"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."
* * * * *