest. And I stopped and
+remained quiet, with much craning of necks about me, to look at me.
+
+As the crowd poured out, I ran out into the road, from group to group,
+and, wherever I found a professor walking along, I vociferated my
+protest at our allowing such a back-water performance at the State's
+supposed centre of intelligence.
+
+"But, Gregory, it makes no difference ... the argument is settled, let
+platform orators like Bryan tilt at windmills all they may."
+
+"The hell it doesn't make a difference! if you professors are worth your
+salt, you won't let a Chautauqua man get by with such bunco."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The writing of my fairy drama progressed amain.
+
+I mailed a copy of it to Penton Baxter, who said that it had genuine
+merit. Was not great, but showed great promise.
+
+Henry Belton, from London, wrote me that it was beautiful and fine, but
+too eccentric for production in even the eccentric theatre.
+
+And Belton kept deluging me with Single Tax pamphlets. And I wrote him
+hot letters in reply, villifying the Single Tax theory and upholding
+revolutionary Socialism. And he grew angry with me, and informed me that
+he had meditated keeping me in his patronage longer, but I was so
+obdurate that he would end my remittance with the six months ... as, in
+fact, was all that was originally promised me.
+
+I replied that it made no difference ... that I would be always grateful
+to him. His letters stopped. The money stopped. But I went on living at
+the Y.M.C.A., charging up rent ... said that I was nearing the end of my
+rope again, glad because I had shown to myself that I was capable of
+sustained creative effort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Many well-known men came to Laurel for lectures to the students.
+
+Lyman Abbott appeared.
+
+"The ancient bell-wether of the Standard Oil," Travers irreverently
+dubbed him.
+
+The College Y.M.C.A. accorded him a reception. I was one of those
+invited to meet him.
+
+After he had delivered a brief talk on God and The Soul, questions were
+invited--meant only to be politely put, that the speaker might shine.
+But my question was not put for the sake of social amenity ... though
+I'll admit, just a little for the sake of showing off.
+
+"Dr. Abbott," I asked, "it is quite possible that there are other worlds
+in the sky--that, also, the rest of the planets either are or will be,
+homes for souls, for living beings equal to or higher than our present
+human grade of development?"
+
+"Yes, yes, that is quite probable."
+
+"Well, then, God, to prove a just God, would have to send his Son to be
+crucified a million times--once for each world ... for, if He did not,
+then the souls on these worlds would either be damned without a chance
+for salvation, or, if God made an exception in their case, that would be
+an unfair deal--for us to suffer from a fault other worlds are free of."
+
+Dr. Abbott hemmed and hawed.
+
+"It is not yet proven that there are other inhabited worlds. I an only
+dealing with questions of practical theology," he answered, with some
+heat and an attempt to be sarcastic.
+
+The members of the Y.M.C.A. were indignant at me for putting a maladroit
+question.
+
+"It doesn't do to invite Gregory anywhere. You can't tell what stuff he
+might pull."
+
+"A legitimate question--" egged on Travers at my side, "bump the old boy
+again, Johnnie."
+
+But I was not given another chance. After a short but painful silence
+the Secretary rose and put a suave and stereotyped query ... and others
+filled the breach in rapid succession. And the prestige of the great
+theologian was salvaged.
+
+Commencement day approached. There came to deliver the address for the
+day, George Harvey, then editor of _Harper's Weekly_. Travers was
+assigned to interview Harvey....
+
+"The fellow's a pompous big stiff," complained Jack, "the kind that
+makes a fetish of morning and evening dress ... wears kid gloves ... and
+a top hat ... he has both valet and secretary with him."
+
+"That's no disgrace. Don't you think, Jack, that we Middle-Westerners
+only make fun of such people and their habits for the reason that we're
+either unable to do the same, or do not dare do it because of our
+jealousy of each other--our so-called hick democratic spirit?"
+
+"There's a lot of truth in that. But fundamentally I would say that the
+newspaper editors who are here this week, holding a conference and
+tendering Harvey a banquet, _mean_ their plainness of dress and life ...
+and do not hanker after the clubman's way of life as Harvey represents
+it to their eyes ... you just watch for what Ed. Lowe and Billy Dorgan
+do to our Eastern chap at the banquet ... they'll kid him till he's
+sick."
+
+That banquet will live in the memory of Kansas newspapermen.
+
+Harvey, when he entered the hall where the journalists were already
+seated, first snapped his top hat sidewise to his attending valet. Then
+he sat down grandly.
+
+Billy Dorgan and Ed. Lowe "rode Harvey around," as Jack phrased it. The
+distinguished editor, with his solemnity, invited thrusts. Besides, most
+of those present were what was denominated as "progressive" ... Jarvis
+Alexander Mackworth was there ... and Alden ... and Tobbs, afterward
+governor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day Travers printed a supposititious interview with Harvey's
+English valet on how it felt to be a valet of a great man. Both the
+valet and Harvey waxed furious, it was said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Arthur Brisbane visited us. He ran down from Kansas City over night.
+This man was Jack Travers' God ... and we of the Press or Scoop Club--a
+student newspaper club of which I had recently been made a member--also
+looked up to him as a sort of deity.
+
+Travers informed me reverentially that Brisbane was so busy he always
+carried his stenographer with him, even when he rode to the Hill in an
+auto ... dictating an editorial as he drove along.
+
+"A great man ... a very great man."
+
+I won merit with Travers by reciting an incident of my factory life.
+Every afternoon the men in my father's department would bring in
+Brisbane's latest editorial to me ... and listen to me as I read it
+aloud. To have the common man buy a newspaper for its editorials--that
+was a triumph.
+
+And Brisbane's editorials frequently touched on matters that the mob are
+supposed not to be interested in ... stories of the lives of poets,
+philosophers, statesmen....
+
+One of the men who could barely read ... who ran his fingers along the
+lines as he read, asked me--
+
+"Who was this guy SO-krats?"
+
+It was an editorial on Socrates and his life and death that brought
+forth the enquiry ... after I had imparted to him what information I
+possessed:
+
+"Where can I find more about him, and about that pal of his, Plato?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was hanging on to my comfortable room at the Y.M.C.A. by bluff. I had
+not let on to the secretary that my Belton subsidy had stopped. Instead,
+I affected to be concerned about its delay. But I did this, not to be
+dishonest, but to gain time ... I was attempting to write tramp stories,
+after the manner of London, and expected to have one of them accepted
+soon, though none ever were....
+
+Decker, the student-proprietor of the restaurant where I ate every day,
+was more astute.
+
+"Now look here, Gregory, you just can't run your bill up any higher."
+
+I already owed him fifteen dollars.
+
+I compounded with him by handing him over my _Illustrated History of
+English Literature_. It was like tearing flesh from my side to part with
+these volumes.
+
+And now I had no more credit at the Y.M.C.A.
+
+And I went back to Frank Randall, to apply again for my old room over
+his shop. He was using it now to store old stoves in. But he moved them
+out.
+
+With a sense of despair, compensated by a feeling of sacrifice for my
+poetry, I found myself once more back over the tinshop, the hammers
+sounding and crashing below.
+
+Old Blore, the cancer doctor, lived in a room in the front. All day long
+he sat drinking rum and sugar ... and shipping out his cancer cure, a
+white mixture like powdered sugar. Whether it did any good or not, he
+believed in it himself....
+
+I have not written about him before ... there are so many odd characters
+that I came in contact with that I have not written about ... for this
+book is about myself....
+
+But old Blore ... he came waddling back to me, drunk, as usual, on his
+rum and sugar.
+
+"Welcome back, Johnnie ... come on, you and Frank, into my room ...
+we've got to celebrate your return."
+
+Frank and I set down the stove we were moving, dusted our hands off,
+and followed.
+
+"But I won't drink any of your rum, Ed! It's got too much of a kick."
+
+"--nonsense ... good Jamaica rum never hurt nobody."
+
+We drank several rounds of rum and water, with sugar. And we jocosely
+joined together in singing the cancer doctor's favourite hymn--"We're
+drifting down the stream of time, we haven't got long to stay."
+
+Then Frank and Ed. retailed to me the practical jokes they had played on
+each other since I had been gone from among them ... on big Sam, the
+chocolate-coloured shoemaker who had his shop next door ... and an
+obscene one on a half-wit named Elmer, who was one of Frank's helpers
+... that, though it was pretty raw, made me choke and gasp with
+merriment ... and they told me how, one night, they had wired the iron
+roof in the back, so that about ten cats that were mewling and
+quarrelling there, received a severe electric shock ... how funny and
+surprised they'd acted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most serviceably a check from the _National Magazine_ came, for
+twenty-five dollars ... I had sold them a prophetic poem on airships.
+The check ameliorated my condition. I saw my way clear to a few weeks
+more of regular eating.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then, on top of that, one day a telegram came....
+
+"Am on my way West. Will stop off visit you at Laurel--Penton."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Travers rushed the story to the Kansas City _Star_.
+
+           "KANSAS POET HONOURED
+          ------------------------
+     AUTHOR OF 'SLAUGHTER HOUSE' TO VISIT HIM"
+
+
+I waited in a fever of eagerness and impatience for the arrival of this
+man whom I idealised and looked on as a great man ... the man who had
+written the _Les Miserables_ of the American workingman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Harry Varden, editor of the _Cry for Right_, had been to Laurel a week
+previously, to address a socialist local, and I had looked him up, at
+the house of the "comrade" where he was passing the night. The comrade
+sent me up to Varden's room, where I found the latter just getting out
+of bed. I shall always think of him in his proletarian grey woollen
+underdrawers and undershirt. In which he had evidently slept. He had the
+bed-habits of the masses. And the room was stale with bad air; like the
+masses, he, too, slept with windows shut.
+
+Varden's monthly magazine _The World to Be_, had occasionally printed a
+poem of mine ... and I was paid five dollars for each poem.
+
+Varden was a frail, jolly little chap, absolutely fearless and alert and
+possessed of a keen sense of humour which he could turn, on occasion,
+even against himself.
+
+I breakfasted with him. He had good table manners, but, from time to
+time, he forgot himself and smacked his lips keenly. And the egg dripped
+on his chin as he flashed a humorous incident that had happened to him
+on one of his lecture trips....
+
+After breakfast he and I took a long walk together ... we began speaking
+of Penton Baxter ... I spoke in high praise of the great novelist ...
+reverently and with awe.
+
+"Yes, yes," Varden assented, "Penton is all you say, but he has no sense
+of humour ... and he takes himself and his work as seriously as if the
+destiny of the human race depended on it ... which is getting in a bad
+way, for a reformer, you know--gives a chap's enemies and antagonists so
+many good openings....
+
+"When Penton was writing _The Slaughter House_ and we were running it
+serially, his protagonist, Jarl--it seemed he didn't know how to dispose
+of him ... and the book was running on and on interminably.... I wired
+him 'for God's sake kill Jarl.' ...
+
+"Baxter took my telegram much to heart ... was deeply aggrieved I
+afterward learned ... the dear boy ... he did 'kill Jarl' finally ...
+and absent-mindedly brought him to life again, later on in his book."
+
+And Harry Varden laughed excitedly like a boy, and he leaned sideways
+and smote his half-bent, sharp, skinny knee with his left hand. I could
+perceive that that was a grotesque platform gesture of his, when he
+drove a comic point home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was waiting at the station ... where I had shaken hands with Bob
+Fitzsimmons, and had seen Emma Silverman off....
+
+Penton Baxter was due on the eleven o'clock train from Kansas City.
+
+I surely must be on the road to becoming somebody, with all these famous
+people taking such an interest in me. I remembered Emerson's dictum
+about waiting in one's own doorway long enough, and all the world would
+come by.
+
+Was I to be disappointed? It did not seem credible that the great man
+would make a special stop-off on his way to the coast, just to pay me a
+visit.
+
+One after another the passengers stepped down and walked and rode away.
+Then a little, boyish-looking man ... smooth-faced, bright-complexioned,
+jumped down, wavered toward me, dropping his baggage ... extended his
+hand ... both hands ... smiling with his eyes, that possessed long
+lashes like a girl's.
+
+"Are you Johnnie Gregory?"
+
+"Penton Baxter?" I asked reverently. He smiled in response and drew my
+arm through his.
+
+"This is great, this is certainly great," he remarked, in a high voice,
+"and I'm more than glad that I stopped off to see you."
+
+He expanded in the sun of my youthful hero-worship.
+
+"Where's the best hotel in town?"
+
+"The Bellman House ... but I've arranged with the Sig-Kappas to put you
+up."
+
+"Are you a fraternity man?"
+
+"No--a barb."
+
+"I'd rather go to the hotel you named ... but thank the boys for me."
+
+I contended with Penton Baxter for the privilege of carrying his two
+grips. They were so heavy that they dragged my shoulders down, but, with
+an effort, I threw my chest out, and walked, straight and proud, beside
+him.
+
+As we walked he questioned and questioned. He had the history of Laurel
+University, the story of my life, out of me, almost, by the time we had
+covered the ten blocks to the hotel.
+
+"Penton Baxter!" I whispered in a low voice to the proprietor, who, as
+he stood behind the desk, dipped the pen with a flourish, and shoved the
+open register toward his distinguished guest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Travers, of course, was the first to see the great novelist. He wired an
+interview to the _Star_, and wrote a story for the Laurel _Globe_ and
+the _Laurelian_.
+
+Baxter said he would stay over for two days ... that he didn't want to
+do much beside seeing me ... that he would place himself entirely in my
+hands. I was beside myself with happy pride.
+
+"This is a glorious country. You must take me for a long walk this
+afternoon. I want to tramp away out to that purple bluff toward the
+South East."
+
+"We call it Azure Mound."
+
+"Has it any historical interest?"
+
+"--don't know! It might have. Richard Realf, the poet, camped out about
+here, on the heights with his men, during the Quantrell Raid, And there
+are one or two old settlers in Laurel who were members of John Brown's
+company."
+
+Baxter was a good walker. He made me think of Shelley as he traipsed
+along, indefatigably talking away, his voice high-pitched and shrill ...
+unburdening his mind of all his store of ideas....
+
+His head was much too large for his body ... a strong head ... strong
+Roman nose ... decisive chin, but with too deep a cleft in it. His mouth
+was loose and cruel--like mine. His face was as smooth as a boy's or
+woman's ... on each cheek a patch here and there of hair, like the hair
+on an old maid's face.
+
+More than a year later his wife confided to me that "Pennie," as she
+dubbed him affectionately, could not grow a beard ... and she laughed at
+his solemnly shaving once a week, as a matter of ritual, anyhow....
+
+Each of us went with bent knees as we walked, as if wading against a
+rising tide of invisible opposition.
+
+I discoursed of a new religion--a non-ascetic one based on the
+individual's spiritual duty to enjoy life--that I meditated inaugurating
+as soon as I left college. He advised me to wait till I was at least
+Christ's age when he began his public ministry, thirty-five or six. His
+face lit with frolic....
+
+Then, in rapid transition, he soberly discoursed on the religion he
+himself had in mind ... instinctively I knew it would not do to make
+sport of his dreams, as he had of mine.
+
+Harry Varden was right. Where he himself was involved in the slightest,
+Baxter absolutely had no sense of humour.
+
+Baxter told me of the great men he had met on intimate terms, in the
+wider world of life and letters I had not yet attained to ... of
+Roosevelt, who invited him to dinner at the White House ... and of how,
+at that dinner attended by many prominent men ... by several Senators
+... Roosevelt had unlimbered his guns of attack on many men in public
+office.... "Senator So-and-so was the biggest crook in American public
+life.... Senator Thing-gumbob was the most sinister force American
+politics had ever seen ... belonged to the Steel Trust from his shoes to
+his hat...."
+
+"Suppose, Mr. President," Baxter had put to him, at the same time
+expressing his amazement at the president's open manner of speech before
+men he had never even met before ... men perhaps of antagonistic shades
+of opinion, "suppose I should go out from here and give to the
+newspapers the things you have just said! How would you protect, defend
+yourself?"
+
+"Young man, if you did--_as you won't_--" smashed Roosevelt, with his
+characteristic of clenched right fist brought down in the open palm of
+the left hand--"if you did--I'd simply brand you as a liar ... and shame
+you before the world."
+
+"And so it was that Roosevelt expressed himself freely ... and at the
+same time protected himself."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We stood on the top of Azure Mound. Baxter was puffing heavily, for it
+had been a hard climb.
+
+At our feet extended a panorama of what seemed like a whole State.
+
+The wide-spread fields of wheat, of corn, exalted us.
+
+"God, what a glorious country!... no wonder Walt loved America ... in
+spite of the abuses capital has perpetrated in it."
+
+"Walt Mason?" I enquired, mischievously....
+
+"No," he responded, seriously, "Walt Whitman."
+
+"But our poet laureate to-day is Walt Mason ... and our State
+philosopher, the sage of Potato Hill, Ed Howe, is an honest-to-God
+stand-patter ... that's Kansas to-day for you, in spite of her wide,
+scenic vistas....
+
+"Nevertheless," I went on, "Kansas does develop marvellous people ... we
+have Carrie Nation--"
+
+"And Johnnie Gregory!" put in Baxter.
+
+"I don't want just to belong to Kansas."
+
+It was I who was humourless now, "I'm sick of its corn-fed bourgeois
+ideals ... I want to belong to the world--as--you do!"
+
+We trudged back to town.
+
+"What a site for a university!... the men who put those buildings up
+there on the Hill must have dreamed greatly ... look at the sun!... the
+buildings are transfigured into a fairy city!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My office as social manager for Baxter during his stay I conducted
+badly. I was so excited and flattered by the visit of one whom I
+considered one of the first geniuses of the world, that I hardly knew
+what I was doing. I listened to all he said as if an oracle spoke.
+
+I asked him if he would like to meet some of the professors on the
+Hill.... I hurriedly gathered together a small group of them and Baxter
+gave a talk to them in one of the unoccupied recitation rooms. Nor did
+he fail in telling them that in me Kansas had a great poet in the making
+... the professors who were not invited to my hasty reception considered
+themselves slighted.
+
+When I saw Baxter off at the station we were calling each other by our
+first names.
+
+"Good-bye, Johnnie!"
+
+"Good-bye, Penton!"
+
+"Don't fail to visit me at Warriors' River, this fall, if you can do so
+conveniently."
+
+I assured him that I would not fail.
+
+For I had spoken with him of my determination to ship on the Great Lakes
+for a few months, to see if I couldn't garner some poetic material for
+my poems of modern life that I was writing for the _National Magazine_.
+
+"My wife and I will be at Warriors' River till late in the fall. We're
+staying at Stephen Barton's Health Home. Barton is a good friend of
+mine.... I am helping him out, since he left New Jersey, where he was
+forced, by a series of petty prosecutions, to give up Perfection
+City.... My wife will be glad to see you ... she knows your poetry
+already."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The weather was warm again. My next to my last college year was drawing
+to a close. Not that I was a graduate ... my course was a special one,
+and I had not followed even that closely.
+
+"If you'll graduate," Jarvis Alexander Mackworth urged me, joking in the
+Kansas fashion, "I will present you with a great bouquet of beauty
+roses.... I'd like to see you vindicate Langworth's and my judgment of
+you. For you have many, many professors and people on the Hill who don't
+believe in you, and, frankly,--say it was a mistake ever to have let you
+in."
+
+Mackworth was one of the regents of the school.
+
+"In fact, once one of the professors rose, at a meeting, ably reinforced
+by several others, to complain that you were actually crazy, and a
+detriment to the school."
+
+"And what did you say, Mr. Mackworth, didn't you defend me?"
+
+"Yes, God pity me, I did," he jested. "I remembered how I was asked to
+quit here, too. In the days when General Fred Furniss was also looked on
+as an unruly, rather undesirable member of the student body ... we were
+classmates....
+
+"I replied that no doubt you were crazy, you starry young tramp, you!...
+but that I wished some of the professors shared a little of your virus
+... it might make them more alive and interesting."
+
+Again I was absolutely starvation-ridden. Several tramp-poems that I
+sold to _Everybody's_ kept me literally in bread and cheese for a month.
+I was still madly in love with Vanna at long distance.
+
+There came an opportunity for me to make a few dollars and to show off
+before her, at the same time.
+
+The Copperwell Street Show came to town. They lined the main street with
+booths, and outside of town, in a large pasture, circus tents were
+pitched, in which the usual one-ringed circus was to be shown ... and
+they had six lions in a cage ... advertised as Nubian lions, the largest
+and fiercest of their kind ... their trainer never going in among them
+except at peril of his life. A gold medal was offered to anyone who
+would go in among the lions alone, and make a speech to the audience
+from the inside of the cage.
+
+I negotiated with the management, but asked for the medal's equivalent
+in money. I was offered twenty-five dollars if I would go in, and repeat
+my speech, each one of the three nights the show would be held.
+
+I was to go in for the first time that very night ... to clinch my
+lagging resolution, the story was printed in the local papers....
+
+        "JOHN GREGORY TIRED OF LIFE
+          ------------------------
+       KANSAS POET TO TALK AMONG LIONS,"
+
+Jack Travers was at his facetious best.
+
+Considering myself heroic, and thinking with inner joy how Vanna Andrews
+would be there, I spent the day in committing to memory the salient
+points on the nature and habits of lions, from the Encyclopedia
+Britannica....
+
+People looked at me both with amusement and admiring amazement as they
+saw me about, late that afternoon....
+
+"Now tell me the honest truth about the lions," I asked of the trainer.
+
+"They're a pretty bad lot."
+
+"Come on. I've made up my mind to go in, and I'm not afraid."
+
+"--though lions are not as bad as leopards and tigers ... there's no
+telling when they might jump you ... there's only one chance in a
+thousand that they will ... but you may bring one up from being a cub
+... and, one morning, because of something you can't read in its animal
+mind--it not liking its breakfast or something--it may jump you, give
+one crunch, and snuff you out like a candle ... it's that chance that
+you take that makes it seem brave."
+
+"Thanks, I'll take the chance."
+
+"Are you sure you'll have enough command of yourself to make a speech?"
+
+"--Certain ... I've committed to memory almost all the Encyclopedia
+Britannica article on lions ... I'm going to give them that...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Gregory! Gregory!" the crowd was calling, half in derisive jocularity,
+half in uneasy admiration....
+
+The trainer shunted me into the cage, after seating his lions in a
+half-moon on their tubs.
+
+"Quick! Step in! We'll be on the outside ready with hot irons in case
+anything goes wrong!"
+
+I didn't know whether the trainer was jesting or serious.
+
+"Don't think of them at all. They'll sit still ... you can turn your
+back to them and face the audience. It will be safe. Only don't make any
+unexpected, quick motions."
+
+I was in among them. The door clanged behind me.
+
+Nobody jeered now. All was filled with an expectant hush.
+
+Then, as if strange and a-far from myself, I stepped easily into the
+very centre of the half moon of squatting beasts, and made my speech ...
+at the end, there was hardly any applause till I was safely out of the
+cage ... Then there was a tumult. Shouts, cat-calls, whoops, and a great
+noise of hearty hand-clapping.
+
+I stood beside the ropes as the people of Laurel surged by, many of them
+shaking me by the hand ... Vanna came by, with the big football player
+with her, bulking behind her slight loveliness ... lightly she put a
+tiny, gloved hand in mine ... a glove neatly mended at the fingers ...
+congratulating me, half with feeling, half with amusement....
+
+"That was reckless and brave, Mr. Gregory."
+
+I was speechless with frightened delight over her words, and the
+pressure of her hand.
+
+I turned to the trainer before I went to my room over the tin-shop.
+
+"You say the leopards are most dangerous?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"For twenty-five dollars a night I will go in with them, alone, and run
+them around with a whip." As I proposed this, in the background of my
+consciousness was the conviction that by so doing I could win Vanna's
+love....
+
+"No ... the leopards are too uncertain."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The papers were full of my deed. And I was not made fun of, but
+commended. And it was announced (for advertising purposes only, of
+course) that the management of the show had approached me with an offer
+to travel as a trainer of wild animals.
+
+The second night I was rather blase. I shook my finger playfully in the
+face of one of the seated lions ... to have a sensation of a thousand
+prickles running sharp through each pore, when the lion responded with
+an open, crimson-mouthed, yellow-fanged snarl; I smelt the carrion
+fetor of his breath. I stepped back rather quickly. All the animals grew
+restless and furtive. Little greenish-amber gleams lit and flickered in
+their eyes.
+
+I pulled myself together. Deliberately I turned my back on them.
+
+"--So you see plainly, ladies and gentlemen, that a lion is, after all,
+a much misrepresented, gentle beast."
+
+The trainer was piqued when I walked out, that night.
+
+"I don't want you to tell the people that my lions are harmless and
+gentle ... if you do that to-morrow night, I'll see to it that you get
+the medal, and not the money."
+
+The afternoon of the following day, while the girl who trained the
+leopards was in the cage of the latter, they jumped on her, and tore her
+back with their claws. Dripping with blood, she whipped them back, inch
+by inch, into their living-cage, that led by a small door into the big
+one used for exhibitions. A shiver ran through me at the news of the
+girl's mishap. I was glad they had not taken me up as regards the
+leopards. And my being among the lions now also seemed less of a joke.
+At least, that last night, I felt it not to be, I delivered a
+constrained discourse and only breathed freely when outside their cage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And in a few weeks my unique and single glory was snatched from me. The
+show had moved to Salina, and a barber in that town had shaved their
+keeper in the cage, while the lions sat around.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before leaving for my projected summer as worker on the boats of the
+Great Lakes, I snatched at a passing adventure: the Kansas City _Post_
+had me walk from Laurel to Kansas City with the famous walker, Weston.
