He arrived the very night of the day he received my letter.
Darrie stepped out over to the Ronds', not to be herself brought into
what she had so far managed to keep out of.
Hildreth consumed the better part of two hours fixing herself up as
women do when they want to make an impression....
"Your friend from Kansas must see that you haven't made such a bad
choice in picking me," she proclaimed, with that pretty droop of her
mouth.
"No, no! be a good boy, don't muss me up now!"
She wore a plain, navy-blue skirt ... wore a white middy blouse with
blue, flowing tie ... easy shoes that fitted snug to her pretty little
feet ... her eyes never held such depths to them, her face never shone
with such beauty before.
I wore a brown sweater vest with pearl buttons ... corduroy trousers ...
black oxfords ... a flowing tie....
A large log fire welcomed my former Kansas friend.
"Well, Johnnie, it's been a long time since I've seen you."
"Jerome, let me introduce you to the only woman that ever lived, or
shall live, for me ... Hildreth Baxter."
As Hildreth gave Miller her hand, I could see that he liked her, and
that he inwardly commented on my good taste and perhaps said to himself,
"Well, Johnnie is not so crazy after all!"
After I had given him the interview, he asked her a few questions, but
she begged to be left out, that it was my interview.
"Mr. Miller, you are a friend of Johnnie's ... I have often heard him
speak highly of you; can't you dissuade him from having this interview
printed ... no matter if you have been sent by your paper all the way
down here for it?"
Jerome liked what Hildreth had said, admired her for her common sense.
He offered to return to the city, and risk his job by stating that he
had been hoaxed.
"I will leave you to argue it out with him, Mr. Miller." And Hildreth
excused herself and went off down the path to the Ronds' too.
"Johnnie," my friend urged, putting his hand on my shoulder, "your
little lady has a lot of sense ... it _will_ kick up a hell of a row ...
it's true what you say about them rather approving of you now, some of
them, considering you a sly dog and so forth.... Yes, I'm sorry to say,
what you're doing, much of the world is doing most of the time."
"I beg your pardon, Jerome, but there you've made my point ... do you
think I want a sneaking, clandestine thing kept up between me and the
woman I love?"
"Then why not stay apart till the divorce is granted, then marry her
like a regular fellow?"
"Damn it, Jerome, you don't understand, you don't get what we radicals
are driving at...."
"I'll take a chance with my job and quash this interview--that's how
much I like you, Johnnie."
"Oh, I know you mean well enough ... most of you boys have treated me
rather well, according to your lights ... it's the damned lead-writers
and re-writers and editorial writers--they're the ones that do the
damage."
"You want me to go ahead then?"
"Yes, that is the only way."
"It is a big story, a real scoop." Miller was again the newspaper man
who had scored a beat on rival newspapers....
"Can't you stay over night, Jerome? We can make room."
"I must catch the next train back ... I'm off now ... there's the taxi I
arranged to have come and take me ... it's out there now ... good-bye,
Johnny, and God help you and your little girl."
* * * * *
Hildreth came in soon after Miller's departure, looking like a
fresh-faced girl of twelve.
"Did--did your friend think I was good-looking?"
"Yes, I am sure he thoroughly approved of you."
"To-morrow another Roman holiday begins."
* * * * *
The result of that interview was worse than I could have surmised. All
the batteries opened fire again. The Kansas papers called me "the
shameless tramp" ... reporters spilled from autos and rigs all over the
front stoop. After giving a few more interviews in the mad hope that
this time they would get it straight, I saw that the harvest was even
greater abuse and defamation ... and, as Hildreth had predicted, she
came in for more than her share of the moral indignation of people who
sold that precious ware at so much a line, or were paid salaries for
such work....
We practically deserted our house so the reporters could not find us....
Many of the reporters never came near the house. Instead, lurid stories
were concocted in the back rooms of nearby roadhouses. And, failing to
find us at home, interviews were faked so badly that they verged on the
burlesque ... where not vulgar, they were vicious ... words were slipped
in that implied things which, expressed clearly, had furnished ample
grounds for libel.
Hildreth and I were pictured as living on frost fish almost entirely;
the fish that run along the ocean shore, and, growing numb with the cold
of autumn, are tossed up on the sand by the waves....
I was depicted as strident-voiced ... belligerent ... waving my arms
wildly. It was said that, full of threats, I had taken a shotgun
menacingly from a rack ... that a vicious bull dog lay between my feet,
growling ... that I went, sockless, in sandals ... had long, flowing,
uncombed hair....
