But Penton came down the front porch, stood in my path.
"Johnnie, a last warning."
"I want none of your last warnings."
"Are you going to Hildreth?"
"I'm tired of being a liar. I've never lied so much in my life ... yes,
I'm going to Hildreth ... and I'm going to persuade her to live with me,
and defy the whole damned world--the world of fake radicals that talk
about divorces when the shoe pinches them, as well as the world of
conservatives," I announced harshly.
"I've done all I could!" he responded wearily, "I see you won't come to
your senses--wait a minute!" and he turned on his heel. He had asked me
to wait with such solemnity that I stuck still in my tracks, waiting.
He disappeared into the big house, to re-emerge with, of all things,
_the coffee percolator_!
"Here!" he exclaimed, holding out the object to me ceremoniously and
seriously, "you can take this to your goddess, this poison-machine, and
lay it on her altar. Tell her I offered this to you. Tell her that it is
a symbol of her never coming back here again."
Here was where I too lacked a sense of humour. I struck the coffee
percolator out of his hands. I stalked off.
* * * * *
On the way to New York I built the full dream of what Hildreth and I
were to effect for the world--a practical example, in our life as we
lived it together, of the rightness of free love....
We would test it out, would rent a cottage somewhere, preferably on the
Jersey coast near the sea shore ... autumn was coming on, and there
would be lovely, crystal-clear weather ... and the scent of pines in the
good air.
* * * * *
Perhaps Penton, Hildreth and I could all three join in amicable accord,
over the solution of our difficulty, along radical and idealistic lines.
* * * * *
I hurried to the address given me by Hildreth. She was not in, but her
mother was ... a plump, rather good looking, fashionably dressed woman.
Evidently the mother did not know of the relationship between me and her
daughter.
"So you are the poet Hildreth has told me about?" after we had
discoursed for upwards of an hour--
"I can easily see how Hildreth has grown so fond of you," and she patted
me on the head as if I were a schoolboy, in motherly fashion.
* * * * *
"Mother's rather stupid and old-fashioned ... there'd be no use trying
to explain the situation to her. The best thing we can do is to persuade
her that Daniel needs her, down in Eden ... that will remove her from
the flat, so we can have it all to ourselves for a few days, in order to
plan what is to be done next."
Next morning Mrs. Deuell, Hildreth's mother, as innocent as a new-born
lamb as to what was up, permitted herself to be shipped off to Eden, to
take care of Daniel.
* * * * *
Instead of planning, however, and marshalling our resources, Hildreth
and I abandoned ourselves to the mutual happiness and endearments of two
love-drunk, emotion-crazed beings on a honeymoon....
* * * * *
The bell rang. In walked Darrie.
"Well, Darrie!" and Hildreth embraced her friend. And I was glad to see
her, too. I knew that, in spite of the high pressure we had lived under
during the past summer, Darrie was trying hard to be just, to be friend
to all of us....
She laughed at the disorder of the place ... dishes unwashed ... food
scattered about on the table....
"What a pair of love-birds you two are."
"And has Penton accepted the situation?"
"I came up to tell you that he has ... it has made him quite sick,
though!"
"Poor Mubby!" Hildreth ejaculated.
"--but he has sent me to tell you that you can go away together wherever
you please, that he won't molest you in the least."
"It's too incredible!" cried Hildreth, almost disappointed, "you don't
know him ... he's changed his mind, I am sure, since you left."
"He said he would follow me by Saturday (it was Wednesday) leaving your
mother in care of Daniel."
"Does mother suspect?--"
"No ... not at all."
"If the entire world fell about mother's ears, she wouldn't know."
"What do you two lovers purpose doing?"
I unfolded my scheme of living with Hildreth in a Jersey bungalow ...
Derek's income to me would go on a while yet ... I could sell stories
and poems to the New York magazines ... Hildreth could write a book as
well as I ... we would become to the modern world an example of the
radical love-life ... the Godwin and Wollstonecraft of the age.
* * * * *
We ate supper together, the three of us, in the flat. It was so cosy.
Darrie and Hildreth joined in cleaning the house that afternoon.
But a bomb was to be hurled among us.
At twelve o'clock of the next day the 'phone rang.
Darrie answered it. After a few words she came for me, her face as white
as a sheet....
"My God, Penton is in town!"
"--this is only Thursday ... he was not coming till Saturday!" I
exclaimed, full of forboding.
"I knew, I knew he wouldn't keep his original mind!" exclaimed Hildreth.
"He's holding the wire ... wants to say something to you, Johnnie."
* * * * *
"Yes, Penton, what is it?"
"Only this," his voice replied, as if rehearsing a set speech,
"yesterday afternoon I sent a telegram to my lawyer to institute
proceedings for a divorce, and I mentioned you as co-respondent...."