+
+The man was going across the continent a-foot. When he saw I was
+sticking the fifty miles or so with him, he became friendly and talked
+with me of the athletes of former days ... the great runners, walkers,
+fighters, oarsmen ... and he knew intimately also many well known
+journalists and literary men of whom he discoursed.
+
+Time and again, like a bicycle pedalled too slow, he stepped awry on so
+small an obstacle as a cinder, and toppled over on his face like an
+automaton running down.
+
+"No, no! Don't touch me. I must get up myself ... that's not in the
+game ..." his rising was a hard, slow effort ... he regained his feet
+with the aid of his metal-tipped cane....
+
+"Keep back! Keep back!" to the people, gangs of curious boys mostly, who
+followed close on his heels. And he poked backwards with the sharp
+metallic point of the stick....
+
+"People follow close on me, stupid, like donkeys. If I didn't keep that
+point swinging back, when I slacked my pace or stopped they would walk
+right up on me...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Percival Hammond, managing editor of the New York _Independent_. the
+first magazine to print my poems, came to town ... to lecture on his
+favourite topic of international peace.
+
+It occurred to me strongly that I ought to afford him some witness of my
+gratitude for what his magazine had done for me.
+
+Though broke, I borrowed ten dollars from the owner of a lunch counter
+where I ate.
+
+"I want to give a dinner to Dr. Hammond ... his magazine has helped me
+as a poet ... it is obvious that I can't give the dinner at your lunch
+counter."
+
+Ten dollars was all the lunchcounter man would lend me.
+
+But Walsh Summers of the Bellman House said I could give a luncheon in
+honour of Hammond at fifty cents a plate ... he would allot me two
+tables ... and a separate room ... and I could invite nineteen
+professors ... and he would throw in two extras for Jack Travers and
+myself.
+
+I gave the lunch, inviting the professors I liked best.
+
+After dessert and a few speeches I told them how I had borrowed the
+money. Hammond privately tried to pay me back out of his own pocket, but
+I wouldn't let him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I asked Hammond if he knew Penton Baxter.
+
+"Yes; we printed his first article, you know ... just as we gave you
+your start....
+
+"Baxter is the most remarkable combination of genius and jackass I have
+ever run into. But don't ever tell him that I said that. He has no sense
+of humour ... everything is of equal import to him ... his toothache is
+as tragic as all the abuses of the capitalist system."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the way to the Great Lakes there are several people I must stop and
+see, and show myself to.
+
+I stop at Topeka and visit Dad Rother ... a columnist on a newspaper
+there, of more than local fame ... an obviously honest-to-God bachelor
+... he is afflicted with dandruff and his hair is almost gone. He shows
+me photographs of Mackworth and of Uncle Bill Struthers, each
+autographed with accompanying homely sentiment.
+
+I catch myself pretending an interest in Rother's column, but really
+actuated by a desire to plant myself in his mind, and to have a notice
+in his paper about me ... anything that Dad Rother has in his column is
+copied in all the Kansas papers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I drop in at a Leavenworth newspaper office, ostensibly to borrow the
+use of a typewriter.
+
+But the stick or so put in the paper about my passing through
+Leavenworth pleases me.
+
+General Fred Furniss is stationed at Fort Leavenworth. I must visit him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+General Furniss walked in rapidly as if executing a military manoevour,
+both hands held forth in welcome. He was "Napoleonic" in size, and, also
+like Napoleon, he carried too much belly in front of him. He wore a
+closely curling salt-and-pepper beard....
+
+He commented on my "military carriage"--asked me if I had ever gone to a
+military academy....
+
+I yielded to an instinct for deprecative horse-play, one of my worst
+faults, begot of an inferiority-complex.
+
+"No, I've never gone to a military academy, but I've had a hole in the
+seat of my pants so generally, and I have had to walk erect so much to
+keep my coat tail well down to hide it, that that is where I acquired my
+military carriage."
+
+The general's eyes twinkled.
+
+"Take a chair. I have heard of you, Mr. Gregory ... I have watched your
+work, too. Roosevelt knows about it ... has spoken of it to me ... has
+remarked: 'there's a young fellow--your poet-chap in Kansas--that will
+be worth watching ... why is it, Fred, that every man of any talent
+whatever in Kansas, instantly gets the eye of the nation?... we're
+always expecting something big from William Allen White's State'."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A week or so of work for a Polish-Catholic farmer ... who locked me out
+of his house, when he and his family went to mass the one Sunday I was
+with him. He asked me if I wanted a book to read. As the only book he
+possessed was Thomas a Kempis' _Imitation of Christ_, I took it, and
+learned Christian humility, reading it, in the orchard. Surely this
+farmer was a practical Christian. He believed in his fellow man and at
+the same time gave him no opportunity to abuse his faith in him....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was pleasant, this working for from a few days to a week, then
+sauntering on ... putting up at cheap little country hotels overnight. I
+liked it better than tramping....
+
+I pitched hay, I loaded lumber, I dug, I planted, I reaped.
+
+In lower Minnesota a Swedish emigrant farmer hired me to help him with
+his hay crop. He and I and his lanky son, Julius ... just coming out of
+adolescence ... we worked away from sun-up till moon-rise....
+
+The first day I congratulated myself for working for that particular
+farmer. The meat at table was abundant and fresh.
+
+But before my two weeks were up I had grown weary of the diet. They had
+killed a cow ... and cow-meat was what I found set before me morning,
+noon, and night,--every day. I complained about it to Julius ... "when
+we kill a cow ain't we got to eat it?" he replied.
+
+Every afternoon we participated in a pleasant Swedish custom. The two
+women of the household, the mother and grandmother, with blue cloth
+rolled about their head for headgear, brought us coffee and cake
+a-field....
+
+"Aeftermittagscaffee," they called it.
+
+It refreshed us; we worked on after that till late supper by lamp,
+driving back to the house by moonlight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Duluth I found that a strike prevailed on the Lakes. I was held in
+doubt whether I ought to sail, for I would have to do so as
+strike-breaker, which was against my radical code ... but, then, I had
+come over-land all the way from Laurel, to voyage the Great Lakes for
+the poetry to be found there ... and I must put my muse above such
+things as strikes.
+
+I signed on, on a big ore boat, as porter....
+
+That means, as third cook; my task the washing and scouring of greasy
+pots, pans, and dishes ... and waiting on the firemen and deckhands at
+meals.
+
+The _James Eads Howe_ took on a cargo of rust-coloured iron ore at Twin
+Harbours ... the gigantic machinery grided and crashed all night,
+pouring the ore into the hold, to the dazzling flare of electric
+lights....
+
+Here for the first time I conceived myself to be caught in the great
+industrial turmoil. If I were to derive song from this, it would be song
+for giants, or rather, for machines that had grown to gigantic
+proportions from the insect world ... diminutive men made parts of their
+anatomy as they swung levers and operated cranes....
+
+We kicked outward on the long drop down Lake Superior, the largest of
+the five Great Lakes. It was like an inland ocean. The water of it is
+always so cold that, when a ship is wrecked there, good swimmers who
+might otherwise keep up till rescued, often perish of the cold....
+
+Day and night the horizon was smoky-blue with forest fires ... one
+afternoon our deck was covered with birds that had flown out over the
+water to escape the flames....
+
+And once we saw lifted in the sky three steamboats sailing upside down,
+a mirage ... and, once, a gleaming city in the clouds, that hung there
+spectrally for about five minutes, then imperceptibly faded out....
+
+"That's a reflection of some real city," explained the tall
+Canadian-Scotch cook ... "once I recognised Quebec hanging in the sky
+...--thought I even saw people walking and traffic moving."
+
+Half-way across to the Soo Canal we ran into my first lake-storm.
+
+"The sailor on the Great Lakes has a harder time than the ocean sailor.
+He can't make his ship run before a storm. He's got to look out for land
+on every side."
+
+Right over my bunk where I slept, ceaselessly turned and turned the
+propeller shaft. The noise and roar of the engines was ever in my ears,
+and the peculiar ocean-like noise of the stokehold ... and the metallic
+clang of coal as it shot from shovels....
+
+The night of the storm the crashing of the water and the whistling
+impact of wave-weighted winds kept me awake.
+
+I jumped into my clothes and went into the fire-room. Hardly able to
+keep their feet, the firemen toiled away, scattering shovels-full of
+coal evenly over the fires, wielding their slice bars ... greeting with
+oaths and comic curses the awkward coal passer who spilled with his
+laden wheelbarrow into the slightly lower pit where they stood.
+
+I quit the _James Eads Howe_ at Ashtabula, after several round trips in
+her, the length of the Lakes.
+
+I freighted it to Chicago, where I shipped, again as porter, on a
+package freighter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The captain of the package freighter _Overland_ should have been
+anything but a captain. He was a tall, flabby, dough-faced man, as timid
+as a child just out of the nursery.
+
+We had taken on, as one of our firemen, a Canuck, who, from the first,
+boasted that he was a "bad man"....
+
+He intimidated the cook right off. He punched in a glass partition to
+emphasise a filthy remark he had made to the head engineer. He went
+after me, to bully and domineer me, next.
+
+It looked as if we were in for a hard voyage to the Georgian Bay.
+
+The Canuck, at the very first meal, terrorised the crew that sat down
+with him. I looked him over carefully, and realised that something must
+be done.
+
+He flung a filthy and gratuitous expression my way. Silently I stepped
+back from the mess room, untied my apron, and meant to go in and try to
+face him down. But at that juncture, my courage failed me, and instead
+of inviting the rough-neck out on deck, as I had tried to force myself
+to do, I hurried to the captain's cabin.
+
+The captain said, "Come in!" to my knock. He was sitting, of all things,
+in dirty pajamas, at a desk ... though it was mid-day ... his flabby,
+grey-white belly exuded over his tight pajama waist-string ... the
+jacket of the pajamas hung open, with all but one button off.
+
+I complained to the captain of the bully--repeated how he had bellowed
+at me to tell the unmentionable skipper he would receive his bumps
+bloody well, too, if the latter did not stick to his own part of the
+ship.
+
+I saw fright in the captain's face....
+
+"It's up to the chief engineer."
+
+"Either that fellow goes off this ship or I do. You'll have to hire
+another third cook."
+
+The boat was sailing in an hour.
+
+I walked back for my few effects. But, on the way back, I took hold of
+myself and determined to stick by my guns. I made up my mind that I
+would not leave the boat, and that, at the first hostile move of the
+bully I would oppose him--besides, what had the fellow done, so far,
+besides chucking a bluff?
+
+My opportunity to live up to my resolve came at mess for supper. There
+was a smoking platter of cabbage set before the boys.
+
+"What the hell! Who wants to eat bloody cabbage."
+
+And snatching up a handful of the dripping, greasy vegetable, he was
+about to fling it into the face of one of the men opposite, when,
+without giving myself a chance to hesitate, I stepped up quickly and
+grabbed the "bad man's" wrist. The cabbage went high and spattered all
+over the opposite wall.
+
+The bully glared like an enraged bull at me.
+
+"I'll--"
+
+Quaking in my boots, I made my eyes glare level with his.
+
+"Listen to me, bo," I bluffed, "I ain't much on guff, and I don't want
+specially to fight ... but I'm waiter in this mess room and you don't
+pull anything like this here, unless you do it over my dead body."
+
+"That's just what I will do ... I'll--I'll--" and the chap, pale with
+what seemed insane rage, started to his feet.
+
+"Ah, sit down!" I commanded, marvelling at my nerve, and pushing him
+violently by the shoulders back on the bench ... then, deliberately, I
+turned my back, and walked away, expecting any moment to have him on me
+like a clawing wild cat.
+
+With seeming calm and nonchalance I made the kitchen. With a semblance
+of outward serenity I picked up a rag and returned to wipe off the wall.
+I was vastly relieved to find that the bluff had worked.
+
+The Canuck was finishing his meal in silence.
+
+From that moment till the end of the voyage he was as quiet and
+Unobtrusive as anyone could wish him to be....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have a curious habit of often waking up in the night from deep
+slumber, and breaking into laughter over some funny incident or other
+that has happened to me a long time ago ... I have chuckled over this
+incident many times ... if that bully only knew how terrorised he really
+had me!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is impossible to describe the Georgian Bay and the beauty of its
+thousands of islands ... as we steamed through them in the dawn, they
+loomed about us through sun-golden violet mists.... Here as small as the
+chine of some swimming animal, there large enough for a small forest of
+trees to grow upon them....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another storm ... on Lake Huron ... a fair-sized one.
+
+I was walking along the deck, just after dawn, the waves riding and
+running and shattering aboard. I carried the dinner bell, was ringing it
+for breakfast ... when the greatest wave I have ever seen on the Lakes
+came running, high-crested, toward the boat,--that seemed to know what
+was happening, for it rose to meet it, like a sentient being....
+
+The wave smashed ... hit the galley and washed over the top of it,
+catching me in a cataract as I hugged close. I was driven hard against
+the taut cable wire that made our only railing. For a moment I thought
+the water reaching up from over-side as the vessel lurched would clutch
+me and suck me down.
+
+A close and breathless call. A rending, splintering sound told me damage
+had been done. I looked toward the captain's cabin ... and laughed
+heartily, for all my discomfort and dangerous escape ... for the whole
+side of the cabin had been stove in,--and, terrified, his eyes sticking
+out, in his dirty underclothes the captain had been hurtled forth, his
+face still stupid from sleep though full of fear.
+
+I rushed up to him. His drawers sagged pitiably with wet.
+
+"A close shave, sir!" I remarked.
+
+When I brought him his breakfast he was still trembling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I left the package freighter _Overland_. It was almost time for the new
+school year. But Warriors' River lay in my way back to Laurel, and I
+determined to stop off and pay a visit to Baxter, at Barton's Health
+Home....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was disappointed with my summer. In terms of poetic output. I had
+written only three or four poems dealing with life on the Lakes, and
+these were barely publishable in the _National Magazine._ I realise now
+that poetic material is not to be collected as a hunter goes gunning for
+game. It cannot be deliberately sought and found. It must just happen.
+
+Yet all the things that I had seen and been through, I knew, would live
+in my mind till they were ready of themselves to get birth in words. I
+knew that I had not lost a single dawn nor one night of ample moon. And
+there drifted back into my remembrance that night when the Italian
+coal-passer had come to my bunk and wakened me, that I might come forth
+with him and observe a certain wonderful cloud-effect about the full,
+just-risen moon, over Huron....
+
+I had cursed at him, thought he was trying to make a monkey of me ...
+for I had dropped on deck a letter to me from Lephil of the _National_,
+and so the crew had learned that I was a poet among them.
+
+But I was not being spoofed ... actual tears of surprise and chagrin
+came into the coal-passer's eyes. Then I had been ashamed of myself ...
+
+"Of course I'll go on deck ... mighty fine of you to wake me!" I slid
+into my pants and went up the ladder--
+
+To envisage, rapturous, a great, flaming globe of shadowy silver ... and
+across it, in a single straight ebony bar, one band of jet-black cloud
+... and the water, from us to the apparition of beauty, danced, dappled,
+with an ecstasy of quivering silver....
+
+I have met many a man in my wanderings, simple and silent, who felt
+beauty like a poet or an artist, without the poet's or artist's gifts of
+expression,--with, on the contrary, a queer shame that he was so moved,
+a suspicion that, somehow, it was not manly to be moved by a sunrise or
+sunset.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found Penton Baxter, his wife Hildreth, and their child, Dan, living
+in two tents, among a grove of trees, near the main building of the
+Health Home. These two tents had, of course, board floors, and there
+was a woman who kept them in condition ... and there was a rack for
+towels, and hot water was supplied by pipes from a nearby building. I
+think the tents were even wired for electric light.
+
+Baxter welcomed me. But I took a room for a week in town, though he
+urged me to stay with him. But when I had the means I liked better to be
+independent. I calculated living a week in Warriors' River for ten or
+twelve dollars. That would leave me thirty dollars over, from what I had
+earned while working on the _Overland_.
+
+Then, back to the university for my last year of leisurely study and
+reading, in the face of the desolate poverty that would have defeated
+many another man, but to which I was used as a customary condition.
+After that--Paris or London, or both! Kansas was growing too small for
+me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have mentioned that Baxter had a head too large for his body. Daniel,
+his son, slight and frail and barely eight years of age, possessed the
+same characteristic....
+
+I footed it out to Baxter's tents, faithfully as to a shrine, each
+afternoon. The mornings he and I both occupied in writing. He, on a
+novel which was the story of the love-life of his wife and himself, and
+of his literary struggles, called _Love's Forthfaring_; I, on my
+abortive songs of the Great Lakes that all came forth still-born ...
+because I was yet under the vicious literary influence of the _National
+Magazine_, and was writing my verse, trying to be inspired by the
+concepts of middle-class morality ... or what was even worse, I was
+attempting to glorify the under-dog; who, if he were the demigod
+Socialists portray him, would by no means remain the under-dog.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found Baxter more a-flame than ever for the utter reformation of
+mankind ... in the way they dressed ... stiff collars hurt the nervous
+system, pressing as they did, on the spine ... in the books they read
+... he wished to start a library that would sell cheaply and bring all
+the world's great thought and poetry into factory, and every worker's
+home ... all conventional ideas of marriage and religion must go by the
+board and freedom in every respect be granted to men and women.
+
+It was good to listen to this sincere, naive man, still young ... who
+would re-make life nearer to the beauty and harmony that Shelley also
+dreamed for mankind. I lived in a state of perpetual reverence toward
+Baxter. This man tried to live his ideals, as well as write about them.
+
+In matters of diet I accepted Baxter's theories but, humanly, did not
+live up to them. He was a vegetarian.
+
+Later I was to learn that he was to himself an experiment station. On
+his own person he directly and practically tried out each idea ... his
+wife was also a convertee, slightly reluctant, to his tests ... and his
+son, perforce. Baxter actually kept a vegetarian dog. "Even carnivorous
+animals thrive better on a vegetarian diet." But the dog was no
+corroboration of his theory. It lacked gloss and shine to its coat, and
+seldom barked.
+
+One afternoon I came upon Dan, Baxter's son, puking in the bushes, not
+far from the tents.
+
+"What's the matter, Dan," he turned to me, wan, and serious, and with a
+grown-up look on his face.
+
+"Nothing! Only sometimes the warm milk father has me drink makes me
+throw up. I'm on a milk diet, you know."
+
+"Does your father know that you can't keep the milk down?"
+
+"Mostly it does stay down ... I guess father's all right," he defended,
+"maybe the diet will do me good."
+
+"Do you ever get a beefsteak?"
+
+"Father says meat is no good ... maybe he's right about killing animals.
+He says it wouldn't be half so bad if everyone killed their own meat,
+instead of making brutes out of men who do the killing for them ... but
+it is kind of hard on the dog, though," and the little fellow laughed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I think my boy is going to become an engineer of some sort; he's always
+playing about with machinery," Penton said to me....
+
+"Suppose you let him take a trip with me to town, then? I'm going to
+look through the Best o' Wheat factory this afternoon, and watch how
+Best o' Wheat biscuits are made. Perhaps he'd like to see the machinery
+working!"
+
+"Johnnie, I'll trust him with you, if you'll promise me not to meddle
+with his diet."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"I don't like people stuffing him full of candy and ice cream. I want
+to bring him up with a good digestion and sound teeth."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Daniel took my hand as we went through the factory from department to
+department. I enjoyed a paternal pride in the handsome, pale,
+preternaturally intelligent little fellow.
+
+"Look at the young father!" exclaimed one girl softly to another, with a
+touch of pathos in her voice, intimating that perhaps I was a widower.
+
+I blushed with pleasure to the tips of my ears, to be thought the father
+of so prepossessing a child.
+
+It delighted him to look into the huge bake ovens where first the wheat
+was baked in big brown loaves, before it was broken up into biscuit
+form. I thought of Hank Spalton and how he was supposed to have grown
+strong on a diet of Best o' Wheat.
+
+It was customary to serve sight-seers, in a dining room kept for that
+purpose, with Best o' Wheat and cream, and wheat coffee ... free....
+
+With a little reluctance Dan sat down and ate.
+
+"Hum! that was good; but look here, Buzzer" (that was the nickname he
+had invented for me) you mustn't tell Mubby."
+
+"Mubby?"
+
+"That's what mother and I call my father."
+
+"Of course I won't tell him ... and now we must go to a restaurant and
+have something real to eat."
+
+"I can't. I don't dare. But I'll sit and watch you eat."
+
+I ordered a steak, and persuaded Dan, finally, to have one too.
+
+"If it's not good for people to eat, why does it taste so good?" mooted
+Dan meditatively....
+
+"Now I'll be in for it," he added, as we walked out of the door and
+started back to the Health Home.
+
+"But your father need never know."
+
+"At first I thought it might be all right to fool him just this once.
+But I mustn't. I've promised him I'd never lie to him about what I ate,
+and I must keep my word ... he'll whip me, perhaps."
+
+"Does he whip you much?"
+
+"Not very much ... only when I need it ... and then when I cry, he
+stops--so it is never very hard!"
+
+I laughed at the boy's frank philosophy....
+
+"But daddy's so funny ... not at all like other daddies," wistfully.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I did not grow friendly enough with Mrs. Baxter even to call her by her
+first name of Hildreth ... during that brief visit....
+
+Hildreth Baxter was always moving about leisurely, gracefully, like some
+strange, pretty animal. Not shy, just indifferent, as if processes of
+thought were going on inside of her that made an inner world that
+sufficed, to the exclusion of all exterior happenings.
+
+She had a beautiful small head with heavy dark hair; large, brown,
+thoughtful eyes ... a face so strong as to be handsome rather than
+beautiful. She walked about in bloomers, languidly conscious that her
+legs were graceful and lovely....
+
+To her I was, at that time, merely one of her husband's visiting
+friends....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After little Daniel had manfully squared himself with his conscience,
+Penton did not whip him. He came to me.
+
+"I did not punish my boy: because it was you, Johnnie, that tempted
+him," and he flushed angrily. "I'm sure you didn't consider what you
+were doing. If I thought you did it out of deliberation, I would never
+speak to you again ... you must learn not to tamper with the ideals of
+others, Johnnie."
+
+I apologised. I spoke of my reverence and regard for him and his
+greatness. I asked him to forgive me, which he did. And, as I pronounced
+him to be as great at Shelley, the Rousseau of America--his naive,
+youthful face wreathed with smiles and peace fell between us again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I am thinking of going to live at Eden, the Single Tax Colony not far
+from Philadelphia ... I want you to come there and visit us in the
+spring. In the meantime don't let them make you bourgeois in Kansas ...
+don't let them smash you into the academic mould."
+
+"They haven't so far, have they?"
+
+"But what in the world are you going back to Kansas for?"
+
+"Because I have them trained there to accept me. I can do pretty much
+as I choose at the university. But mainly I want to write my four-act
+play in earnest--my New Testament drama, _Judas_. And I know of no
+better place to go to."
+
+"Good-bye, and don't fail to pay me a visit in the spring."
+
+"I will ... for a few weeks ... on my way to Paris."
+
+"Paris? How are you going to get there?"
+
+"I'll take a few cars of cattle east to New York from the Kansas City
+stock yards ... and I'll work my way across on a cattle boat."
+
+"Good-bye! I wish I had your initiative!"
+
+"Good-bye! Mrs. Baxter ... glad to have met you!"
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Gregory," and she dropped my hand quickly and turned on
+her heel, walking away with easy grace. I admired the back of her legs
+as she disappeared into her tent.
+
+"Good-bye, Dan!"
+
+"Good-bye, Buzzer!"
+
+"Daniel," called Mrs. Baxter from the interior of her tent, "you mustn't
+call Mr. Gregory that!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Laurel again, I found it still a month before fall session. All
+summer I had lacked my nude sunbaths to which I had become accustomed.
+So again I sought my island.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I rented my room over the tinshop again, and was soon in the thick of
+the fall term. By this time I had my contemporaries on the hill very
+much puzzled.
+
+Henry Belton, the Single Tax millionaire, had come to Kansas City. He
+was so diminutive as to be doll-like. He had to stand on a box to be
+seen, when he spoke from the floor, at the banquet tendered him ... and
+I had gone in to Kansas City as his guest, and had been seated on his
+right hand--I, in my painfully shabby clothes.
+
+The professors and students could not see why I made such a stir with
+prominent people, how I held their friendship despite my eccentricities
+and deep poverty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I can't help you any more," observed Belton to me, as we sat in the
+lobby of the Coates House where he was putting up.
+
+"Who the hell's asking you to help me?" I replied. "I came down from
+Laurel with no ulterior motive; I came just to pay you a visit, and to
+thank you personally for giving me six months of freedom from economic
+worry while I wrote my fairy drama ... anyhow, please remember that it
+wasn't me you helped, but Poetry!"
+
+"It's too bad you can't be a Single Taxer," he sighed. "I like you,
+Gregory, and I'd put you on my pension list if you'd only shift some of
+your fanaticism for poetry to the Single Tax cause."
+
+Since then I have been frankly sorry that I did not play the hypocrite
+to Belton, in order to be put on a pension for several years. I might
+have achieved great verse during the leisure so afforded for calm,
+creative work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I started a poetry club on the Hill.... I determined that it should be
+anarchistic in principle ... we should have no officials ... no dues ...
+not even a secretary to read dull minutes of previous meetings ... we
+should take turns presiding as chairman. And the membership was to be
+divided equally with girls.
+
+But the school year had begun unhappily for me. I did not find Vanna
+there. I went to visit her homely roommate.
+
+"Vanna has gone off to Arkansas ... she is teaching school down there
+for the winter."
+
+"Thank God she's not married somebody!" I cried, forgetting, and giving
+myself away. Then Vanna Andrews' roommate saw at last that it was not
+she I was interested in. She gave way to invective.