Once a party of three reporters, from a big metropolitan paper,--two men
and a woman, after stopping at a nearby road house till they were well
lit,--drove about in a livery rig till they finally located us at the
house of Mrs. Rond....
All the old nonsense was re-written ... things we had never said or even
had in our thought ... vulgarities alien to Hildreth's mouth or mine....
The final insinuation--a sly touching on the fact that the Rond family
was on intimate terms with me, and that the young daughters were
attractive-looking, and seemed to favour the ideals I expressed with
murmurs of approval ... thus the story afterward appeared....
Mrs. Rond, after a peculiarly impertinent question of the woman member
of the party, realised by this time that the three reporters were more
than a little tipsy, and ordered these guardians of the public morality
out of the house....
In the first place, they had wormed admittance through a fraud to
Hildreth and me ... the woman falsely pretended that she was a friend of
Hildreth's mother ... a great stroke of journalistic enterprise.
Mrs. Rond's rebuke was so sharply worded that it got through even their
thick skins....
I must say, though, that the behaviour of these three was not
characteristic ... generally the newspaper men and women were most
considerate and courteous ... even when they afterward wrote unpleasant
articles about us. And often I have had them blue-pencil wild statements
I had made, which, on second thought, I wished withdrawn ... and during
all the uproar I never had a reporter break his word, once given.
"Say, Mr. Gregory, that's great stuff, do let us keep that in the
interview."
"Please, boys, draw your pencil through that ... it doesn't sound the
way I meant it."
"Oh, all right"--a sigh--"but it's a shame to leave it out."
The last and final outrage--perpetrated by the papers by orders from
above, I am sure....
Even the second uproar had died down.
Always the "natives" in West Grove and round about, our neighbours,
behaved considerately, let us alone ... we were greeted politely
wherever we went....
But now, Mrs. Rond informed me, strange men were appearing on the street
corners, conducting a regular soapbox campaign against us....
Some of them were seen to get on and off trains going to and coming from
New York....
Goaded and spurred by these mysterious outsiders, the village people
began to act aloof, and the more ignorant of them sullen toward us ...
but as yet it was only in the air, nothing concrete to lay hold of.
* * * * *
Mrs. Suydam had run away with her plumber ... the interviews she gave
out showed that it was our case mainly that had impelled her to launch
forth in imitation ...
Others, in a wave of sex-radicalism, were running off together all about
the country ...
But it was Mrs. Suydam's case that interested me and Hildreth most ...
she was a dainty, pretty little slight thing, as Hildreth was--I could
judge by her pictures....
"Hildreth," I urged, "let's drop Mrs. Suydam a note encouraging her ...
she's probably without a friend in the world, she and her man ...
they're trying to oust her from her flat ... she's being hounded about."
"My God, Johnnie dear, let's _don't!_ ... they'll only give our letter
to the papers ... let's let well enough alone once more ... the grocer
boy passed me in the street to-day and didn't tip his hat to me."
* * * * *
I was sitting at Mrs. Rond's tea-table having afternoon tea with her.
She had sent one of her girls over to the cottage to tell me she wished
to see me "alone" ... "on a matter of great importance."
The cats, who had trailed her eldest daughter, Editha, across to our
place, followed us back again with sailing tails in the air.
Mrs. Rond poured me a cup of strong tea.
"Drink that first, then I'll give you a little information that won't
be so very agreeable to you."
The glimmer of satiric yet benevolent humour that was never long absent
from her eyes, lightened there again, as she rolled and lit a "Plowboy."
"Have you noticed a change in the weather? A storm is blowing up. I'm
speaking figuratively ... I might as well out with it, Johnnie,--there's
a report, growing in strength, that a mob of townspeople is scheduled to
come your way to-night, some time, and treat you to a serenade of
protest and the traditional yokel hospitality of mobs ... a coat of tar
and feathers and a ride on a rail beyond the town limits."
"So it's come to that, has it?"
"Johnnie, it isn't the townsfolk that started it ... of that I am
certain ... left alone, they would still have been content to mind their
business, and accept you and Hildreth on a friendly basis...."
She brought up the story of the strange men haranguing from street
corners again....
"It's the New York newspapers, or one or two of the most sensational of
them, that are back of this new phase."
"You mean, Mrs. Rond, that they would dare go so far as to instigate an
attack on me and Hildreth ... with possibly fatal results?"
"Of course they would ... they need more news ... they want something
more to happen ... to have all this uproar end tamely in happy,
permanent love--that's what they couldn't endure....
