When we were ready to pay our bill, the proprietress pulled a rug from
under the bed and accused us of having spilled grease on it. We had had
no grease, and hadn’t even seen the rug; but when we refused to pay for
the damage, the woman called in a policeman--I think he was the tallest
man I ever saw in uniform. He told us we would have to pay or we could
not leave. It was a “racket,” of course, but there was nothing we could
do; so to France also we bade an unloving farewell. When World War I
came, we weren’t quite sure which person we wanted most to have
punished--the German restaurant proprietor or the French virago and tall
policeman.
III
We went to England, where nobody ever robbed us. We settled in the model
village of Letchworth, built by co-operatives. I had acquired from Mrs.
Bernard Shaw the right to make a novel out of a drama by the French
playwright Eugène Brieux, called _Damaged Goods_, dealing with venereal
disease. I wrote that novel and got an advance from the publisher, and
so we had a pleasant summer. I played tennis at the club, and in a
middle-aged bachelor girl found the first female antagonist who could
keep me busy. I have forgotten her name, but I remember that whenever I
got in a good shot she would exclaim, “Oh, _haught_!”
Also I remember an outdoor socialist meeting at which I addressed an
audience of co-operators, speaking from the tail of a cart along with
dear, kind George Lansbury, member of Parliament and leader of the
left-wing socialists.
We moved into London for a while, and there the lady from the
Mississippi Delta met more strange kinds of people--among them Mrs.
Pethick Lawrence, Sylvia Pankhurst, and other suffrage combatants.
Craig’s sister Dolly had met them too, and we learned, somewhat to our
dismay, that Dolly had carried into the National Art Gallery a hatchet
concealed under her skirt. Known suffragettes, when they tried to go in,
were searched; but the guards didn’t know Dolly, and it was a simple
matter for her to retire to the ladies’ room and pass the hatchet. What
would Chancellor Kimbrough, president of two banks in Mississippi, have
said if a newspaper reporter had called him up and told him that his
youngest daughter had been arrested for passing a hatchet!
While I renewed my acquaintance with my socialist friends, it was
Craig’s pleasure to go out on the streets and watch the people. At home
the servants had been black; here they had white skins but even so were
like another race. The educated classes were gracious and keen-minded;
but the poor seemed to be speaking a strange language. What did “Kew”
mean? Every shop assistant said it when you handed her money; and once
when Craig and I were going down into “the Tube,” two male creatures
rushed past us in the midst of a hot argument. We caught one shouted
sentence, “Ow, gow an’ be a Sowshalist!”
I had a curious experience in London with Jessica Finch, who was the
owner and director of a fashionable American school for young ladies,
just off Fifth Avenue in New York. Her prices were staggering, and
admission had to be arranged years in advance. She was an ardent
suffragist and a socialist as determined as myself; she taught these two
doctrines to her pupils, and when they went home for Christmas vacation,
the Intercollegiate Socialist Society moved into her school to hold its
annual convention.
When Craig had first met me in New York, I had taken her to one of these
conventions, and she had met a youth named Walter Lippmann, founder and
president of the Harvard chapter of that organization. Walter was
interested now to meet a young lady from the Far South, and began at
once to further his education. “What is the economic status of the Negro
in Mississippi?” Craig, with her red-brown eyes twinkling, replied, “I
didn’t know he had any.”
Jessica was in the habit of taking a bevy of her pupils abroad at the
end of each school year, and they were all snugly ensconced in the
palatial home of London’s great department-store proprietor, Harry
Gordon Selfridge. Jessica laughingly assured me that she had a Rembrandt
in her bedroom and that every one of the girls had a hundred thousand
dollars’ worth of pictures on her walls. Jessica loved to talk, and
there was plenty to talk about; the suffragettes and the British
socialist movement and the prospect of a world war. It must have been
two or three o’clock in the morning when we parted. Craig and I saw her
several years later in New York. She was married to J. O’Hara Cosgrave,
onetime editor of _Everybody’s Magazine_ and later editor of the New
York _Sunday World_.