+
+"You! a worthless tramp like you! A crazy fool!... to dare even hope
+that Vanna Andrews would ever love _you_!" In a torrent of tears she
+asked me never to speak to her again.
+
+I was sorry I had not procured Vanna's address before I had betrayed
+myself. But, anyhow, I wrote her a long letter and sent it in care of
+the university registrar.
+
+Flamboyantly I confessed my love ... rehearsed the story of my worship
+of her from afar....
+
+For a month, every day, I sent her a bulky envelope full of mad verse
+and declarations of undying love. As the letters were not being
+returned, she must be receiving them.
+
+One morning, with trembling hands and a pounding heart that nearly bore
+me down, it acted so like a battering ram on the inside, I drew a
+delicately scented envelope from my mailbox ... addressed in a dainty
+hand.
+
+I kissed the letter again and again before I tore it open ... it was
+well that I did it then. I would not have kissed it afterward.
+
+It was filled with stinging rebuke for my presumption ... if I had a
+shred of the gentleman in me I would cease troubling her.... I had
+caused her exceeding annoyance by my deluge and torrent of absurd
+letters ... she did not care for me ... she thought my poetry was bad
+... and why had I behaved so brutally toward her former roommate?...
+
+I saw that the homely girl had not been remiss in writing to Vanna about
+me....
+
+My reply was a very poetic letter.
+
+"I will trouble you no more," I ended; "but do not destroy my letters
+and poems, for, long after your wonderful beauty has become a mere
+handful of oblivious dust blowing about the stones of the world, you
+will be famous because a great poet loved you ... a poet whom you
+unwisely and ignorantly scorned."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Van Maarden, the Dutch psychiatrist and playwright, author of _De
+Kleine Man_, was to come to Laurel to deliver his celebrated lectures on
+"The Socialisation of Humanity."...
+
+Professor Dineen, a flabby, feminine little fellow, one of our
+professors of philosophy, and hated by the dean of his department
+because he was a real philosopher, despite his physical
+ludicrousness,--and had published a book which the critics were hailing
+as a real contribution to the world of thought--
+
+Dineen had engineered the bringing of the semi-radical Van Maarden to
+Laurel....
+
+"For such men are needed here ... to rouse us out of the petty, dogmatic
+ways of our crude pioneers...."
+
+"Van Maarden is a remarkable man," continued Dineen; "he writes plays,
+poems, books of economic philosophy, novels ... recently he tried to
+start a co-operative colony for Dutch farmers in South Carolina, but it
+went on the rocks ... and now Van Maarden, for all his genius, is
+practically stranded here in America.
+
+"It is, or ought to be, one of the duties of an educational centre like
+Laurel, to aid such men ... men who travel about, disseminating ideas,
+carrying the torch of inspiration ... like Giordano Bruno, in former
+days."
+
+Van Maarden came ... a little, dapper, black-bearded man ... but a very
+boy in his enthusiasm. He advanced many doctrines at variance with even
+the political radicalism of Kansas.
+
+But whether it was his winning way or his foreign reputation, he was
+accepted gravely, and ideas won consideration, enunciated by him, that
+would have been looked on as mad, coming from me....
+
+Again the faculty were nonplussed ... puzzled....
+
+Dineen, Van Maarden and I were together much. And the latter found more
+delight in the time when he could discuss freely and unacademically with
+me than when he was invited to formal teas and dinners by the weightier
+members of the faculty and community.
+
+It was psychic research that we particularly discussed. Van Maarden was
+the greatest scholar in the Mystic, the Occult, the Spiritualistic that
+I have ever met. He claimed to be able to go out of the body at will and
+see what any friend was up to at any time, in any out-of-the-way place
+in the world....
+
+When I jested that such a faculty might sometimes prove embarrassing to
+his friends, he laughed and slapped me on the back.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dineen was a queer little chap. He roomed de luxe at the Bellman House.
+
+One night, during a cyclone that swept the town and the adjacent
+country, a fragment of roof was lifted off the hostelry in which he
+dwelt. The women-servants and waitresses were thrown into a panic. One,
+who collapsed on a lounge in the upstairs hall, swore that Dineen had
+felt of her leg as she lay there. A scandal was started. I know that
+Dineen, in his European fashion, was free with his hands, when he meant
+no harm. He had merely laid his hand on the girl's leg, in friendly
+fashion, and asked if she was hurt.
+
+But the nasty Puritan mind of the community went to work, and the story
+was hawked about that Professor Dineen, taking advantage of the cyclone,
+had tried to "feel the girl up."
+
+This, and the fact that he had been a friend of mine (after my
+forthcoming scandal it counted strongly against him) later effected in
+his being requested to resign from the faculty.
+
+But the real cause of the brilliant, strange man's persecution was the
+jealousy of the dean of the philosophical department of the former's
+real ability.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We must do more for this man than we have ... he is a genius ... he has
+not enough money to return to Europe on....
+
+"He has written a curious, mad play called _Iistral_ ... one dealing
+with psychic phenomena, which we ought to put on....
+
+"That way we'll net him three or four hundred dollars."
+
+It was Dineen who spoke.
+
+We chanced to be walking up the Hill together.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The school cheer-leader was tall and statuesque, and his voice was deep
+and resonant ... but, though pleased with his stature and his vocal
+qualifications, Van Maarden decided on me to play the lead in his
+abnormal play.... I did not possess as fine a voice, but I knew the
+mystics almost as well as he did.... I believed in spiritism, and would
+be accordantly sympathetic with the author's ideas....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The rehearsal of the play progressed. Van Maarden, receiving' from
+Dineen's own personal bank-account a substantial advance on the expected
+receipts from the two performances, returned East, and sailed away for
+Holland.
+
+But an intimate friend of Penton Baxter's, before he left, he related to
+me many fine things about the latter, and spoke in special admiration of
+his wife, Hildreth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I rehearsed and rehearsed.
+
+I fought and fought with the directress, a teacher of elocution, who
+tried to make me mouth my words in the old style.
+
+She swore that she would get rid of me as Iistral (pronounced Eestral),
+if it were not for the fact that it would seriously embarrass her to try
+others for the part, the time of production being so near.
+
+Dineen upbraided me for being insubordinate....
+
+I asked Dineen please to believe in me, and watch results.
+
+My idea of acting was to go into the part, be burned alive by it ... to
+recite my lines naturally.
+
+I was proud of myself. I was to act as lead in a play by a
+world-celebrated author, in its premier American production.
+
+The story of it was that of a young poet-student, Iistral ... eccentric
+... a sensitive ... who had, while tutoring the children of a count,
+fallen in love with the countess, his wife ... on the discovery of the
+liaison, she had committed suicide in a lake on their private
+grounds....
+
+The play opened up with the young student, Iistral, come back home,
+after the wife's death....
+
+The tragedy had affected him strangely.
+
+He wore a Hindoo robe, let his beard grow like a Yogi ... was irritated
+with the unimaginative, self-seeking smugness of the grown-ups.
+
+He found in Lisel, a little niece of his, the wise, innocent,
+illuminated imagination of childhood. And he associated with her,
+teaching her the mystic meanings of flowers in the garden.
+
+But he lived for one thing only--the coming of the voice of Egeria, as
+he called the spirit of the dead countess....
+
+Her voice came to him continually ... preluded by strains of music ...
+he lived from day to day with her lovely speech, a clairaudient.
+
+As long as nothing material was involved, he was regarded as merely a
+gentle eccentric ... by his relatives and the bourgeoisie....
+
+But as soon as word came that he had inherited a fortune through the
+death of a rich uncle in America--the attitude of the people around him
+changed. His relatives began intriguing to have him declared insane.
+
+But the village burgomaster, ordinarily decent, saw through their
+artifices....
+
+Goaded and goaded, finally Iistral assailed his pestering relatives with
+a shovel with which he was working among the gentle flowers in the
+garden ... at his customary task of tending them with Lisel....
+
+And now the burgomaster, bribed, had reason to adjudge him insane.
+
+And Iistral was dragged off, wailing, to the asylum.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With my clothes in literal rags I went through the rehearsals, attended
+classes, kept up my athletics....
+
+Often I woke up in the night, crying out, with tears rolling down my
+cheeks, the lines of unhappy Iistral ... the spirit-woman Egeria grew
+real as flesh and blood to me....
+
+"Egeria! Egeria!--"
+
+I woke, time and again, and heard my own voice, like the voice of
+another, calling her name in the dark.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You mustn't take the play so desperately ... remember it's just a play
+... you rehearse as if the whole thing were a part of your life."
+
+"Some of the boys," I replied, "some of the football boys lost ten or
+twelve pounds in our Thanksgiving game at Kansas City last fall ... why
+do you rebuke me for taking art and beauty as seriously as athletes take
+a football match?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two days before the play, as I was walking by the Bellman House, I saw
+Jarvis Alexander Mackworth standing there, come up from Osageville for a
+regents' conference....
+
+"Hello!" the dear, good man called, "you heavenly bum! You starry young
+tramp!"
+
+His eyes were twinkling in appreciative merriment over his quaint
+phraseology.
+
+"What are you doing in Laurel, Mr. Mackworth?"
+
+I noticed that he did not wear his many-patched trousers, but was well
+dressed....
+
+--"attending a regents' meeting, young man,--where I suppose I'll have
+to stand up in your defence again....
+
+"It's a good thing you don't run after the women, Gregory, or your case
+would be entirely lost."
+
+(Yet Mackworth didn't know of the dirty trick that had been played on
+me:
+
+One of the boys from the school, running wild down in Kansas City, had,
+with a curious sense of humour, given my name as his ... to the "girls"
+in various houses of prostitution....
+
+And "do you know Johnnie Gregory?" and "when is Johnnie Gregory coming
+to see us again?" other students were asked who frequented the
+"houses.")
+
+"And what are you up to now?" asked Mackworth.
+
+--"acting ... in Van Maarden's _Iistral_ ... leading role!"
+
+"You look skinnier than ever!"
+
+"I am taking the part seriously, and it's bringing me down. I like to
+do real things when I get a chance, Mr. Mackworth ... and I am going
+to make the two performances of _Iistral_ memorable ones."
+
+"You need a new suit of clothes very badly."
+
+"I know I do. But I have no money, and no credit."
+
+"Well see about that, my young Villon."
+
+Mackworth took me to one side and thrust a fifty-dollar bill into my
+hand.
+
+I hurried down to Locker, the clothier....
+
+In a very little while I was again walking by the Bellman House,
+completely togged out in new apparel from head to heel.
+
+Mackworth was still standing there, and he laughed with astonishment at
+the lightning-quick change in my appearance....
+
+"You're a card, Gregory!"
+
+He afterward repeated the story with gusto....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The day before the night of our first performance at the Bowersby Opera
+House, Jack Travers, always turning up, came to me with a smile of faint
+sarcasm on his face--
+
+"How's the great actor, eh?"
+
+"Don't be an ass, Jack!"
+
+"I've got a good proposition to make for advertising the show--and
+there'll be a lot of fun in it, too....
+
+"Suppose we kidnap you, take you out somewhere in the country--then,
+after a day or so--find you bound, in a farm house....
+
+"Of course it would compel them to put off the performances for a few
+days ... but look at the excitement; and the stories in the papers!...
+afterwards you could go on tour through all the principal cities of
+Kansas."
+
+The idea fascinated me, in spite of myself....
+
+"But how about Dineen? He'd go nearly crazy!"
+
+"There's where a lot of the fun would come in. And to see the way Gertie
+Black, the elocution teacher, would carry on!..."
+
+But after a long pause of temptation I shook my head in negation of the
+suggestion....
+
+It _would_ be a lark, but I had pledged Dineen that I would give him no
+more trouble with my vagaries....
+
+And, besides, I didn't trust Jack Travers--once they had me in their
+power, he and his kidnappers might hide me away for several weeks ... to
+"bust up" the play entirely; would, I wisely reflected, be, to Travers,
+even a greater joke than merely to delay its production.
+
+And I wanted this time to show my enemies that I could be depended on in
+affairs of moment....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We had to have recourse to Kansas City for our costumes. And we were
+more fortunate in them than the cast of _She Stoops to Conquer_ had been
+the year before....
+
+Costumes had then been rented for them which left the children
+mysteriously itching, driven to the inexplicable necessity of scratching
+in embarrassing localities....
+
+The poor girls especially were terror-stricken ... and many of the boys
+were too innocent to conjecture what was the matter ... at first they
+thought that the rented costumes had imparted some obscure skin disease
+to the entire company ... and word was conveyed to the costuming firm
+that they were to be sued....
+
+But when it was discovered that an indecent sort of vermin was the
+cause, the case was dropped....
+
+Suit could not be conducted on such grounds....
+
+But the joke was passed around and caused considerable merriment among
+the wise ones.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The only thing I allowed the elocution teacher and directress to do was
+to put on my make-up for me ... including the sticking to my face of a
+close Van Dyke beard....
+
+I refused to avail myself of her instruction for acting, as I perceived
+that was all bosh....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The curtain went up, I sitting there, the orchestra softly breathing
+Massenet's _Elegy_--meant to be the music sent from the spirit world,
+the melody that I, Iistral, heard, whenever my dead mistress was
+present....
+
+The orchestra finished the melody. It stopped and left the house in
+expectancy.
+
+A mistake had been made on the entrance-cue of little Lisel, my
+child-nephew.
+
+There I sat, in my strange robe, like a bath-robe, with stars cast over
+it, waiting.
+
+I knew something had gone wrong.
+
+Several girls (of course everyone in the audience knew me) began to
+titter at my strange appearance, in my apotheosised bathrobe, in my
+close Van Dyke beard....
+
+I knew inwardly that in a moment all the house would be laughing ... at
+first out of sheer nervousness over the delay in the progress of the
+play--then from genuine amusement....
+
+I threw my will, my entire spirit, against the incoming tide of ridicule
+which would wreck the play even with the rising of the curtain.
+
+I pictured to myself the beautiful woman who had drowned herself; I
+burned with her unhappiness ... I felt her hovering near me ... I
+thought of the lovely passion we had known together ... I _was_ Iistral.
+
+I was not on a stage, but in a room, holding actual and rapt communion
+with my spirit-bride, Egeria!...
+
+"Egeria! Egeria!" I sobbed ... and tears streamed down my face.
+
+I was miserable, without her, in the flesh ... though she was there,
+beside me, in soul!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was aware of the audience again. I was proud and strong in my
+confidence now. The tittering had stopped. The house was filling with
+awe. I was pushing something back, back, back--over the footlights. I
+did not stop pushing till it had reached the topmost galleries....
+
+I _had_ them....
+
+The applause after the first act was wonderful.
+
+"Great! You're great ... you've vindicated my belief in you entirely!"
+Dineen was shouting, as he clapped me on the back, beside himself.
+
+"Oh, I knew I'd do it!... I want a drink!"
+
+"Here's some grape juice!" Gertie Black hold out a glass to me....
+
+"No, I won't drink that stuff," I replied, with all the petulance and
+ill-humour traditionally allowed a star.
+
+A Sig-Kapp, whom I had got into the play as a supe, slipped me a drink
+of real booze....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had to run to the toilet three times before the second act, I was so
+nervous and excited.
+
+"For God's sake, keep it up!" urged Dineen.
+
+"For Christ's sake, let me alone, all of you,--I know what I'm doing,"
+this, as the elocution teacher tried to press home some advice....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the second act I was as electric as during the first, but now I
+allowed myself to see over the foot-lights and recognise people I knew.
+I even overheard one girl say to another, "why, Johnnie Gregory is
+handsome in that Van Dyke!"
+
+"Yes, he has a fine profile ... he looks quite distinguished."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before the curtain for the third act, Jack Travers worked his way back
+through the props to my dressing room....
+
+"Sh! I've brought a nip of something real for you, Johnnie!"
+
+"Bill already has given me some. It's enough! I don't want any
+more!--wait till the last act, and then I'll take it!
+
+"I don't want it _now_! _Do you hear_!" I almost screamed, as he
+mischievously insisted.
+
+The bell rang for the third curtain....
+
+The news had come for Iistral that his rich uncle in America had died
+and left him a fortune ... now his family would try and have him
+adjudged insane, in order to lay hands on the wealth for their own
+uses....
+
+That third act went off well....
+
+"But you skipped a few lines in that act, Mr. Gregory," warned the
+directress, concerned.
+
+"Oh, let me alone, will you!" I returned, enjoying the petulance of
+stardom to the full....
+
+"Remember the fight-scene at the finish," she persisted, "just _pretend_
+to strike with the shovel ... you might hurt someone!" anxiously.
+
+"I am going to act the thing realistically, not as a matter of
+stagecraft."
+
+She tiptoed away. And I had the satisfaction of hearing her instruct the
+boys who acted as guards, and who were to seize on me--in my moment of
+physical exasperation--
+
+"Grab him before the cue, just a trifle before it! I think Mr. Gregory
+is going to forget himself!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I swung the shovel high in the air, making at all my relatives, crying
+out terms of reproach ... sobbing....
+
+In the audience, everybody sat still with wonder.
+
+The actors scattered from my brandished shovel, just as they would have
+done in real life ... the directress had schooled them to crowd about me
+so as to mask the action.
+
+But the action needed no masking. It was real.
+
+The two guards were on me,--boys who, in everyday life, were big
+football men on the freshman team....
+
+I fought them, frenzied, back and forth over the stage, smashing down
+the pasteboard hedge, falling ... getting up again....
+
+But, though the scenery went down, the audience did not laugh, but sat
+spellbound.
+
+I was finally dragged away ... on the way to the asylum, half my costume
+torn from my body ... and I kept crying aloud ... for mercy ... for
+deliverance ... after the curtain had long gone down....
+
+"Big Bill" Heizer gave me a thump in the ribs.
+
+"For God's sake, Mr. Gregory" (he had called me "Johnnie" always,
+before) "it's only play-acting ... it's not real ... quit it ... it gets
+me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The audience went wild with applause. I had won Laurel's complete
+approbation--for the day, as I had won Mt. Hebron's, that fall Field
+Day, long before!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Travers had slipped me just one shot of whiskey before the last act went
+on. He had tried to persuade me to drink more. He was in my dressing
+room....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I could hardly stand, from the weakness of excitement and exertion.
+
+After the play was over--
+
+"_Now_ you can give me the rest of the bottle."
+
+"We'll drink it together ... to your success, Gregory!"
+
+"Yes--you devil!" I replied, fond of him, "you'd have had me reeling
+drunk, that last act, if I had listened to you."
+
+And I gave him an affectionate clout in the ribs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again the professors were urging me to become more "regular" and
+pointing out the great career that awaited me--if I only would work.
+
+There was some subsequent talk of sending the play to Osageville,
+Topeka, Kansas City....
+
+But the faculty opposed it ... it would not be proper to send girls and
+boys out together, travelling about like a regular theatrical company.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As it had been said that I was going to take up the career of animal
+trainer,--after my going into the cage with the lions--so it was now
+pronounced, and reported in the papers--Travers saw to that--that I
+meditated a career as a professional actor....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gleeful, and vastly relieved, Professor Dineen slipped me twenty-five
+dollars out of his own pocket.
+
+Several fraternities showed indications of "rushing" me, after my star
+performance ... but my associations with the odd characters about town
+and the wild, ignorant farmers of the lower type that drove in each
+Saturday from the adjacent country, made them, at first, hesitate ...
+then utterly drop the idea....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Broke, I now wrote a long letter to Jarvis Alexander Mackworth.
+
+I boldly complained of my poverty, inasmuch as it deterred me from my
+work.
+
+"I have now proven my case," I wrote him,--"my poems have appeared in
+the _Century_, in _Everybody's_, in _Munsey's_....
+
+"I have acted, as well, as a professional in a first-rate play, by a
+great European dramatist ... giving Kansas the distinction of being the
+first to produce _Iistral_ on the American stage....
+
+"_Now_ I want to finish my four-act play on Judas. To do so I must have
+enough to eat and a place to sleep, without being made to worry about
+it, for a year....
+
+"Can't you help me to a millionaire?"
+
+Mackworth answered me generously, affectionately.
+
+In two weeks he had procured my millionaire ... Derek, of Chicago, the
+bathtub magnate ... how much could I get on with?
+
+I wrote that I could do with seven dollars a week....
+
+Mackworth replied not to be a fool--that Derek was willing to make it
+fifteen, for a year's duration....
+
+I replied that I could only take enough to fill my simplest wants....
+
+Derek jocosely added fifty cents to the sum I asked--"for postage
+stamps"-- ... for one year, week in, week out, without a letter from me
+except those indicating changes of address, without sending me a word of
+advice, criticism, or condemnation, no matter what I got into ... Derek
+sent me that weekly stipend of seven dollars and fifty cents!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I settled down to consecutive literary work.
+
+Lyrics I could write under any condition. They came to me so deeply from
+the subconscious that at times they almost seemed like spirit-control,
+which, at times, I am sure they had been, till I set the force of my
+will against them. For I was resolved that what _I_ wrote should be an
+emanation from my own personality, not from dead and gone poets who used
+me for a medium.
+
+But when it came to long and consecutive effort, the continual petty
+worry of actual penury sapped my mind so that I lacked the power of
+application....
+
+With Derek's remittances this obstacle was removed....
+
+I had soon completed the first act of my apostolic play....
+
+And then I plunged into a scrape, together with my fellow members of the
+press or "Scoop Club," as it was more popularly known, which halted my
+work mid-way....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our common adventure derived its inception from a casual remark of Jack
+Travers', at one of our meetings....
+
+Ever since Arthur Brisbane had come to Laurel, Jack had been on his
+toes....
+
+"Brisbane brought me a breath of what it must mean to be a big newspaper
+man in the world outside," said Travers, as he stretched and yawned,
+"why don't we," he continued, "_start_ something to show 'em we're
+alive, and not dead like so many of the intellects on the Hill!"
+
+"--s all right to talk about starting something ... that's easy to do.
+The hell of it is, to stop it, after you've got it started,"
+philosophised "The Colonel"....
+
+"Just what is it that you propose starting?" asked practical, pop-eyed
+Tom Jenkins.
+
+"Oh, anything that will cause excitement!" waved Travers, serenely.
+
+"If you boys really want some excitement ... and want to do some service
+for the community at the same time,--I've got a scheme to suggest ...
+something I've been thinking over for a long time," suggested Jerome
+Miller, president of the club....
+
+"Tell us what it is, Jerome!"
+
+"The Bottoms ... you know how rotten it is down there ... nigger
+whorehouses ... every other house a bootlegger's joint ... blind pigs
+... blind tigers, for the students....
+
+"We might show up the whole affair....
+
+"--how the city administration thrives on the violation of the law from
+that quarter ... how the present administration depends on crime and the
+whiskey elements to keep it in power by their vote....
+
+"_That_ would be starting something!"
+
+"I should say it would!" shouted Jack Travers, ablaze with enthusiasm.
+
+"Then we might extend operations," continued the masterful, incisive
+Jerome, "and show up how all the drug stores are selling whiskey by the
+gallon, for 'medicinal' purposes, abusing the privilege of the law."
+
+"But how is all this to be done?"
+
+"Through the _Laurelian_?"
+
+"No ... I have a better plan than that ... we might be able to persuade
+'Senator' Blair and old Sickert, joint editors of the _Laurel Globe_, to
+let the Scoop Club run their paper for a day--just as a college stunt!"
+
+"They'd never stand for it!" I averred, innocently.
+
+"Of course they wouldn't--if we let them in on what we were up to!--for
+they are staunch supporters of the present administration--but they
+won't smell a rat till the edition is off the press ... and then it will
+be too late to stop it!"
+
+"In other words," laughed Travers, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke
+from his nose, "they'll think they're turning over their paper, _The
+Globe_, to a bunch of boys to have some harmless fun ... a few
+sophomoric jokes on the professors, and so forth....
+
+"And they'll wake up, to find we've slipped a real man-size sheet over
+on them, for the first time in local history!"
+
+"It'll raise hell's all I've got to say!" sagely commented the
+prematurely bald "Colonel," his eyes glinting merrily.
+
+"It'll be lots of fun," remarked Travers, characteristically, "and I'm
+for it, lock, stock, and barrel."
+
+"That's not the reason I'm for it; I'm for it for two reasons,"
+reinforced Jerome Miller magisterially, "first, because it will put the
+Scoop Club on the map as something more than a mere college boys'
+organisation; secondly, because it will lead to civic betterment, if
+only temporary--a shaking up where this old burg needs a shaking up ...
+right at the court house and in the police station....
+
+"But, make no mistake about it,--it's going to kick up a big dust!
+
+"Also, remember, no one is going to stand by us ... even the Civic
+Betterment League, headed by Professor Langworth--your friend,
+Johnnie--will be angry with us--say our methods are too sensational.
+
+"And the university authorities will say we shouldn't have done it
+because it will give the school a black eye ... it will be Ibsen's
+_Enemy of Society_ all over again!..."
+
+Immediately some of our more conservative members set themselves against
+the "clean up" ... but Jack Travers and I delivered eloquent, rousing
+speeches. And the decision was more for full steam ahead.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Senator" Blair was easily deluded, and persuaded to turn his paper over
+to us, for one day.
+
+Our strong-featured, energetic president, Jerome Miller, together with
+the suave, plausible Travers, went to see him, deputation-wise, where he
+sat, in the Laurel _Globe's_ editorial office,--white and
+unhealthy-looking, a great, fat slug of a man, with the slug's nature,
+which battens on the corruption of earth.
+
+He liked the idea of the publicity his paper would get through the stunt
+of the "boys." He did not guess the kind of publicity he would really
+come into.
+
+During the three weeks that we had before we were to bring out the paper
+we grew quite proficient in the tawdry life lived in the "Bottoms."