"Damn you to hell ... I thought we were going to settle this in the
radical way?"
"It's the only way out that I can see. I've stood this business till
it's almost killing me."
"Well, is that all?"
"No ... somehow--how, I do not know, the _New York Journal_ has gotten
hold of my wire ... it will be in all the papers to-night or to-morrow
... so I advise you and Hildreth to disappear quietly somewhere, if you
don't want to see the reporters,--who will all presently be on the way
to the flat."
"Damn you, Penton ... needn't tell _me_ about the news leaking out ...
you've done it yourself ... now I want you to promise me only one thing,
that you'll hold the reporters off for a couple of hours, till we have a
good start."
"I'll do my best," answered he, "but please believe me. How they got the
contents of the telegram I do not know, but on my honour I did not give
it out nor did I tell the reporters where you are."
* * * * *
Hildreth was so angry she could hardly speak.
"This is a fine to-do," exclaimed Darrie, "Penton distinctly promised
me--"
"I'd like to get a good crack at him!" I boasted, at the same time
enjoying the excitement.
* * * * *
Hildreth began packing her clothes in a large suitcase ... as we later
found she cast all her clean clothes aside, and in her excitement
included all her soiled linen and lingerie....
We had our last meal together. I brought in a large bottle of white
wine. All of us grew rather hilarious and made a merry joke of the
adventure. We poked fun at Penton.
We sallied forth at the front door, Darrie to go to the Martha
Washington. "I don't want to be mixed up in the coming uproar and
scandal," she exclaimed ... "so far, I'm clear of all blame, and I know
only too well what the papers would insinuate."
Hildreth and I took train for New Jersey ... two tickets for--anywhere
... in our excited condition we ran off first to Elizabeth. We had with
us exactly one hundred dollars, which I had borrowed of Darrie before we
parted on our several ways.
I registered for Hildreth and myself as "Mr. Arthur Mallory and wife,"
in the register of an obscure hotel hear the noise and clatter of a
hundred trains drawing continually out and in.
It made me happy and important to sign her name on the register as
something belonging to me.
Once alone in the room, Hildreth, to my consternation, could talk of
nothing else but Penton.
"--to think that he would do such a thing to me, only to think of it!"
she cried vehemently, again and again.
"If he believes in freedom for men and women, why was all this
necessary? the sordidness of the public clamour? the divorce court?...
oh, my poor, dear, sweet, wild poet-boy, you're in for it! Don't you
wish you were well out of all this and back in Kansas again?"
"No; I am glad. As long as I am with you I don't care what happens. I
love you, Hildreth!"
* * * * *
In the night she woke, screaming, from a nightmare. I could hardly stop
her.
"Hush, dearest ... darling ... sweetheart ... I am with you; everything
is all right" ... then, as she kept it up, "for God's sake ... Hildreth,
do be quiet ... you're all right ... the man you love is here, close by
you ... no harm shall come to you."
"Oh, Johnnie," clutching me, quivering, "I've just had such a horrible
dream," sobbing as I took her tenderly in my arms....
"There, there, darling!"
She was quiet now.
"In a few minutes we would have had the whole hotel breaking in at the
door ... thinking I was killing you."
* * * * *
She woke up again, and woke me up.
"Johnnie, find me some ink and a pen. I'm going to write that cad a
letter that will shrivel him up like acid."
"Can't you wait till morning, Hildreth?" sleepily.
"No ... I _must_ write it now."
I dressed. I went down to the hotel writing-room and came back with pen
and ink.
She sat up in bed and wrote the letter. She then read it aloud to me.
She was immensely pleased with her effort.
With a final gesticulation of vindictive, feminine joy, she succeeded in
spilling the whole bottle of ink on the white bed-spread.
"Now you've done it."
"We'll have to clear out early before the chambermaid comes in ...
we're only staying here for one night and can't waste our money paying
for the damage."
In the morning I bought the papers.
The _American_ had made a scoop. There it was, the story of the whole
thing on the front page.
"PENTON BAXTER SUES FOR DIVORCE
--------------------------
NAMES VAGABOND-POET AS CO-RESPONDENT"
There it stood, in big head-lines.
The actuality stared us in the face. We belonged to each other now. It
was no longer a summer idyll, but a practical reality.
As we took the train for Long Branch we realised that we had plunged
midmost into the action that would put all our theories to the test....
I looked at my woman with a sidelong glance, as she sat beside me on the
train seat.... She was so pretty, so frail, so feminine that I pitied
her, while at the same time my heart swelled with tenderness for her,
and with pride of possession. For she was mine now without dispute. She,
for her part, spoke but little, except illogically to upbraid Penton
Baxter, as if he had perpetrated an ill on two people thoroughly
innocent.
I was angry with him on other grounds ... he was not playing the radical
game, but taking advantage of the rules of the conventional world.