The happy summer passed. _Damaged Goods_ was coming out, and I had to be
in New York. Craig’s blessed mother, much against the judgment of the
Judge, allowed Dolly to stay in London to become a paying guest at the
Wilshires’ and attend the Dalcroze School of Eurythmics. My David was
placed in one of the progressive schools near the city.
As I have already said, Craig had written some tales of her Southern
girlhood; and I had stolen them from her for a novel to be called
_Sylvia_. _Damaged Goods_, both the play and novel, had filled my mind
with the subject of venereal disease, something considered unmentionable
in those days. I now decided to use the material from _Sylvia_ for a
novel on that theme, and we settled down in a little apartment to finish
it. We had long arguments of course. Craig was herself Sylvia, and she
thought she knew what Sylvia would do and say. I had to agree; but I
thought I knew what the public would want to read. If anybody had been
in the next room while we were arguing they would surely have thought
that World War I had already broken out.
IV
We decided to transfer the battleground to Bermuda for the winter. We
found one of those little white cottages built of blocks carved out from
coral. Craig had had enough of social life to last all her days, she
said; all she wanted was to sit in the shade of a palm tree and decide
what she believed about life. In the afternoon I would mount a bicycle
and ride down to the Princess Hotel and play tennis with a captain of
the British Army, stationed nearby.
A former young woman secretary of mine had married a Bermuda planter,
and they would come for us in a carriage--no autos permitted in those
days--and take us to a home completely surrounded by onions and
potatoes. At night the planter took me out on Harrington Sound in a
flat-bottomed boat; holding a torch we would look into the clear water,
and there would be a big green lobster waiting to be stabbed with a
two-pronged spear.
It was in Bermuda that we had an experience Craig delighted to tell
about. Walking along the lovely white coral road, we stopped at a little
store to buy something to eat. Looking up, my eyes were caught by
familiar objects on shelves near the ceiling--flat cans covered with
dust but with the labels still visible: “Armour’s Roast Beef.” “What are
those cans doing up there?” I asked, and the proprietor replied, “Oh,
some years ago a fellow wrote a book about that stuff, and I haven’t
been able to sell a can since.”
V
In the spring of 1914 we came back to New York. The novel, which we
called _Sylvia’s Marriage_, was finished: the story of a Southern girl
who marries a wealthy Bostonian and Harvard man and bears a child
blinded by gonorrhea. A terrible story, of course, and an innovation in
the fiction of that time. I took the manuscript to Walter Lippmann, who
had himself graduated from Harvard and had founded a branch of the
Intercollegiate Socialist Society there. He read it, and invited me to
lunch at the Harvard Club.
I remember vividly his reaction to my novel. I hadn’t thought of him as
an ardent partisan of Harvard, but perhaps he was already coming to a
more conservative attitude to life. He told me that my picture of a
Harvard man was utterly fantastic; no such pretentious snob had ever
been seen there, and my portrait was a travesty. I remember one
sentence: “It’s as preposterous as if you were to portray an orgy in
this place.” And Walter waved his hand to indicate that most decorous
dining room.
I would have been embarrassed had I not known certain facts that,
unfortunately, I was not at liberty to mention to my old ISS friend. I
thanked him for his kindness, took my departure, and have not met him
since.
It was Mary Craig who had provided me with the picture of that august
Harvard senior, named Van Tuiver in the novel. What had happened was
this. In my little cottage in the single-tax colony of Arden, Craig had
met a patron of the colony, a leading paper manufacturer, Fiske Warren.
When I left Arden, my secretary, Ellen, had become one of the
secretaries to this extremely wealthy and important Bostonian. On his
country estate each of his secretaries had a separate cottage of her
own, and Ellen had invited Craig to pay her a visit in her cottage.
Craig had done so, and Fiske had dropped in now and then in the evening
to chat with Craig. He did not invite her to the mansion, and Craig was
shrewd enough to guess why and proud enough to be amused. Fiske’s wife,
Gretchen Warren, was the most august and haughty leader of Boston
society, and was not accustomed to receive secretaries socially--or
friends of secretaries.
