"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....