+
+We found out that most of the ramshackle "nigger" dives were owned by a
+former judge ... from which he derived exorbitant rents.
+
+We located all the places where booze was sold, and ascertained exactly
+how much whiskey was disposed of in the town's drug stores for "snake
+bite" and "stomach trouble." We discovered many interesting
+things--that, for instance, "Old Aunt Jennie," who would allow her
+patrons any vice, but demurred when they took the name of "De Lawd" in
+vain--"Old Aunt Jennie" ran a "house" where the wilder and more
+debauched among the students came (in justice to Laurel University, let
+me add, very few) girls and boys together,--and stayed for the
+night--when they were supposed to be on trips to Kansas City....
+
+Travers and "The Colonel" and I were half-lit for two weeks....
+
+That was the only way to collect the evidence.
+
+I drank but sparingly, as I loafed about the joints and "houses."
+
+Jerome Miller did not drink at all ... and was the spirit and soul of
+our activities.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Senator" Blair came out with a humorous editorial the night before we
+were to take the day's charge of his paper.
+
+He headed his editorial "A Youthful Interim ... Youth Must Be Served!"
+
+He was laying down his pen, he wrote, for a week-end holiday ... he had
+dug a can of bait and would go fishing, turning all the care and trouble
+of a newspaper over to youth and eagerness ... would forgot all his
+troubles for a few days....
+
+The editorial made us roar with laughter ... Blair didn't know the
+trouble that was preparing for him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wrote a poem for the Scoop Club Edition of the Laurel _Globe_ ...
+
+  "The Bottoms now I sing, where whiskey flows
+  And two-cent makes life coleur de rose,
+  Where negro shanties line the sordid way
+  And rounders wake by night who sleep by day--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By noon of the day, hints of what was coming were riding the winds of
+general report....
+
+Carefully we read the proofs.
+
+At last there it was--all the data, statistics, and details of the
+town's debauchery and corruption ... damning, in cold type, the
+administration, and the aquiescent powers in the university.
+
+We ourselves had not as yet begun to perceive what it would lead to--a
+state-wide scandal that would echo in the Chicago, San Francisco and New
+York newspapers, and result in severe criticism of the university
+faculty for remaining blind to such a condition of affairs ... and how
+there would be interrogations in the Kansas Legislature and a complete
+shake-up of the political power in Laurel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+News of the forthcoming expose spread mysteriously in "The Bottoms"
+before the paper was off the press. To avoid the coming storm, already
+negro malefactors and white, were "streaming" as Travers phrased it, "in
+dark clouds" out of town, for brief sojourns, beyond reach of the
+compelling subpoena, in Kansas City, Missouri.
+
+By five o'clock the edition, an extra large one, had been almost
+exhausted, and people were lining up at the newspaper office, paying
+five cents a copy....
+
+"Senator" Blair rushed back, having heard of what he called our
+"treachery" and abuse of his confidence, over telephone....
+
+He looked sick and worried, as if he had run in all the way from the
+little lake, five miles from town, where he had gone for his week-end of
+idyllic, peaceful fishing....
+
+"You've ruined me, you boys have!" he almost sobbed, collapsing fatly in
+his chair, then he flamed, "by God, I'll have you each investigated
+personally and clapped in jail," ... which threat, however, he did not
+even try to carry through....
+
+Instead, his paper, and the other two town papers, tried to turn off the
+affair as a mere college joke, played on a whole community....
+
+But we had expected just such action--rather the executive genius of
+Jerome had expected it--for which reason we had confronted the readers
+of the _Globe_ with damning facts and statistics, carefully gathered,
+which presented an insurmountable barrier to evasion.
+
+And as we also had expected, the Civic Betterment League was also dead
+against us....
+
+"Why," cried Langworth to me, "why didn't you bring all the evidence to
+us, and let _us_ proceed calmly and soberly with the case?"
+
+"Professor Langworth, you are a friend of mine, and a very good
+one--but you know very well that the conditions exposed you people knew
+of all along ... and for years you have dallied along without acting on
+it."
+
+"We were biding the proper time!"
+
+"The reason you never started something was your fear of involving the
+university in the publicity that was sure to follow!..."
+
+Langworth was a good man, but he knew I had him. He hemmed and hawed,
+then covered his retreat in half-hearted anger at me....
+
+"You know well enough, Johnnie Gregory, that all you boys did it for was
+to 'pull a stunt'--indulge in a little youthful horseplay."
+
+"Granted--but we have effected results!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"What results? merely a lot of trouble for everybody!"
+
+"The Civic Betterment League now has a chance afforded it to make good
+... we've provided you with the indisputable data, the evidence ... it's
+up to you, now, to go ahead."
+
+"So God help me, Johnnie, sometimes you make me wish I had never
+sponsored you here."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The editor of the _Globe_ made a right-about-face--repudiating us.
+
+Jack Travers, in the style of his beloved Brisbane, put an editorial in
+the school paper, the _Laurelian_, addressed to Blair, beginning, "Get
+back into the collar of your masters, you contemptible cur."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The usual thing took place. Most of the worst criminals were
+mysteriously given ample time to make their get-away ... probably aided
+in it. The humorous side of the resulting investigation and trials of
+various minor malefactors were played up almost exclusively.
+
+Little by little the town dropped back to its outward observance of not
+seeing in its civic life what it did not care to see, and which no one
+could radically remedy till human nature is itself different.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The school year was drawing to a close, my last year at Laurel.
+
+Professor Black, of the English department, had assured me that, if I
+would tone down a bit, I could easily win a scholarship in his
+department, and, later, an assistant professorship.
+
+But I preferred my rambling, haphazard course of life, which was less
+comfortable, but better for the freedom of mind and spirit that poets
+must preserve....
+
+Dr. Hammond, when I had given him that luncheon on the borrowed money,
+had taken me aside and informed me that one of the professors--an
+influential man on the Hill (beyond that, he refused to identify him
+further) had advised him, Hammond, not to accept the luncheon in his
+honour....
+
+"We don't approve generally of Gregory, on the Hill, you know...."
+
+And Hammond had, he told me, replied--
+
+"I'm sorry, but Mr. Gregory is my friend, and Dr. Ward, our literary
+editor, looks on him as a distinguished contributor to the
+_Independent_, and a young writer of great and growing promise" ... so
+the luncheon was given ... I wonder if the protesting professor was one
+of those invited, and if so, if he attended?...
+
+I saw clearly that I could never fit into the formal, academic life of
+the college--where professors were ashamed to be seen carrying packages
+and bags home from the stores, but must have them delivered ... for fear
+of losing their social status!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a park on the outskirts of town where I loved to loaf, when
+the weather was sunny,--a place where the blue jays fought with the
+squirrels and the leaves flickered in the sun ... sometimes I lay on the
+grass, reading ... sometimes I lounged on a bench ... I read my Greek
+and Latin poets there ... and my English and German poets ... and, when
+hungry, I sauntered home to my bread and cheese, or, now that I was in
+receipt of Derek's weekly stipend, to a frugal meal at some lunch
+counter. I dearly liked rib-ends of beef....
+
+One day, when I was in my park, lying on my belly, reading Josephus, I
+was aware of the deputy sheriff, Small, whom I knew, standing over
+me....
+
+"Oh, it's _you_, Gregory!"
+
+"Yes, what's the matter, Deputy Small? what do you want?"
+
+"People who drove in from the country complained about your lying here."
+
+"Complained about my lying here? what the hell!... look'e here, Jim
+Small, there's no ordinance to prevent me from lying on the grass."
+
+"Well, Johnnie, you either got to git up and sit, proper, on a bench, or
+I'll have to pull you in, much as I dislike to do it."
+
+"Jim, you just 'pull' ahead, if you think you're lucky ... it'll be a
+fine thing for me ... I'll sue the city for false arrest."
+
+Deputy Small was puzzled. He pushed his hat back and scratched his
+head....
+
+"Jim, who put you up to this?"
+
+"The people what saw you lying here, as they drove in, stopped off at
+the office of the _Globe_ ... it was 'Senator' Blair telephoned the
+courthouse--"
+
+"Blair, eh?... trying to get even for what we boys did with his dirty
+paper ... he knows I like to lie out here and read my books of poetry!"
+
+I was thoroughly aroused. I jumped to my feet.
+
+"Jim, do me a favour, and arrest me ... and I'll sue you, the city of
+Laurel, and 'Senator' Blair ... all three of you!"
+
+"--guess I won't do it ... but _do_ sit on the bench ... I ask it as a
+personal favour, Johnnie."
+
+"As a personal favour, Jim, till you are out of sight. Then I'll go back
+to the grass."
+
+That night Blair, cocksure, had the story of my arrest in the paper.
+But, as it happened, he was too previous....
+
+Jerome Miller and Jack Travers joined me in going to the office of the
+_Globe_, the next morning....
+
+After we had finished telling him what we thought of him, the "Senator"
+begged my pardon profusely, and the next day a retraction was
+printed....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now school was over at Laurel.
+
+And I determined to bum my way to New York, and, from there, ship on a
+cattleboat to Europe. Where I would finish writing my play, _Judas_.
+
+Farewell to Laurel!--
+
+I went up to the athletic field and ran my last two miles on its track,
+at top speed, as good-bye to its cinders forever!
+
+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 habitue 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 naive 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, naive, 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."
+
+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.
+
+"I'm no good at that, either ... let's stop playing ... I'm tired."
+
+We caught sight of a little man crossing a field, trotting like a dog
+out hunting on his own. He looked back twice as he went.
+
+"--wonder if he saw us?"
+
+"--perhaps--but what matter if he did?"
+
+"Then I hope he's not a fellow Edenite. You have no idea what an
+undercurrent of gossip runs in this place."
+
+We sank down together on a small knoll under the low-spreading branches
+of a live oak. We watched the man who we thought had observed our antics
+bobbing off down the road, as if running for exercise.
+
+We sat quite apart, at first. Then our hands met in instinctive fondness
+... met in the spirit in which we had been romping together.
+
+"You're like a small boy, Johnnie."
+
+"And you haven't acted so very much like a grown woman, have you,
+Hildreth?" It was the first time I had called her by her first name.
+
+"Can you, or anyone else, tell me just how grown women do act? I myself
+don't know, yet I'm a woman."
+
+I drew closer to her as if drawn by some attractive power. A stray wisp
+of her hair lit across my cheek stingingly. Then the wind blew a
+perfumed strand of it across my lips and over my nostrils.
+
+It made me rub my lips, it tickled so. Hildreth noticed it.
+
+"Wait," she bade playfully, "I'll bet I can make you rub your lips
+again."
+
+"No, you can't."
+
+"Hold still!" she leaned toward me; I could look down into her bosom.
+She just touched my lips with her forefinger.
+
+"Now!" she exclaimed triumphantly.
+
+"--think you've tickled me, do you?"
+
+"--just wait!"
+
+I forgot myself. My lips tickled and I rubbed them with the length of a
+finger ... Hildreth laughed....
+
+"Hildreth!"
+
+I leaned toward my friend's wife, calling her again by her first name.
+
+I lay in a half-reclining posture, my head almost against her hip. I
+was looking up into her face. She glanced down at me with a quick start
+at the tone of my voice. She looked gravely for a moment into my face. I
+observed an enigmatic something deep in her eyes ... which sank slowly
+back as the image of a face does, in water,--as the face itself is
+withdrawn. She moved apart a little, with a motion of slow deliberation.
+
+"Hildreth!" I heard myself calling again, with a deep voice, a voice
+that sounded alien in my own ears....
+
+"Come, boy!" and she pulled back her hand from my grasp, and catching
+mine in hers a moment, patted the back of it lightly--"come, don't let's
+be foolish ... we've had such a happy afternoon together, don't let's
+spoil it ... now let's start home."
+
+As soon as I was on my feet and away from her, she became playful again.
+She reached up her hand for me.
+
+"Help me up!"
+
+I brought her to her feet with a strong, quick pull, and against my
+breast. But I did not dare do what I desired--take her in my arms and
+try to kiss her. She paused a second, then thrust me back.
+
+"Look, the sun's almost gone down ... and Mubby and Darrie will be home
+a long time by this time ... and Mubby will be getting fidgety."
+
+The sun's last huge shoulder of red was hulking like a spy behind a
+distant, bare knoll ... separate blades of grass stood up in microscopic
+yet giant distinctness, against its crimson background.
+
+Our walk home was a silent, passively happy one that went without
+incident....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Penton and Darrie were indeed home before us.
+
+"Where have you two been all this time," Penton asked, a slight touch of
+querulousness in his voice.
+
+"Oh, Johnnie and I have been out for a walk, too!" replied Hildreth in
+an even voice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At lunch, the next day,--a day when Penton was called in to Philadelphia
+on business--while Darrie, Ruth, Hildreth and I sat talking together
+peacefully about our outdoor board, Hildreth suddenly threw a third of a
+glass of milk on Darrie's shirt-waist front.
+
+We were astounded.
+
+"Why, Hildreth, what does this mean?" I asked.
+
+"I won't stop to explain," she said, "but from now on I won't stay in
+the same house with her ... I'm going to move this afternoon, down to
+Penton's house" (meaning the little cottage but a few steps from my
+tent).... Ruth rose to intercede ... "Don't Ruth, don't! I want to be
+let alone." And Hildreth hurried away.
+
+"What in the world could be the matter with Hildreth?" I asked of Ruth.
+Darrie had also departed, to the big house, to rub her blouse quickly,
+so that no stain would remain.
+
+"Hildreth's capricious," answered Ruth, "but the plain explanation is
+downright jealousy."
+
+"Jealousy?"
+
+"Yes ... even though Hildreth no longer loves Penton, she's jealous of
+him ... the fact is, Hildreth doesn't know what she wants."
+
+"But Darrie--Darrie is her friend?"
+
+"Of course ... and remains her friend. Darrie doesn't want Penton. She
+only pities him."
+
+I quoted the line about pity being akin to love ... "they do a lot of
+strolling together."
+
+"Yes. But there's nothing between them ... not even a kiss ... of that
+I'm certain. Darrie is as cool as a cucumber ... and Penton is as shy
+with women as--you are!"
+
+I smiled to myself. If Ruth had seen us that preceding afternoon!
+
+"Of course the fault could not all be on Hildreth's side."
+
+"No, they're both a couple of ninnies ... but there's this to be said
+for Penton, he's trying to get something done for the betterment of
+humanity ... while Hildreth's only a parasite."
+
+"And Darrie--how about her? What does she do but loaf around in a more
+conventional manner, talking about her social prestige, the dress of one
+of her ancestresses in the Boston Museum, her aristocratic affiliations
+... how many and how faithful those negro servants of hers are, down
+South ... between the two, Hildreth has the livest brain, and puts on
+less."
+
+"Take care! You'll be falling in love with Penton Baxter's wife yet!"
+
+Our talk was halted by Darrie's re-appearance. Hildreth came furtively
+back, too, from the little cottage, like a guilty child. She apologized
+to Darrie, and her apology was accepted, and, in a few minutes we were
+talking ahead as gaily as before....
+
+We rehearsed Hildreth in her part as Titania ... for that was the part
+she was to play in _The Mid-Summer Night's Dream_, that the Actors'
+Guild of the colony was to put on in their outdoor theatre, a week from
+that afternoon ... Hildreth insisted on dressing for the part ... in her
+green, skin tights ... letting her black hair flow free ... wearing even
+her diadem, as fairy queen. She had a good, musical voice ... a way of
+speaking with startled shyness that was engaging.
+
+But Hildreth stuck to her original intention of moving to the cottage.
+She had Mrs. Jones move her things for her.
+
+As I sat in the library of the big house reading Tolstoy's _Anna
+Karenina_, I overheard Darrie telling Ruth in the bathroom that Hildreth
+would not have insisted on donning her tights, if she had not been proud
+of her symmetrical legs, and had not wanted to show them off to me.
+
+Between the three women, nevertheless, Hildreth was easily my choice
+already ... Darrie was lovely, but talked like a debutante from morning
+till night....
+
+Ruth had too much of the quietist in her, the non-resistent. She had a
+vast fund of scholarship, knew English poetry from the ground up ... but
+her bringing that knowledge to me as an attraction was like presenting a
+peacock's feather to a bird of paradise....
+
+However, when Penton came home that night, he found us all in huge good
+humour. I had just received a check from Derek, and had insisted on
+spending most of it for a spread for all of us, including a whopping
+beefsteak.
+
+And we ate and joked and enjoyed ourselves just like the bourgeoisie.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If Penton only had had a sense of humour ... but this I never detected
+in him.
+
+Even at singing classes, which I attended one evening with him ... his
+whole entourage, in fact....
+
+With solemn face he sang high, and always off key, till the three women
+had to stuff their handkerchiefs in their mouths to keep from laughing
+at him before his face....
+
+After class, we strolled home by a devious path, through the moonlight.
+This time Ruth walked ahead with little Dan, Hildreth with her husband,
+Penton,--Darrie with me....
+
+"Drag back a little, Johnnie ... Penton and Hildreth are having a
+private heart-to-heart talk, I can tell by their voices."
+
+We hung back till they disappeared around a bend. We were alone. Darrie
+began to laugh and laugh and laugh.... "Oh, it's so funny, I shall die
+laughing"....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Why--why, what's the matter!"
+
+For I saw tears streaming down the girl's face in the moonlight.
+
+"It's so awful," replied Darrie, now crying quietly, "--so tragic ...
+yet I had to laugh ... I'm so sorry for Penton ... for both of them....
+
+"Penton _is_ such a jackass, Johnnie," she gulped, "and God knows, as I
+do, he's such an honest, good man ... helping poor people all over the
+country ... really fighting the fight of the down-trodden and the
+oppressed."
+
+I put my arm around the girl's waist, and she wept on my shoulder.
+
+Finally she straightened up her head, stopping her crying with
+difficulty.
+
+"We're all so funny, aren't we?"
+
+"Yes, we're a funny bunch, Darrie ... all so mixed up,--the world
+wouldn't believe it, would they, if we told them?"
+
+"And you could never make them understand, even if you did tell them.
+You know, my dear, old Southern daddy--he thinks Penton is a limb of the
+old Nick himself ... with his theories about life, and the freedom of
+relations between the sexes, and all that ... even yet he may leave me
+out of his will for coming up here, though he has all the confidence in
+the world in me."
+
+And Mary Darfield Malcolm--whom we always called "Darrie"--went quickly
+to her room when we got back, so the others wouldn't notice that she had
+been crying....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Quite often, in the afternoons, toward dusk, around a dying fire, the
+whole community had "sings" out in the woods, near the one large stream
+that abutted the colony, and gathered into itself, all the little
+brooks....
+
+The old songs were sung; rich, beautiful, old Scotch and English and
+Irish ballads--which were learnt, by all who wanted to know them, at the
+singing school ... and the old-fashioned American songs, too.
+
+And the music softened our hearts and fused us into one harmony of
+feeling. And all the bickerings of the community's various "isms" melted
+away ... after all, there was not so very much disharmony among us. And,
+after all, the marvel is that human beings get along together at all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The afternoon before the "circus" the little settlement more than ever
+took on the appearance of a medieval village ... almost everybody took
+turns in participating in the "circus" ... almost everybody togged out
+in costume. But first we had a parade of the "guilds" ... the Actors'
+Guild, in which Hildreth bore a part; in her pretty tights she looked
+like a handsome boy page in some early Italian prince's court.
+
+Don Grahame was the son of the leader of the community whom Jones had
+promised to rake over the coals that night, after the circus.
+
+Don led the Carpenters' Guild, looking like nothing else than a handsome
+boy Christ. Don, secretly disliking in his heart the free-love doctrines
+his father and others taught (though he always rose loyally in his
+father's defence) had gone to the other extreme, he lived an ascetic,
+virgin life. But it didn't seem to hurt him. He was as handsome as
+Hildreth was beautiful.
+
+Everybody liked the young fellow. He had sworn that he would maintain
+his manner of abstinent living till he fell in love with a girl who
+loved him in return. Then they would live together....
+
+That, he maintained, was the true and only meaning of free love. He had
+no use for varietism nor promiscuity.
+
+The Guilds paraded twice around the Village Green, led by the Guild of
+Music Masters, who played excellently well.
+
+The Children's Guild was a romping, lovely sight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The circus was held shortly afterward in the huge communal barn, in the
+centre of its great floor,--the spectators seated about on the sides....
+
+There was the trick mule, made up of two men under an ox-hide, the mule
+fell apart and precipitated Don Grahame in between its two halves ...
+each half then ran away in opposite directions.
+
+Don rode so well that that was the only way they (I mean the mule) could
+unseat him. He won much affectionate applause.
+
+Then there was the fearful, great boa-constrictor ... which turned out
+to be a double-jointed, lithe, acrobatic, boy-like girl whom we knew as
+Jessie ... Jessie, they whispered, was marked for death by consumption,
+if she didn't look out and stop smoking so many cigarettes ... she was
+slender and pretty--but spoke with an adenoidal thickness of speech.
+
+The colony was as merry as if no storm impended.
+
+We adjourned for supper.
+
+After supper, under the evening star we marched back to the barn again,
+which also served as our town hall. On the way there our talk was
+subdued and expectant. Many people were disgruntled with Jones.
+
+"Why must he do this?"
+
+"Why can't old Jones let well enough alone?... no community's perfect,
+not even our community."
+
+Daniel had been put to bed, angrily objecting.
+
+The five of us joined the flow of people toward the barn. Penton carried
+a lantern.
+
+"Jones is all right," said Penton to me, "I like his spirit. I'm going
+to stand by him, if he finds himself seriously pressed, just because the
+man's spirit is a good one ... nothing mean about him ... but I know
+he'll place me among the snobs and wealthy of the community."
+
+When all were gathered, as still as at the opening of a prayer meeting,
+Grahame came in, and, with his son and other friends, took seats
+opposite Jones. Grahame, who had been master of ceremonies and ring
+master for the afternoon circus, had not changed his dress of
+knee-britches and ruffed shirt.
+
+The debate was prolonged and fiery....
+
+Jones launched into a gallant attack on Grahame, and was replied to
+evasively. Don Grahame wanted to punch Jones's head for what he called
+slurs cast at his father's good name....
+
+Penton made a famous speech reconciling, almost, the irreconcilable
+parties.
+
+And so we adjourned.
+
+Penton and I accompanied Jones home. All the way the latter was arguing
+against Baxter's plea, that he be more lenient with Grahame....
+
+"You look out, Penton," Jones warned with genial firmness ... "Grahame
+has been trying to persuade people in this community not to bring shoes
+to me to be mended ... a dirty attempt to starve me out ... Oh, no!... I
+haven't the slightest trace of persecution mania....
+
+"And you'd better look out, Penton, and not play tennis this Sunday, for
+I'm going to strike back at the tennis-playing snobs here, of whom
+you're one."
+
+"Jones, what do you mean by that? Surely not a bomb to smear us all over
+the courts!" Penton joked.
+
+"A bomb, yes ... it will be a bomb of sorts ... but I warn you you
+shan't play games on Sunday any more. I'll see to that ... not that I've
+unexpectedly grown religious, but that I mean to strike back as pettily
+as the way in which I'm being persecuted."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I suppose he means the Blue Laws," Penton commented seriously, "but
+surely he can get no one to enforce them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But Jones found a facetious officer of the law or so, down in
+Philadelphia, who were as glad of a chance to molest a radical colony as
+of an opportunity to put over a good joke....
+
+Baxter, Grahame, Bedell, and others of the prominent members of the
+community were haled in to court ... and, to the surprise of everyone,
+sentenced to forty-eight hours hard labour on the rock-pile, in the
+workhouse....
+
+And Jones sang triumphant snatches of song and hammered away merrily at
+shoes in his little shack along the road, while unused hands gathered
+water blisters making big stones into little ones, with other and
+heavier hammers.
+
+The newspapers made a great to-do about the matter. The affair was just
+serio-comic enough to attract nation-wide attention. And the story was a
+good one--the story of the anarchist-shoemaker who invoked the use of
+archaic, reactionary laws, in his battle against his less radical
+antagonists, the Single Taxers and Socialists.
+
+Story after story was also written about our curious little colony.
+
+Penton Baxter shared honours with the shoemaker. Reporters swarmed over
+his front porch and into his house to interview him, on the triumphant
+return of the party when they had served their forty-eight hours.
+
+Penton gave out interview after interview. And, to his credit let it be
+said, though he revelled in the notice accorded him, he also effected
+two serious results from what had begun as almost a practical joke ...
+he started a fight on the absurd Blue Laws by focusing publicity on them
+... and he exposed the bad prison conditions his unknown fellow
+prisoners lived under, who had _not_ gone to the workhouse in a jocular
+mood because of resurrected Blue Laws.
+
+Jones was willing to let the matter rest, as well as were his other
+opponents ... but Baxter kept the fight going as long as he could. He
+was accused of loving notoriety. His attitude toward it was mixed. He
+did love notoriety ... he enjoyed every clipping about himself with
+infinite gusto. But he also used publicity as a lever to get things done
+with, that would otherwise never have been noticed. The others were
+willing to consider what had happened to them, as a private affair.
+Penton gracelessly used that, and every private adventure for
+propaganda--turned it sincerely in the way he thought it might benefit
+people....
+
+He gave the papers a very bad poem--_The Prison Night_. I remember but
+one line of it--
+
+  "The convict rasped his vermin-haunted hide."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Come, get into the group; I want the papers to tell the public about
+you, too," he urged me, prophetically, as I stood on the outskirts,
+while three camera men were focusing on him, as he stood, expectant,
+blandly smiling, and vain-glorious.
+
+"Boys, I want my friend, the poet, Mr. John Gregory, in the picture,
+too."