To spare too many details: Craig happened to mention that she was a
lineal descendant of that Lady Southworth who had come to Massachusetts
to marry Governor Bradford. Fiske went up into the air as if she had put
a torpedo under him. He hurried to confirm it in his genealogy books,
and then to tell Gretchen about it--with the result that Ellen lost her
guest and Craig was moved up to the “big house” (I use the phrase to
which Craig was accustomed in Mississippi).
So it had come about that she had met “Van Tuiver”--only of course that
was not his real name. Gretchen had invited the top clubmen of eligible
age to meet this Southern belle, and Craig had listened to their
magnificence. Of course, she was no longer “eligible,” being engaged to
me, but she was not at liberty to reveal that fact; and she let them
spread their glory before her. She had never met this particular kind of
arrogance and self-importance, in Mississippi or anywhere else.
So when she came back from the visit she gave me Van Tuiver as a
character for our book, with every detail of his appearance, his manner,
and his language. And so it was that I was not disturbed by the opinion
of Walter Lippmann. Walter’s chances of meeting such a man at Harvard
had been of the slimmest, for Walter suffered not merely from the
handicap of being Jewish but also from having declassed himself by
setting up a socialist society. (Never have I forgotten the tone of
voice in which the secretary of the Harvard Club answered me when I
asked if I could obtain a list of Harvard students in order to send them
a circular about the proposed Intercollegiate Socialist Society.
“_Socialist!_” he exclaimed, incredulously; and I got the list
elsewhere.)
VI
In New York we had found ourselves a ten-dollar-a-week apartment on
Morningside Heights. One evening I went to a meeting at Carnegie Hall
alone; Craig, being tired, preferred to sleep. I came back about
midnight; and after that she had little sleep, because I told her about
the meeting.
Mrs. Laura Cannon, wife of the president of the Western Federation of
Miners, had told the story of what came to be known to the world as the
Ludlow massacre. In the lonely Rocky Mountains were coal camps fenced in
and guarded like medieval fortresses. No one could enter without a pass
or leave without another, and the miners and their families were in
effect white slaves. Rebelling against such conditions, they had gone on
strike and had been turned out of the camps. Down in the valley, with
the help of their unions, they had set up tent colonies; after they had
held out for several months, the gunmen of the company had come one
night, thrown kerosene on the tents, and set fire to them. Three women
and eleven children had been burned to death; but the newspapers of the
country, including those of New York, had given only an inch or two to
the event.
The most important fact about the whole thing was that these coal camps
were owned by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, a Rockefeller concern.
I told my terrified wife what I had decided to do--to take Mrs. Cannon
to the office of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in the morning and ask him to
hear her story. If he refused, we would charge him with murder before
the American public and organize a group of sympathizers who would put
mourning bands around their arms and walk up and down in front of the
Standard Oil Building in protest against the company’s crime.
I won’t try to portray the dismay of my bride of just one year. We had
been so perfectly happy and so carefully respectable--and now this
horror! “You will all be arrested,” she exclaimed. I answered, “Maybe,
but they couldn’t do anything but fine us, and someone will put up the
money.” We didn’t have it.
Craig couldn’t bring herself to say no--not this time. In the morning I
set to work to call people who had been at the meeting, and put them to
work to call others to the Liberal Club that evening. And, of course, we
did not fail to notify the newspapers. Some thirty or forty people
assembled--having scented publicity, which “radicals” dearly love. I set
forth the proposal and called for the help of those who would agree to a
program of complete silence and complete nonresistance. One man,
overcome with indignation, called for a program of collecting arms, and
I invited him to go into the next room, shut the door, and collect all
the arms he wanted.
Craig was willing to be one of the marchers but insisted that she had to
have a proper costume. She waited until the department stores opened,
and then she got herself an elegant long white cape. When I arrived at
nine in the morning, I found no men but four ladies, one of whom had
provided herself with a many-colored banner and a loud screaming voice.
I invited her to set the banner against the wall of the Standard Oil
Company and to stuff her handkerchief in her mouth; we then took up our
silent parade in front of the office of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (We
never saw him, and I learned that he had taken up the practice of coming
in by a back door.)