With a fugitive sense of pursuit, we hired a cabby to drive us to a
summer boarding house at Long Branch ... where Hildreth and I rented a
single large room for both of us....
And there Hildreth immediately went into hysterics, and did nothing but
weep. While I waited on her hand and foot, bringing up food to her
because she was sensitive about the probability of people recognising
her.
We stayed there a week. Each day the papers were full of our mysterious
disappearance ... reporters were combing the country to find us. Reports
of our being in various places were sent in by enterprising local
correspondents....
Again we entrained ... for Sea Girt.
An old cabman who drove a dilapidated rig hailed us with uplifted whip.
"We are looking for a place to board."
"I'll take you to a nice, quiet place, just suited to two home-loving
folks like you," he replied, thinking he had paid us a compliment, and
whipping up his ancient nag.
Hildreth gave me a nudge and a merry look and it pleased me to see she
still had her sense of humour left.
That night, as I held her in my arms, "Don't let these little, trivial
inconveniences and incidents--the petty persecutions we are undergoing,
have any effect on our great love," I pleaded.
"That's all very well, darling Johnnie, but where are we going to?"
"We'll find a cottage somewhere ... a pretty little cottage within our
means," I replied, visioning a vine-trellised place such as poets and
their brides must live in.
"Our money is giving out ... soon we'll have--to turn back to New York!"
"If we do, that need not part us.... I'll get a job on some newspaper or
magazine and take care of you."
* * * * *
When I called for my mail at the Sea Girt post office, sure of hearing
from Darrie, anyhow,--who promised us she would keep us posted, I found
no letter. And the man at the window was certain he had handed over
several letters addressed to me to someone else who had called for them,
giving my name as his.
A wave of hot anger suffused my face. How stupid of me not to have
noticed it before. Now I remembered the men who had followed us.
Our mail was being intercepted. How was Baxter to procure his divorce
without gaining evidence in just such a way?
* * * * *
One night I started on a long walk alone. I walked along the beach. In
the dark I took off my clothes and plunged for a swim into the chilly
surf ... a high sea was thundering in. I was caught in the undertow,
swept off my feet, and dragged beyond by depth ... for a moment I was of
a heart to let go, to permit myself to be drowned ... I was even
intrigued, for the moment, by the thought of what the newspapers would
say about my passing over in such a romantic way.
But the will to live rose up in me. And I fought my way,--and it was a
bitter fight,--back to shallow water. I flung myself prone on the beach,
exhausted.
When I reached our room again, I related my adventure to Hildreth.
It was she who took care of me now. I lay all night in a high fever ...
but I was so happy, for the woman of my heart sat close by me, holding
my hand, speaking soft terms of endearment to me, tending to all my
wants.
This tenderness, this solicitude and companionship seemed for the first
time better to me than the maddest transports of passion that swept us
into one.
* * * * *
In the morning mail came a letter, general delivery, from Penton.... Now
I was sure he was having our every step watched. A blind passion against
him rose in me ... the little bounder!
In the letter he asked me to meet him at the Sea Girt railway station at
four o'clock. I made it by the time indicated, by a brisk walk.
There he was, dropping off the train as it came to a stop. Another scene
flashed through my mind, a visual remembrance of the day he had dropped
off to visit me at Laurel.
Then we had rushed toward each other, hands extended in warm,
affectionate greeting ... now ... I slowly sauntered up to him.
"Yes, Penton, what do you want; how much longer are you going to torture
your wife?"
"--yours now, Johnnie; mine no longer!" grimly.
"If she were wholly mine, I'd knock you flat ... but you still have a
sort of right in her that protects you from what I otherwise might do to
you."
"For heaven's sake, let's be calm."
"Calm--when you say in your letter, 'you need not be afraid, I meditate
no harm?'--do you mean to imply that, under any circumstance, I would be
afraid of you?"
"Johnnie, there is only one way to settle this ... I'm set on getting
the complete evidence for a divorce ... exactly where is Hildreth now?"
"None of your damned business ... all I can say is that she is somewhere
near here ... and she's sick and hysterical through your persecutions
... and if you don't call off your snooping detectives, by the Lord God,
if I run into any of them, I'll try to kill them."
"Johnnie, it's the best thing to deliver the legal evidence and have it
over with. Let me accompany you to where Hildreth is, and--"
"If she set eyes on you," I replied, "she'd fly at you and scratch your
eyes out--in her present mood."
"Only _show_ me where she is, then--point out the place."
"If I find you snooping around, you'll need hospital attention for a
long time."
"Then you won't help facilitate the proceedings, secretly?"
"No, since you've begun this game, find out what you can yourself. What
do you think I am?"
"A very foolish young man to treat me so when I am still your best
friend."
"Here comes the north-bound train. You hop aboard and go on back to New
York."