+
+"Oh, all right!" they assented indifferently, which injured my egotism.
+But I was too adroit to show it. I still demurred with mock modesty.
+Penton would have been franker.
+
+Finally, at his urgency, they snapped us, our arms about each other's
+shoulders.
+
+In the light of subsequent events, they were glad of that picture.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our tennis-playing, Blue-Law martyrs, as I have said, were held over
+night in the workhouse ... or maybe two nights, I do not exactly
+remember which ... and when they came back they were full of the
+privations of jail-life, and the degradation of the spirit and mind
+suffered by prisoners there. To me, their attitude seemed rather
+tender-foot and callow. It was something that would have been accepted
+off-handedly by me. I had been in jail often, not for a cause, as I
+punned wretchedly, but _be-cause_. I did not accord hero-worship to
+Penton when he returned, as the women of the household did.
+
+For a week it quite reconciled Hildreth with him....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But on the first night of his absence Hildreth and I took a stroll
+together in the moonlight.
+
+Long the three women and myself had sat in the library, while I read
+aloud from a MSS. volume of my poetry, which I intended submitting to
+the Macmillans soon. For Ruth knew Mr. Brett and promised to give me an
+introduction to him. And I was to make a special trip to the city on the
+money I had saved from my weekly remittances ... for Penton would not
+permit me to spend a cent for my keep while I visited him. And I had
+already been with him three weeks....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I read them many love poems--those I had written for Vanna....
+
+"Why," commented Hildreth, "these verses sound like what a very callow
+youth would write, who never had experience with women ... I mean by
+that, intimate knowledge of them."
+
+I flushed and sat silent.
+
+"Some day, when you've lived more," remarked Ruth, "you'll write
+love-poetry more simple, more direct."
+
+  "Though infinite ways He knows
+    To manifest His power,
+  God, when He made your face,
+    Was thinking of a flower!"
+
+I read.
+
+"There again you have an instance, of what I mean ... you are only
+rhetoricising about love; not partaking of its feelings."
+
+"But I wrote all these poems about a real girl," and I told them the
+story of my distant passion for Vanna.
+
+"No matter--you're a grown-up man who, as far as knowledge of women is
+concerned, has the heart of a baby," observed Hildreth.
+
+--"in these days of sex-sophistication a fine thing!" cried Ruth.
+
+"Yes, when out of the mouths of babes and sucklings come quotations from
+Havelock Ellis and Ellen Key!" cried Darrie.
+
+"Good! Darrie, good!" Hildreth applauded....
+
+"--time to go to bed ... here it's almost one o'clock."
+
+"--had no idea it was so late. I have a lot of typing to do to-morrow.
+Good night, folks!" and Ruth was off to her room upstairs.
+
+"Good-night, Hildreth,--suppose you're going to sleep down in the little
+house!" It was Darrie who spoke.
+
+"Yes," answered Hildreth, in a simple tone, "I will feel quite safe
+there ... Johnnie's tent is only a few yards away."
+
+Hildreth and Darrie kissed each other on the mouth tenderly.
+
+"Good night, Johnnie--" and impulsively Darrie stepped up to me, took me
+by the two shoulders, and kissed me also a kind sisterly kiss.... I
+responded, abashed and awkward.
+
+A ripple of pleasant laughter at me from both women.
+
+"Johnnie's a dear, innocent boy!" Darrie.
+
+"He makes me feel like a mother to him!" said Hildreth.
+
+Though each of these remarks was made without the slightest colour of
+irony, I did not like them ... I lowered my head, humiliated under them.
+
+Ever since I had been among them the three women had treated me in the
+way they act with small boys, preserving scarcely any reserve in my
+presence. Penton himself had lost all his first disquiet.
+
+Outside--
+
+"I'll take you as far as the cottage ... it's right on the way, you
+know."
+
+"All right, but where are you going?"
+
+"Into the kitchen to get a lantern."
+
+"The moon is almost as bright as day. We won't need it."
+
+We stepped out into the warm, scented night. In a mad flood of silver
+the moon reigned high in the sky, dark and bright with the contours and
+shades of its continents and craters, as if nearer the earth than it had
+ever been before....
+
+"This night reminds me of those lines in Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_,
+the ones that follow after 'Is this the face that launched a thousand
+ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilion?' which are, to me, a
+trifle over-rhetorical ... the ensuing lines are more lovely:
+
+"'Fair as the evening air--
+
+"'Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,' or is it 'ten thousand
+stars'?"
+
+Hildreth turned her face up to me. Her arm went through mine. She drew
+my arm close against her body and held it tight in silent response for a
+quiet interval....
+
+"You _are_ a poet ... a _real_ poet ... and," she dropped her voice,
+"and, what is more, a real man, too!" there was a world of compassion in
+her voice....
+
+"--You remember Blake's evening star--that 'washed the dusk with
+silver?'"
+
+"Jesus, how beautiful!" I cried.
+
+We were standing in front of her cottage, that darkled in the trees.
+
+Suddenly, roused by our voices, like some sweet, low, miraculous thing,
+a little bird sang a few bars of song, sweet and low, in the bushes
+somewhere, and stopped....
+
+"Hildreth, don't let's go to bed yet." I caught her arm in my hands,
+"it's too beautiful ... to go to bed."
+
+I was trembling all over....
+
+"Yes, boy?"
+
+"Let's--let's take a walk."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We went through the little sleeping community. She clung to my arm
+lightly....
+
+"You're the first woman I haven't been frightened of, rather, have felt
+at home with."
+
+"You, who have been a tramp, a worker all over the country ... in big
+cities ... do you mean to tell me that?--"
+
+"Yes ... yes ... before God, it is true! You don't think I'm a fool, do
+you--a ninny?"
+
+"No, on the contrary, I think you are a good man ... that it is
+miraculous ... I--I feel so old beside you ... how old are you,
+Johnnie?"
+
+"Twenty-six."
+
+"Why, I'm only two years older ... yet I feel like your mother."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the groves adjoining the colony, for a mile on either side, wherever
+there was a big tree, a circular seat had been built about it. It was on
+one of these that we sat down, without a word.
+
+I laid my head against Hildreth's shoulder. Soothingly she began
+stroking my hair. With cool fingers she stroked it.
+
+"What fine hair you have. It's as soft and silky as a girl's."
+
+"I took after my mother in that."
+
+"What a mixture you are ... manly and strong ... an athlete, yet
+sensitive, so sensitive that sometimes it hurts to look at your face
+when you talk ... you've suffered a lot, Johnnie."
+
+"In curious ways, yes."
+
+"Tell me about yourself. I won't even whisper it in the dark, when I'm
+alone."
+
+"I know I can trust you, Hildreth."
+
+"What are you doing, boy?"
+
+"I want to sit at your feet."
+
+"You dear boy."
+
+"I feel quite humble ... I don't want you to see my face when I talk."
+
+She drew my head against her knees. Threw one arm as if protectingly
+over my shoulder.
+
+"There. Are you comfortable, boy?"
+
+"Yes. Are you?"
+
+"Quite ... don't be ashamed ... I know much about life that you do not
+know ... tell me all."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So I told her all about myself ... my ambition ... my struggles ... my
+morbidity ... my lack of experience with girls and women....
+
+"And I must have experience soon ... it's obsessing me ... it can't last
+this way much longer ... I shall go mad."
+
+And I rehearsed to her a desperate resolve I had made ... to find a
+woman of the streets, in New York, when I went in, the ensuing week ...
+and force myself, no matter how I loathed it--
+
+I buried my head in her lap and sobbed hysterically.
+
+Then I apologised--"forgive me if I have been too frank!"
+
+"I am a radical woman ... Penton and I both believe in the theory of
+free love, though we happen to be married ... what you have told me is
+all sweet and natural to me ... only--you must not do what you say
+you'll do--in New York!--"
+
+"I must, or--" and I paused, to go on in a lower, embarrassed voice ...
+"Do--do you know what else I thought of--dreamed of--?
+
+"In Paris--I understand--men live with women as a matter of course--
+
+"You see--" I was hot with shame to the very ears, "you see--there, you
+know,--I thought if I went there I would find some pretty little French
+girl that I would take to live with me ... in some romantic attic in the
+Montmartre district ... and we would be happy together ... and I would
+be grateful, so grateful, to her!"
+
+"Why you're the Saint Francis of the Radicals," Hildreth exclaimed.
+
+"Please don't make fun of me ... I suppose you think me very foolish."
+
+"Foolish?... No, I think you have a very beautiful soul. I wish every
+man had a soul like that."
+
+She took my head in her hands and kissed me on the brow.
+
+"Hildreth, only tell me what I am to do?"
+
+"I do not know ... theoretically I believe in freedom in sex ... I wish
+to God I could help you."
+
+"Why can't you?"
+
+"Hush, you do not know what you're asking!"
+
+"By the living Christ, I only know that I would crawl after you, and
+kiss your holiest feet before all the world, if you helped me."
+
+"Now I understand what Lecky meant when he spoke of the sacrificial
+office of a certain type of women ... I only wish ... but come, we must
+go."
+
+I was on my feet beside her, as she rose.
+
+"Yes, we had better go home," I spoke quietly, though my heart pumped as
+if I had taken strychnine.
+
+I put my arms about her, to steady her going, for she stumbled.
+
+"Why, Hildreth, dearest woman, you're trembling all over, what's the
+matter?... have I--I frightened you with my wild talk?"
+
+"Never mind ... no, take your arm away ... Let me walk alone a minute
+and I'll be all right ... I'll be all right in a minute ... it's just
+turned a trifle chilly, that's all."
+
+"Hush!" going down the path by the big house, Hildreth stopped,
+hesitated. "I'm--I'm not going to the little cottage to-night."
+
+"Then I'll say good-night!"
+
+"No, come on in and we'll sneak out to the kitchen and find something to
+eat ... aren't you hungry?"
+
+"A little bit. But I'm afraid we might wake Ruth and Darrie up."
+
+We tip-toed in. Hildreth searching for the matches, knocked the
+wash-basin to the floor. We stood hushed like mice.
+
+"Who's down there?" asked Darrie's voice, with a dash of hysteria in it
+... of hysteria and fright.
+
+"Damn it, there's Darrie waked up."
+
+"Such a clatter would wake anyone up!"
+
+_"Who's there, I say!"_
+
+"It's only me, Darrie ... I got hungry in the night and came up to the
+house to snatch a bite to eat."
+
+"Oh ... I'm coming down to join you, then."
+
+We saw Darrie standing at the top of the stairs, her eyes luminous and
+wide with emotion.
+
+She stood, rosy-bodied, in her night-dress, which was transparent in the
+light of the lamp she carried....
+
+"Johnnie's here, too!" warned Hildreth.
+
+"Oh!" cried Darrie, and turned back, to re-appear in her kimono.
+
+"I'm sorry we waked you up. But I knocked that infernal basin down off
+the sink."
+
+"You didn't wake me. I was awake already. I haven't slept a wink."
+
+"Neither have we!" I responded.
+
+"What?" Darrie asked me in so startled, impulsive a manner that Hildreth
+and I laughed ... and she laughed a little, too ... and then grew grave
+again....
+
+"It was such a beautiful night, Johnnie and I took a walk in the
+moonlight."
+
+Darrie looked from one to the other of us with a wide, staring look.
+
+"You needn't look that way, Darrie!"
+
+"Please, please, Hildreth!"
+
+"You and Penton have taken walks in the moonlight."
+
+"Hildreth, dear, I'm not rebuking you ... and you know my walks with
+Penton are all right, are harmless."
+
+"Yes, I know they are ... but you mustn't rebuke me, either."
+
+"I wasn't rebuking either you or Johnnie ... it isn't that I'm thinking
+of at all ... but everything has been so uncanny here to-night ... I
+could not sleep ... every little rustle of curtains, every creak or
+motion in the whole house vibrated through me ... something's going to
+happen to someone."
+
+"You're only upset because Penton's in jail," I explained.
+
+"No, that's not it ... that's nothing compared to this feeling ... this
+premonition--"
+
+"Come on, let's make some coffee ... in the percolator."
+
+"You girls sit down and I'll make it. I've been a cook several times in
+my career."
+
+Someone was knocking about in the dark, upstairs. We heard a match
+struck....
+
+"There, we've waked Ruth, too."
+
+"What's the matter down there?" Ruth was calling.
+
+"Come on down and join us, Ruth,--we're having a cup of coffee a-piece."
+
+"It's only two o'clock ... what's everybody doing up so early? Has
+Penton come back?"
+
+"No ... but do come down and join us," I replied.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I tell you, I thought it was burglars at first, and I was going to the
+drawer in Penton's room and get out his six-shooter."
+
+"Does Penton keep a gun?" I asked.
+
+"Yes ... it's the one he bought to shoot the mongrel dog with."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We ate some cold roast beef sandwiches and drank our coffee.
+
+Hildreth stayed in the big house, not going down the path with me.
+
+I went silently to my tent. It was blowing a little now. The moon was
+surging along behind little, grey, running clouds. It would rain before
+daylight. A haunted shiver swept through my back as I stole along the
+path. I repeated poetry rapidly aloud to crowd out uncanny imaginings. I
+had a silly, sick impulse to run back to the big house and sleep on the
+couch in the library.
+
+But I forced myself on. "If you're ever going to be a man, you'd better
+begin now," I muttered to myself, as if talking to another person.
+
+In my tent ... I lit the lamp. I removed all hanging objects because
+their lurching shadows sent shivers of apprehension through me....
+
+"That damned coffee--wish I hadn't drunk it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The wind and rain came up like a phantom army. It sang in the trees, it
+drummed musically on my tent. It comforted me.
+
+The floodgates of my mind, my inspiration, broke loose. I rose to my
+super-self. And now if a horrible thing had stood grey at my elbow,
+unmoved, I would have looked it unflinchingly in the sightless
+visage....
+
+My pencil raced over paper ... raced and raced.
+
+"Here it comes ... just like your good rain, so kind to earth.... Oh,
+beautiful God, I thank Thee for making me a poet," I prayed, tears
+streaming down my face.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The second act of _Judas_ stood complete, as if it had written itself.
+
+I rose. It seemed hardly an hour had passed.
+
+It took me a few minutes to work the numbness out of my legs. How they
+ached! I stepped out of the tent-door like a drunken man ... fell on my
+face in some bushes and bled from several scratches. The blare of what
+was full daylight hurt my eyes. I had been writing on, entranced, by
+unneeded lamp, when unheeded day burned about me.
+
+Stepping inside again, I saw by my Ingersoll that it was twelve o'clock.
+I fell into a deep sleep, still dressed ... I was so exhausted. Usually
+I slept absolutely naked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These were the things that happened while Penton was in jail because he
+played tennis on Sunday.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now I was part and parcel of the household, no longer a stranger-friend
+on a visit. Though Penton's jail-experience did not thrill me, the
+continued thronging of reporters did, as did Baxter's raging desire to
+do good for the poor ordinary prisoners in jail. He had got at several
+of them who had received a raw deal in the courts, and was moving heaven
+and earth to bring redress to them. He gave interviews, dictated
+articles ... the State officials were furious. "What's the matter with
+the fellow? What's he bother about the other fellows for, he ought to be
+glad he's not in their shoes!"...
+
+In agitations for the public good, in humanitarian projects, Baxter was
+indeed a great man ... I loomed like a pigmy beside him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Darrie and I in dialogue:
+
+She met me on the path, as I was proceeding toward the big house. She
+carried Carpenter's _Love's Coming of Age_ in her hand. She was dressed
+daintily. Her brown eyes smiled at me, and a rich dimple broke in her
+cheek.
+
+But Darrie was taller than Hildreth, and I like small women best;
+perhaps because I am myself so big.
+
+"Don't go up to the house, Johnnie."
+
+"I want a book from the library."
+
+"Hildreth and Penton are there. Hildreth is having a soul-state."
+
+"A what?" I laughed.
+
+"Oh, she thinks something is the matter with her soul, and, for the
+three hundredth time since I've known them, Penton and she are
+discussing their lives together."
+
+"I don't see anything to jest about in that."
+
+"I'm tiring of it ... if Hildreth has a tooth-ache, or anything that the
+rest of us women accept as a matter of course, she runs to Mubby, as she
+calls him ... and, as if it were some abstruse, philosophical problem,
+they talk on, hour after hour ... like German metaphysics, there's no
+end to it. They've been at it since ten and they'll go on till four, if
+they follow precedents ... Penton takes Hildreth too seriously."
+
+"You talk as if you, you were jealous of Hildreth and in love with
+Penton."
+
+"It's neither the one nor the other. I love them both, and I want to see
+them happy together."
+
+"You see, Darrie, neither you nor I are married, and neither of us knows
+anything about sex, except in the theory of the books we've read--how
+can _we judge_ the troubles of a man and woman who are married?"
+
+"There's a lot in what you say."
+
+"I believe it would be better if we both cleared out and left them to
+fight this out alone."
+
+"Perhaps it would."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Darrie, Oh, Darrie!--want to come for a walk with Hildreth and me?"
+
+So the three set off together, leaving me and Ruth alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ruth and I had just settled down to a discussion of the writing of
+narrative poetry, how it was done, and the reason why it was no longer
+customary with the poets to write longer stories out of real life, like
+Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_,--when we heard a rustling as of some wild
+thing in the bushes beside the house, and here came Hildreth breaking
+through, her eyes blazing, her hair down, her light walking skirt that
+she had slipped on over her bloomers torn by catching on thorns.
+
+She staggered into the open, swept us with a blazing glance as if we had
+done something to her, and hurried on down the path toward the little
+house where Penton had written in quiet till she had strangely routed
+him out and taken its occupancy for herself.
+
+"Hildreth!" I leaped to my feet, starting after her, "Hildreth what's
+the matter?"
+
+I had put all thought of narrative poetry out of my head.
+
+"Don't follow her," advised Ruth, in a low, controlled voice, "it's best
+to let her alone when she acts like that ... she'll have it out, and
+come back, smiling, in an hour or so."
+
+I plunged on. Ruth ran after me, catching me by the shoulder from
+behind.
+
+"Listen to me. Take my advice and keep out of this--Johnnie!" she called
+my name with a tender drop in her voice.
+
+If it had not been for her tell-tale pronouncement of my name I might
+have listened to her ... but that made me angry, and it ran through my
+mind how she and Penton had fatuously arranged my marrying her....
+
+I ran after Hildreth. She slammed the door when I was so close upon her
+that the wind of its shutting went against my face like a blow.
+
+I found myself on my knees by the door.
+
+"Let me in," I said through the key-hole, for the door was locked; she
+had thrown the bolt on the inside.
+
+"Go away, Johnnie, I want to be alone."
+
+"Hildreth, dearest woman, do let me in. It hurts my heart to see you so
+suffer so."
+
+"I don't want to see anybody. I want to die."
+
+"I'll come in the window."
+
+I was at the window madly. I caught it. It was locked. But I pulled it
+up like a maniac. The lock, rusty, flew off with a zing! The window
+crashed up. I tumbled in at one leap.
+
+My whole life was saying, "this is your woman, your first and only
+woman--go where she is and take her to yourself!"
+
+That avalanche of me bursting in without denial, struck little Hildreth
+Baxter dumb with interest. She had been kneeling by her bed, sobbing.
+Now she rose and was sitting on it.
+
+"Well?" and she smiled wanly, looking at me with fear and a twinkle of
+amusement, and intrigued interest, all at one and the same time, on her
+face--
+
+"I couldn't stand seeing you suffer, Hildreth. I had to come in. And you
+wouldn't unlock the door ... what has gone wrong?"
+
+"It's Darrie!--"
+
+"But you all three started on your hike like such a happy family, and--"
+
+"For God's sake don't think I'm jealous of Darrie ... I'm only wild
+about the way she encourages Mubby to talk over his troubles with
+her--and tell her about him and me, asking _her_ advice ... as if _she_
+could give any advice worth while--
+
+"They began to talk and talk about me just as if I were a laboratory
+specimen....
+
+"Damn this laboratory marriage! damn this laboratory love!
+
+"Penton experiments, and Penton experiments ... on his cat, his dog,
+himself, me--you, if you'd let him ... everybody! let him marry Humanity
+if he loves it so much."
+
+"But what did you do?"
+
+"I caught myself running away from them, and sobbing."
+
+"And what did they do?"
+
+"'Hildreth, for God's sake!' Mubby called, 'what's the matter now?' in
+that bland, exasperating tone of his,--that injured, self-righteous,
+I'm-sacrificing-myself-for-mankind tone--"
+
+I had to laugh at her exact mimicry....
+
+I stroked her hair....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I'm glad you came to Eden, John Gregory. You might be a poet, but you
+have some human sense in you, too....
+
+"Oh, you don't know what I've been through," then, femininely, "poor,
+poor Mubby, he's been through a lot, too."
+
+Her tears began to flow again. I sat beside her on the bed. I put my arm
+about her and drew her to me. I kissed her tear-wet mouth. The taste of
+her ripe sweet mouth with the salt of her tears wet on her lips was very
+good to me....
+
+In a minute unexpectedly she began returning my kisses ... hungrily ...
+her eyes closed ... breathing deeply like one in a trance....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Go up to the house now, Johnnie, my love ... go, so Mubby won't be
+suspicious of us ... I want to stay here ... leave the blinds drawn as
+they are....
+
+"You have been so gentle, so sweet."
+
+"Hildreth ... listen to me ... this has been the greatest day in my
+life, will always be! If I died now, I would go to death, singing....
+
+"You're the most wonderful woman in the world....
+
+"I want you to be mine forever....
+
+"I know what it all means now....
+
+"It's like Niagara, sweetheart ... one hears so much of it ... expects
+so much ... that it seems disappointing, the first actuality....
+
+"Then afterward, it's more than any dream ever dreamed of what it would
+be!
+
+"I want to work for you....
+
+"I want to let you walk all over me with your little feet....
+
+"I want you to kill me, sweetheart....
+
+"I want to die for you....
+
+"Hildreth, I love you!
+
+"I'll tell Penton ... I'll tell everybody--'I love Hildreth! I love
+Hildreth!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie, my own sweet darling, my own dear, pure-hearted, mad, young
+poet....
+
+"Don't talk that way....
+
+"Come to me again...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Penton must not know. Not yet. You must let _me_ tell him.
+
+"It is my place to tell him, sweetest of men, my darling boy...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Go to your tent.
+
+_"He'd see it in your eyes now."_
+
+"No, I won't go to my tent. I'll go right up to the house."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"If he says anything to me I'll kill him.
+
+"I'm a man now.
+
+"I'll fight him or anybody you want me to."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These were the words we said, or left unsaid. I am even yet too confused
+to remember the exact details of that memorable time.
+
+For I was re-born then, into another life.
+
+Is there anyone who can remember his birth?
+
+I returned to my tent in a blissful daze.
+
+I had not the least feeling of having betrayed a friend.
+
+The only problem that now confronted us was divorce! I would ask Penton
+to divorce Hildreth, and then Hildreth and I would marry.
+
+But why even that? Was not this the greatest opportunity in the world
+for Hildreth and me to put to practical test our theories ... proclaim
+ourselves for Free Love,--as Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher
+Godwin had done, a century or so before us?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following day Ruth and I ate breakfast together, alone. I had
+behaved with unusual sedateness, had showed an aplomb I had never before
+evidenced. Full manhood, belated, had at last come to me.
+
+With more than usual satisfaction I drank my coffee, holding the cup
+with my hands around it like a child ... warming my fingers, which are
+nearly always cold in the morning....
+
+Then, while Ruth sat opposite me, eyeing me curiously, I began to sing,
+half-aloud, to myself.
+
+A silence fell. We exchanged very few words.
+
+And it was our custom, when together, Ruth and I, to hold long
+discussions concerning the methods and technique of the English poets,
+especially the earlier ones.
+
+This morning Baxter's secretary rose and left part of her breakfast
+uneaten, hurrying into the house as if to avoid something which she had
+seen and dreaded.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I ate a long time, dreaming.
+
+Darrie came out, followed immediately by Daniel. Daniel was in an
+obstreperous mood ... he cried out that I must be his "telegraph pole,"
+that he would be a lineman, and climb me. I felt an affection for him
+that I had not known before. I played with him, letting him climb up my
+leg.
+
+He finished, a-straddle my shoulders. I reached up and sat him still
+higher, on my head. And he waved his arms and shouted, as if making
+signals to someone far off.
+
+Darrie laughed.
+
+"Which would you rather have, a son or a daughter?" she asked me.
+
+"I don't know," I replied, letting Daniel slide down, "but I think I'd
+rather have a daughter ... the next generation will see a great age of
+freedom for women ... feminism....
+
+"Then it would be a grand thing, too, to have a beautiful daughter to go
+about with ... and I would be old and silver-haired and
+benignant-looking ... and people would say, as they saw the two of us:
+
+"'There goes the poet, John Gregory, and his daughter ... isn't she a
+beautiful girl!'
+
+"And she would be a great actress."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Penton came forth from the big house ... he poised tentatively like a
+queer bird on the verge of a long flight ... then he wavered rapidly
+down the steps.
+
+"--slept late!... has the mail come yet?... where's Ruth?"
+
+"Isn't she in the house?" I queried.
+
+"I saw her stepping out at the back door a minute ago" ... said Darrie.
+
+"We had breakfast together ... I...."
+
+"I hope she doesn't stay away long ... I have an article on Blue Laws as
+a Reactionary Weapon, that I want to dictate for a magazine ...--one of
+her moods, I suppose!"
+
+I looked the little, large-browed man over almost impersonally. I saw
+him as from far away. He came out very clear to me.
+
+I found a profound pity for him waking in my heart, together with a
+sort of contempt.
+
+"And where's Hildreth?"
