"I toiled like a sleepless sisyphus, and one day, in a flash of intuition, I located and showed the flaw in an obscure process; I was completely successful.

"I had put no price on my services. For Jim's sake, I had worked like a Trojan, physically and mentally, for a month. With unlimited money at my disposal, I had drawn only twenty dollars altogether, and this I sent to Marie, to keep the wolf away from the Rogues' Gallery, our flat.

"When the factory was running smoothly, I told Mr. Kirkman that I would break in a man for my place. He made me a tempting offer to take full charge of the shop. I told him I would not be a participant in exploiting his 'hands,' who were getting only $7 to $8 a week. Furthermore, I said I would not stand for the discharge of any man for incompetency. I had never in the shop met any man I could not teach and learn something from in return; I had never discharged a man, and never would. The millionaire boss nevertheless continued to urge me to take the position, and my brother Jim offered me two thousand dollars' worth of stock at par and a large yearly salary. Well, I suppose, there's no use of anybody's trying to move me when Jim has failed.

"I quit Pittsburg with nothing but the price of a ticket to Chicago, though my brother told me the firm would send me a check for $500 or $1,000 for my services as an expert. When, with a beating heart, I returned to my dear Rogues' Gallery, all was change and dispersion. No more happy times in our little balcony of fellowship, which had overlooked in its irresponsibility the jarring sects and insects of this world: the most delightful place in this world to me is a home without a boss, and this home was for the time gone. The possibility of being unfair to Marie makes me draw a veil over the cause of the breaking-up of the Rogues' Gallery.

"Poor Jim found that the firm would not pay me a cent for my really brilliant month's work, for the reason that I had refused to be a conventional boss and had no written or verbal contract or agreement. Jim therefore resigned, forfeiting fifty dollars of weekly salary and twenty-five thousand dollars in stock, ten thousand of which he had offered me to stay. Mr. Kirkman thought all the world of Jim and could not run the shop without him. Nor could he recover from the blow, for he loved my brother, as everybody did. Mr. Kirkman died a few weeks afterward, and after a year or two the firm went into the hands of a receiver. All this happened because of a few paltry dollars, which I did not ask for, for which I did not care a damn—and this is business! I heartily rejoice, if not in Mr. Kirkman's death, at least in the dispersion of his family and their being forced into our ranks, where there is some hope for them.

"My brother Jim was one of the maimed ones in my family. Twenty years ago, defective machinery and a surgeon's malpractice made one arm useless. The Pittsburg affair broke up his beautiful home. He and his whole-souled wife and charming children, into whose eyes it was an entrancing rapture for me to look, were a family without a boss; they needed none, for they loved one another perfectly. Jim is dead now, and the best I can do is to send you his last letter; it has the brevity of grief:

"'I have no explanation to offer for my silence, more than a feeling which possessed me shortly after my arrival here—a desire to be considered a dead one, and am doing all but the one thing that will make my wish a reality. I am long tired of the game, and only continue to play because of the hardships my taking off would cause those who at present are not able to care for themselves. A way out of it would be to take them along, but I think if the matter were put before them, they would decline my proffered service; and take a chance as half-orphans. You calling up our boyhood days in "Little Hell" makes me question still further if I have any right to deny those dear to me the delights that only the young can feel and enjoy. I made a great mistake in coming to this Ohio town. The chase for dollars which I am performing here seven days every week is very disgusting to me, and every day only adds to the pangs. I am out all day selling goods, pleading for trade and collecting for former weeks' business; and in the evening I must do the necessary office work. Every day is the same, except Sunday, when I make up the book-keeping for the whole week and prepare statements and the like, to begin the usual round on Monday morning. It is a hell of a life and I wish it were done. I have some consolation in being able to call up at will those that I love. I have many a waking dream, while tramping the hills, about the comrades that have added to the joys of my former existence. Let me hear from you occasionally, because a letter from you seems to revive some of the old feeling that formerly made life passable.'

* * * * *

"I suppose I shall recover in time from Jim's death. I wish I could have been with him when he died. During his last half-unconscious moments the nurse proposed to send for a priest. Jim's soul must have made a last effort, for raising himself erect, he flung these words: 'I hire no spiritual nurse,' and then asked his daughter of fourteen to bring him a volume of Emerson and read to him. When she returned with the book, he was gone.

"Of course, the doctor and all the wise ones have diagnosed Jim's case. But I think he sized up his case in that letter I sent you. He died of that great loneliness of soul which made of his wasted body a battered barricade against the stupidity which finally engulphed him. The soul of social and individual honour and commercial integrity, he had the misfortune to find few like himself. He yearned for the ideal; and I am sure he went down with that hope for humanity. Let us trust that there is an ever increasing number of human beings who have Jim's malady—'seekers after something in this world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.' If this letter seems boisterously blue, remember it is only the sullen marching of the black sap preceding the unfurling of the emerald banners of spring, when all things break into a 'shrill green.'"

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Terry's letter, like Marie's, I give verbatim.—H. H.



CHAPTER VII

The Meeting

The mood of rebellious idealism sometimes expresses itself in actual anti-social conduct and life. So it was with Terry. He is the most consistent anarchist I have known, in the sense that he more nearly rejects, practically, all social institutions and forms of conduct and morality. He is very sweet, and very gentle, loves children and is tender to every felt relation. There is a wistful look always in his eyes. He is tall, thin, and gaunt, his hair is turning grey; but there is nothing of the let-down of middle age in his nature, always tense, intense; scrupulously, deeply rebellious.

Even before his meeting with Marie, his open acts of sympathy with what is rejected by society had put him more and more in the position of an outcast. Some of the members of his family had become fairly successful in the ways of the world. Terry might easily have taken his place in comfortable bourgeois society. But his temperament and his idealism led him to the disturbed life of the radical rejector. And he was rejected, in turn, by all, even by his family.

Between him and his mother there was perhaps an uncommon bond, but even she in the end cast him out. He wrote of her:

"She taught me that I did not belong in this world; she did not know how deeply she was right. When she crossed my arms over my childish breast at night and bade me be prepared, she gave me the motive of my life. She told me I would weep salt tears in this world, and they have run into my mouth. She loved me, as I never have been loved before or since, even up to the hour of my social crucifixion: then she basely deserted me. But I rallied, and the motive she implanted in me remains. Though a child without any childhood, I had my reason for existence, just the same. Everything is meaningless and transitory, except to be prepared. And I finally became prepared for anything and everything. My life was and is a preparation—for what? For social crucifixion, I suppose, for I belong to those baffled beings who are compelled to unfold within because there is no place for them without. I am a remaining product of the slums, consciously desiring to be there. I know its few heights and many depths. There have I seen unsurpassed devotion and unbelievable atrocities, which I would not dare, even if I could, make known. The truth, how can we stand it, or stand for it? I think a sudden revelation has wofully unbalanced many a fine mind. Hamlet, revealing himself to Ophelia, drives distraught one of the sweetest of souls. Fortunately we never know the whole truth, which may account for man being gregarious. One cannot help noticing that they who have a hopeless passion for truth are left largely alone—when nothing worse can be inflicted upon them."