VII
We walked for perhaps five minutes, and then policemen politely told us
to walk somewhere else; when we politely refused, they told us that we
were under arrest. One of them grabbed me by the arm and started to
hustle me, but I said to him very quietly, “Please behave like a
gentleman. I have no idea but to go with you.” So after that we had a
pleasant stroll to the police station, where we found a half-dozen
newspaper reporters with their pads of scratch paper and their busy
pens.
To the sergeant at the desk I told the story of the Ludlow massacre all
over again. It wasn’t his business to listen, but it was the reporters’
business, and all police sergeants are respectful to reporters. A little
later we were put into a patrol wagon and taken to the police court, and
again I told the story, this time to the judge. The policeman who had
arrested me testified that my conduct had been “that of a perfect
gentleman”; whereupon the judge found me guilty of disorderly conduct
and fined me three dollars. I declined to pay the fine, and so did the
four ladies; so each of us got three days instead of three dollars, and
I was led over the “Bridge of Sighs” to a cell in the ancient prison
known as The Tombs.
A most interesting experience, because I had as cellmate a young Jewish
fellow in for stealing. He was a lively talker and told me all about his
art; and of course every kind of knowledge is useful to a novelist
sooner or later. This young fellow stole because he loved to. It was a
sporting proposition--he pitted his wits against the owners of property
in the great metropolis, and he didn’t especially mind when he was
caught because the charge was always petty theft; apparently they never
bothered to compare his fingerprints with previous fingerprints, and he
was always a “first offender.” He trusted me--I suppose he thought of a
socialist as an intellectual and higher type of thief. Anyhow, we were
pals, and I was entertained for two days.
I never left the cell, because I had learned about fasting, and when I
contemplated prison fare, I decided this was a good time to apply my
knowledge. At the end of the second day a message came to me that if I
wanted to appeal my sentence I would have to pay a fine; for, obviously,
if I served the whole three days I could not sue to get my time back. It
was my wife who had sent this information, and she set out to find the
court where the one dollar for the third day was to be paid. She has
told in _Southern Belle_ the delightful story of how she got lost in the
several galleries of courtrooms and stopped a gentleman to ask the way
to the room where the fine should be paid. The gentleman asked, “What is
it for?” and Craig said, “Some idiot of a judge has sent my husband to
jail.” “Madam,” was the reply, “I am that judge.” But he told her where
to go to pay her dollar.
We kept that demonstration going for a couple of weeks, and Craig met
such people as Judge Kimbrough’s daughter had never dreamed of meeting
in this world--lumberjacks from the mountains, sailors from the harbor,
and poor Jewish garment workers half-starved in a period of
unemployment.
George Sterling, the poet, happened to be visiting in New York. He
marched on one side of Craig, with Craig holding his arm to keep him
from making any move when the “slugs” muttered insults at her. (“Slugs”
was what Craig called them, groping for a word.) Clement Wood,
stenographer and also poet, marched on the other side. Irish-born
novelist Alexander Irvine and Irish-born suffragette Elizabeth Freeman
took charge while Craig rested, and some rich supporter put up money for
a rest room and feeding station. I went out to Colorado to make
publicity there, and to write it; meantime Craig kept things going on
lower Broadway. Clement told her that an agent of the Rockefellers had
come to him and offered him money for secret information about our plans
and purposes. Since we had no secrets of any sort, Craig told him to get
all the Rockefeller money that was available.
VIII
A group of students of the Ferrer School, an anarchist institution, came
down to march, and later decided to carry the demonstration to the
Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills. They did not ask our consent, and
we had nothing to do with it--until they were beaten up for trying to
hold a free-speech meeting in nearby Tarrytown. Then I went up to try to
persuade the board of directors of the town to let us hold a meeting; I
carried with me a letter from Georg Brandes, perhaps the most highly
respected literary critic in Europe--but I doubt if the trustees had
heard of him. They turned down our request.
What should turn up then but an offer from a millionaire lady, whose
estate adjoined the Rockefellers’, to let us hold a free-speech meeting
in her open-air theater; I went there and made a speech and was not
beaten up. Let would-be reformers make a note of this item and always
have their free-speech meetings on the property of millionaires.
