Peace was patched. We then sat together, under the chequered shade of
the big tree which towered over our table ... Baxter waxed as eloquent
as an angel ... the wonderful, absurd, little man.
Daniel came romping out for breakfast.
* * * * *
Penton reached for the morning's mail. He climbed into the hammock and
read, with all the joy of a boy, the huge bunch of press clippings about
himself, his activities, his work ... a daily procedure of his, I was to
learn. He chuckled, joked, was immensely pleased ... handed me various
items to read, or read choice bits aloud to all of us.
After all, though I pretended to criticise, to myself ... yet, in my
heart, I liked his frank rejoicing in his fame, his notoriety, and only
envied him his ability to do so.
* * * * *
I returned to my tent to work, as I had planned to do each morning, on
my play _Judas_. The dialogue would not come to me ... I laid it aside
and instead was inspired to set down instantly the blank verse poem to
the play:--
"A noise of archery and wielded swords
All night rang through his dreams. When risen morn
Let down her rosy feet on Galilee
Blue-vistaed, on the house-top Judas woke:
Desire of battle brooded in his breast
Although the day was hung with sapphire peace,
And to his inner eye battalions bright
Of seraphim, fledged with celestial mail,
Came marching up the wide-flung ways of dawn
To usher in the triumph-day of Christ....
But sun on sun departed, moon on moon,
And still the Master lingered by the way,
Iscariot deemed, dusked in mortality
And darkened in the God by flesh of man.
For Judas a material kingdom saw
And not a realm of immaterial gold,
A city of renewed Jerusalem
And not that New Jerusalem, diamond-paved
With love and sapphire-walled with brotherhood,
Which He, the Master, wrestled to make plain
With thews of parable and simile--
So ''tis the flesh that clogs him,' Judas thought
(A simple, earnest man, he loved him well
And slew him with great friendship in the end);
'Yea, if he chose to say the word of power,
The seraphim and cherubim, invoked,
Would wheel in dazzling squadrons down the sky
And for the hosts of Israel move in war
As in those holy battles waged of yore'....
* * * * *
"Ah, all the world now knows Gethsemane,
But few the love of that betraying kiss!"
* * * * *
I did not have to be very long at Eden to learn that the community was
divided into two parties: the more conservative, rooted element whom
success was making more and more conservative,--and the genuinely
radical crowd. The anarchist, Jones, led the latter group, a very small
one.
As far as I could see, this anarchist-shoemaker held the right. On my
third day in Eden my interest in the community life about me led me to
inquire my way to the place where Jones lived ... a shack built
practically in its entirety of old dry goods boxes ... a two-room affair
with a sort of enlarged dog-kennel adjunct that stood out nearer the
road--Jones's workshop.
The man looked like the philosopher he was--the anarchist-philosopher,
as the newspapers were to dub him ... as he sat there before his last,
hammering away at the shoe he was heeling, not stopping the motions of
his hands, while he put that pair aside, to sew at another pair, while
he discoursed at large with me over men and affairs.
"What is all this trouble I'm hearing about?" I asked him.
"Trouble?--same old thing: Alfred Grahame, when he founded, started,
this colony, was a true idealist. But success has turned his head,
worsened him, since,--as it has done with many a good man before. Now he
goes about the country lecturing, on Shakespeare, God, the Devil, or
anything else that he knows nothing about....
"But it isn't that that I object to ... it is that he's allowing the
original object of this colony, and of the Single Tax Idea, to become
gradually perverted here. We're becoming nothing but a summer resort for
the aesthetic quasi-respectables ... these folk are squeezing us poor,
honest radicals out, by making the leases prohibitive in price and
condition."
He stopped speaking, while he picked up another pair of shoes, examined
them, chose one, and began sewing a patch on it....
He rose, with his leathern apron on, and saw me out....
"--glad you came to see old Jones ... you'll see and hear a lot more of
me, the next week or so!" and he smiled genially, prophetically.
He looked like Socrates as he stood there ... jovially homely,
round-faced ... head as bald as ivory ... red, bushy eyebrows that were
so heavy he shrugged them....
"I'm just beginning the fight (would you actually believe it) for free
speech here ... it takes a radical community, you know, to teach the
conservatives how to suppress freedom....
"You must come around to the big barn Friday night, after the circus."
"--the circus?"
"Oh, we have a circus of our own every summer about this time ... we
represent the animals ourselves ... some of us don't need to make up
much, neither, if we only knew it," he roared.
"After the imitation circus, the real circus will begin. I have
compelled the announcement of a general meeting to discuss my
grievances, and that of others, who are not game enough to speak for
themselves."
* * * * *
I found nobody but Hildreth--Mrs. Baxter--at home, when I returned. She
was lying back in the hammock where Penton lounged to read his news
clippings ... near the outdoor table ... dressed easily in her bloomers
and white middy blouse with the blue bow tie ... her great, brown eyes,
with big jet lashes, drooping langourously over her healthy, rounded
cheeks ... her head of rich, dark hair touseled attractively. She was
reading a book. I caught the white gleam of one of her pretty legs where
the elastic on one side of her bloomers had slipped up.
Alone with her, a touch of my old almost paralytic shyness returned ...
but the pathway to my tent lay so near her hammock I would almost brush
against its side in passing....
She looked up. She gazed at me indefinitely, as if coming back from a
far dream to reality.
"Oh, Johnnie Gregory! You?" fingering her hair with flexible fingers
like a violinist trying his instrument.
"Yes!" I stopped abruptly and flushed.
"Did Jones like you?"
"I think he did."
"Jones is an eccentric ... but nine-tenths of the time he is right in
his contentions ... his moral indignations ... it is his spirit of no
compromise that defeats him."
With that she reached out one hand to me, with that pretty droop of the
left corner of her mouth, that already had begun to fascinate me....
"Help me up ... a hammock's a nice place to be in, but an awkward thing
to get out of."