Terry's experience in the slums was no other than many another's, but the effect it made upon his great sensibility was far from ordinary. In another letter, speaking of what he calls his "crucifixion," he wrote:

"Only great sorrow keeps us close, and that is why, the first night after one of my deepest quarrels with my mother, I picked out a five-cent lodging-house, overlooking my home, to pass the night of my damnation in sight of the lost paradise. I never had any reason, or I would have lost it. Let me hope that I am guided by something deeper than that. All my life I have felt the undertone of society; it has swept me to the depths, which I touched lovingly and fearfully with my lips.

"Whenever and wherever I have touched the depths, and it has been frequent and prolonged, and have seen the proletarian face to face, naked spiritually and physically, the appeal in his eyes is irresistible and irrefutable. I must do something for him or else I am lost to myself. If I should ever let an occasion go by I am sure I never could recover from the feeling that something irreparable had happened to me. I should not mind failure, but to fail here and in my own eyes is to be forever lost and eternally damned. This looks like the religion of my youth under another guise, but I must find imperishable harmony somewhere. The apathy of the mass oppresses me into a hopeless helplessness which may account for my stagnation, my ineffectiveness, my impotence, my stupidity, my crudeness, and my despair. I have always felt lop-sided, physically, especially in youth. My awkwardness became, too, a state of mind at the mercy of any spark of suggestion. My subjectively big head I tried to compress into a little hat, my objectively large hands concealed themselves in subjective pockets, my poor generous feet went the way of the author of Pilgrim's Progress. The result is a lop-sided mind, developed monstrously in certain sensitive directions, otherwise not at all. A born stumbler in this world, I naturally lurched up against society—but, as often happens I have lost the thread of my thought: my thoughts, at the critical moment, frequently desert me, as my family did; they seem to carry on an alluring flirtation, and when I think them near they suddenly wave me from the distance. But, like a lover, I will follow on—follow on to platonic intercourse with my real mistress, the proletarian. And soul there is there. I have met as fathomless spirits among the workers as one will meet with anywhere. Art never has fathomed them, and may never be able to do so. Often have I stood dumbfounded before some simple day-labourer with whom I worked. Art does not affect me, as this kind of grand simplicity in life does. I keep muttering to myself: there must be a meaning to our lives somewhere, or else we must sunder this social fabrication and create a meaning; and so my incantations go on endlessly.

"The proletarian is that modern sphinx whose thundering interrogative society will be called upon to answer. You and I know too well that society hitherto has answered only with belching cannon and vain vapourings of law, religion, and duty. But the toiling sphinx, who has time only to ask terrible questions, will some day formulate an articulate reply to its own question, and then once more we shall see that our foundations are of sand—sand that will be washed away, by blood, if need be. Some there are who will weep tears over the sand: the pleasures and the joy may die, for to me they are cold and false. My joy cannot find place within the four walls which shut out the misery and brutality of the world.

"How be a mouthpiece for the poor? How can art master the master-problem? They who have nothing much to say, often say it well and in a popular form; they are unhampered by weighty matters. It takes an eagle to soar with a heavy weight in its grasp. The human being, rocking to and fro with his little grief, must give way in depth of meaning to him who is rocked with the grief of generations past, present, and to come. It is then that love might rise, love so close to agony that agony cannot last: the love that will search ceaselessly, in the slums, in the dives, throughout all life, for the inevitable, and will accept no alternative and no compromise."

This was the man who met Marie at a critical time of her life. He was about thirty-five years old, had experienced much, had become formed, had rejected society, but not the ideal. Rather, as he dropped the one, he embraced more fervently the other. He had consorted with thieves, prostitutes, with all low human types; and for their failures and their weaknesses, their ideas and their instincts, he felt deep sympathy and even an aesthetic appreciation.

Marie, as we have seen, was only seventeen, unformed and wild, full of youthful passion and social despair, on the verge of what we call prostitution; reckless, hopeless, with a deep touch of sullenness and hatred. She was working at the time in the house of one of Terry's brothers. Katie, too, was employed there; although she lived with Nick, her husband, she still occupied herself at times with her old occupation; and, as ever, she watched Marie with a careful eye, rather vainly so just then, for this girl was as wild as a girl well could be.

One day Terry paid one of his infrequent visits to his brother's home, and saw the plump and pretty Marie hanging clothes in the yard. He was at once attracted to her, and entered into conversation. He was deeply pleased; so was the girl; and they made an appointment. He soon saw what her character was, and this was to him an added attraction.

"I had been looking for a girl like Marie," he said, "for several years. I had made one or two trials, and they always got me into trouble with my family. But the other girls did not make good. They were too weak and conventional and could not stand the pace of life with me. I had early formed a contempt for the matrimonial relation. Five years I had nursed my rebellion and waited for a chance to use it. As soon as I met Marie I felt I had met one of my own kind. It was partly the fierce charm of a social experiment, the love for the proletarian and the outcast; for I felt Marie was essentially that. This element of my interest in her Marie never understood—this unconscious propaganda, as it were. She thought it was all sex and wanted it so."

Katie saw that Terry was making up to her beloved Marie, and tried to prevent their meetings; but in vain; the attraction was too strong. Katie blackguarded Terry on every occasion, until she finally saw it was hopeless, and then invited him into her house to meet the girl. There he began to go frequently and the intimacy grew. Nick warned Terry against the girl on account of her loose character. "I have often found her," he said, "misconducting herself with some fellow or other. Why, she does so with everybody. Only this evening I found her on the front door-step with young Bladen. She is not the kind for you to be serious about. Everybody knows how common she is."

Nick did not understand that an argument of that kind tended only to confirm Terry in his interest in Marie. Terry answered him laconically: "That's all right, Nick. When you don't want her, just send her to me."

Nick, as we have seen, was jealous of Marie, because of Katie's love for her; so he fomented trouble between the two women. Katie, too, was at this time more exasperated with the girl's conduct than she had ever been before; and they had frequent quarrels. As the result of one of them, Marie went off with Terry to his family flat, where he was living alone at the time—to "have a fish dinner," telling the relenting Katie that she would return in the evening. But she stayed there with Terry all that night, for the first time. In the morning Katie turned up bright and early, burst into the flat, and reproached Terry so bitterly that they almost came to blows. But when Marie took Terry's side, Katie, terribly disappointed and hurt, yet made up her mind that it was inevitable; and Terry and Marie began to live together.