+
+"Not up yet I presume," replied Darrie.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I excused myself and hurried back to my tent ... where, instead of
+settling down to work on the third act of my play, I lay prone on my
+cot, day-dreaming of the future. How beautiful it would be, now that I
+had at last found my life-mate!
+
+I thanked God that nothing trivial was in my heart to mar the
+stupendousness of my love, my first real passion for a woman!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie!"
+
+I leaped alert. It was Hildreth, at my tent door....
+
+"Get up, you lazy boy ... surely you haven't been sleeping all this
+time?"
+
+"No, darling."
+
+"I ate my breakfast all alone," she remarked, in an aggrieved tone,
+"where's Darrie and Mubby and Ruth?"
+
+"God knows! I don't--and I don't care!"
+
+"You needn't be peevish!"
+
+"Peevish?--as long as you are with me I don't care if all the rest of
+humanity are dead."
+
+I stepped out beside her. We stood locked in a long embrace.
+
+She drew back, with belated thoughtfulness....
+
+"We ought to be more careful ... so near the house."
+
+"I'm so glad you're in the little house near my tent, Hildreth."
+
+"But we can't be together there much ... it's too near the big house."
+
+"What shall we do, then?"
+
+"There's the fields and the woods ... miles of them ... the whole
+outside world for us."
+
+"I don't see why _we_ shouldn't go strolling together ... the rest are
+all abroad somewhere, too ... but we must be careful, Johnnie, very
+careful."
+
+"Careful--why?"
+
+"Because of Mubby."
+
+"But he doesn't love you any more?"
+
+"I'm not so sure about that ... I'm not so sure about anything."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I never saw the world so beautiful as on that day. I was translated to
+the veritable garden of Eden. The community had been named rightly. I
+was Adam and Hildreth was my Eve.
+
+And so it went on for two blissful weeks....
+
+If the Voice of God had met us, going abroad beneath the trees, I would
+not have been surprised.
+
+Hildreth took her volume of Blake with her on our rambles ... and we
+revelled in his "Songs of Experience" as well as "Songs of Innocence";
+and we were moved deeply by the huge, cloudy grandeur of his prophetic
+books....
+
+Why could it not go on forever thus? eternal summer, everlasting love in
+its first rosy flush?...
+
+Hildreth was very wise and very patient with one who was as yet a mere
+acolyte in love's ways and uses ... she taught me many things, and I
+adored her for it--as little by little, day by day, she brought me to
+the full stature of my manhood....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of course the two other women of the household immediately sensed what
+was happening. But Penton remained pathetically blind....
+
+What an incredible man! A mole would have gotten a glimmer of the
+gradually developing change.
+
+With bravado I acted my part of the triangular drama ... but Hildreth
+carried off her part with an easiness, a femininely delicate boldness,
+that compelled my utmost admiration ... she even threw suspicious Ruth
+and Darrie off the scent--at times.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The night of the performance of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ I shall
+never forget ... Hildreth as Titania in her green tights ... I sat in
+the back (she would not allow me in the front because it might fluster
+her, she pleaded) and enjoyed a sense of blissful ownership in her, as
+she glided about, through the Shakespearean scenes ...--such a sense of
+ownership that it ran through my veins with a full feeling, possessed my
+entire body....
+
+Who was this little, alien man, Penton Baxter, who also dared claim her
+possession!...
+
+Nonchalantly and with an emotion of inner triumph I let him walk
+homeward with Hildreth, while I paced along with Ruth and Darrie.
+
+Let him congratulate her now on her triumph ... that she had had, as
+Titania, there under the wide heaven of stars, in our outdoor theatre
+... in the midst of the Chinese lanterns that swayed in the slight
+breaths of summer air....
+
+Later on, when she was warm in my arms, _I_ would congratulate her
+... --tell her she was greater than Bernhardt ... than Duse herself!...
+tell her every incredible thing that lovers hold as mere, commonplace
+truths.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jones had acquitted himself wonderfully as Bottom ... roaring like any
+suckling dove ... putting real philosophic comedy in his part ... to the
+applause of even the elder Grahame, who, to do him credit, was not such
+a bad sport, after all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie, we are having a sing to-night ... there'll be a full moon up.
+I have informed the committee that you will read a few of your poems by
+the camp-fire."
+
+"--the first time I ever heard of it," I replied, concealing my pride in
+the invitation, under show of being disgruntled....
+
+That was Penton's way, arranging things first, telling you afterward.
+
+"But you will do it? I have said you would!"
+
+"Yes, Penton, if you wish me to!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth was always insistent on my strength ... my greyhound length of
+limb, my huge chest ... she stood up and pounded on my chest once....
+
+"Oh, why do I pick out a poor poet, and not a millionaire, for a lover!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There grew up between us a myth ... we were living in cave-days ... she
+was my cave-woman ... I was her cave-man....
+
+As I came to her in my bath-robe (for now, bolder with seeming immunity,
+we threw caution aside, and met often in the little house)--
+
+As I came to her in my bath-robe, unshaven, once ... she called me her
+Paphnutius ... and she was my Thais ... and she told me Anatole France's
+story of _Thais_.
+
+But the cave-legend of our love ... in a previous incarnation ... was
+what spelled her most ... she doted on strength ... cruel, sheer, brute
+strength....
+
+That I could carry her, lift her high up with ease, toss her about,
+rejoiced her to the utmost....
+
+I caught her up in my arms, pleasing this humour, tossing her like a
+ball ... till my muscles were as sore as if I had fought through the two
+halves of a foot-ball game....
+
+Out of all this play between us there grew a series of Cave Poems.
+
+One of them I set aside to read at the sing, beside the camp-fire.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had chorused _Up With the Bonnet for Bonny Dundee_ and _You Take
+the Highway_....
+
+There ran a ripple of talk while they waited for me.
+
+In the red glow of the camp-fire I towered over the stocky little
+husband as he introduced me. Hildreth was sitting there ... I must make
+a good impression before my mate. All I saw was she--too patently, I
+fear.
+
+I went through poem after poem, entranced with the melody of my verse
+... mostly delicate, evanescent stuff ... like this one ...
+
+  "THE EMPEROR TO HIS LOVE
+
+  "I've a green garden with a grey wall 'round
+  Where even the wind's foot-fall makes no sound;
+  There let us go and from ambition flee,
+  Accepting love's brief immortality.
+  Let other rulers hugely labour still
+  Beneath the burden of ambition's ill
+  Like caryatids heaving up the strain
+  Of mammoth chambers, till they stoop again ...
+  Your face has changed my days to splendid dreams
+  And baubled trumpets, traffics, and triremes;
+  One swift touch of your passion-parted lips
+  Is worth five armies and ten seas of ships."
+
+Hildreth's applause was sweet. My heart almost burst with happiness
+within me, as those tiny hands, that had run through my hair and been so
+wonderful with me ... hands that I had kissed and fondled in
+secret--joined in unison with Penton's and Darrie's and Ruth's
+hand-claps.
+
+"And now I will finish with the _Song of Kaa, the Cave-Man_," I
+announced ... it seemed that the poem was not, after all, in the bunch
+of MSS. I had brought along with me....
+
+At last I found it--and read:
+
+  "THE SONG OF KAA
+
+  "Beat with thy club on a hollow tree
+  While I chant the song of Kaa for thee:
+  I lived in a cave, alone, at first,
+  Till into a neighbouring valley I burst
+  Wild and bearded and seeking prey,
+  And I came on Naa, and bore her away ...
+  Away to my hole in the crest of the hill,
+  Where I broke her body to my fierce will....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  "My fellow cave-men, fell in a rage:
+  'What hast thou done?' cried Singh, the Sage,
+  'For I hear far off a battle-song,
+  And the tree-men come, a hundred strong ...'
+  Long the battle and dread the fight;
+  We hurled rocks down from our mountain height"--
+
+I copy this from memory alone ... Hildreth has all my cave-poems. I gave
+them to her, holding no transcripts of them--
+
+The upshot--
+
+ "All of our tribe were slain ... Naa and I alone escaped--
+       going far off--
+   To start another people and clan:
+   She, the woman, and I, the man!"
+
+In my love-drunkenness, I looked directly at Hildreth as I read the
+last lines ... she lowered her head and picked at her sandal....
+
+The applause was tumultuous....
+
+Penton Baxter rose to his feet, as chairman of the occasion....
+
+"I'm sure we all thank Mr. Gregory--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Events trod rapidly on one another's heels. Though Penton had gone on
+frequent walks with Darrie, after his day's work,--chiefly because
+Hildreth had not wanted to go on walks with him herself, or had not
+wanted to accompany them both--yet she and I seized on the precedent
+Penton and Darrie had set, and we were abroad most of the time ...
+roaming idyllically in the fields, the woods ... passionate ... mad with
+the new love that had come to us ... unseeing, in our absorption in each
+other's arms ... praying with devout lover's prayers that we were as
+unseen as unseeing....
+
+We were abroad in the fields so much that even Penton himself must
+notice it....
+
+So we developed the flimsiest of all flimsy pretexts ... pretended to be
+engrossed, together, in of all things, the study of--toadstools and
+mushrooms ... taking with us Neltje Blanchan's book on _Mushrooms and
+Toadstools_, with its beautiful coloured illustrations ... and we did
+learn a lot about these queer vegetations that grow without the need of
+chlorophyll ... entering into a world of new colours in the vegetable
+kingdom ... exquisite pinks and mauves and greys ... blues ... purples
+... reds ... russets ... in the darkest spots of the woods we sought and
+found strange species of these marvellous growths ... that grow more
+readily in the dark and obscurity, the twilights of nature, than in the
+open sunlight of green summer days....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Down vistas of forest we often pursued each other ... often got lost so
+that it took hours for re-orientation ... once, for awhile, to our great
+fright, we could not re-discover our clothes, that we had lightly tossed
+aside on the bank of a brook lost and remote,--that had never before
+laved a human body in its singing recesses of forest foliage ... for I
+had been playing satyr to her nymph, pursuing her....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And each day saw us a little more reckless, more bold and open in our
+love, our passion, for each other.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"How handsome love is making you, my Paphnutius!"
+
+I was wearing my bath-robe, had stopped at her cottage a moment, in the
+morning, where she sat, in an easy chair, reading peacefully ... I was
+on my way for my morning dip in a nearby brook....
+
+My bath-robe, that made me, somehow, feel so aristocratic, so like a
+member of the leisure class ... I forgot to tell how I had brought it
+all the way from Kansas, together with my MSS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I swam about in the brook, not over four feet deep, I sang and
+shouted. I had never been so happy in my life....
+
+I dried myself in the sun, using its morning heat for a towel....
+
+As I sat there on a rock, I heard a crackling of twigs, and Penton
+thrust his way through the intervening branches to my bare rock and my
+bare self ... I hastily, I do not know why, put on my bathrobe....
+
+"Hello, Penton."
+
+"Good morning, Johnnie. I felt you'd be down here for your morning bath
+... I came to have a serious talk with you."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I want you to take calmly what I am about to say!"
+
+Penton was much impressed with my stories of tramp days and tales of
+adventure on land and sea, which you may be sure my sense of the
+dramatic had encouraged me to lay on thick--and he, plainly, did not
+desire any heat in the discussion which was to follow....
+
+"Recently it has come to my attention that there has been a lot of
+gossip about you and Hildreth ... your conduct together." He drew his
+lips together tightly, settled himself for a long siege....
+
+"Why, Penton," I began, protestingly and hypocritically,--I had planned
+far other and franker conduct in such an emergency--but here I was,
+deprecating the truth--
+
+"Why, Penton, God knows--"
+
+"Never mind ... if it is true, I am very sorry for you--for Hildreth's
+sake, for yours, for mine ... but I want to warn you, if it is not true,
+to look out ... you, as a friend, owe me some obligations ... I have
+taken you in here, accepted you as one almost of my family, and--"
+
+"But, Penton, this is unfair," I lied, "unfair even to suspect me--"
+
+"If it had been anybody but you, Johnnie, I would have been suspicious
+weeks ago ... Oh, I know, Hildreth ... she is giving all the
+manifestations ... how her face shines, how beautiful she has grown, as
+she does, with a new heart interest!... and her taking my little cottage
+... ousting me from it....
+
+"If it was anyone else," and he fetched a deep sigh, with tears standing
+in his eyes, leaving the sentence incomplete.
+
+At that moment I was impelled almost to cast myself at his feet, to
+confess, and beg forgiveness....
+
+"I want to warn you," he went on, "of Hildreth ... once before this has
+happened ... she is a varietist by nature, as I am essentially a
+monogamist."
+
+"--and the free love idea, it was you who taught her this, brought her
+into contact with Havelock Ellis, Ellen Key, Rosa Von Mayerreder?"
+
+"I deny that. I believe in human freedom ... divorce ... remarriage ...
+but not in extreme sex-radicalism ... Hildreth has misinterpreted me ...
+the people you mention are great idealists, but in many ways they go too
+far ... true--I brought Hildreth into contact with these books; but only
+that she might use her own judgment, not accept them wholly and blindly,
+as she has done...."
+
+I looked at the man. He was sincere. An incredible, naive, almost
+idiotic purity shone in his face....
+
+Again I was impelled to confess. Again I held my tongue. Again I lied.
+
+"Penton, what you have just said about you and Hildreth and your lives
+together, I shall consider as sacred between us."
+
+He gave me his hand.
+
+"Promise me one thing, that you will not take Hildreth as your
+sweetheart ... be true to our friendship first, Johnnie."
+
+"Penton, I am only flesh and blood; I will promise, if anything happens,
+to tell you, ultimately, the truth."
+
+He looked at me with close scrutiny again, at this ambiguous speech.
+
+"Johnnie, _have_ you told me the absolute truth?"
+
+"Yes!" evading his eyes.
+
+"--because there is a wild strain in Hildreth that only needs a little
+rousing--" He paused.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Johnnie," as we walked away, "don't you think you had better pack up
+and leave? _The next time_ I am going to sue for a divorce."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We walked home arm in arm. I simulated so well that it was Baxter who
+begged pardon for even suspecting me.
+
+But I felt like a dog. I, for my part, determined to bid farewell to
+Hildreth that very evening, before she retired for the night, in her
+cottage--take train to New York, and so to Paris, without first
+finishing my _Judas_, as I had intended.
+
+We would bury forever in the secret places of our hearts what had
+already happened between us ... this was my first impulse....
+
+My next was--that we should up and run away together, and defy Penton
+Baxter and the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth could see by the strangeness in my behaviour, as I came into
+the cottage, to kiss her good-night ... and stay a little while--a new
+custom of ours, as we grew bolder--could see that I had something on my
+mind.
+
+I related to her all that had taken place between me and Penton that
+morning....
+
+"The cad," she cried, "the nasty cad, to talk to you so about me ... I
+would have told you myself because you are my lover ... but he had no
+right to tell you ... as far as he has proof positive, you are merely a
+mutual friend....
+
+"But that's the way with him. He has mixed his own life up so that it is
+all public, to him.
+
+"Yes," she cried impetuously and passionately ... "it's true ... I have
+not been faithful to him before...."
+
+"--and you returned to him? wasn't that weak?"
+
+I took her hands in mine, with mind and soul made up at last....
+
+"This time you can go through with it. Here's a man who will stand by
+you forever. I can earn a living for both of us, and--"
+
+"Don't let's discuss the horrid old subject any more to-night ... I'm
+tired of discussing ... as you love me, read some poetry to me ... or I
+shall scream!"
+
+"Have you ever read the sonnets of George Santayana?... I know most of
+them by heart ... let me quote you his best ...
+
+  'O world, thou choosest not the better part!
+  It is not wisdom to be only wise,
+  And on the inward vision close the eyes,
+  But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
+  Columbus found a world, and had no chart
+  Save one that faith deciphered in the skies
+  To trust the soul's invincible surmise
+  Was all his science and his only art.
+  Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
+  That lights the pathway but one step ahead
+  Across a void of mystery and dread.
+  Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
+  By which alone the mortal heart is led
+  Unto the thinking of the thought divine!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I wish I had written that!" I said, in a hushed, awed voice, after a
+moment's silence....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Now kiss me good-night and go to your tent ... I feel restless,
+troubled in spirit, to-night," she said, continuing:
+
+"Perhaps I have been too harsh with Penton....
+
+"He is steering on a chartless sea with no compass....
+
+"No wonder he, and all radicals and pioneers in human thought, blunder
+ridiculously....
+
+"The conservative world has its charts, its course well mapped out....
+
+"I suppose I am not strong enough, big enough, for him."
+
+"Hush! now it is you who're just talking!" I replied.
+
+"You're jealous!"
+
+"By God, yes. I _am_ jealous, though I suppose I ought to be ashamed of
+it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She sat in bed, propped up with pillows. She had been reading
+Shakespeare's sonnets aloud to me. The big green-shaded reading lamp
+cast a dim light that pervaded the room.
+
+She reached out both arms to me, the wide sleeves falling back from
+them, and showing their feminine whiteness....
+
+I sat down beside her, caught her to me, kissed her till she was
+breathless....
+
+"There ... there ... please! _Please!_"
+
+"What! you're not tiring of my kisses?"
+
+"No, dearest boy, but I have a curious feeling, I tell you ... maybe
+we're being watched...."
+
+"Nonsense ... he believes I told him the truth."
+
+And I caught her in my arms again, half-reclining on the bed.
+
+"Sh!" she flung me off with a sudden impulse of frightened strength, "I
+hear someone."
+
+"It's only the wind."
+
+"Quick!... my God!"--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I snatched up a volume of Keats. It fell open at "St. Agnes Eve." I
+hurled myself into a chair ... gathering my breath I began aloud, as
+naturally as I could--
+
+  "St. Agnes' Eve! ah, bitter chill it was;
+  The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold--"
+
+At that very instant, Penton burst in at the door.
+
+He paused a dramatic moment, his back to it, facing us.
+
+I stopped reading, in pretended astonishment.
+
+"Well, Penton?" acted Hildreth languidly....
+
+The look of defeat and bewilderment on the husband's face would have
+been comic if it had not been pitiable.
+
+I rose, laying the book down carefully.
+
+"I think I'll go now, Hildreth ... you wish to see Penton alone." I put
+all the calm casual deference in my voice possible. I started to walk
+easily to the door.
+
+"No! stop! I wish you to stay here, John Gregory ... since you've got
+yourself into this--"
+
+"I'd like to know what you mean by 'got yourself into this'?"
+
+"Oh, Gregory, let's not talk nonsense any longer."
+
+"You don't believe what I assured you this morning?"
+
+"Johnnie, it's not human ... I can't make myself, and I've tried and
+tried, God knows!"
+
+"I'd like to know, for my part, just what you mean, Penton Baxter,
+spying on me this way--bursting in on poor Johnnie Gregory and me like a
+maniac, while we were only reading poetry together."
+
+"--reading poetry together!" he echoed bitterly, almost collapsing, as
+he went into a chair.
+
+Again I tried to make my exit.
+
+"Johnnie, I want you to stay. I want to have all this out right here and
+now," snapped Baxter decisively.
+
+"Very well ... if you put it that way."
+
+"--a nice way to treat your guest," Hildreth interposed, "the way you've
+been raving about him, too. 'Johnnie Gregory' this, and 'Johnnie
+Gregory' that!--and the minute he arrives, first you try to make him put
+up at the community inn; and now you accuse him of--of--"
+
+Hildreth began to weep softly....
+
+And then began a performance at which I stood aside, mentally, in
+admiration ... the way that little woman handled her husband!
+
+She wept, she laughed, she upbraided, she cajoled ... at one moment
+swore she wanted nothing better than to die, at the other, vowed eternal
+fidelity till old age overtook them both....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I _must_ go," I cried, quite ashamed of myself in my heart. Baxter's
+credulity had expanded again, in the sun of Hildreth's _forgiveness_ of
+him for his unjust suspicions!...
+
+For the first time in my life I perceived how a desperate woman can
+twist a man any way she wants.
+
+"No, you must not go! it is I who am going--to show that I trust you."
+
+"Good God!" I protested--this was too much! "no, no ... good-night,
+both of you ... good-night, Penton! good-night, Hildreth!"
+
+Penton Baxter stepped in my way, took hold of one of my hands in both of
+his....
+
+"Please, Johnnie, please, dear friend ... I wish you to stay while I
+myself go. Finish reading the poem to Hildreth ... I think I have been
+too harsh in my judgment of both of you ... only please do be more
+discreet, if only for appearance's sake, in the future....
+
+"Sit down where you were. I wish to show that I trust you both....
+
+"Good-night, Hildreth!" and he kissed his wife in fond contrition.
+
+"Good-night, Johnnie ... forgive me!"
+
+And he wavered out at the door, his face set in pain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As soon as he had gone I rose swiftly.
+
+"And now I must go."
+
+"If you men aren't the funniest things!" she caught me by the hand,
+detaining me ... "not yet ... wait a minute. Read more of that poem you
+began, if only for a blind."
+
+I picked up the book, started reading again ... strangely a rush of
+tears flooded my eyes and blurred the type....
+
+I began to sob, heart-sick. I did love the absurd little man. My heart
+ached, broken over my lies....
+
+"Oh! Oh!" I sobbed, "Hildreth, my woman, my sweetheart--he trusted me,
+Hildreth ... he trusted me!"
+
+I knelt by the bed, thrusting my head into the lap of my First Woman.
+
+She kissed me on top of the head.
+
+"You're both two big, silly babies, that's all you are."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was dawn when I returned to my tent, pulled the flap aside, fell,
+exhausted, on my cot in dreamless sleep....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How was it all going to end?
+
+It seemed to me that I had tapped violent, subterranean currents in life
+and passion, that I had not hitherto known existed....
+
+Free Love, Marriage, Polygamy, Polyandry, Varietism, Promiscuity--these
+were but tossing chips of nomenclature, bits of verbal welter, upborne
+by deep terrible human currents that appalled the imagination!
+
+The man who prated glibly of any ready solution, orthodox or heterodox,
+radical or conventional, of the problem of the relationships between men
+and women was worse than a fool, he was a dangerous madman!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth and I, a-field, had found a bed of that exceptionally poisonous
+mushroom named _Pallida_ something or other ... the book said its poison
+was kin to that of the poison in the rattlesnake's bite. My eyes met
+with Hildreth's ... we needed say no word, both thinking the same
+thought that frightened us!... "how easy it would be--!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now we were plumbing the darker side of passion. Something that
+Carpenter does not write of in his _Love's Coming of Age_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A night of wind, shifting into rain. Hildreth I knew would be afraid,
+alone.
+
+I stepped into her cottage, in my bath-robe. She almost screamed at my
+sudden appearance. For I came in at the door like a shadow, the wind and
+rain making such a tumult that a running horse would not have been
+heard.
+
+"Dearest ... you're all wringing wet ... you're dripping all over the
+floor. Throw off that robe. Dry yourself--there's a towel there!"
+
+She flung me her kimono. "Here, put this on, till you're comfortable
+again."
+
+I came out in her kimono, which I was bursting through ... my arms
+sticking out to my elbow.
+
+She laughed herself almost into hysteria at my funny appearance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It will be quite safe to-night. I don't think he'd venture out. This is
+a hurricane, not a rainstorm ... besides, I believe he's a little afraid
+of you, Johnnie ... I was watching him rather closely, while I handled
+him, the other night ... he kept an uneasy eye on you all the time."
+
+"God, but you were superb, Hildreth ... if you could only act that way
+on the stage!--"
+
+"I _could_ act that way on the stage," she replied unexpectedly, a
+trifle put out....
+
+Then--
+
+"A woman has to do many things to save herself--"
+
+"Oh, I swear that you are the most marvellous, the most beautiful woman
+in the world ... I love you ... I adore you ... I'd die for you ...
+right here ... now!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we lay there in the dark the storm pulled and tugged and battered as
+if with great, sinister hands, striving to get in at us.
+
+Hildreth trembled in my arms, shaking afresh at each shock of the wind
+and the rain.
+
+"Don't be afraid, my little woman!"
+
+"I wonder if he'd dare come down to-night?"
+
+"If he did, and caught us, I'd kill him."
+
+"He knows that, if he knows anything, I'm sure ... that's why I think
+we're all right!"
+
+And she came up closer into my arms with a sigh of content.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had been asleep....
+
+The sudden madness and saturnalia of love into which I had these few
+weeks been plunged tapped, it seemed, my subliminal consciousness, maybe
+my memory of former incarnations....
+
+I never had such a vision in my life....
+
+I was fully aware of my surroundings, yet through them shone another, a
+far reality that belonged to me, too.
+
+I described it to Hildreth, as she lay, thrilled, beside me.
+
+A cave ... high up on the hill-crest ... our cave, that we had imagined,
+now come true....
+
+I was a huge chap, with a girdle of leaves about my waist ... strange,
+tropic leaves ... there was black hair all over my body ... there was a
+little, red fire back in the cave's obscurity....
+
+I had come in, casting a dead fawn down from my shoulder....
+
+Hildreth came forward ... it was plainly she ... though with fine red
+hair like down on her legs....
+
+"But your name is Naa ... my name is Kaa, the hunter, the slayer of
+good, red meat."
+
+"Johnnie, do you really see that,--_all_ that!"
+
+She was enthralled like a child, as I described the landscape that lay,
+spread immense, beneath us ... and the wide ocean, great and blue, that
+tossed to the east.
+
+Though I was genuinely possessed by this strange vision, though it was
+no make-believe, I could not help injecting a little Kansas horse-play
+into it....
+
+I sank my teeth in "Naa's" shoulder, till she cried aloud. I seized her
+by the hair and dragged her till she lay prone on the floor.
+
+I stood over her, making guttural noises, which I did so realistically
+that it made shivers run up and down my back while doing it....
