Tramping on Life Part 125

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 t.i.tle 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 fis.h.i.+ng.

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 courts.h.i.+p. '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 das.h.i.+ng 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 _s.e.x in Its Relation to Society_.

I might add, for the sake of the reader who may be p.r.o.ne 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 cla.s.sics, 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 relations.h.i.+p between mother and daughters was one more of delightful, understanding comrades.h.i.+p 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 s.p.a.ce 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."