How did Marie feel about all this? What was her condition at the time, and her attitude toward this strange man, so different from every other she had met? In a long letter to me she has given an account of it all.

"I wrote you about my adventure with the club man. Well that was only a single instance of what finally became frequent with me. I had grown so fearfully tired of the life I was leading in domestic service that the only problem for me was how to get away from it all. For a time, I had thought I could get away only by marriage. I was ready to marry anybody who offered me food and shelter, and I had even thought of prostitution as a means of escape from domestic drudgery. I had not the slightest idea of what prostitution in its accepted sense meant. I knew in a vague way that women sold their bodies to men for money, that they lived luxurious lives, went to theatres and balls, wore beautiful gowns and seemed to be gay and happy. I was willing to marry any man who offered me a home, without the least suspicion that in that way, too, I should prostitute myself. But no one at that time offered me this means of escape, so I was quite ready to take the only other way, as I thought, left to me.

"About this time I met an old girl-friend whom I had not seen for several years; she was a domestic servant, too, but was in advance of me in her recklessness. When I met her again she was in the mood to lose all the little virtue left to her. She was quite willing to sell herself: she had done enough for love, she said, marriage was now an impossibility, and she might as well realise on her commercial value. To these ideas I agreed, and we arranged to meet in two weeks from that day and try an experiment. Meanwhile she was to go back to her home, get her belongings, and tell her parents she had secured a place as a servant-girl in Chicago.

"I left my position, and finding things too disagreeable at home where I continually quarrelled with my mother, I went to visit Kate, until my friend should return.

"How my ideas and ideals had changed! When I first began to dislike the work I was forced to do, I dreamed that some charming fairy would come and release me: I had been taught such a view of life from the novels of Bertha M. Clay and E. D. E. N. Southworth. Some rich man, young and charming, possibly the owner of the factory I was working in, would fall passionately in love with me, marry me and carry me away to his palace! Gradually, my ideas came down. I should have been glad to marry a foreman, then some good mechanic, and finally, some workman, however humble, whom I would love dearly. And now I was deliberately preparing for a life of prostitution!

"It was then, while living with my dear friend Kate, whom I sometimes helped in the work she did out, that I met my first, my last, my truest lover and friend, Terry. We met just at the right moment. I was filled with rebellion at the powers that were crushing me, breaking me, without realising why, or how, or what I might make of myself, when he came along and taught me in his own quiet and gentle convincing way how cruel and unjust is this scheme of things, and pointed out to me the cruelty and tyranny of my parents and of all society. He showed me that marriage such as I had contemplated was a bad form of prostitution, and he told me why. Of course, I did not grasp all the things he told me at once, but I listened and felt comforted; I began to feel that perhaps I might amount to something, might have some life of my own, and that my rebellion was perhaps justifiable. I began to understand why work was so objectionable to me and why I rebelled against the authority of my parents. My conceptions of freedom were crude, but I began to feel that my revolt was just, and was based upon the terrible injustice whereby the many must toil so that the few may live in splendour. I will not weary you with all the details of the things I learned at that time from Terry. To you it might seem very raw and crude, and you no doubt have read some of the pamphlets written by socialists and anarchists dealing with the labour question in all of its aspects. But to me these ideas were quite new and they seemed grand and noble.

"And Terry revealed to me, too, almost at once, the great inspiring fact that there is such a thing as beauty of thought—that there is poetry and art and literature. This, too, of course, came little by little, but do you wonder I loved a man who showed me a new world and who taught me I was not bad? He put good books into my hands, and to my grateful joy I found I liked these books better than the trash I had hitherto read.

"I felt so much better, after seeing so much of Terry, that I decided to go to work again. Terry was against this. 'Try it,' he said, 'But I assure you you don't need to work. I have tried doing without work for many years, it is much easier than it seems.' Nevertheless I got a job in a bicycle factory, but I only stayed a few days. It seemed like a stale existence to me! And besides, I was in love and wanted to be with Terry all the time. 'By God,' I said to him that night, 'you are right! I'll never work again.'

"My friend Gertrude, the girl with whom I had intended to go in the last reckless experiment, came to Terry's flat to see me, and get me to go with her. I had thought, after I gave up work, that Terry might offer me marriage, but he told me quite frankly that it was against his principles to marry anybody. I was a little hurt and astonished at this, but as I was very much in love and was already beginning to imbibe his ideas, it did not matter so very much to me.

"So, when Gertrude came, I led her to Terry and asked him what he thought about her plan. He said to us: 'The kind of prostitution you contemplate is no worse than the kind often called marriage. Selling your body for a lifetime is perhaps worse than selling it for an hour or for a day. But the immediate result of this kind of prostitution which you plan is very terrible practically. It generally leads to frightful diseases which will waste your bodies and perhaps injure your minds. The girls you envy are not always as happy, gay, and careless as they seem. It is part of their business to seem so, but they are not, or only so for a very short time. Perhaps you will be better off so than in domestic drudgery. It is a choice of evils, but if you are very brave and courageous you may perhaps get along without either. But if forced to one or the other, I recommend prostitution. It may be worse for you but, as a protest, it is better for society, in the long run.'

"He pictured to us as truly as he could the life of the street-walker; he did not seem to think that morally it was worse than any other life under our social organisation, but he did not make it seem attractive; nor did he make the life of the domestic servant or factory-girl seem attractive. He seemed to feel that one might look on prostitution as, under the circumstances, a grim duty—but it was certainly grim.

"We were rather incredulous at the picture Terry had drawn of the life we had resolved to lead. Gertrude turned up her pretty little nose and said it would not be like that with her. We talked about it all that day and night; and Gertrude decided to have a try at it, while I was undecided. I was somewhat piqued at Terry's attitude. I had expected him to oppose my plan, to do all in his power to prevent it. But I did not understand him. He knew that if I were determined, nothing would prevent me, and all he could do was to give us a faithful picture of what such a life would be.

"Things were happening of which we were ignorant for a time, but which helped to settle our immediate problem. I had often been seen going into Terry's flat, and this was food for gossip. It was said that Terry had started a bad house, and had done so in the flat belonging to his family, who were in the country at the time. These stories reached my mother's ears, and also were told to Terry's mother and sisters, and the mischief began. I was forbidden ever to cross my mother's threshold again, and he was requested to leave the home of his virtuous sisters which he had polluted and contaminated by his debaucheries with that immoral person, myself."

Marie omitted, in the above letter, the details of the split with the two families. It seems that Terry had, on hearing about the "rumours," gone to his family, then near Chicago, and presented to them his philosophy of life; also his determination not to give up Marie, and not to marry her. It was then that the last rung was put in the ladder of his family crucifixion, as he would call it. It was then that his mother "basely deserted him;" and Terry left for good, rejecting the money offered him.