Seething with rage, I caught Penton Baxter by the arm and thrust him up
the steps....
* * * * *
Next morning came a letter from Darrie, from the Martha Washington. We
were the talk of the town, she told us.
She had tried to keep Penton from employing detectives to follow us. She
advised us to return to New York--we must be out of money by this
time....
Hildreth could stay at her mother's and father's flat till we made
further arrangements for going off some place together.
* * * * *
"Darling, if we return from what has proven to be a wild-goose chase,
will you promise me not to become disheartened, to lose faith in me?"
"Of course not, Johnnie ... I think Darrie offered very good advice,"
she sighed.
Back we turned, by the next day's train, full of a sense of frustration;
what an involved, unromantic, practical world we lived in!
* * * * *
Hildreth heaved a sigh of content as we walked into her mother's flat
again. Her mother was still at Eden ... alone ... taking care of Daniel,
for whom she had a great love.
We had Darrie over the telephone, and soon she was with us, giving us
the latest news of the uproar.
The papers were at us pro and con, mostly con.
Dorothy Dix had written a nasty attack on me, saying that I was climbing
to fame over a woman's prostrate body ... that, in my own West, instead
of a judge and a divorce court, a shotgun Would have presided in my
case....
The _Globe_ was running a forum, suddenly stopped, as to whether people
of genius and artistic temperament should be allowed more latitude than
ordinary folk....
As Hildreth and I rode down Broadway together, side by side,
unrecognised, on a street car, we saw plastered everywhere, "Stop That
Affinity Hunt," a play of that name to be shown at Maxime Elliott's
Theatre....
I must admit that I was pleased with the sudden notoriety that had come
to me ... years of writing poetry had made my name known but moderately,
here and there ... but having run away with a famous man's wife, my name
was cabled everywhere ... even appeared in Japanese, Russian, and
Chinese newspapers....
* * * * *
But this was not what I wanted of the papers ... I must use this space
offered me to propagandise my ideas of free love....
So I arranged to meet Penton privately in the lobby of the Martinique.
* * * * *
Hildreth and I were there, waiting, before Penton came the next day.
Appearing, he wore the old, bland, childlike smile, and he shook hands
with us as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.
Someone had tipped off the reporters and they were on time, too,
crowding about us eagerly. One young fellow from the _Sun_, looking like
a graduate from a school of divinity, asked a special interview of me
alone, which I gave ... afterward ... in a corner.
That _Sun_ reporter gave me the fairest deal I ever received. He talked
with me over an hour, without ever setting pencil to paper ... the other
interviews were long over, Penton had left, Hildreth sat chafing....
"Come over and join us, Hildreth."
She sat listening in silence while I continued rehearsing all my ideas
on marriage, love, divorce ... how love should be all ... how there
should, ideally, be no marriage ceremony ... but if any at all, only
after the first child had been born ... how the state should have
nothing to do with the private love-relations of the individual....
The reporter from the _Sun_ shook hands good-bye.
"But you haven't taken a single note!" I protested.
"I have it all here, in my head."
"But how can you report me accurately?"
"See to-morrow's _Sun_."
* * * * *
The interview with me was a marvel in two ways: it represented to a
hair's breadth everything I had pronounced, transmuted into the
reporter's own style of writing ... it curtailed my conversation where I
had repeated myself or wandered off into trivial detail.
* * * * *
"I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas!" I had exclaimed to Hildreth,
in the hearing of the reporters.
"Oh, bother Kansas!" replied Hildreth humorously.
For a month "I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas" was a catch-word
for Broadway and the town.
When the _Evening Journal_ put us in their "Dingbat Family" I enjoyed
the humour of it. But Hildreth was angry and aggrieved.
"You and Penton," remarked she, "for men of culture and sensibility,
have bigger blind spots than ordinary in your make-up. Why, Johnnie, I
believe you enjoy the comic pictures about this business!...
"The only way to conduct propaganda for a cause is through the dignified
medium of books, I am rapidly becoming convinced--not through newspaper
interviews; which, when they are not silly, are insulting."
* * * * *
Baxter's lawyer soon put a stop to our public amicability ...
"collusion," he warned Penton; "they'll call it collusion and you won't
get your final decree."
Tad drew cartoons of us ... a cluster of them ... "_Silk Hat Harry's
Divorce Suit_" ... with dogs' heads on all of us ... Hildreth, with the
head of a hound dog, long hound-ears flopping, with black jade ear-rings
in them ... Penton, a woe-begone little pug....
A box car loomed in the centre of the main picture, "_The Affinity Nest
of the Hobo Poet_," I think it was legended ... then I was drawn
standing, one leg crossed over the other, the peak of the toe jauntily
resting on the ground, hand-in-breast like an old-fashioned picture.
