half-dozen tiny white dogs dancing in their laps, the two social
philosophers compared their views on the state of the world. Wells had
now come to the conclusion it would take about three hundred years to
get socialism, which to Thyrsis seemed the same as being a die-hard
tory. Wells took him to lunch at the New Reform Club, and as they were
leaving the dining room, he stopped and whispered that Thyrsis now had
an opportunity to observe the Grand Khan of Anglo-American literature,
Henry James, eating a muttonchop. On the landing halfway down the stairs
they ran into Hilaire Belloc, who held them with half an hour of
brilliance. He exhibited an amazing familiarity with the medieval world
and its manifold futilities. It was like an exhibition of a million
dollars’ worth of skyrockets and pyrotechnical set pieces; when it was
over, you went away with nothing.
Also Thyrsis met Frank Harris, possessor of a golden tongue. Harris
would talk about Jesus and Shakespeare in words so beautiful that only
those masters could have matched it; but in the midst of his eloquence
something would turn his thoughts to a person he disliked, and there
would pour from the same throat such a stream of abuse as might have
shocked a fallen archangel. Harris invited the young author to lunch at
an expensive hotel and spent four or five pounds on the occasion;
politeness forbade Thyrsis to hint his feelings of distress at such a
demonstration. He would not partake of the costly wines, and could have
lived for a couple of weeks on such an expenditure. Not long after this,
Harris published in a magazine his solution of all the problems of
health--which was to use a stomach pump, get rid of all you had eaten,
and start over again.
Then Bernard Shaw. For eight or nine years Thyrsis had followed our
modern Voltaire with admiration, but also with some fear of his sharp
tongue. When he met him, he discovered the kindest and sweetest-tempered
of humans, the cleanest, also; he had bright blue eyes, a red-gold beard
turning gray, and the face of a mature angel. The modern Voltaire
motored Thyrsis out to his country place and gave him a muttonchop or
something for lunch, while he himself ate ascetic beans and salad, and
admitted sadly that his periodic headaches might possibly be due to
excess of starch, as Thyrsis suggested. To listen to G. B. S. at lunch
was exactly like hearing him at Albert Hall or reading one of his
prefaces; he would talk an endless stream of wit and laughter, with
never a pause or a dull moment.
After lunch they walked to see the old church. Not even a modern
Voltaire could imagine a visitor from America failing to be interested
in looking at the ruins of an old church! On the way they came to a sign
warning motorists that they were passing a school. Thyrsis asked, “Where
is the school?” His host laughed and explained, “This is England. The
school was moved some years ago, but we haven’t got round to moving the
sign yet. The motorists slow up, and then, just after they have got up
speed again, they come to the school.”
Years back, Thyrsis had met May Sinclair, then visiting in New York.
Those were the days of _The Divine Fire_--does anyone remember that
novel? Thyrsis had sent it to Jack London, who wrote that if he could
write one such story, he would be willing to die. Now in London, Thyrsis
went to see May Sinclair at her studio, and listened while she received
another visitor to tea and asked him questions. It was a shy youth, a
shop assistant in London, who had been invited because May Sinclair was
writing a book about such a person and wished to know what hours he
worked, what his duties were, and so on. One could guess that the poor
youth had never been in such company before, and never would be again.
The class lines are tightly drawn in that tight little island. May
Sinclair told me a little story about H. G. Wells, who had begun life as
a shop assistant; talking to Wells about the novel she was writing, she
asked him some question about the dialect of a shop assistant. Wells
flushed with annoyance and said: “How should _I_ know?” Thyrsis thought
that was a dreadful story, so dreadful that he covered his face with his
hands when he heard it. May Sinclair was distressed, because she hadn’t
meant to gossip--she hadn’t realized how this anecdote would sound to an
American socialist.
VIII
Thyrsis went back to Holland, which was supposed to be his residence. He
was not deceiving the honorable judges of the Amsterdam courts--he
really did mean to live in Holland, where everybody was so polite and
where, alone of all places in Europe, they did not give you short
change, or coins made of lead. It was an unusually cold and rainy
summer--the peasants of France were reported to be gathering their hay
from boats. Thyrsis sat in a little room, doing his writing by a wood
stove, and waiting in vain for the sun to appear. His friend Van Eeden
took him walking and pointed out the beautiful effects of the tumbled
clouds on the horizon. “These are the clouds that our Dutch painters
have made so famous!” But Thyrsis did not want to paint clouds, he
wanted to get warm.