"I passed them up," he said, scornfully, "and after spending the night in the lodging-house, I beat my way back to Chicago. I had been gone several days, and when I got back to the flat, where I went only to get Marie and clear out for God knows where, I found her gone, and no apparent way of finding her address. I went to see her mother, and had an awful scene with her. The violent woman was in hysterics and, after a long dispute, implored me to find her daughter. 'I'll find her,' I replied, 'for myself,' and left.

"Marie afterwards told me that she and Gertrude had gone to see her mother, when I was in the country with my family, and that her mother had driven them away. Perhaps, the mother realised the change in the girl. Perhaps, too, she realised what must happen, if she drove her away. Yet she did drive her daughter away. From her own point of view, it was diabolical to do so. Her anger, her exasperation and her outraged desire to rule drove her to doing what she must have felt was the worst thing she could do. And she did it in the name of virtue! Perhaps it was for the best: I believe it was, but she did not and I cannot see where her spiritual salvation comes in."

Terry finally found Marie—found her in the midst of a short experiment, in company with Gertrude, "in one of the social extremes,"—to be plain, leading the life of a prostitute.

I ask the reader to pause here and reflect. Pause, before you conclude that this book is an indecent and immoral book. Reflect before you conclude that this woman is an immoral woman. I am engaged in telling a plain tale in such a way that certain social conditions and certain social considerations and individual truths may be illustrated thereby. Consequently, I shall not pause, though I ask the reader to do so, in order to point a moral in any extended way. In return for the readers' courtesy and tolerance, I will here reassuringly assert that there will be found in these pages no detailed description of Marie's life during her few months of prostitution; and nothing whatever, from cover to cover, of anything that in my judgment is either immoral or indecent.

Well, Terry found her, and Terry did not try to "reform" her. But he stood by her, and was more interested, more in love with her than ever. In addition to his personal interest, he felt an even stronger social interest in her. To live with a girl like that was unconscious propaganda. This passion, as he calls it, was now more deeply stirred than when he first met her. This deeply aroused his imagination and his keen desire to see what the naked constitution of the soul is, after it is stripped of all social prestige.

If Marie had been simply a low, commercial grafter, Terry, the idealist, would not have been interested. But Terry knew that Marie cared nothing whatever for money. He regarded her as a social victim and in addition a vigorous and life-loving personality, an excellent companion for a life-long protest against things as they are. He saw she had the capacity for deep and excited interest in truth, an emotional love for ideated experience. These two human beings were wonderfully fitted to each other: no wonder they loved!

Terry, telling me about the girl's experience during the two weeks or so before he found her, dwelt especially upon how well she was treated.

"She has a way of getting the interest, almost the deference, of many people. She and Gertrude were often reduced to the proverbial thirty cents, but they had little difficulty in getting along. For instance, one day, almost broke, they went to a restaurant and ordered two cups of coffee. The negro waiter knew what they were, and offered them a nice steak, at his expense. Nor did he try to 'ring in,' to make their acquaintance. He treated them with great respect. They went there several times afterward, and always found the negro waiter beaming with the desire to help them for quite disinterested reasons, and he never tried to meet them outside. Marie always appreciated a thing like that. She took a delight in thinking about the fine qualities in human nature."

Marie is a frank woman, but it is natural that she could never bring herself to talk about this period of her life with entire openness. She has, however, written me a letter in which she tells the essential truth, although clothing it with a certain pathetic attempt to conceal the one episode in her life about which, to me, she was perhaps unreasonably reticent. She did not say that she and Gertrude were separated from Terry for a time, but she wanted to convey the impression that she and Terry, from the start, struggled along together, which was essentially, though not literally, true. Continuing her account, from the time the two families cast her and Terry out, she wrote:

"So there we were, thrown out into the harsh world, shelterless and almost moneyless. But we all three put our little capital together, amounting to about eleven dollars, went down town, and hired a furnished room. We managed to live a week on this capital, and then Terry pawned his watch, which gave us five dollars. Gertrude soon disappeared with an old roue and went out of our lives. Terry and I kept along as best we could. Kate helped us as much as we would allow her to, and sometimes paid for our room, and I would sometimes eat at her house.

"During this period I was in a curious state of mind and body. Living in the midst of so-called vice, I was at first both attracted and repelled. Yet my strongest feeling was a hatred of the life I had formerly led, and I was determined not to go back to it, happen what might. I should probably have gone much farther than I did, had it not been for my love for Terry, which made me feel that I did not want to throw myself entirely away. So I did not know whether to go into the game entirely or keep out of it. Terry did not try to influence me, but seemed to watch me, to make me feel that he would stand by me in any event.

"For a time we were both of us dazed and stunned by our sudden change in life. The change was much greater for Terry than for me. I don't know what his thoughts and feelings at that time were. They must have been terrible. For years he had lived, for the most part with his family, a quiet, studious life, the life of contemplation; and now he was suddenly plunged into the roar and din, with an ignorant and disreputable girl on his hands whom he would not desert. We were certainly on the verge of destruction. The inevitable would have happened, for no other choice was left me, and I should have drifted with the current and Terry would do and could do nothing.

"Just at the crucial moment, Terry met an old friend who offered him a political job, organising republican workingmen's clubs, and Terry accepted it. No one can understand how bitter this was to Terry. To work for a political organisation was to him great degradation. He did it for my sake, for the thirty-five dollars a week, so that I could be free to live as I wanted. I did not realise at the time how much his sensitive nature suffered, and I took poor advantage of the freedom his money and character gave me. What an intolerable burden I must have been to him, and yet he never even intimated a desire to leave me!

"I had an opportunity now to satisfy my desire for pleasure. Terry put no obstacles in my way. Yet the cup already tasted bitter. I tried to deny to myself that this life of pleasure was an illusion, and so I plunged into the most reckless debaucheries: I really would be ashamed to tell you of the things I did. I had affairs with all sorts of men, many of whom I did not know whether I liked or hated—seeking always excitement, oblivion. I frequented cafes where the women and men of the town were to be found, and made many acquaintances. Two or three of them proposed marriage to me. They no doubt wanted to 'save' me, and thought I was a prostitute. I did not care to disabuse them on the subject: in fact I don't know whether I was what they called me or not.

"This life lasted only two or three months, but it seems like so many years to me. At the end of that time Terry's work was over, and we left down town and roomed with a respectable radical family. My health had broken down. I weighed only a hundred pounds, although three months earlier I had weighed one hundred and forty. My beautiful, healthy body had wasted away. Ah! how proud I used to be of this body of mine! how I used to glory in the vigorous, shapely limbs, the well-moulded breasts and throat. But all this passed away before my youth had passed away."