+
+I was almost as frightened as she was.
+
+Before I knew it, she was thinking I had suddenly gone mad. She was
+shouting "Mubby" for help--her husband's pet name....
+
+The little fool! I caught her over the mouth with a grim hand.
+
+"Don't do that ... can't a fellow play once in a while?"
+
+"But it wasn't _all_ play, was it?"
+
+"No, I really saw the cave, and the primeval landscape.
+
+"Shall I tell you some more?"
+
+"No, it frightens me too much ... it seems too real. And you've bruised
+me, and my head feels as if you've torn half my hair out."
+
+"Why did you call out your husband's pet name?"
+
+"I don't know ... did I?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"After a pause in the dark.
+
+"Tell me, was he ... was Mubby.. back there, in our former life?"
+
+"O yes, he was there."
+
+"And Darrie, too?"
+
+"Yes, Darrie, too!"
+
+"If my name was Naa and your name was Kaa, what were their names?"
+
+"Mubby was named Baa and Darrie was Blaa!"
+
+This convulsed Hildreth.
+
+"You great, big, sweet fool of a poet, I do love you, I really do!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We were made for each other in every way ... my head just fits your
+shoulder," she observed quaintly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Mubby came down to me this morning," said Hildreth one evening, "and
+pleaded to be taken back again ... as husband...."
+
+"And what?--"
+
+"What did I do?... when I love you?... the mere idea made me sick to
+think of. I couldn't endure him again."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon Penton and Hildreth were closeted together from lunch to
+dark. It was my turn to cry out in my heart, and suffer agonies of
+imagination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning Hildreth began packing up, with the aid of Mrs. Jones.
+I came upon her, in the library, where I had gone to get a book. My face
+fell dismally.
+
+"I can't endure it any longer, Johnnie, I'm going back home, to New York
+... my father will take me in."
+
+"And how about me?"
+
+"--wait patiently a few days then, if you still feel the same about me,
+follow me!... and, until you come to join me, write me at least three
+times a day."
+
+"I'll do it ..." then I couldn't help being playful again, "I'll write
+you entirely in cave-fashion."
+
+"I am taking a big step, Johnnie, I'm through with Penton Baxter
+forever--but I wonder if my new life is to be with you ... you are such
+an irresponsible, delightful madman at times....
+
+"You're wonderful as a lover ... but as a man with a woman to take care
+of--!"
+
+"Don't worry about that! just give me a chance, and I'll show you I can
+be practical too."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth had gone. With her going the bottom seemed to drop out of my
+existence, leaving a black hole where it had fallen through. I walked
+about, looking so truly miserable, that even Baxter spoke with gentle
+consideration to me.
+
+"Poor Johnnie, to think you'd run into a proposition like this, the
+first pop out of the box."
+
+"No, it isn't what you think ... I'm getting malaria, I believe."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But to be deprived of her, my first love. No longer to be in her
+presence, no longer to watch her quiet smile, the lovely droop of her
+mouth's corner ... to feed on the kisses no more that had become as
+necessary as daily bread itself to me--
+
+I began to lose weight ... to start up in the night, after a brief fit
+of false slumber, hearing myself, as if it were an alien voice, crying
+her name aloud....
+
+I whispered and talked tender, whimsical, silly things to my pillow,
+holding it in my arms, as if it were she....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Each day I sent her four, five letters ... letters full of madness,
+absurdity, love, despair, wild expressions of intimacy that I would Have
+died to know anybody else ever saw.
+
+Her first letter in return burned me alive with happiness....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"--you know why she went to the city," Penton teased, "it's because
+'Gene Mallows, the California poet, is up there. He and she got on
+pretty well when we were on the coast."
+
+"You lie!" I bellowed, beside myself, "Hildreth will be faithful to me
+... she has promised."
+
+Penton Baxter looked me up and down, courageously, coolly, for a long
+time. Slowly I realised what I had just said.
+
+"That's all I wanted to know, John Gregory! I've got it out of you at
+last!"
+
+He turned on his heel.
+
+Changing his mind, he faced me again. This time there was a despairful
+agony of kindness in his face.
+
+"Dear boy, I'm sorry for all this thing that has come between us. But
+there is yet time for you to keep out of it. Hildreth and I are done
+with each other forever ... but you needn't be mixed up in this
+affair....
+
+"Johnnie, let her stay in New York, and, no matter how much she wants
+you, don't go up there to join her."
+
+"I love her. I adore her. I want to be where she is. Now the whole truth
+is out."
+
+"My poor friend!"
+
+"Don't call me your friend--you--"
+
+He tightened his lips....
+
+"If you go up there to join her, remember that I gave you fair warning."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I could endure it no longer, the torment of not seeing her, of not being
+with her....
+
+As her favourite sonneteer, Santayana, writes--lines she often quoted--
+
+  "Love leads me on, no end of love appears.
+  Is this the heaven, poets, that ye paint?
+  Oh then, how like damnation to be blessed!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I informed Ruth, Darrie, Penton that I was going to New York in the
+morning....
+
+Penton immediately whisked out of my sight, full of uncontrollable
+emotion....
+
+Darrie and Ruth almost fell upon me, trying to persuade me not to rejoin
+Hildreth. I evaded by saying that I was now on my way to Europe, that
+possibly I might see her before I went, but--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had an hour till train time. My MSS. was packed again, my Josephus, my
+Homer, my Shakespeare, my Keats, my bath robe.
+
+I thought I would escape without saying good-bye.
+
+But Penton came down the front porch, stood in my path.
+
+"Johnnie, a last warning."
+
+"I want none of your last warnings."
+
+"Are you going to Hildreth?"
+
+"I'm tired of being a liar. I've never lied so much in my life ... yes,
+I'm going to Hildreth ... and I'm going to persuade her to live with me,
+and defy the whole damned world--the world of fake radicals that talk
+about divorces when the shoe pinches them, as well as the world of
+conservatives," I announced harshly.
+
+"I've done all I could!" he responded wearily, "I see you won't come to
+your senses--wait a minute!" and he turned on his heel. He had asked me
+to wait with such solemnity that I stuck still in my tracks, waiting.
+
+He disappeared into the big house, to re-emerge with, of all things,
+_the coffee percolator_!
+
+"Here!" he exclaimed, holding out the object to me ceremoniously and
+seriously, "you can take this to your goddess, this poison-machine, and
+lay it on her altar. Tell her I offered this to you. Tell her that it is
+a symbol of her never coming back here again."
+
+Here was where I too lacked a sense of humour. I struck the coffee
+percolator out of his hands. I stalked off.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the way to New York I built the full dream of what Hildreth and I
+were to effect for the world--a practical example, in our life as we
+lived it together, of the rightness of free love....
+
+We would test it out, would rent a cottage somewhere, preferably on the
+Jersey coast near the sea shore ... autumn was coming on, and there
+would be lovely, crystal-clear weather ... and the scent of pines in the
+good air.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perhaps Penton, Hildreth and I could all three join in amicable accord,
+over the solution of our difficulty, along radical and idealistic lines.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I hurried to the address given me by Hildreth. She was not in, but her
+mother was ... a plump, rather good looking, fashionably dressed woman.
+Evidently the mother did not know of the relationship between me and her
+daughter.
+
+"So you are the poet Hildreth has told me about?" after we had
+discoursed for upwards of an hour--
+
+"I can easily see how Hildreth has grown so fond of you," and she patted
+me on the head as if I were a schoolboy, in motherly fashion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Mother's rather stupid and old-fashioned ... there'd be no use trying
+to explain the situation to her. The best thing we can do is to persuade
+her that Daniel needs her, down in Eden ... that will remove her from
+the flat, so we can have it all to ourselves for a few days, in order to
+plan what is to be done next."
+
+Next morning Mrs. Deuell, Hildreth's mother, as innocent as a new-born
+lamb as to what was up, permitted herself to be shipped off to Eden, to
+take care of Daniel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Instead of planning, however, and marshalling our resources, Hildreth
+and I abandoned ourselves to the mutual happiness and endearments of two
+love-drunk, emotion-crazed beings on a honeymoon....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The bell rang. In walked Darrie.
+
+"Well, Darrie!" and Hildreth embraced her friend. And I was glad to see
+her, too. I knew that, in spite of the high pressure we had lived under
+during the past summer, Darrie was trying hard to be just, to be friend
+to all of us....
+
+She laughed at the disorder of the place ... dishes unwashed ... food
+scattered about on the table....
+
+"What a pair of love-birds you two are."
+
+"And has Penton accepted the situation?"
+
+"I came up to tell you that he has ... it has made him quite sick,
+though!"
+
+"Poor Mubby!" Hildreth ejaculated.
+
+"--but he has sent me to tell you that you can go away together wherever
+you please, that he won't molest you in the least."
+
+"It's too incredible!" cried Hildreth, almost disappointed, "you don't
+know him ... he's changed his mind, I am sure, since you left."
+
+"He said he would follow me by Saturday (it was Wednesday) leaving your
+mother in care of Daniel."
+
+"Does mother suspect?--"
+
+"No ... not at all."
+
+"If the entire world fell about mother's ears, she wouldn't know."
+
+"What do you two lovers purpose doing?"
+
+I unfolded my scheme of living with Hildreth in a Jersey bungalow ...
+Derek's income to me would go on a while yet ... I could sell stories
+and poems to the New York magazines ... Hildreth could write a book as
+well as I ... we would become to the modern world an example of the
+radical love-life ... the Godwin and Wollstonecraft of the age.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We ate supper together, the three of us, in the flat. It was so cosy.
+Darrie and Hildreth joined in cleaning the house that afternoon.
+
+But a bomb was to be hurled among us.
+
+At twelve o'clock of the next day the 'phone rang.
+
+Darrie answered it. After a few words she came for me, her face as white
+as a sheet....
+
+"My God, Penton is in town!"
+
+"--this is only Thursday ... he was not coming till Saturday!" I
+exclaimed, full of forboding.
+
+"I knew, I knew he wouldn't keep his original mind!" exclaimed Hildreth.
+
+"He's holding the wire ... wants to say something to you, Johnnie."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Yes, Penton, what is it?"
+
+"Only this," his voice replied, as if rehearsing a set speech,
+"yesterday afternoon I sent a telegram to my lawyer to institute
+proceedings for a divorce, and I mentioned you as co-respondent...."
+
+"Damn you to hell ... I thought we were going to settle this in the
+radical way?"
+
+"It's the only way out that I can see. I've stood this business till
+it's almost killing me."
+
+"Well, is that all?"
+
+"No ... somehow--how, I do not know, the _New York Journal_ has gotten
+hold of my wire ... it will be in all the papers to-night or to-morrow
+... so I advise you and Hildreth to disappear quietly somewhere, if you
+don't want to see the reporters,--who will all presently be on the way
+to the flat."
+
+"Damn you, Penton ... needn't tell _me_ about the news leaking out ...
+you've done it yourself ... now I want you to promise me only one thing,
+that you'll hold the reporters off for a couple of hours, till we have a
+good start."
+
+"I'll do my best," answered he, "but please believe me. How they got the
+contents of the telegram I do not know, but on my honour I did not give
+it out nor did I tell the reporters where you are."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth was so angry she could hardly speak.
+
+"This is a fine to-do," exclaimed Darrie, "Penton distinctly promised
+me--"
+
+"I'd like to get a good crack at him!" I boasted, at the same time
+enjoying the excitement.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth began packing her clothes in a large suitcase ... as we later
+found she cast all her clean clothes aside, and in her excitement
+included all her soiled linen and lingerie....
+
+We had our last meal together. I brought in a large bottle of white
+wine. All of us grew rather hilarious and made a merry joke of the
+adventure. We poked fun at Penton.
+
+We sallied forth at the front door, Darrie to go to the Martha
+Washington. "I don't want to be mixed up in the coming uproar and
+scandal," she exclaimed ... "so far, I'm clear of all blame, and I know
+only too well what the papers would insinuate."
+
+Hildreth and I took train for New Jersey ... two tickets for--anywhere
+... in our excited condition we ran off first to Elizabeth. We had with
+us exactly one hundred dollars, which I had borrowed of Darrie before we
+parted on our several ways.
+
+I registered for Hildreth and myself as "Mr. Arthur Mallory and wife,"
+in the register of an obscure hotel hear the noise and clatter of a
+hundred trains drawing continually out and in.
+
+It made me happy and important to sign her name on the register as
+something belonging to me.
+
+Once alone in the room, Hildreth, to my consternation, could talk of
+nothing else but Penton.
+
+"--to think that he would do such a thing to me, only to think of it!"
+she cried vehemently, again and again.
+
+"If he believes in freedom for men and women, why was all this
+necessary? the sordidness of the public clamour? the divorce court?...
+oh, my poor, dear, sweet, wild poet-boy, you're in for it! Don't you
+wish you were well out of all this and back in Kansas again?"
+
+"No; I am glad. As long as I am with you I don't care what happens. I
+love you, Hildreth!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the night she woke, screaming, from a nightmare. I could hardly stop
+her.
+
+"Hush, dearest ... darling ... sweetheart ... I am with you; everything
+is all right" ... then, as she kept it up, "for God's sake ... Hildreth,
+do be quiet ... you're all right ... the man you love is here, close by
+you ... no harm shall come to you."
+
+"Oh, Johnnie," clutching me, quivering, "I've just had such a horrible
+dream," sobbing as I took her tenderly in my arms....
+
+"There, there, darling!"
+
+She was quiet now.
+
+"In a few minutes we would have had the whole hotel breaking in at the
+door ... thinking I was killing you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She woke up again, and woke me up.
+
+"Johnnie, find me some ink and a pen. I'm going to write that cad a
+letter that will shrivel him up like acid."
+
+"Can't you wait till morning, Hildreth?" sleepily.
+
+"No ... I _must_ write it now."
+
+I dressed. I went down to the hotel writing-room and came back with pen
+and ink.
+
+She sat up in bed and wrote the letter. She then read it aloud to me.
+She was immensely pleased with her effort.
+
+With a final gesticulation of vindictive, feminine joy, she succeeded in
+spilling the whole bottle of ink on the white bed-spread.
+
+"Now you've done it."
+
+"We'll have to clear out early before the chambermaid comes in ...
+we're only staying here for one night and can't waste our money paying
+for the damage."
+
+In the morning I bought the papers.
+
+The _American_ had made a scoop. There it was, the story of the whole
+thing on the front page.
+
+      "PENTON BAXTER SUES FOR DIVORCE
+         --------------------------
+   NAMES VAGABOND-POET AS CO-RESPONDENT"
+
+There it stood, in big head-lines.
+
+The actuality stared us in the face. We belonged to each other now. It
+was no longer a summer idyll, but a practical reality.
+
+As we took the train for Long Branch we realised that we had plunged
+midmost into the action that would put all our theories to the test....
+
+I looked at my woman with a sidelong glance, as she sat beside me on the
+train seat.... She was so pretty, so frail, so feminine that I pitied
+her, while at the same time my heart swelled with tenderness for her,
+and with pride of possession. For she was mine now without dispute. She,
+for her part, spoke but little, except illogically to upbraid Penton
+Baxter, as if he had perpetrated an ill on two people thoroughly
+innocent.
+
+I was angry with him on other grounds ... he was not playing the radical
+game, but taking advantage of the rules of the conventional world.
+
+With a fugitive sense of pursuit, we hired a cabby to drive us to a
+summer boarding house at Long Branch ... where Hildreth and I rented a
+single large room for both of us....
+
+And there Hildreth immediately went into hysterics, and did nothing but
+weep. While I waited on her hand and foot, bringing up food to her
+because she was sensitive about the probability of people recognising
+her.
+
+We stayed there a week. Each day the papers were full of our mysterious
+disappearance ... reporters were combing the country to find us. Reports
+of our being in various places were sent in by enterprising local
+correspondents....
+
+Again we entrained ... for Sea Girt.
+
+An old cabman who drove a dilapidated rig hailed us with uplifted whip.
+
+"We are looking for a place to board."
+
+"I'll take you to a nice, quiet place, just suited to two home-loving
+folks like you," he replied, thinking he had paid us a compliment, and
+whipping up his ancient nag.
+
+Hildreth gave me a nudge and a merry look and it pleased me to see she
+still had her sense of humour left.
+
+That night, as I held her in my arms, "Don't let these little, trivial
+inconveniences and incidents--the petty persecutions we are undergoing,
+have any effect on our great love," I pleaded.
+
+"That's all very well, darling Johnnie, but where are we going to?"
+
+"We'll find a cottage somewhere ... a pretty little cottage within our
+means," I replied, visioning a vine-trellised place such as poets and
+their brides must live in.
+
+"Our money is giving out ... soon we'll have--to turn back to New York!"
+
+"If we do, that need not part us.... I'll get a job on some newspaper or
+magazine and take care of you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I called for my mail at the Sea Girt post office, sure of hearing
+from Darrie, anyhow,--who promised us she would keep us posted, I found
+no letter. And the man at the window was certain he had handed over
+several letters addressed to me to someone else who had called for them,
+giving my name as his.
+
+A wave of hot anger suffused my face. How stupid of me not to have
+noticed it before. Now I remembered the men who had followed us.
+
+Our mail was being intercepted. How was Baxter to procure his divorce
+without gaining evidence in just such a way?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One night I started on a long walk alone. I walked along the beach. In
+the dark I took off my clothes and plunged for a swim into the chilly
+surf ... a high sea was thundering in. I was caught in the undertow,
+swept off my feet, and dragged beyond by depth ... for a moment I was of
+a heart to let go, to permit myself to be drowned ... I was even
+intrigued, for the moment, by the thought of what the newspapers would
+say about my passing over in such a romantic way.
+
+But the will to live rose up in me. And I fought my way,--and it was a
+bitter fight,--back to shallow water. I flung myself prone on the beach,
+exhausted.
+
+When I reached our room again, I related my adventure to Hildreth.
+
+It was she who took care of me now. I lay all night in a high fever ...
+but I was so happy, for the woman of my heart sat close by me, holding
+my hand, speaking soft terms of endearment to me, tending to all my
+wants.
+
+This tenderness, this solicitude and companionship seemed for the first
+time better to me than the maddest transports of passion that swept us
+into one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning mail came a letter, general delivery, from Penton.... Now
+I was sure he was having our every step watched. A blind passion against
+him rose in me ... the little bounder!
+
+In the letter he asked me to meet him at the Sea Girt railway station at
+four o'clock. I made it by the time indicated, by a brisk walk.
+
+There he was, dropping off the train as it came to a stop. Another scene
+flashed through my mind, a visual remembrance of the day he had dropped
+off to visit me at Laurel.
+
+Then we had rushed toward each other, hands extended in warm,
+affectionate greeting ... now ... I slowly sauntered up to him.
+
+"Yes, Penton, what do you want; how much longer are you going to torture
+your wife?"
+
+"--yours now, Johnnie; mine no longer!" grimly.
+
+"If she were wholly mine, I'd knock you flat ... but you still have a
+sort of right in her that protects you from what I otherwise might do to
+you."
+
+"For heaven's sake, let's be calm."
+
+"Calm--when you say in your letter, 'you need not be afraid, I meditate
+no harm?'--do you mean to imply that, under any circumstance, I would be
+afraid of you?"
+
+"Johnnie, there is only one way to settle this ... I'm set on getting
+the complete evidence for a divorce ... exactly where is Hildreth now?"
+
+"None of your damned business ... all I can say is that she is somewhere
+near here ... and she's sick and hysterical through your persecutions
+... and if you don't call off your snooping detectives, by the Lord God,
+if I run into any of them, I'll try to kill them."
+
+"Johnnie, it's the best thing to deliver the legal evidence and have it
+over with. Let me accompany you to where Hildreth is, and--"
+
+"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.
+
+"Now, now, my dear boy," he replied very gently, "I am older than you
+say ... I am a very, very old man ... and I know life--"
+
+"But do you know the woman you speak of?"
+
+"I have met Mrs. Baxter casually with her husband several times." He
+stopped short. He paused, gave a gesture of acquiescence.
+
+"Oh, come, Mr. Gregory, you're right ... quite right ... I had no right
+whatever to speak to you as I have--
+
+"But please interpret it as my serious concern over your career as a
+poet ... it seems such a pity ... you had such a good start."
+
+"You mean?--" I began, and halted.
+
+"Precisely ... I mean that for the next two or three years all the
+reputable magazines will not dare consider even a masterpiece from your
+hands."
+
+"In other words, if Shelley were alive to-day and were the same
+Shelley, he would be presented with a like boycott?"
+
+"If his manner of living came out in the papers--yes."
+
+"And Francois Villon?"
+
+"Undoubtedly."
+
+"I'm in good company then, am I not?"
+
+"You should thank me for being frank with you."
+
+"I do thank you ... that explains why the atmosphere up at the office of
+the _National_ was as cold as the refrigerator-box of a meat car, when I
+was up there an hour ago ... but they were not as frank as you ... they
+acted like a company of undertakers officiating at my funeral."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was glad to find myself back in my little cottage, that same
+night--back in my little cottage, and in the arms of the woman who was
+everything to me, no matter if they said she spelled the ruination of my
+career.
+
+For any man, I held, and still hold, who lets a woman ruin his career,
+ought to have it ruined.
+
+I did not tell her of what Dr. Ward had told me. Why cause her
+unnecessary worry?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, the magazine world was not the only medium to present my
+literary wares to the public. There remained the book world, a less
+narrow and prejudiced one.
+
+Kennerley had written me that he waited eagerly the completion of my
+Biblical play.
+
+And Zueblin, of the now defunct _Twentieth Century_ had just sent me a
+twenty-five dollar check for a poem called _Lazarus Speaks_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I brought back with me from New York two books as a present for Hildreth
+... Mary Wollstonecraft's _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,_ and
+_The Life of Mary Wollestonecraft_ ... these were two books she had long
+desired. She was thoroughly pleased with her resemblance to the
+frontispiece picture of the celebrated woman radical, in the _Life_.
+
+"You possess all her vivacity, all her intelligence ... but you are
+beautiful where she was plain ... she is like a plainer sister of
+yours."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While in New York I had also paid a visit to the editor of one of the
+biggest sensational magazines in the city, and I had arranged with him,
+acting as Hildreth's agent, for a thousand dollars advance on her
+unfinished novel. The editor had dictated a letter in which he promised
+to deliver the thousand on receipt of two-thirds of the book....
+
+Hildreth kissed me again and again when I gave her the letter....
+
+"Johnnie, you really are wonderful ... and quite practical, after all."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And now, my darling Hildreth, we'll take this old world and shake it
+into new life, into the vital thing I have dreamed!" I boasted
+grandiloquently....
+
+"Here in this little sequestered dream-cottage of ours you and I will
+carry out, popularise, through novels, poems, plays, essays, and
+treatises, the noble work that Ellis, Key, and Rosa Von Mayerreder, and
+others, are doing in Europe ... and we ourselves will set the example of
+true love that fears nothing but the conventional legal slavery."
+
+"It will soon be very cold down here," commented Darrie, irrelevantly,
+"this is only a summer cottage, and they say--the old settlers--that we
+are to have a severe winter ... the frost fish are already beginning to
+come ashore."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was generally known, sub rosa, that Hildreth and I were living
+together. But, as long as she pretended it was not so, as long as I
+lived seemingly in another house, pretending, under another name, to be
+Mrs. Baxter's literary adviser, the hypocrisy of the world was
+satisfied.
+
+I was, in other words, following the accepted mode.
+
+It was a nasty little article by a fellow literary craftsman from the
+Pacific coast, that set me off, brought me to the full realisation that
+I was but playing the usual, conventional game,--that roused me to the
+determination that I must no longer sail under false colours.
+
+This writer retailed how, after a brief, disillusioning few weeks
+together, Hildreth had grown tired of the poverty and spareness of the
+living a poet was able to make for her ... of how I was lazy, impliedly
+dirty ... of how, up against realities, we had parted ... I had, he
+stated, in fact, deserted her, and was now on my way back to Kansas,
+riding the rods of freights, once more an unsavoury outcast, a knight of
+the road ... he ended with the implication, if I remember correctly,
+that the reception that awaited me in Kansas, would be, to say the
+least, problematical.
+
+Of course this story was made up out of whole cloth.
+
+'Gene Mallows afterward informed me that the big literary club in San
+Francisco that this hack belonged to had seriously considered
+disciplining him by expulsion for his unethical behaviour toward a
+fellow-writer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But I maintain that it was good that he penned the scurrilous article.
+For I had allowed happiness to lull my radical conscience asleep. It was
+now goaded awake. I held a conference with Hildreth.
+
+"There is now only one thing for me to ... to come right out with it
+that you and I are living here together in a free union, and that the
+love we bear each other not only justifies, but sanctifies our doing as
+we do--as no legal or ecclesiastical procedure could....
+
+"That here we are and here we intend to abide, on these principles--no
+matter what the rest of the world does or says or thinks."
+
+"I admit, Johnnie, that that would be the ideal way, but--" interrupted
+Darrie--
+
+"But nothing--I'm tired of sneaking around, hiding from grocers and
+butcher boys, when everybody knows--
+
+"And besides, Hildreth," turning to her, taking her in my arms, kissing
+her tenderly on the brow--"don't you see what it all means?
+
+"As long as I pretend not to be living with you I'm considered a sly dog
+that seduced his friend's wife and got away with it ... 'served him
+right, the husband, for being such a boob!' ... 'rather a clever chap,
+that Gregory, don't you know, not to be blamed much, eh?' ... 'only
+human, eh?' ...--'she's a deuced pretty little woman, they say!'
+
+"Can't you see the sly looks, the nudges they give each other, as they
+gossip in the clubs?"
