"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.
* * * * *