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....