+
+"Don't let your imagination get the better of you, please don't!" urged
+Darrie....
+
+"No," I went on, "I'm going to send right now for Jerome Miller, a
+newspaper lad I knew in Kansas, who's now in New York on a paper, and
+give him an interview that will set us right with the stupid world once
+and for all. Miller was a fellow student of mine at Laurel ... he's a
+fine, square chap who will give me a clean break ... was president of
+our Scoop Club."
+
+"Darling, darling, dearest," pleaded Hildreth, "I thought you had about
+enough of the newspapers ... you've seen how they've distorted all our
+ideals ... how our attempt to use them for propaganda has gone to smash
+... how they pervert ... the filth and abuse they heap upon pioneers of
+thought in any direction--why wake the wild beasts up again?"
+
+"What's the use believing in anything, if we don't stick up for what we
+believe?"
+
+"Oh, go ahead, dear, if you feel so strongly about it, but--" and her
+tiny, dark head drooped, "I'm a little wearied ... I want quiet and
+peace a little while longer ... I'm getting the worst of it--not you so
+much, or Penton.
+
+"I'm the woman in the case.
+
+"Remember the invitation the other night, from the Congregational
+minister--for tea? He invited you for tea, you remember, and left me
+out?"
+
+"--remember, too," I replied fondly, caressing her head, "how I didn't
+even deign to reply to the ---- ---- ---- ----!"
+
+"Sh!" putting her hand gently and affectionately over my mouth, "don't
+swear so ... very well, poke the wild beasts again!... but we'll only
+serve as sport for another Roman holiday for the newspapers."
+
+I wrote Miller to come down, that I had an exclusive interview for him.
+
+He arrived the very night of the day he received my letter.
+
+Darrie stepped out over to the Ronds', not to be herself brought into
+what she had so far managed to keep out of.
+
+Hildreth consumed the better part of two hours fixing herself up as
+women do when they want to make an impression....
+
+"Your friend from Kansas must see that you haven't made such a bad
+choice in picking me," she proclaimed, with that pretty droop of her
+mouth.
+
+"No, no! be a good boy, don't muss me up now!"
+
+She wore a plain, navy-blue skirt ... wore a white middy blouse with
+blue, flowing tie ... easy shoes that fitted snug to her pretty little
+feet ... her eyes never held such depths to them, her face never shone
+with such beauty before.
+
+I wore a brown sweater vest with pearl buttons ... corduroy trousers ...
+black oxfords ... a flowing tie....
+
+A large log fire welcomed my former Kansas friend.
+
+"Well, Johnnie, it's been a long time since I've seen you."
+
+"Jerome, let me introduce you to the only woman that ever lived, or
+shall live, for me ... Hildreth Baxter."
+
+As Hildreth gave Miller her hand, I could see that he liked her, and
+that he inwardly commented on my good taste and perhaps said to himself,
+"Well, Johnnie is not so crazy after all!"
+
+After I had given him the interview, he asked her a few questions, but
+she begged to be left out, that it was my interview.
+
+"Mr. Miller, you are a friend of Johnnie's ... I have often heard him
+speak highly of you; can't you dissuade him from having this interview
+printed ... no matter if you have been sent by your paper all the way
+down here for it?"
+
+Jerome liked what Hildreth had said, admired her for her common sense.
+He offered to return to the city, and risk his job by stating that he
+had been hoaxed.
+
+"I will leave you to argue it out with him, Mr. Miller." And Hildreth
+excused herself and went off down the path to the Ronds' too.
+
+"Johnnie," my friend urged, putting his hand on my shoulder, "your
+little lady has a lot of sense ... it _will_ kick up a hell of a row ...
+it's true what you say about them rather approving of you now, some of
+them, considering you a sly dog and so forth.... Yes, I'm sorry to say,
+what you're doing, much of the world is doing most of the time."
+
+"I beg your pardon, Jerome, but there you've made my point ... do you
+think I want a sneaking, clandestine thing kept up between me and the
+woman I love?"
+
+"Then why not stay apart till the divorce is granted, then marry her
+like a regular fellow?"
+
+"Damn it, Jerome, you don't understand, you don't get what we radicals
+are driving at...."
+
+"I'll take a chance with my job and quash this interview--that's how
+much I like you, Johnnie."
+
+"Oh, I know you mean well enough ... most of you boys have treated me
+rather well, according to your lights ... it's the damned lead-writers
+and re-writers and editorial writers--they're the ones that do the
+damage."
+
+"You want me to go ahead then?"
+
+"Yes, that is the only way."
+
+"It is a big story, a real scoop." Miller was again the newspaper man
+who had scored a beat on rival newspapers....
+
+"Can't you stay over night, Jerome? We can make room."
+
+"I must catch the next train back ... I'm off now ... there's the taxi I
+arranged to have come and take me ... it's out there now ... good-bye,
+Johnny, and God help you and your little girl."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth came in soon after Miller's departure, looking like a
+fresh-faced girl of twelve.
+
+"Did--did your friend think I was good-looking?"
+
+"Yes, I am sure he thoroughly approved of you."
+
+"To-morrow another Roman holiday begins."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The result of that interview was worse than I could have surmised. All
+the batteries opened fire again. The Kansas papers called me "the
+shameless tramp" ... reporters spilled from autos and rigs all over the
+front stoop. After giving a few more interviews in the mad hope that
+this time they would get it straight, I saw that the harvest was even
+greater abuse and defamation ... and, as Hildreth had predicted, she
+came in for more than her share of the moral indignation of people who
+sold that precious ware at so much a line, or were paid salaries for
+such work....
+
+We practically deserted our house so the reporters could not find us....
+
+Many of the reporters never came near the house. Instead, lurid stories
+were concocted in the back rooms of nearby roadhouses. And, failing to
+find us at home, interviews were faked so badly that they verged on the
+burlesque ... where not vulgar, they were vicious ... words were slipped
+in that implied things which, expressed clearly, had furnished ample
+grounds for libel.
+
+Hildreth and I were pictured as living on frost fish almost entirely;
+the fish that run along the ocean shore, and, growing numb with the cold
+of autumn, are tossed up on the sand by the waves....
+
+I was depicted as strident-voiced ... belligerent ... waving my arms
+wildly. It was said that, full of threats, I had taken a shotgun
+menacingly from a rack ... that a vicious bull dog lay between my feet,
+growling ... that I went, sockless, in sandals ... had long, flowing,
+uncombed hair....
+
+Once a party of three reporters, from a big metropolitan paper,--two men
+and a woman, after stopping at a nearby road house till they were well
+lit,--drove about in a livery rig till they finally located us at the
+house of Mrs. Rond....
+
+All the old nonsense was re-written ... things we had never said or even
+had in our thought ... vulgarities alien to Hildreth's mouth or mine....
+
+The final insinuation--a sly touching on the fact that the Rond family
+was on intimate terms with me, and that the young daughters were
+attractive-looking, and seemed to favour the ideals I expressed with
+murmurs of approval ... thus the story afterward appeared....
+
+Mrs. Rond, after a peculiarly impertinent question of the woman member
+of the party, realised by this time that the three reporters were more
+than a little tipsy, and ordered these guardians of the public morality
+out of the house....
+
+In the first place, they had wormed admittance through a fraud to
+Hildreth and me ... the woman falsely pretended that she was a friend of
+Hildreth's mother ... a great stroke of journalistic enterprise.
+
+Mrs. Rond's rebuke was so sharply worded that it got through even their
+thick skins....
+
+I must say, though, that the behaviour of these three was not
+characteristic ... generally the newspaper men and women were most
+considerate and courteous ... even when they afterward wrote unpleasant
+articles about us. And often I have had them blue-pencil wild statements
+I had made, which, on second thought, I wished withdrawn ... and during
+all the uproar I never had a reporter break his word, once given.
+
+"Say, Mr. Gregory, that's great stuff, do let us keep that in the
+interview."
+
+"Please, boys, draw your pencil through that ... it doesn't sound the
+way I meant it."
+
+"Oh, all right"--a sigh--"but it's a shame to leave it out."
+
+The last and final outrage--perpetrated by the papers by orders from
+above, I am sure....
+
+Even the second uproar had died down.
+
+Always the "natives" in West Grove and round about, our neighbours,
+behaved considerately, let us alone ... we were greeted politely
+wherever we went....
+
+But now, Mrs. Rond informed me, strange men were appearing on the street
+corners, conducting a regular soapbox campaign against us....
+
+Some of them were seen to get on and off trains going to and coming from
+New York....
+
+Goaded and spurred by these mysterious outsiders, the village people
+began to act aloof, and the more ignorant of them sullen toward us ...
+but as yet it was only in the air, nothing concrete to lay hold of.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Suydam had run away with her plumber ... the interviews she gave
+out showed that it was our case mainly that had impelled her to launch
+forth in imitation ...
+
+Others, in a wave of sex-radicalism, were running off together all about
+the country ...
+
+But it was Mrs. Suydam's case that interested me and Hildreth most ...
+she was a dainty, pretty little slight thing, as Hildreth was--I could
+judge by her pictures....
+
+"Hildreth," I urged, "let's drop Mrs. Suydam a note encouraging her ...
+she's probably without a friend in the world, she and her man ...
+they're trying to oust her from her flat ... she's being hounded about."
+
+"My God, Johnnie dear, let's _don't!_ ... they'll only give our letter
+to the papers ... let's let well enough alone once more ... the grocer
+boy passed me in the street to-day and didn't tip his hat to me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was sitting at Mrs. Rond's tea-table having afternoon tea with her.
+She had sent one of her girls over to the cottage to tell me she wished
+to see me "alone" ... "on a matter of great importance."
+
+The cats, who had trailed her eldest daughter, Editha, across to our
+place, followed us back again with sailing tails in the air.
+
+Mrs. Rond poured me a cup of strong tea.
+
+"Drink that first, then I'll give you a little information that won't
+be so very agreeable to you."
+
+The glimmer of satiric yet benevolent humour that was never long absent
+from her eyes, lightened there again, as she rolled and lit a "Plowboy."
+
+"Have you noticed a change in the weather? A storm is blowing up. I'm
+speaking figuratively ... I might as well out with it, Johnnie,--there's
+a report, growing in strength, that a mob of townspeople is scheduled to
+come your way to-night, some time, and treat you to a serenade of
+protest and the traditional yokel hospitality of mobs ... a coat of tar
+and feathers and a ride on a rail beyond the town limits."
+
+"So it's come to that, has it?"
+
+"Johnnie, it isn't the townsfolk that started it ... of that I am
+certain ... left alone, they would still have been content to mind their
+business, and accept you and Hildreth on a friendly basis...."
+
+She brought up the story of the strange men haranguing from street
+corners again....
+
+"It's the New York newspapers, or one or two of the most sensational of
+them, that are back of this new phase."
+
+"You mean, Mrs. Rond, that they would dare go so far as to instigate an
+attack on me and Hildreth ... with possibly fatal results?"
+
+"Of course they would ... they need more news ... they want something
+more to happen ... to have all this uproar end tamely in happy,
+permanent love--that's what they couldn't endure....
+
+"Well," she resumed after a pause, "what are you going to do? You're not
+afraid, are you?"
+
+"To tell the truth I am, very much afraid."
+
+"You and Hildreth and Darrie would best take the three o'clock train
+back to New York then."
+
+"I haven't the least intention of doing that."
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"--just let them come."
+
+"You won't--fight?"
+
+"As long as I'm alive."
+
+"You just said you were afraid."
+
+"Where a principle is considered, one can be afraid and still stick by
+one's guns."
+
+"You're a real man, John Gregory, as well as a real poet, and I'm going
+to help you ... if it was the townspeople alone I would hesitate
+advising you ... but it's dirty, hired outsiders who are back of this
+feeling. Here!" and she stepped over to the mantel and brought a
+six-shooter to me and laid it in my hand, "can you shoot?"
+
+"A little, but not very well."
+
+"It's loaded already ... here is a pocketful of extra bullets."
+
+She filled my coat pocket till it sagged heavily. I slipped the gun in
+my hip pocket.
+
+"You're really going to stand them off if they come?"
+
+"As long as no one tries to break into my house I will lie quiet ... the
+minute someone tries to break in, I'll shoot, I'll shoot to kill, and
+I'll kill as many as I can before they take me. I'll admit I'm
+frightened, but I have principles of freedom and radical right, and I'll
+die for them if necessary."
+
+Mrs. Rond put her hand on my shoulder like a man.
+
+"You have the makings of a fine fanatic in you ... in the early
+Christian era you would have been a church martyr."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I held immediate consultation with Darrie and Hildreth and they were
+both scared blue ... but they were game, too.
+
+Darrie, however, unfolded a principle of strategy which I put into
+immediate effect ... she advised me to try a bluff first.
+
+When I walked downtown within the hour, to obtain the New York papers,
+there was no doubt, by the even more sullen attitude of the inhabitants
+that I passed on the street, that something serious was a-foot....
+
+I sauntered up to the news stand, took my _Times_ ... hesitated, and
+then tried the bluff Darrie had suggested:
+
+"Jim," I began, to the newsdealer, who had been enough my friend for us
+to speak to each other by our first names, "Jim, I hear the boys are
+planning a little party up my way to-night!"
+
+"Not as I've heard of, Johnnie," Jim answered, with sly evasion, and I
+caught him sending a furtive wink to a man I'd never seen in town
+before.
+
+"Now, Jim, there's no use trying to fool me. I'm _on_!"
+
+The newspaper stand was, I knew, the centre for the town's
+dissemination of gossip. I knew what I said would sweep everywhere the
+moment I turned my back.
+
+"As I said," I continued, "I'm on!" And I looked about and spoke in a
+loud voice, while inwardly quaking, "Yes, I know all about it, and I
+want to drop just this one hint ... tell the boys they can come. Tell
+them they'll be welcome ... So far I've had no trouble here ...
+everybody has been right decent with me," affecting a Western,
+colloquial drawl, "and I've tried to treat everybody, for my part, like
+a gentleman,--ain't that true?"
+
+"That's true, Mr. Gregory" (it was suddenly "Mr. Gregory" now, not
+"Johnnie"). "As I was saying just the other day, there's lots worse in
+the world than Mr. Gregory that ain't found out."
+
+"I want to leave this message with you, Jim. I'm from the West. I'm a
+good shot. I've got a six-shooter ready for business up at the cottage.
+I've got a lot of extra bullets, too. As I've said, I ain't the kind
+that looks for trouble, but when anybody goes out of their way--Well, as
+I said before, as soon as the boys begin getting rough--I'll begin to
+shoot ... I'll shoot to kill, and I'll kill everybody I can get, till
+someone gets me."
+
+"Yes, Mr. Gregory!"
+
+"Mind you, Jim, I've always considered you as my friend. I mean what I
+say. I'm a householder. I'm in the right ... if the law wants me that's
+another matter ... but no group of private citizens--"
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Gregory."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I walked rapidly back to the cottage. I was thinking as rapidly as I
+walked. For the space of a full minute I thought of packing off
+ignominiously with my little household.
+
+But before I stepped in at the door something murky had cleared away
+inside me.
+
+"Oh, Hildreth! Darrie!"
+
+The women came dragging forward. But with them, too, it was a passing
+mood.
+
+My indignation at the personal outrage of the impending mob incited me
+as them ... till I think not one of the three of us would have stepped
+aside from the path of a herd of stampeding elephants.
+
+"The yokels," and Darrie's nostrils flared, her blue blood showing, "to
+dare even think of such an action, against their betters!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We lit a roaring log fire. We sat reading aloud from Shelley. As the
+hours drew by ... eight ... nine ... ten ... eleven ... there is no
+doubt that our nerves grew to a very fine edge....
+
+And at twelve o'clock--
+
+Far off, at a respectful distance, a carol of rough, humorous voices
+sang the song, "_Happily Married_"!
+
+"H-a-double-p-y," etc.
+
+And we knew that my bluff had worked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day we went through a let-down.
+
+Hildreth was quite nerve-shaken, and so was Darrie.
+
+But I strutted about with my chest out, the cock of the walk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But, nevertheless, and despite their bravery and the fiasco of the mob's
+attack, the hearts seemed to have left the bodies of both "my" women.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The cold weather that Darrie and the old settlers had predicted was now
+descending on the countryside....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One morning Hildreth timidly and haltingly proposed returning to her
+mother's flat in New York....
+
+I could stay and finish my play and, having disposed of it, come
+likewise to the city, and rent a flat, and she would come and live with
+me again. I am sure she was sincere in this. Or I could come to New
+York, rent a furnished room somewhere, and she would be with me daily,
+as now....
+
+Darrie seconded Hildreth's proposal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And yet my heart broke as Hildreth rode off in the carriage that came
+for her. I kissed her, and I kissed her ... despite the stern, unbending
+figure of the aged, moral coachman in the seat.
+
+Then, after she had started off, I pursued the carriage, overtook it by
+a short cut, cried out that I had still something I had forgotten to
+give her ... it was more kisses ... and I kissed and kissed her again
+and again.. and we both wept, with aching hearts.
+
+Then the moral coachman unbent.
+
+"--beg pardon," he ventured, "but I'm sorry for you two children ... oh,
+yes, I know all about you ... everybody knows ... and I wish you good
+luck."
+
+Darrie stayed over for the night, after Hildreth left, in order to see
+to packing the latter's clothes in her trunk ... Hildreth had been too
+upset to tend to the packing....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day Darrie left, too.
+
+"You have no more need of your chaperon," she laughed, a tear glinting
+in her eye....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So now I was left utterly alone....
+
+And a hellish winter descended upon the coast ... bitter, blowing,
+frosty winds that ate into the very bone and made a fellow curse God as
+he leaned obliquely against them.
+
+I learned how little a summer cottage was worth--in winter.
+
+Mrs. Rond lent me a huge-bellied stove, the fireplace no longer proving
+of comfort.
+
+But though I kept the stove so hot that it glowed red, I still had to
+hug it close, my overcoat on, and a pair of huge, woollen socks that I'd
+bought at the general store down in West Grove.
+
+But, despite the intense cold, I worked and worked ... my play, _Judas_
+was nearing completion ... its publication would mean the beginning of
+my life as a man of letters, my "coming out" in the literary world.
+
+I ate my food from open cans, not taking the trouble to cook.
+
+At night (I had pulled my bed out close to the stove) I heaped all the
+blankets in the house over me, and still shivered ... I lived on the
+constant stimulus of huge draughts of coffee....
+
+"Only a little while longer ... only a few days more ... and the play
+will then be finished ... and it will be published. And it will be
+produced.
+
+"Then _the woman_, my first and only woman, she will be with me again
+forever ... I'll take her to Italy, away from all the mess that has
+cluttered about our love for each other."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day, in an effort to keep the house warm--the one room I confined
+myself to, rather,--I stoked the stove so hot that the stovepipe grew
+red to the place where it went through the roof into the attic....
+
+My mind, at the time, was in far-off Galilee. I was on the last scene of
+the last act of my play ... the disciples, after the crucifixion, were
+gathered in the upper room again, waiting for the resurrected Christ to
+appear to take the seat left vacant for Him....
+
+I looked up from the page over which my frosty fingers crawled....
+
+The boards were smoking faintly. If I didn't act quickly the house would
+catch fire ... I laughed at the thought of the curious climax it would
+present to the world; I imagined myself among the embers.
+
+I must lessen the heat in the stove. I ran and brought in a bucket of
+water. I pried open the red-hot door of the stove with a stick that
+almost caught flame as I pried.
+
+With a backward withdrawal, a forward heave, I shot the contents of the
+pail into the stove....
+
+There followed a detonation like a siege gun.
+
+The stove-lid shot so close to my head it was no joke ... it took out
+the whole window-sash and lit in the outside snow. The stove itself,
+balanced on bricks under its four feet, slumped sidewise, fortunately
+did not collapse to the floor ... the stovepipe fell, but the wire that
+held it up at the bend also prevented it from touching the carpet ...
+the room was instantly full of suffocating soot and smoke.
+
+I crawled forth like a scared animal ... found myself in the kitchen. In
+the mirror hanging there I looked like a Senegalese.
+
+Then, finding myself unhurt, I laughed and laughed at myself, at the
+grotesqueness and irony of life, at everything ... but mostly at myself.
+
+I righted the stove as best I could, brought the door in again from
+where it had bitten to the bottom of the snow drift, like an angry
+animal. It was still uncomfortably hot ... shifting it from hand to hand
+I managed to manoeuvre it back to a slant position on its hinges....
+
+Before I could light another and more moderate fire, unexpectedly the
+inspiration for the completion of the last scene of _Judas_--the
+inspiration for which I had been waiting and hoping--rode in on me like
+a wave....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Christ, in the spirit, unseen, comes to his waiting disciples.
+
+_Thomas_. Someone has flung open the door. The wind has blown out the
+candles.
+
+_Andrew_. Nay, I sit next the door. 'Tis closed!
+
+_John_. He has risen. He is even now among us.
+
+_Thomas_. Someone sits in the chair. I feel a presence by my side.
+
+_Peter_. Brethren, 'tis the Comforter of which He spake! [_A misty light
+fills the room_.]
+
+_John_. Ah, 'tis He! 'tis He! He is with us. He has not forsaken us.
+Verily, He has risen from the dead into a larger life than ever! Dear
+Lord, Beloved Shepherd of Souls, is it Thou?
+
+_Thomas_. I believe, I believe! It is past speech! Thy Kingdom comes as
+I dreamed, but dared not believe!
+
+
+_John_. He lives, He lives--the very Son of God!
+
+  Behold the Kingdom that He promised us;
+  'Tis no vain dream, 'tis everlasting truth!
+  He shall bind all the nations into one,
+  The love of him shall flood the world!
+  He shall conquer with love and gentleness, and not with the sword.
+  He shall live again in every heart that loves its fellow men.
+  Peace he will plant where discord grew before.
+  He will save and heal the souls of men forever and forever.
+  Ah, dear Master, forgive us, we beseech Thee,
+  For deeming Thou hadst ever died.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so, having nearly burnt a house down, and perhaps myself with it, I
+had written "finis" to my four-act play called _Judas_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hildreth and I had written faithfully to each other twice a day ... the
+absurd, foolish, improper letters that lovers exchange ... I wrote most
+of my letters in the cave-language that we had invented between us....
+
+And we marked all the interspaces with secret symbols that meant
+intimate caresses ... kisses ... everything....
+
+The play brought to a successful end, I realised that for one day no
+letters had come from Hildreth. And the next none came ... and the
+next....
+
+I besieged the post office five and six times a day in a panic, till the
+postmaster first pitied me, then grew a bit put out....
+
+A week, and not a single letter from the woman I loved....
+
+The day before, Mrs. Suydam and her plumber affinity, for whom I felt
+myself and Hildreth and Penton largely responsible, in the example we
+had set--the day before these two young people had committed suicide.
+
+As I walked about the cottage, alone, I had the uncanny feeling that the
+place was haunted ... that maybe the ghosts of these two poor children
+who had imitated us were down there haunting me ... why had not Hildreth
+and I written that joint letter to them as I had suggested!
+
+--only a little thing, but it might have given them courage to go
+on!....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was at the long-distance phone.
+
+"Hildreth!" I cried, hearing her dear voice....
+
+"Oh, how good, how sweet, my love, my life, it is to hear your voice
+again ... tell me you still love me!"
+
+"Hush, Johnnie, hush!" answered a far-away, strange voice ... "I'm
+writing you a long letter ... somebody might be listening in."
+
+"Did you see in the paper about Mrs. Suydam?"
+
+"Yes, it was a terrible thing."
+
+"--if we had only written to them!"
+
+"--that was what I thought!"
+
+"Shall I come to the city now? My book is finished. I'm a real author
+now."
+
+"The book is finished? That's fine, Johnnie ... but don't come to the
+city now ... wait my letter."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the bulky letter came, the roads rang like iron to my step. I
+wouldn't allow myself to read it in the post office. I hugged the luxury
+of the idea of reading it by the fire, slowly. I kissed the still
+unopened envelope many times on the way home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I broke the letter open ... it fell out of my hands as if a paralysis
+had smitten me....
+
+No, no, I would not believe it ... it could not be true ... in so short
+a time ... with hands that shook as with palsy I plucked it up from the
+chilly, draughty floor again....
+
+"_Another man_!"
+
+She had met, was in love with, another man!
+
+Oh, incredible! incredible! I moaned in agony. I rocked like an old
+woman rocking her body in grief.
+
+Now was my time to end it all!
+
+Damn all marriage! Damn all free love! God damn to hell all women!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I thought of many ways of committing suicide. But I only _thought_ of
+them.
+
+I flung out into the night, meaning to go and tell Mrs. Rond of the
+incredible doom that had fallen upon me, the unspeakable betrayal.
+
+"Poor Penton!" I cried. "Poor Penton!"
+
+At last I sympathised fully with him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ashamed, in my slowly gathering new man's pride, I did not go in to see
+Mrs. Rond. Instead, I drove past her house with that curious, bent-kneed
+walk of mine,--and I walked and walked, not heeding the cold, till the
+ocean shouldered, phosphorescent, in the enormous night toward me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Home again, I slept like a drunkard. It was broad day when I woke.
+
+I had dreamed deliciously all night of Hildreth ... was strangely not
+unsatisfied--when I woke again to the hell of the reality her letter had
+plunged me into.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Rond ... of course I finally took her into my confidence, and told
+her the entire story....
+
+"Not to speak in disparagement of Hildreth, I knew it all along, Johnnie
+... knew that this would be the result ... but come, come, you have
+bigger things in you ... Penton Baxter will win his divorce sooner or
+later. Hildreth has another man, poor little girl! You have all that God
+means you to have at present: _Your first book_!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Tramping on Life, by Harry Kemp
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