There was a tin can thrown over the shoulder of the tattered bulldog
that represented me ... one of my ears went through my hat ... beneath,
a rhyme ran:
"I am the hobo poet,
I lead a merry life:
One day I woo the Muse, the next,
Another fellow's wife!"
* * * * *
I brought this up to the cottage we had now procured, down in West
Grove, N.J., where we had gone finally to escape the city, and the swarm
of reporters that seemed never to cease pursuing us ... for, when we
found out that they did not want propaganda, we sought to hide away from
them....
Hildreth had been rather gloomy at breakfast that morning, and I thought
she would join in a laugh with me over Tad's horse-play. There is a
streak in me that makes me enjoy the grotesque slap-stick of the comic
artists.
When Hildreth saw the cartoons, she laughed a little, at first; then she
wept violently.
Then she wrote a savage letter to Tad, letting him know what she thought
of his vulgarity.
* * * * *
"There is one thing in you which I shall never quite compass; with my
understanding," she almost moaned, "you express the most exquisite
thoughts in the loveliest language ... you enter into the very soul of
beauty ... and then you come out with some bit of horse-play, some
grotesquerie of speech or action that spoils it all."
Nevertheless, it was the humanness in me that brought all the reporters
who came to interview us to sympathise with Hildreth and me, instead of
with Penton.
* * * * *
Yes, we had found our dream-cottage ... back in the lovely pines, near
West Grove. At a nominal sum of fifteen dollars a month; the actress
who owned it, sympathising with our fight, had rented it to me for the
fall and winter ... if we could stand the bitter cold in a summer
cottage....
There Hildreth stayed, seemingly alone, with Darrie, who had come down
to chaperon her. To the reporters who sought her out when her place of
retreat became known, she averred that she had no idea of my
whereabouts. In the meantime, under the name of Mallory, I was living
near by, was renting a room in the house of a Mrs. Rond, whose husband
was an artist.
I came and went to and from my cottage by a bye-path through the pines
that led to the back door.
Darrie, as we called her, performed the most difficult task of all--the
task of remaining friends to all parties concerned.
The strain was beginning to tell on Penton. A strange, new, unsuspected
thing was welling up in his heart, Darrie averred ... his love for his
repudiated wife was reviving so strongly that now he dared not see her,
it would hurt him too deeply....
His friends, the Stotesburies, a wealthy radical couple, had let him
have a cottage of theirs up in Connecticut, and he was staying in it all
by himself, doing his own cooking and hurrying with a new book in order
to get enough money to defray the enormous expenses he had incurred by
initiating and prosecuting his divorce suit....
And now Daniel joined us. Daniel and I agreed with each other famously.
For he liked me. He took walks with me, and we went bathing together
after I had done my morning's writing. We crabbed in the Manasquan
River, and fished.
Once, when I was galloping along the road in imitation of a horse, with
him perched on my shoulders--
"Say, Johnnie, I like you ... I won't call you buzzer any more!"
"I like you, too, Daniel, but don't squeeze me so hard about the neck
... it's choking my wind off."
* * * * *
That was a happy month ... that month of fine, fairly warm fall weather
that Darrie, Hildreth, Daniel and I spent together in the little cottage
back in the woods, secluded from the road.
The newspapers had begun to let up on us a little. It had grown a bit
galling and monotonous, the continual misrepresentations of ourselves
and what Hildreth and I were trying to stand for.
* * * * *
Now that I was playing the conventional game of evasion and hypocritic
subterfuge, holding a nominal lodging at Mrs. Rond's as one Mr. Arthur
Mallory, and explaining my being seen with Mrs. Baxter by the statement
that I was a writer sent down by a publishing house for the purpose of
helping her with a book she was engaged in writing--
Though everybody knew well who I was, it assuaged the American passion
for outward "respectability," and we were left, comparatively speaking,
alone to do as we wished....
* * * * *
Hildreth was a spoiled, willful little rogue ... once or twice she tried
a "soul-state" on me....
Walking through the pines one day, suddenly she sat down in her tracks,
began crying, and affirmed in a tragic voice, that she couldn't stand
the strain of what she had been through any longer, that she believed
she was going crazy.
I immediately plumped down on all fours and began running up and down
through the crashing underbrush, growling and making a great racket.
Startled, intrigued, she watched me.
"Johnnie, don't be such a damn fool! What _are_ you doing?"
"I'm going crazy, too, I'm suffering the hallucination that I'm a big
brown bear, and you're so sweet that I'm going to eat you all up."
I ran at her. She leaped up, pealing laughter. I began biting at her
ankles ... at the calves of her legs ... "oof! oof! I'm going crazy
too!" She squealed, delighted, her mind taken off her troubles ... she
struck me on the head with her open hands, to keep me off ... I bowled
her over with a swift, upward jump ... I picked her up and carried her
off, kissing her.