Marie here pathetically omits to state the immediate cause of her ill health—a long and terrible experience in the hospital, the result of her excesses, during which time Terry was the only one to care for her, from which place she came broken in health, thin and pale, with large, dark, sad eyes, looking as she did when I first met her.



CHAPTER VIII

The Rogues' Gallery

"My terrible experiences during these months," continued Marie, "had at least the advantage of bringing me nearer to him who was and is the inspirer of whatever is worthy or good in me. It helped me to appreciate him, and surely everything I suffered, everything I may still suffer, is not too much to pay for that. He has made for me an ideal, and, without that, life is but a sorry, sorry thing. During those wild months I, of course, thought little of those things, those wonderful new things which I had heard of from him, but now, when we were living quietly with our anarchist friends, and the surroundings were in harmony with the mood for thought, my interest awakened. I read a great deal and listened attentively to the talk of the people around me, and slowly my ideas became more and more clear.

"It took a long time for me to learn, to really understand what the others were interested in. I did not dare to ask Terry too many questions, especially there, where everybody admired him and looked up to him so. A new shyness came over me when I began to see him in the light of a philosopher and a poet. He seemed so far above me and I felt myself so small and unworthy. But it was not long before I really began to feel a strong interest in all that was said, in all these social theories, in these ideas about the proletaire, about art and literature; and I began to read books in a far different spirit from what I used—I began to see in them truth about life, and to love this truth, whatever it was. And I loved the freedom of the talk, and, above all, I loved the feeling that from the highest point of view I was not an outcast, and that the people who seemed to me the best did not so regard me. It helped to give me the self-respect which every human being needs, I think.

"I thought for a long time that I was very lucky indeed to get admitted into this atmosphere. And, indeed, I know I was lucky, but there came a time when, for a while, I was very unhappy, not in the society of the radicals—I always loved that—but among these particular people, because they could not, after all, rid themselves of some conservative prejudices. After a while I began to see that even those enlightened people really had contempt for what I had been, or for my ignorance, perhaps for both.

"This family, with whom we were staying, was supposed to have broad and liberal ideas, and its members prided themselves on the fact that they really put their theories into practice. Their home was run on a sort of communistic basis, and the men and women who lived there were not tied to each other by any legal bonds, for they believed in freedom of love. They never made much noise about their ideas, or rather their practice, and were what you might call refined or cultured anarchists.

"Terry and I had nothing in a worldly way, and we lived there on 'charity,' so to speak, though that word was, of course, never used. We did, however, what work there was to be done in the household, trying in this way to give some compensation in return for a bed to sleep on and the simple food necessary to keep our bodies alive.

"Now, after a while, I began to feel crushed, oppressed in this home, among these cold, cold, refined people, although they were anarchists. They could not help showing me their contempt: they made me feel inferior. They never said one word that indicated such a feeling, but I could feel it by their attitude, by the attitude even of the little child in the house. They looked upon me much in the same way as my former mistress used, when I was the servant in the house, except that they were bound by their theories to give me a nominal respect and to try charitably to improve my mind and make of me a philosophical anarchist.

"It was painful to me to see these people, who were so humane, who could not bear to see the lowly oppressed, who could not bear to have injustice done, to see these people pass me by in insulting silence, look at me with cold, unsympathetic eyes! How it hurt me, not to receive the word of encouragement from the kind look of people I looked up to! So I crawled into my shell and did not go about much with the others. I think I was forgotten by nearly everybody for days at a time. Terry shared the room with me, and brought me food, as I grew more and more unable to eat with the cold superior ones. He brought me tobacco, too, and here it was, sitting all day alone, that I began the cigarette habit: if it had not been for that, I think I should have gone mad.

"I never ceased to love Terry, but I had a bitter feeling against him, too. He was always kind and good to me, but he spent most of his time with his intellectual friends, and I began to feel that even he was being 'charitable' to me. So after much misery and despair, I accepted a proposal of marriage from a friend of my wild days and fled with him to St. Louis. He took me to the home of his sisters and parents, where I lived in peace and quiet for three weeks, recovered some of my health and strength, and was able to review my past and think of my future; and reflect on my coming marriage.

"The people I was with now were kind and sympathetic. They did not know about my past life—only my prospective husband knew—he, of course, knew all. The others thought I was a poor shop-girl, tired and overworked. They were refined people, fairly well-to-do, rather bourgeois, but with good hearts, and so innocent that they believed everything their son told them, and received me as a daughter and sister.

"Perhaps my nature is perverse, I don't know; but as soon as I got a little rest and peace, I began to think of what I had left and especially of Terry. It was not only my love for him that called, but what my life with him had been and would be if I returned—a life that was not a commonplace life, a life of intelligence and freedom. Already I was bored by the quiet goodness of the people I was with, and I wanted 'something doing'!

"I saw Terry again as I had seen him first, with the glamour of ardent love, the love that overleaps all barriers and, if only for an instant, stands face to face with love, unhesitating, tumultuous, and triumphant. The memory of even one perfect moment can never leave us, even if life be ever so dark and harsh and bitter, there will always be that single ray of light to illumine the darkness, and keep our steps from utter and complete stumbling.

"I thought of Terry day and night, and grew so melancholy that my new found friends were alarmed and suggested hastening the marriage, in order to let me go South with my husband. This alarmed me terribly and I begged that no such step should be taken. With much inward trembling, I proposed that the marriage should be postponed and that I return to Chicago. They would not listen to this, and I could see in their honest faces the deepest amazement and a kind of suspicion. So I took refuge in tears, pleading ill-health and offering no more suggestions.

"That same day I wrote Terry a long letter, in which I told him that I still loved him, could not forget him, but had taken this step in desperation because I could no longer endure living among these people in Chicago, his friends, but not mine; that here in St. Louis I had found a certain measure of peace and quiet which had lately been disturbed by the realisation that soon I must decide to take a step which would perhaps separate us two irrevocably, that I longed more than words could tell to see him, to look into his face. I could never go back, I wrote, to that life I had been living, because what I had learned from him of what life is and what makes it worth living, had made that thing impossible for me. So, I wrote, I could not go back, and how, without him, could I go forward? So here I was, weak, perplexed, and I begged him to write me, to advise me what to do.

"Very soon his reply came—the truest, kindest reply that I could have received. He too had suffered since I left him, and comprehended only too well why I had done as I did. Our suffering would help us to gain a more comprehensive knowledge of life and of each other. And if I still loved him, I should follow the inclination of my heart and return to him. We two might start out again, wiser and surer for what had passed. He assured me of his love, but warned me not to expect too much from him, that our material comforts would be few, for he was as poor as I, and however much he might wish to provide better, he knew that, for one reason or another, he could not. But if I would be content to share his crust and his love, much happiness and joy might be in store for us. He finished his letter with a quotation from Browning's 'Lost Leader':

'Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a ribbon to tie in his coat.'

