Dick and I with Kenneth, caught an 11:30 train for Croton. We lunched
with Crystal Eastman and her husband, Walter Fuller, in a roadside
cottage surrounded by roses. It was real country and, luxuriantly
green, with the fresh immaturity of impending summer. In the orchard on
the steep grassy hill behind the house the children climbed a cherry
tree, and Dick brought me greenleafed branches hanging with ripe sweet
cherries. After lunch we walked up the road to see the view from the
top of the hill. There is a sort of Colony at Croton, and every other
house is inhabited by someone one knows, or who knows the other. All
work-worn journalists, artists and Bohemians generally, who come there
with their children for a rest. The houses have no gardens, the grass
grows long and the rose bushes are weed tangled. Now and then a bunch
of peonies survives. The cottages have almost an abandoned look, for
the town toilers are too weary to work in their gardens when they get
there. Towards the hill summit I noticed a wooden veranda’d cottage,
looking rather neglected and lonely, the ground sloped down to a stream
where some yellow and some purple iris bloomed amid the waste. On the
post box at the gate were inscribed the two names: Reed, Bryant, and
sure enough it was the summer cottage of Jack Reed and his wife. My
thoughts shot straight across to Moscow, and to the grave under the
Kremlin wall. At the top of the hill we lay down in the long grass
under the shadow of a giant tree, and felt like insects, with the
butter-cups so much higher than ourselves, and the tall seed grasses
like slender trees above our heads. Dick, who was unrestful, and
looking for work, built a wall of loose stones between us, “to separate
us,” he said, and that accomplished he proceeded to pull down a post
and chain and dig up another. In my half somnolent state I was aware
of much hammering and cracking and splitting but took no notice. After
awhile Dick came running to me, and in some trepidation asked anxiously
if he were likely to be put in prison.
“What on earth for?” I asked.
“Because I’ve been destroying the man’s property,” he said.
“What man?” I asked.
“The man whom this place belongs to.”
“Be happy,” I advised him; “be happy and enjoy whatever the work is
you have undertaken even if it’s the destruction of the other fellow’s
property.” And so Dick went back, and the sounds of hammering were
mingled with a love song he’d learned from the gramaphone and no man
disturbed our peace.
Returning whence we came, after a time, we sauntered into the garden
of Mr. and Mrs. Boardman Robinson, there on a slope, overlooking the
tennis court and the wonderful distant view of the Hudson; a large
party eventually foregathered. Quite apart from the fact that it was
pleasant, conditions made it extremely attractive. It was as though
Greenwich Village in summer array had been dumped down with almost
deliberate pageantry upon the grass. There were men in open-necked
shirts, and there was one in a green sweater, another in a butcher
blouse shirt and corduroy trousers like a French _ouvrier_. Women
in yellow, and orange, children in royal blue, or bare-armed and
bare-legged in bathing suits; lovely splotches of color grouped among
the tree stems. Boardman Robinson, looking like a primitive man, with
his red unkempt beard, bushy eyebrows and hair standing on end, lay on
his stomach in the grass listening intently to Walter Fuller’s little
sister, who sang old English folk songs to us, and sang them gracefully
without any self-consciousness. Floyd Dell, the author of “Moon-Calf,”
was there, and a great many people I didn’t know. And all the children
were good (by a strange coincidence there was not a girl-child among
them...!) and all the people were happy. One or two mothers asked me
(and I looked at them twice to see if they were serious) when in my
opinion conditions in Russian would be sufficiently adjusted to enable
them to take their children there for education.
That evening, about 8:15, the train disgorged us in New York, and Dick,
looking truly proletarian, went triumphantly two hours late to bed.