* * * * *
"My darling big rascal ... my own Johnnie Gregory!" She caught me fondly
by the hair, "I can't do anything with you at all!"
Once again, waking me up in the middle of the night:
"Johnnie, I--I have a dreadful impulse, an impulse to hit you ... I just
can't help it, Johnnie dear! I must do it!" and she fetched me a very
neat blow in the face.
"You don't mind, do you ... having your own little girl hit you?"
Now, poor Penton would have spent the remainder of the night taking
this "impulse" and the act which followed it as a serious problem in
aesthetics, economics, feminism, and what-not ... and the two would have
talked and discussed, their voices sounding and sounding in philosophic
disquisition ... and, before the end, Hildreth, persuaded to take the
situation seriously and enjoying the morbid attention given her,
Hildreth would have gone off several times into hysterics....
My procedure was a different one:
"--of course I don't mind you following your impulses ... you should ...
but also I have just as imperative an impulse--now that you suggest
it--to hit you."
And I was not chary of the vigorous blows I dealt her, a tattoo of them
on her back....
"Why, Johnnie," she gasped, "you--hit--me!" and her big eyes, wide with
hurt, filled with tears. And she cried a little....
"There, there, dear!" I soothed. Then, with a solemn look in my face, "I
couldn't resist my impulse, either."
"You mustn't do that any more, Johnnie ... but,--you must let _me_ hit
_you_ whenever I want to."
But she never had that "impulse" again.
* * * * *
But, though we romped a lot, Darrie, Hildreth, Daniel, and I,--and
though Hildreth called me her "Bearcat" (the only thing she took from
the papers, whose title for me was "The Kansas Bearcat") don't think
that this made up all our life in our cottage....
In the morning, after breakfast, which Daniel and I usually ate together
alone, we being the early risers of the household--I repaired to the
large attic and wrote on my play. Then frequently I read and studied
till four, keeping up my Latin and Greek and German, and my other
studies.
Darrie also wrote and studied in her room.... Daniel led the normal life
of the happy American boy, going where the other boys were, and playing
with them--when he and I didn't go off, as I have said, for the
afternoon, together, crabbing and fishing.
Hildreth, of course, was working hard at _her_ book--a novel of radical
love....
After four was strolling time, for all of us ... along the river, by
the ocean beach, further away ... or among the pines that reached up
into our very backyard.
When the grocer boy or the butcher boy came, I (for the sake of outward
appearances) stepped out of sight, though it irked me, still to resort
to subterfuge, when we had launched forth with such a fanfare of
publicity....
"Wait till Penton wins the decree, then we can come out into the open
and live in a Free Union together--or _marry_!" Hildreth begged of me
... and I acquiesced, for the time....
* * * * *
Each evening, by the open fire, I read aloud from the poets ... or
Darrie or Hildreth did ... happy evenings by fire-light, that shall
always live pleasantly in my memory....
We had but few disagreements, and those trifling ones.
Darrie was herself in the midst of a romantic courtship. 'Gene Mallows,
the Californian poet, had fallen madly in love with her, having met her
during his brief visit to New York....
Every day Darrie received her two, three, even four letters from him,
couched in the most beautiful literary phraseology ... and each letter
invariably held a sonnet ... and that, too, of an amazingly high
standard of poetic excellence, considering the number Mallows was
dashing off every day ... many of them were quite lovely with memorable
phrase, deft turn of fancy or thought.
* * * * *
Penton recalled Daniel to the city.... Afraid now that the papers might
locate him with us....
We had a few warm mid-days of glorious sunshine still, and I often
persuaded Darrie and Hildreth to take nude sunbaths with me back of the
house ... which we enjoyed on outspread blankets, ever keeping a weather
eye for intruders....
As we lay in the sun we read poetry aloud. And I read aloud much of a
book that amounted to our Bible, Havelock Ellis's _Sex in Its Relation
to Society_.
I might add, for the sake of the reader who may be prone to
misinterpret, that our behaviour was quite innocent, as we lay about in
that manner....
* * * * *
Our best friend was the artist's wife, Mrs. Rond ... she was, in her
way, herself a character ... the poverty of her family was extreme. She
had a numerous menage of daughters; and a horde of cats as pets.
Whenever she walked away from her house the cats followed her in a long
line, their tails gaily in the air, like little ships sailing.
Mrs. Rond smoked incessantly, rolling her own cigarettes, from packages
of Plowboy tobacco....
Her conversation was crisp, nervous, keen. An intellectual woman of the
highest type; with all her poverty, she preserved around her an
atmosphere of aristocratic fineness (even if she did smoke Plowboy)
which bespoke happier days, in an economic and social sense.
She was thoroughly radical, but quiet and unostentatious about it. She
looked on me and Hildreth as play-children of the feminist movement.