"My hesitation disappeared at once, although it hurt me greatly to carry out my resolution to return to Chicago. It cost me many a pang to shock and hurt the dear good people, to seem so ungrateful for all their love and kindness. But it had to be. I could not do otherwise. I returned to Chicago two days after receiving the letter, and my lover and I met and clasped hands and gazed into one another's eyes. We were reunited, or rather united truly, for the first time, with better understanding on both sides.

"Since that day, now six years ago, we have travelled the rough road together, assisting one another as best we could, often stumbling and misunderstanding and hurting one another, for we continually tried to get deeper and deeper into real knowledge, real life, and it is hard to reconcile all things. Generally to gain much, one must compromise, but Terry and I did not wish to compromise. His and mine has been a difficult and dangerous relation, but an interesting one. Very soon after my return to Chicago, I felt much more at ease, no longer a stumbling-block in his way; and I gained confidence, strength, and knowledge. I met many people of the true communistic spirit, and by social intercourse with them developed in every way. I continued to read good books and attended lectures on the social problems of the day. So after a time I became what is called an anarchist, just as Terry was.

"The reasons my books and companions brought forward for the justification of anarchism were like meat and drink to me. I was filled with enthusiasm for the ideas of a freedom which I now think is perhaps impossible in our society. But I thought that the 'downtrodden,' the 'working classes,' held the fate of the world in their hands, if they could but realise it. As time passed, my enthusiasm waned, for I began to see many difficulties in the way of this beautiful idealism. At times, I even doubted if the 'mob' were worthy of liberty at all. Such thoughts, however, passed away whenever I saw the crowds of workers streaming from the factories and stores, and looked upon their loutish, brutal faces, wherein there was never a gleam of pride, of the joy of creation, of intelligent effort. Then I would think, surely, surely, humankind is not meant to be thus. Why, even the little birds, the tiny little ants, what intelligence they display in their work; little kittens and dogs playing in the streets, what unrestrained joy is theirs! Work ought to be a pleasure and a blessing: and it would be so if we could only choose our labour, if we could create, do those things for which we are fitted, voluntarily, because of the need within us, for the outward expression of our life, our hope and joy. So, work would cease to be the curse it is to-day.

"And surely if we were free men and women, we would find our place in the scheme of things, surely each one of us would seek the place suited to his individual nature, and so perhaps at last everything would be a part of the harmonious whole.

"When I think of things as they are and as they might be, I grow dizzy and sick at heart, that mankind can be so blind, so hopelessly ignorant, so unspeakably cruel, so weak and cowardly. I am only a novice, I know, and there is so much for me to know, to learn, to strive for—much that I, and hundreds and thousands of others, will never reach, for we are burdened with heavy chains which we cannot break. Yet, there must be somewhere on this big earth, some little place fitted for me, some small corner where I must be of some value to myself.

"To you, no doubt, my sufferings and struggles will seem petty and my ideas crude and commonplace; but, if so, the pity is all the greater. After the agony I went through, freedom seemed to me the noblest thing in the world, and I thought it the solution of everything. Since then my ideas, perhaps, have become somewhat less 'crude,' but I have never for a moment lost faith in the thought that freedom is the most essential, the most necessary condition for us, if we are to endure life."

It is certainly what Marie calls "crude" to talk of liberty without careful definition. Absolute freedom is inconceivable. But I am not interested in presenting an argument: I am interested in the description of a state of mind, of a section of society, of a certain emotional view of things. The value, however, of these general ideas is undoubted, in the spiritual improvement and moral comfort of thousands of people. I think that Marie and Terry and the other characters that will appear in this book are decidedly better off for the ideas they hold: that about these ideas, or rather ideals, perhaps, they have grouped a society in which they are not outcasts, in which their lives seem from some points of view justified. And even in my opinion, though I live in different circumstances, and see greater difficulties in the way of the realisation of any social ideal than they do, yet I feel that their way of looking at things is useful to the larger society of men, ultimately. And, I, like other people, have deep respect for a consistent and courageous life, based upon a principle or principles which I may not hold myself.

The next scene in the life of Marie and Terry took place in what they called "The Rogues' Gallery." This was during the time that Terry held a position in the Prudential Insurance Company, whose employ he left, as we have seen, in order to go to Pittsburg, to find the flaw in the tannery process, at his brother Jim's request. He hired three little rooms, and up to the time he went to Pittsburg, he welcomed to his home everybody who was "against" things. Later on, he became more particular in his associates—that is to say, he demanded of them something more than mere disreputability, to use the conventional word. But at that time he loved everything that the world hated or cast out. That was his principle of action, his norm of judgment. Seeking the truth with undivided passion, he rid himself at a later time, at least partially, of this prejudice, and became quite able to "pass up," as he calls it, that is reject, a human being even though he might be a thief, a practical anarchist, a prostitute, or a souteneur. But at the time of the existence of the Rogues' Gallery he loved everything rejected by society, without making too nice a use of his natural taste.

There, in those three little slum rooms, gathered a strange society—a society held together on the basis of its utter rejection of the larger society of men. To be an acceptable member of this society, the individual must in some way be a social rebel—either practically or theoretically, or both. When Terry saw in some being rejected by society a spark of thought or of feeling, he was excited and happy. It was obvious to him, as to all persons who think and have practical contact with many different kinds of people, that there are in life no heroes and no villains; it was obvious that in the lowest thief or prostitute there was that possibility of light and spiritual grace which all true souls desire. Terry's function was to make them conscious of this; to organise, so to speak, the outcasts upon a philosophic and aesthetic basis and so save them to themselves, at least.

This was his great experiment with Marie, about which a large part of this book is to be concerned. But this interest, this effort, extended itself to many other individuals, and whenever Terry could feel himself in contact with what he felt was essentially human, and, at the same time, to his sense beautiful, he was filled, as I have said, with that deep excitement of pleasure, which was both intellectual and moral. I remember, one day, he said to me: "How often, during the lifetime of the Rogues' Gallery, did I saunter down State Street with the pleasing knowledge that I would find some 'low' person, girl or man, whom I knew I could get at, who would strip himself or herself bare to me in a spiritual sense, and would be revealed disinterestedly, would have no axe to grind and no contemptible small ends to gain, and no tradesman's commercial morality and no grafting conventionality, no moral cant based on self-interest—some being so near the 'limit' that he was intellectually and morally fearless and did not need to pose, from whom some truth could be derived, whose sincerity and power of straight-seeing was not warped and concealed by any bourgeois ambitions, by any respectability."