Craig came to Holland, and Dr. Van Eeden and his wife introduced her to
staid burgomasters’ wives, who were as much thrilled to meet the
granddaughter of American slave owners as she was to meet Dutch
dignitaries. Because Van Eeden had been through a divorce scandal in his
own life, he could sympathize with the troubled pair. An odd fact, that
all the friends who helped him through these days of trial--the Herrons
in Italy, the Wilshires and Russells in England, the Van Eedens in
Holland--had been through the divorce mill.
Frederick van Eeden was at this time in his fifties, the best-known
novelist and poet of his country. But the country was too small, he
said--it was discouraging to write for only seven million people! He had
had a varied career--physician, pioneer psychotherapist, then labor
leader and founder of a colony like Thyrsis; he lived on the remains of
this colony, a small estate called Walden. His beard was turning gray,
but his mind was still omnivorous, and he and his young American friend
ranged the world in their arguments.
Van Eeden s wife was a quiet woman, young in years but old in fashion,
the heroine of Van Eeden’s _Bride of Dreams_; she sat by and did her
sewing and seemed a trifle shocked when the young lady from Mississippi
ventured to poke fun at the ideas of her lord and master. Her two little
children were lacking altogether in American boisterousness; their
utmost limit of self-assertion was to stand by Thyrsis’ chair at
suppertime, and watch him with big round eyes while he ate a fig, and
whisper “Ik ok!”--that is, “Me, too!” Thyrsis found the Dutch language a
source of great amusement, and he evolved a rule for getting along;
first say it in German, and if that is not understood, say it in
English, and if that is not understood, say it halfway between.
Van Eeden took Thyrsis to Berlin, where they visited a young German
poet, Erich Gutkind, who under the pen name of Volker had published an
ecstatic book that Van Eeden expected to outmode Nietzsche. A charming
young Jewish couple--Thyrsis called them the _Gute Kinder_, and
sometimes the _Sternengucker_, because of the big telescope they had on
the roof of their home. Van Eeden and Gutkind were on fire with a plan
to form a band of chosen spirits to lead mankind out of the wilderness
of materialism; Thyrsis brought tears into the young rhapsodist’s eyes
by the brutality of his insistence that the sacred band would have to
decide the problem of social revolution first.
All three of these men saw the war coming, and the problem of what to do
about it occupied their thoughts. Thyrsis had written a manifesto
against war, calling on the socialist parties of the world to pledge
themselves to mass insurrection against it. He had found sympathy among
socialists in England and France, but very little in Germany. Karl
Kautsky had written that the agitation of such a program would be
illegal in Germany--which apparently settled it with him and his party.
Thyrsis now spent a day with Kautsky and his wife and son--_die heilige
Familie_, as their enemies dubbed them. He debated the problem with
Suedekum, with Fischer, with Ledebour and Liebknecht; the latter two
escorted him about the Reichstag and took him to lunch--in a separate
dining room where Social Democratic members were herded, apart from the
rest! Ledebour and Liebknecht were sympathetic to his program, but could
not promise any effective action, and what they told him had much to do
with Thyrsis’ decision to support the Allies in 1917.
IX
Yes, the war was not far away. Military men with bristling mustaches
were strutting about, jostling ordinary folk out of the way, staring
over the heads of the men, and into the faces of women. “Papa, why do
they twist their mustaches into points?” inquired David, eleven years
old, and the answer was, “It is to frighten you.” “But it doesn’t
frighten me,” said the little boy. However, it frightened his father, so
that he removed his son from the German school to one in England.
The _Gute Kinder_ took their guests driving to see the sights of Berlin,
including the monstrous statues of the Sieges Allee. Thyrsis thought he
had never seen anything so funny since the beginning of his life. He
found something funnier to say about each one--until his host leaned
over and signaled him to be quiet, pointing to the cab driver up in
front. More than once it had happened that a ribald foreigner, daring to
commit _lèse-majesté_ in the hearing of a Prussian ex-soldier, had been
driven to the police station and placed under arrest.