I think it was the exaggerated maternal instinct in her that moved her
to foster and champion Hildreth and me ... an instinct that made her
gather in every stray cat she found on the road ... she is the only
person I have ever known who could break through the reserve of the
cat's nature, and make it as fond and sentimental as a dog is toward its
master.
Mrs. Rond knew all the classics, and, in her library, which she never
let go, when their economic crash came, were most of the English poets
and essayists and novelists from Malory and Chaucer down to William
Watson and W.L. George....
She made us welcome at her home. We formed a pleasant group together,
the occupants of my little cottage back in the pines, and she, her
valitudinarian husband, and her four daughters, the eldest of whom,
Editha, was of an exquisite type of frail, fair beauty ... all her
daughters had inherited their mother's keen-mindedness ... she had
brought them up on the best in the thought, art, and literature of the
world....
The relationship between mother and daughters was one more of
delightful, understanding comradeship than anything else ... in spite of
the fact of Mrs. Rond's over-developed maternal instincts ... a
favourite trick of the two youngest daughters being to hide away
upstairs and then call out in mock tones of agony, in order to enjoy the
sight of their mother, running breathless, up from the kitchen or in
from the yard, and up the stairs, pale with premonition of some
accident or ill, and crying, "what's the matter? children, what's the
matter?"
"Oh, nothing, mother ... we're only playing."
And her relief would be so great that she would forget to scold them for
their childlike, unthinking cruelty.
* * * * *
Just before I had left Kansas to come East on my projected trip to
Europe, the magazines had begun to buy my poems, the best of them--Now
every poem of mine was sent hurriedly back with an accompanying
rejection slip.
Yet I was sure that I was writing better than ever before.
Simonds, of the _Coming Nation_, and the editor of the Kansas City
_Star_ were about the only editors who now took my work. I inferred
rightly that my notoriety was what was tabooing me. I determined to run
up to New York and find out for myself if this was true!
As I rode north along the flashes of sea, marsh, and town, I thought of
my little flock that I had left behind for a day, with intense
satisfaction and content. They were mine. Hildreth was my woman, Daniel
had been my child for the space he was with us. And I held Darrie in
friendly tenderness, much as the bourgeois business man holds the
supernumerary women of his household, though she was by no means that,
nor was she in any way dependent on me....
I was finding it very good to own, to possess, to take root; to be
possessed and owned, in turn. I carried an obscure sense of triumph over
Baxter.
* * * * *
Darrie, who had been to town the week before, had come back with a
report of Penton's unhappiness, his belated acknowledgment that he was
still, in spite of his battle against the feeling, deeply in love with
his discarded wife. It was not so easy to tear her out of his heart, she
had intertwined so deeply there ... eight years with a woman, and one
child by her, and affection for her was no easy thing to root up from
one's being.
"I sat there a long while with him in Riverside Park," Darrie reported,
"it was chilly and he wore an old overcoat because he couldn't afford a
new one. His hair was greying at the temples. He looked stooped, aging,
frail as if an extra wind might lift him up and carry him away from
me....
"He was worried about my having been brought into what he called 'the
mess' ... wondered how the papers had not scented 'the other woman' in
me, no matter how innocent I was of that appellation.
"He seemed so lonely ... admitted he was so lonely....
"Johnnie, you're both poor, dear innocents, that's what you are--
"But of the two of you, you are the harder, the best equipped to meet
the shock of life ... for you will grow wiser, where Penton never will."
"How did Penton speak of me?"
"Splendidly--said he considered that in a way, perhaps, he had worked
you a wrong, done an injustice to you."
"Nonsense, the poor little chap!"
"He made me cry, he acted so pathetic ... he seemed like a motherless
little boy that needed a woman's love and protection."
"Darrie, why don't _you_ marry him?"
"Now you're trying to do with me as he tried to do with Ruth and you ...
marry him ... no ... I'm--I think I'm--in love with 'Gene Mallows."
Penton was pleased to hear, she said, that Daniel and I had got on so
nicely together, while he was down at West Grove....
* * * * *
So, as I rode in the dusty, bumping train, my mind reverted to our whole
friendship together, and tenderness welled up in my heart for Penton
Baxter.
* * * * *
In the office of the New York _Independent_ sat William Hayes Ward, old,
bent over, with his triple-lensed glasses behind which his dim, enlarged
eyes floated spectrally like those of a lemur.
He greeted me with a mixture of constraint and friendliness.
"Well, my boy, you've certainly got yourself into a mess this time."
"A 'mess,' Dr. Ward?" I interrogated, quoting back to him the word he
had used,--with rebuke in my voice.
"How else shall I phrase it?"
"--with the understanding that I expect from an old friend, one who
bought my first poems, encouraged my first literary endeavours,--who
enheartened and helped me at the inception of my struggle for
recognition and fame."