From time to time Terry would take one of these beings home with him—to his Rogues' Gallery and to Marie and to the other intimates, mainly more or less self-conscious anarchists, all or nearly all derelicts of the labouring class. There they could stay as long as they aesthetically fitted, could share the communal cigarette, beds, beer, and food. And Terry and Marie and their friends would talk and read aloud—Terry the teacher, giving transcendental light into the nature of the good, the beautiful, and the true. Many an outcast here came first to a pleasing sense that from some points of view he was not altogether bad, nay, that he had unexpectedly good points. Many of them to some philosophic intensity; conversation became a joy, strangely unknown hitherto. The educational character of this meeting place was marked, but, as I have said, Terry's indiscriminating passion for the outcasts of the proletaire limited the intellectual development of his little society. At a later time, a much more developed society grew around Terry and Marie, as we shall see, when we get to the Anarchist salon, or the intellectual drawing room of the Anarchist Proletaire.

Terry's main effort was, at this time, and for years afterwards, naturally directed toward Marie's spiritual education. Hitherto Marie has revealed herself to the reader as a rather commonplace, very physical, rather lazy, and quite egoistic person, one of many, with no distinguished characteristics. But she was unusually endowed in some ways. Eminently plastic, up to a certain point she rapidly assumed forms suggested by Terry's spiritual touch. She derived from him her interest in all high things, in philosophy, art and literature, but there always remained an interesting distinction in the way she reacted to her education. Terry remained always the rather transcendental philosopher, with a predominant ethical sense. Marie, as she developed, showed a deeper and subtler feeling for expression and a surer sensing of human character, a juster psychology. Her nature is essentially less beautiful, by far, than that of Terry, but more real, in a way, more robust, and so constituted that in a long spiritual conflict she would wear out the finer qualities of her lover. But this is anticipating, except in so far as it is true that from the start Marie's psychological vividness showed itself, often, of course, with base and physical concomitants. In this connection I will quote a letter which well illustrates this side of her character, and which also shows a contrast to some of her loftier but more conventional and less true qualities. She had been attending an anarchists' ball and she wrote:

"I danced a great deal and felt very happy, without the aid of any stimulant either. I did not have any feeling of irritation or even indifference toward anybody, not even toward Rose. I am fascinated by Rose, and I sometimes think I hate her. I always like to be near her when there is no one else around. She reveals herself to me then; in fact quite throws off the mask which all women wear. In order to encourage her to do this, I apparently throw down my own mask. Oh, how I gloat over her then, when she shows me a side of her life and betrays secret thoughts and feelings to me half unconsciously! Sometimes I succeed in having her do this when there is a third person present, and the look of hatred which passes across her face when she perceives she has made a mistake, is a most interesting thing to see. But she immediately comes to my side and we kiss each other and call each other 'angel girls' and 'darlings.' Thus we play with each other, and it is a stand-off which is cleverest. She is quite puzzled sometimes by my frankness about some things, for instance, about her looks. I notice she compliments me on my looks whenever I am decidedly off colour, when I wear a green ribbon, or a dowdy dress, or big shoes. But I am honest with her in these things, and I like to see her look well. The game is more interesting then.

"Well, at this ball, I wanted to dance with a certain man, but I did not wish to ask him myself. So I requested Rose to do so, and she consented, and I was soon whirling around in his arms. I had felt curious about him for a long time: I did not know just what the state of my feeling toward him was. I did not know whether I liked or disliked him, but I had often experienced a sort of thrilling sensation when he happened to pass by or touch me, or even when he mentioned my name, which had occurred only once since I knew him. 'Good evening, Marie,' was all he said. But the name and the way he said it seemed new, and it kept recurring to me at unexpected times and always troubled me. When I fancy I hear that name in his voice I feel sad and lonely, and my heart aches. I see him often, mostly at our Sunday evening lectures. We are very distant, and I am often rude to him, not answering when he speaks to me.

"So when I danced with him the other night, I was agreeably surprised to find that I did not experience any unusual sensation at all. And I was relieved, too, for I had a sort of instinctive feeling that he was not worthy of any strong interest. After the dance was over, we went down-stairs together and he kissed me. You know, the radicals all kiss one another freely and it does not mean anything special, as a rule: often it is done without any feeling at all, just a common habit. But this time I was astonished to find that the moment he touched me I had the same thrilling sensation, only more intense, as when I heard him speak my name. I resisted however, and just then I heard Rose's voice ring out exultantly, 'Oh, if you knew how crazy Marie is about you, how she raved when she first met you and so on.' You can imagine how I felt then. I managed to get away and drank and smoked and danced all the evening and never looked at him again. When we all went away Rose and I kissed each other and called each other 'darling girl.'

"In some moods I would like to be a big, beautiful, heartless woman like one or two I know. In such moods, how I would make men suffer! I was talking about this to little Sadie the other day, and she assured me solemnly that she would do that when she was thirty, but not merely to make men suffer, but to develop them."

As Terry continued to read aloud and talk in his Rogues' Gallery, Marie grew to reflect more and more the results of the reading of good things, and of the thinking and talking about these things. It shows how some temperaments are able to connect literature and philosophy with life, and thereby see their real meaning, quite independently of any merely conventional culture or education. One of the greatest prejudices of our time (and of all times) is the belief that intellectual culture, which is merely the perception in detail of how life and thought is expressed in form, is peculiarly dependent upon academic or conventional education. And yet, of course, somewhere or other, the nature capable of understanding form must come in contact with it, before the meaning of the whole thing is incorporated into its daily habit. Terry was Marie's point of contact with form, in its deep relation to life. Marie felt this and loved him and was grateful, to the depths of her nature, so different from his, so animal, so unideal, in comparison! She wrote:

"Terry gave me a new way to express myself, and that, after all, is the only thing worth living for. And he gave me this new way without trying to make me give up any other way of self expression, my sensuality, for example. This sensuality I have sometimes regretted, but not directly through Terry's influence, except that he has shown me the beauty of something else. He is a winged thing in comparison with me, but he is so wonderfully tolerant that he can see beauty in even the baser part of my nature. Why should I regret what I am, anyway? I believe that the only purity that means anything is that which results from working one's nature out harmoniously, not suppressing it. Terry must be a wonderful man, to have been able to encourage me in many new directions, and to take away the maiming sting of regret for what I inevitably was and could not help being.