Thyrsis was invited to meet Walter Rathenau. He had never heard the
name, but his friends explained that this was the young heir of the
great German electrical trust; he went in for social reform and wrote
bold books. They were driven to the Kaiserlicher Automobil Klub, a
gorgeous establishment, with footmen in short pants and silk stockings.
There was a private dining room and an elaborate repast, including
plovers’ eggs, a dish of which Thyrsis had never heard and which proved
to be dangerous in practice, since you never knew what you were going to
find when you cracked a shell. Thereafter the irreverent strangers
always referred to Rathenau as _Kiebitzei_.
They united in finding him genial but a trifle overconfident--an
attitude that accompanies the possession of vast sums of money and the
necessity of making final decisions upon great issues. Van Eeden was a
much older man who had made himself a reputation in many different
fields--yet he did not feel so certain about anything as he found this
young master of electricity and finance. However, there is this to be
added: it is the men who know what they think who are capable of action.
Walter Rathenau would no doubt have made over German industry along more
social and human lines if the reactionaries had not murdered him.
X
The Dutch divorce was granted, in pleasant fashion, without Thyrsis
having to appear in court. Craig, who was back in England under the wing
of her earl and countess, now wished to return to Mississippi to
persuade her parents to let her marry a divorced man; Thyrsis also
wished to go, having a new novel to market. These were the happy days
before the passport curse, so it was possible to travel incognito and
land in New York without newspaper excitement. In the interest of
propriety, the pair traveled on separate steamers. Craig came on the
_Lusitania_, ship of ill fate for her as for others; in a stormy
December passage she was thrown and broke the bones at the base of the
spine, which caused her suffering for many years, and made a hard task
yet harder for her.
The siege of the family began. The father was a judge and knew the
law--at least he knew his own kind, and took no stock in a piece of
engraved stationery from Amsterdam that he could not read. “Daughter,
you cannot marry a married man!” That was all he would say; and the
answer, “Papa, I have made up my mind to marry him!” meant nothing. She
would spend her nights weeping--an old story in her life. She was his
first child, and her portrait, a beautiful oil painting, hung in the
drawing room; when she went away to New York again, he put this portrait
up in the attic.
Thyrsis, meantime, was interviewing publishers--an old story in _his_
life. Mitchell Kennerley had no use for _Sylvia--it_ was not in the
modern manner. Thyrsis’ fate was to wander from one publisher to
another--since he would not obey the rules of their game. Literary works
were turned out according to pattern, stamped with a trademark, and sold
to customers who wanted another exactly like the last. A new publisher
came forward, an old-fashioned one; but apparently the buyers of
old-fashioned novels distrusted the Thyrsis label. _Sylvia_ sold only
moderately, and the sequel, _Sylvia’s Marriage_, hardly sold at all. Two
thousand copies in America and a hundred thousand in Great Britain--that
was a record for a prophet in his own country!
It was a time of stirring among the foreign-born workers in America, and
Thyrsis and other young enthusiasts thought it was the beginning of the
change for which they prayed. There was a strike of silkworkers in
Paterson, New Jersey, and the intelligentsia of Greenwich Village made
weekend pilgrimages for strike relief and oratory. Leading the strike
were Bill Haywood, grim old one-eyed miners’ chief from the Rockies;
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who had begun her rebel career as a high-school
girl in New York; Carlo Tresca, his face and body scarred by the bullets
of his masters’ gunmen; Joe Ettor and Arthur Giovannitti, fresh from a
frame-up for murder in Massachusetts. Helping them, and at the same time
studying them for copy, were budding young novelists such as Leroy Scott
and Ernest Poole; a dramatist, Thompson Buchanan, who was later to
employ his knowledge in the concoction of anti-Bolshevik nightmares; and
John Reed, war correspondent, whose bones were destined to lie in the
Kremlin in less than ten years.
They besought Thyrsis to join them; he yielded to the temptation, and
once more saw the busy pencils of the newspaper reporters flying. Did
they make up the false quotations themselves, or was their copy doctored
in the office? Impossible to say; but Thyrsis saw himself quoted as
advising violence, which he had never done in his life. He filed the
clippings away, and filed the rage in his heart. It was still six years
to the writing of _The Brass Check_.