"Well," she resumed after a pause, "what are you going to do? You're not
afraid, are you?"
"To tell the truth I am, very much afraid."
"You and Hildreth and Darrie would best take the three o'clock train
back to New York then."
"I haven't the least intention of doing that."
"What are you going to do?"
"--just let them come."
"You won't--fight?"
"As long as I'm alive."
"You just said you were afraid."
"Where a principle is considered, one can be afraid and still stick by
one's guns."
"You're a real man, John Gregory, as well as a real poet, and I'm going
to help you ... if it was the townspeople alone I would hesitate
advising you ... but it's dirty, hired outsiders who are back of this
feeling. Here!" and she stepped over to the mantel and brought a
six-shooter to me and laid it in my hand, "can you shoot?"
"A little, but not very well."
"It's loaded already ... here is a pocketful of extra bullets."
She filled my coat pocket till it sagged heavily. I slipped the gun in
my hip pocket.
"You're really going to stand them off if they come?"
"As long as no one tries to break into my house I will lie quiet ... the
minute someone tries to break in, I'll shoot, I'll shoot to kill, and
I'll kill as many as I can before they take me. I'll admit I'm
frightened, but I have principles of freedom and radical right, and I'll
die for them if necessary."
Mrs. Rond put her hand on my shoulder like a man.
"You have the makings of a fine fanatic in you ... in the early
Christian era you would have been a church martyr."
* * * * *
I held immediate consultation with Darrie and Hildreth and they were
both scared blue ... but they were game, too.
Darrie, however, unfolded a principle of strategy which I put into
immediate effect ... she advised me to try a bluff first.
When I walked downtown within the hour, to obtain the New York papers,
there was no doubt, by the even more sullen attitude of the inhabitants
that I passed on the street, that something serious was a-foot....
I sauntered up to the news stand, took my _Times_ ... hesitated, and
then tried the bluff Darrie had suggested:
"Jim," I began, to the newsdealer, who had been enough my friend for us
to speak to each other by our first names, "Jim, I hear the boys are
planning a little party up my way to-night!"
"Not as I've heard of, Johnnie," Jim answered, with sly evasion, and I
caught him sending a furtive wink to a man I'd never seen in town
before.
"Now, Jim, there's no use trying to fool me. I'm _on_!"
The newspaper stand was, I knew, the centre for the town's
dissemination of gossip. I knew what I said would sweep everywhere the
moment I turned my back.
"As I said," I continued, "I'm on!" And I looked about and spoke in a
loud voice, while inwardly quaking, "Yes, I know all about it, and I
want to drop just this one hint ... tell the boys they can come. Tell
them they'll be welcome ... So far I've had no trouble here ...
everybody has been right decent with me," affecting a Western,
colloquial drawl, "and I've tried to treat everybody, for my part, like
a gentleman,--ain't that true?"
"That's true, Mr. Gregory" (it was suddenly "Mr. Gregory" now, not
"Johnnie"). "As I was saying just the other day, there's lots worse in
the world than Mr. Gregory that ain't found out."
"I want to leave this message with you, Jim. I'm from the West. I'm a
good shot. I've got a six-shooter ready for business up at the cottage.
I've got a lot of extra bullets, too. As I've said, I ain't the kind
that looks for trouble, but when anybody goes out of their way--Well, as
I said before, as soon as the boys begin getting rough--I'll begin to
shoot ... I'll shoot to kill, and I'll kill everybody I can get, till
someone gets me."
"Yes, Mr. Gregory!"
"Mind you, Jim, I've always considered you as my friend. I mean what I
say. I'm a householder. I'm in the right ... if the law wants me that's
another matter ... but no group of private citizens--"
"Good-bye, Mr. Gregory."
* * * * *
I walked rapidly back to the cottage. I was thinking as rapidly as I
walked. For the space of a full minute I thought of packing off
ignominiously with my little household.
But before I stepped in at the door something murky had cleared away
inside me.
"Oh, Hildreth! Darrie!"
The women came dragging forward. But with them, too, it was a passing
mood.
My indignation at the personal outrage of the impending mob incited me
as them ... till I think not one of the three of us would have stepped
aside from the path of a herd of stampeding elephants.
"The yokels," and Darrie's nostrils flared, her blue blood showing, "to
dare even think of such an action, against their betters!"
* * * * *
We lit a roaring log fire. We sat reading aloud from Shelley. As the
hours drew by ... eight ... nine ... ten ... eleven ... there is no
doubt that our nerves grew to a very fine edge....