The time came when all our money was gone, and we went back to our
little apartment on Morningside Heights. A day or two later our
telephone rang. It was the nearby police station calling to ask Craig if
she knew Arthur Caron and if she would come and identify his body. Caron
was a French-Canadian boy who had been in a strike in Rhode Island and
beaten there. After being beaten at Tarrytown, he and two of his
colleagues had set to work in a tenement-house room to make a bomb,
doubtless to blow up the Rockefellers. Instead, they had blown out the
top floor of the tenement house, and two of them were killed.
I have often thought what must have been the effect of that event upon
the Rockefeller family. There has been an enormous change in their
attitude to the public since that time. John D., Jr., went out to his
coal mines and danced with the miners’ wives and made friends with the
angry old Mother Jones; more important, he made a deal to recognize the
unions and reform conditions in all the camps of the Colorado Fuel and
Iron Company. If you look at the record that his son, the present Nelson
A. Rockefeller, is making as governor of New York State, you will see
that our lessons were indeed learned by that family.
One curious outcome of that “civil war” of ours had to do with the
newspapers. Craig had made friends with some of the reporters, and they
had told her how their stories were being mutilated in the office. The
New York _Herald_ gave us especially bad treatment, making many
statements about us that were pure invention. For example, they said
that the president of the board of trustees in Tarrytown had denounced
my conduct in an angry speech. I went up to see the gentleman, to whom I
had been perfectly courteous. He assured me he had made no such
statement to anyone--and he gave me a letter to that effect.
That letter was shown to the _Herald_, but they refused publication and
even repeated the charge; so I told a lawyer friend to bring a libel
suit against them. Then I went back to my writing and forgot all about
it. The usual law’s delay occurred. Some three years later, to my
astonishment, I received a letter from my lawyer telling me that the
case had been settled, with the _Herald_ paying three thousand dollars’
damages!
George Sterling and Clement Wood each got a fine poem out of this
experience. George wandered down to the battery and gazed at the Statue
of Liberty and asked,
Say, is it bale-fire in thy brazen hand,
A traitor light set on betraying coast
To lure to doom the mariner?...
And Clement Wood, after collecting his Rockefeller money, wrote a sonnet
beginning:
White-handed lord of murderous events,
Well have you guarded what your father gained....
Both these poems are in my anthology, _The Cry for Justice_, which I set
out to compile as soon as the excitement of the “mourning parade” was
over.
IX
We were broke as usual, but the John C. Winston Company of Philadelphia
fell for my proposition of a book, _The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of
Social Protest_; they advanced a thousand dollars to make possible its
compilation. A good friend, Frederick C. Howe, then United States
Commissioner of Immigration, offered us the use of a cottage in the
hills above Croton-on-Hudson; so we moved out of our ten-dollar-a-week
apartment into a fifty-dollar-a-month cottage on the edge of woods that
sloped down to the Croton River. In summer the woods were green, and in
winter the ground was white, and George Sterling came and chopped down
dead trees for firewood. Clement Wood came to be my secretary and to
quarrel with me over all the poetry I put into _The Cry for Justice_ and
all that I left out--including some of his. Vachel Lindsay had come to
see us in New York, and his book had set Clement on fire; we would hear
him roaring through the forest:
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo ...
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you!
Poor dear Vachel! He had been sending me his stuff for two or three
years, and I had been praising it; but when I met him he suddenly burst
out, to my consternation, “_Oh, you don’t like me!_” I had to persuade
him that I liked him very much indeed. Clement liked him, and liked Walt
Whitman too, but he didn’t like Edward Carpenter for two cents. We had
fierce arguments, but in the end we got _The Cry for Justice_ put
together, and it was published and widely reviewed.
Edgar Selwyn and his wife, Margaret Mayo, lived within bicycling
distance, and so I had tennis. Isadora Duncan’s sister had her dancing
school nearby, and we met unusual characters there. Floyd Dell and
Robert Minor constituted a little radical colony, and we could go there
and solve all the problems of the world, each in his own special way.