A terrible thing to see tens of thousands of human beings starved into
slavery, held down by policemen’s clubs and newspaper slanders. The
young sympathizers were desperate, and in the hope of moving the heart
of New York, they planned the “Paterson Pageant”--to bring two thousand
silkworkers to the stage of Madison Square Garden and give a mass
performance of the events of the strike, with special emphasis on
speeches and singing. Over this scheme a group of twenty or thirty men
and women slaved day and night for several weeks, and bled their
pocketbooks empty--and then saw the New York papers hinting that they
had stolen the money of the strikers! Two things out of that adventure
will never pass from memory: first, the old warehouse in which
rehearsals were held, and John Reed with his shirt sleeves rolled up,
shouting through a megaphone, drilling those who were to serve as
captains of the mass; and second, the arrival of that mass, two thousand
half-starved strikers in Madison Square Garden rushing for the
sandwiches and coffee!
XI
The elderly Judge in Mississippi would not change his decision once
given; but the ladies of the family were more pliable, and by springtime
it had become plain to them that they could not break the bonds that
held their daughter to the dreaded socialist muckraker. Two of them came
to New York on a pilgrimage to see what sort of man it might be that had
woven this evil spell. The mother was a lady who refrained from boasting
of being the seventh lineal descendant of that Lady Southworth who had
come to Massachusetts to marry the second colonial governor; but who
allowed herself a modest pride as founder of the Christian (Disciples)
church of her home town and sponsor of no one knew how many monuments to
Confederate heroes throughout the South. With her came a greataunt, one
of the few “strong-minded women” the state of Mississippi had produced;
she had gone to California, and become a schoolteacher, and married a
pioneer, General Green, who was known as the “father of irrigation” and
had left her a newspaper, the Colusa _Sun_, to manage.
These two reached New York in a state of trepidation hardly to be
comprehended by irreverent intellectuals. Oh, fortunate chance that the
socialist muckraker had been born close to Mason and Dixon’s line, and
had so many Virginia ancestors he could talk about! Actually, there
were cousins who were cousins of cousins! His mother had taught him
exactly how to use a knife and fork; his bride-to-be had taught him that
gloves do not go with tennis shoes! For these reasons, plus a lawyer’s
assurance that the divorce was valid in the United States, it was
decided that there should be a wedding.
But surely not in New York, swarming place of reporters! Let it be in
some decent part of the world, where family and good breeding count!
Mississippi was impossible, because the Judge forbade it; but in
Virginia there were cousins who would lend the shelter of their name and
homestead. So the party took a night train--one amused but attentive
muckraker and three Southern ladies on the verge of a nervous crisis,
seeing a newspaper reporter in every sleeping-car berth. “Oh, the
reporters! What will the reporters say!” Thyrsis heard this for a week,
until he could stand it no more and suddenly exploded in a masculine
cry: “Oh, _damn_ the reporters!” There followed an awe-stricken
silence--but in their secret hearts the two elderly ladies were
relieved. It was a real man, after all!
Fredericksburg, scene of the slaughter of some fifteen thousand Yankees.
The old-maid cousins knew Craig, because she had been sent to them to
recuperate after dancing seasons; they now welcomed this romantic
expedition with open arms. There was a tremendous scurrying about, and
the respectable mother set out to persuade the pastor of her respectable
kind of church to officiate. But, alas, that dread stigma of a divorce!
Thyrsis had to seek out an Episcopal clergyman and persuade him. Having
been brought up in that church, he knew how to talk to such a clergyman;
having been the innocent party in the divorce, he had under the church
law the right to be remarried.
But the clergyman required evidence that Thyrsis had been the innocent
party; so the would-be bridegroom came back to the hotel to get the
divorce certificate. As it happened, in the hurry of packing, the proper
document had been overlooked; instead, there was another and subsequent
document, giving Thyrsis the custody of his son. It was in the Dutch
language, and the author, who was no Dutchman, took it and translated
it, with the elderly clergyman looking over his shoulder. Somehow the
legal formulas became confused, and a certificate of custody underwent
a mysterious transmogrification--it became a certificate of divorce
based on the wife’s admitted infidelity.