"And now you've won too much of the baser coinage of fame, of a kind
that a poet should never have."
"I have a poem with me ... one on the subject of what Christ wrote on
the sand--after which he bade the woman go and sin no more ... and he
who was without sin should cast the first stone."
Dr. Ward looked over the half-moons of his triple glasses at me ... he
reached for the poem and read it.
"Yes, it's a fine poem, with that uniqueness in occasional lines, that
occasional touch of power, that marks your worst effusions, Mr.
Gregory!... but," paused he, "we do not allow the _Woman Taken in
Adultery_ in the columns of the _Independent_."
"Well," I shot back, pleased with myself at the retort I was making,
"well, I'm mighty glad Christ didn't keep her out of the pages of the
New Testament, Dr. Ward!"
He barely smiled. He fixed me with a steadfast look of concern.
"Are you still with--with Mrs. Baxter?"
"Yes--since you ask it."
"The sooner you put that woman out of your life the better for you."
"Dr. Ward--one moment!... understand that no woman I love can be spoken
of as 'that woman' in my presence--if you were not an old man!--" I
faltered, choking with resentment.
"Now, now, my dear boy," he replied very gently, "I am older than you
say ... I am a very, very old man ... and I know life--"
"But do you know the woman you speak of?"
"I have met Mrs. Baxter casually with her husband several times." He
stopped short. He paused, gave a gesture of acquiescence.
"Oh, come, Mr. Gregory, you're right ... quite right ... I had no right
whatever to speak to you as I have--
"But please interpret it as my serious concern over your career as a
poet ... it seems such a pity ... you had such a good start."
"You mean?--" I began, and halted.
"Precisely ... I mean that for the next two or three years all the
reputable magazines will not dare consider even a masterpiece from your
hands."
"In other words, if Shelley were alive to-day and were the same
Shelley, he would be presented with a like boycott?"
"If his manner of living came out in the papers--yes."
"And François Villon?"
"Undoubtedly."
"I'm in good company then, am I not?"
"You should thank me for being frank with you."
"I do thank you ... that explains why the atmosphere up at the office of
the _National_ was as cold as the refrigerator-box of a meat car, when I
was up there an hour ago ... but they were not as frank as you ... they
acted like a company of undertakers officiating at my funeral."
* * * * *
I was glad to find myself back in my little cottage, that same
night--back in my little cottage, and in the arms of the woman who was
everything to me, no matter if they said she spelled the ruination of my
career.
For any man, I held, and still hold, who lets a woman ruin his career,
ought to have it ruined.
I did not tell her of what Dr. Ward had told me. Why cause her
unnecessary worry?
* * * * *
After all, the magazine world was not the only medium to present my
literary wares to the public. There remained the book world, a less
narrow and prejudiced one.
Kennerley had written me that he waited eagerly the completion of my
Biblical play.
And Zueblin, of the now defunct _Twentieth Century_ had just sent me a
twenty-five dollar check for a poem called _Lazarus Speaks_.
* * * * *
I brought back with me from New York two books as a present for Hildreth
... Mary Wollstonecraft's _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,_ and
_The Life of Mary Wollestonecraft_ ... these were two books she had long
desired. She was thoroughly pleased with her resemblance to the
frontispiece picture of the celebrated woman radical, in the _Life_.
"You possess all her vivacity, all her intelligence ... but you are
beautiful where she was plain ... she is like a plainer sister of
yours."
* * * * *
While in New York I had also paid a visit to the editor of one of the
biggest sensational magazines in the city, and I had arranged with him,
acting as Hildreth's agent, for a thousand dollars advance on her
unfinished novel. The editor had dictated a letter in which he promised
to deliver the thousand on receipt of two-thirds of the book....
Hildreth kissed me again and again when I gave her the letter....
"Johnnie, you really are wonderful ... and quite practical, after all."
* * * * *
"And now, my darling Hildreth, we'll take this old world and shake it
into new life, into the vital thing I have dreamed!" I boasted
grandiloquently....
"Here in this little sequestered dream-cottage of ours you and I will
carry out, popularise, through novels, poems, plays, essays, and
treatises, the noble work that Ellis, Key, and Rosa Von Mayerreder, and
others, are doing in Europe ... and we ourselves will set the example of
true love that fears nothing but the conventional legal slavery."
"It will soon be very cold down here," commented Darrie, irrelevantly,
"this is only a summer cottage, and they say--the old settlers--that we
are to have a severe winter ... the frost fish are already beginning to
come ashore."
* * * * *
It was generally known, sub rosa, that Hildreth and I were living
together. But, as long as she pretended it was not so, as long as I
lived seemingly in another house, pretending, under another name, to be
Mrs. Baxter's literary adviser, the hypocrisy of the world was
satisfied.