The Episcopal proprieties having thus been satisfied, the clergyman put
on his glad robes, and there was a ceremony in an ancient family garden
by the banks of the swiftly flowing Rappahannock, with the odor of
violets and crocuses in the air, and a mother and a greataunt and
several old-maid cousins standing by in a state of uncertain romance. As
for the bride and groom--the world had battered them too much, and they
could hardly squeeze out a tear or a smile. Thyrsis had even forgotten
the ring, and with sudden tears his mother-in-law slipped her own
wedding ring from her finger into his hand. Apart from this lapse, and
the single “damn,” he played his part perfectly. He promised to love,
honor, and obey--and did so for a total of forty-eight years thereafter.
At home in Mississippi sat the elderly Judge, having been forewarned of
the event and waiting for the storm to break. The telephone rang: the
Memphis _Commercial Appeal_--or perhaps it was the New Orleans
_Times-Picayune_. “Judge Kimbrough, we have a dispatch from
Fredericksburg, Virginia, saying that your daughter has married Upton
Sinclair.” “Yes, so I understand.” “The dispatch says that the husband
is an advocate of socialism, feminism, and birth control. Does your
daughter share her husband’s ideas on these matters?” Said the Judge:
“My daughter does not share _any_ of her husband’s ideas!” And so the
interview went out to the world.
_9_
_New Beginning_
I
The fates who deal out marriages seldom chose two more different human
personalities for yoking together. Craig was all caution and I was all
venture. She was all reticence, and I wanted to tell of my mistakes so
that others could learn to avoid them. Craig would have died before she
let anyone know hers. When she got some money she wanted to hide it like
a squirrel; when I got some I wanted to start another crusade, to change
a world that seemed to me in such sad shape. Craig agreed about the
shape, but what she wanted to do was to hide us from it. This duel was
destined to last for forty-eight years.
My mother and hers had proudly produced their family trees, and behold,
we were both descended from the same English king. We had traveled by
different routes: Craig’s ancestor, Lady Southworth, had come to
Massachusetts to be married to the colonial governor, William Bradford;
mine had come to Virginia and entered the Navy. One of my ancestors had
been a commander in the Battle of Lake Huron in the War of 1812, and his
son, Captain Arthur Sinclair, my grandfather, had commanded one of the
vessels with which Admiral Perry opened up Japan. That grandfather,
three uncles, and several cousins had fought in the Confederate States
Navy. Craig’s great-grandfather had been appointed by President
Jefferson the first surveyor general of the Territory of Mississippi. So
those two mothers had got along conversationally, and Mama Kimbrough had
good news to take back to Leflore County.
The youngest Kimbrough daughter, Dolly, was at a school in Tarrytown, on
the Hudson, and I escorted Mama Kimbrough there. On the way she set out
to make a Christian out of me, and I was so attentive that we went an
hour past our station; we had to get out and wait for a train to take us
back. We found Dolly in bed, blooming in spite of an appendix operation.
By the time we returned to New York I had been able to persuade Mama
that my socialism was just Christian brotherhood brought up to date;
also Mama had decided that a trip to Europe with Craig and me would be
educational for Dolly.
II
The first place we visited was Hellerau, in Germany, where the Dalcroze
School was holding its annual spring festival. Hellerau means “bright
meadow.” Rising from that meadow was a temple of art, and we witnessed a
performance of Gluck’s _Orpheus_, represented in dance as well as in
music. It was one of the loveliest things I had ever seen, and a quarter
of a century later I used it for the opening scene of _Worlds End_--the
world’s beginning of Lanny Budd. The young Lanny met on the bright
meadow--as we ourselves had met--Bernard Shaw with his golden beard
outshining any landscape. I had already had lunch at his home in London
and at his country home; he welcomed us, and our joy in the Dalcroze
festival was confirmed by Britain’s greatest stage critic. He was always
so kind, and the letters he wrote me about the Lanny Budd books helped
them to win translation into a score of foreign languages.
We traveled to David’s school and collected him. We had lunch in a
restaurant in Dresden. I ordered an omelet in my most polished German,
and very carefully specified that I did not want pancakes. “_Kein
Mehl_,” I said several times, but they brought us pancakes; when we
refused to accept them and tried to leave the restaurant, they would not
let us out. Our train was due so we had to pay, and I bade an unloving
farewell to Germany--just a year before World War I.