"I do not think an ordinary person could have made me see the beauty of anarchism. I know that the anarchistic ideas are rather shocking, even at their best, and of course they naturally appeal most to the man with the hoe, inciting him to rebel, while the man behind the idea is usually endowed with so much sensitiveness that he shrinks from the rebellion part of the programme himself; he is not a man of action, only a man of ideas. It is shameful, some think, to disturb the blissful ignorance of the man with the hoe, for when the gleam of intelligence shines in his eye and he is aroused to the knowledge of his degrading position, he is likely to rebel in the most healthy but brutal manner, so much so that the aesthetic reformer shrinks back from the consequences of the propagation of his own ideas. Of course, the brutality of the proletariat is not nearly so subtle as that of the aristocracy, and it takes some cleverness to discover that the latter is brutality at all. It requires time and patience to drive into the thick heads of the workers that they are downtrodden, and that their oppressors are worthless parasites. When they finally do awaken to this idea and rebel, how terribly shocked the world is because these brutes have not the cleverness or delicacy to be more subtle in their brutalities.

"In your last letter you wrote of the crudeness of most propagandists of anarchism, naming Anatole France as one of the rare anarchists who express themselves otherwise than crudely. He rarely or never, you say, ever mentions the word 'anarchism,' although much of his writing is calculated to destroy belief in the value of organised society as it now exists. Don't you think you are perhaps prejudiced too much against certain words because of their associations? I know that many words are objectionable to refined, cultured people because they have been so long associated with the coarse and brutal mob, the working class, as the socialists would say. But you must remember that anarchism is intended to appeal to this 'mob' especially; that its doctrines might not be needed by refined people who ought to have enough sensibility not to enjoy 'freedom' unless it is shared by the coarse and brutal workers. Believe me, there is nothing so degrading as poverty. It makes the slave more slavish and the brute more brutal. It acts like a goad, spurring people on to do things which make them seem to themselves and others lower and lower, until they are truly no longer human beings but animals.

"Therefore it is that the propaganda of anarchism is generally crude. It is true that much good literature is permeated with the ideals of anarchism, for instance, Shelley, Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson. Such reading is excellent as a means of humanising and making anarchists of refined people, but how could you appeal to the rebellious workers with such books as these? For instance, my father, do you think he could read Ibsen or any of the others? Indeed not; but let him go to a meeting where he can hear Emma Goldman speak, or let him read Jean Grave, or Bakunin, or some other writer of 'crude' pamphlets, and he might become interested, he might be able to understand. But since it seems that truly refined people cannot enjoy the pleasures of freedom without being, at any rate at times, worried because of the condition of the 'mass,' what is to be done? This objectionable crudity must remain until there is a demand for something more subtle on the part of the workers for whom is intended all propaganda. The rich and cultured presumably have brains which they can use to solve the problems for themselves or to digest the things written by Anatole France and others. But how do you suppose that I, for instance, could a few years ago have relished Anatole France? Wouldn't you think it idiotic for anyone to have given me such books, at that time, with any expectation of my appreciating their refined and evanescent anarchism?"

It must have been a strange sight that of Terry sitting on his dilapidated bed in the Rogues' Gallery, with his eternal cigarette in his mouth, talking to Marie and perhaps to some prostitute or pickpocket! We begin already to see the result on Marie's education: that will appear complex and manifold, but it is likely that on many a half-formed creature who afterward passed out of Terry's life, his words yet made an impression which perhaps in some later darkness revived an idea which explained and justified his miserable existence.



CHAPTER IX

The Salon

The Rogues' Gallery went the way of all good things: it ceased to exist when the creative spirit was gone. Terry went to Pittsburg, as we have seen, to find the flaw in the tanning process, and while he was away Marie attempted to conduct the academy of anarchism. But she was too much interested in what is called "life" to make a sustained mental or moral effort without the inspiring presence of a man whose central passionate ideas never changed. The personal jealousies which Terry's philosophic attitude and idealism tended to dissipate became, during his absence, too strong for the bond uniting the "rogues," and when Terry returned he found that his little colony had dispersed and that Marie, unable any longer to pay the rent, was living with her old friend Katie.

This was, to our idealist, a deep disappointment. On the heels of his final break in Pittsburg with society came this sign of woman's weakness. Terry might easily have expected it, but one of the limitations of an idealist is an insufficient knowledge of realities. To men of his temperament there is always a distinct shock envolved in coming face to face with an actuality. Truth is the element of the idealist, but an abstract truth into which concrete realities seldom fit. Terry did not, or tried not to, mind, at this time, this continued sexual freedom, or rather vagaries, of Marie's life; for that fitted into his scheme of personal freedom: he zealously strove to respect the private inclinations of every human being. But the least sign, in any of his acquaintances, of a compromise with the integrity of the soul, of any essential weakness, met with no tolerance from him. "He passed him up," on the spot, with a scornful wafture of his hand. That Marie had yielded to the stress of circumstances, had been unable to hold out in the Rogues' Gallery, galled the relatively uncompromising, exigent idealist. If she had resorted to temporary prostitution to hold the society together he would have admired her. But, instead, she weakly sought, like any merely conservative woman, the shelter of Katie's roof. The first seed of the essential discord which finally resulted, at a much later time, in their relations was planted thus in this deep irritation of Terry's soul; it did not, however, affect seriously his love for Marie as a person or his interest in her as a social experiment. But it tended to make him feel more lonely and to render him more hopeless of any realisation of the ideal, as he saw it.

When Terry returned, without a job, and with no intention of trying for one, and found Marie living with Katie, he had a long talk with the two women. Katie was still with her husband, Nick, but she was willing to quit him in order to live with and take care of, her darling Marie. She proposed to Marie and Terry to hire some rooms and all live together. She would work as cook in a restaurant and thus support the three of them.

To this eager desire of Katie's Terry refused to consent; but he also refused to work. What was to be done? He was too proud willingly to live on Katie, and he was principled against labour. Katie wanted the luxury of her proposed arrangement. She quarrelled with Terry, but he interested her. Already she began to look on these two as her superior cultivated ones, aristocrats, with whom it was a joy to live and for whom it was a pleasure to work. To work for them, especially for Marie, she would drop her old Nick, good dull man, in a moment.

An event which happened just at the right moment to decide things, finally brought about the union of the three. One night Terry was drinking in a saloon, talking philosophy, and quoting literature. Some rapid lines from Swinburne had just left his lips when an elderly man, who had been listening to Terry's talk approached him and said: "You are the man I'm looking for, won't you have a drink?"

As he spoke, he flashed a fifty dollar bill over the bar and repeatedly treated the crowd, all in Terry's honour.

"Before we separated that night," said Terry, telling me the story, "I learned that the old guy had fifty thousand dollars and that he would soon go down and out, for he had all sorts of bad diseases. He knew it himself, but he was an old sport and he wanted his fling before he died. He liked me and wanted me to be bar-tender in a saloon he owned. He lived above the saloon and wanted a housekeeper to take care of the rooms. So I told Kate here was her chance. The next day Marie, Katie, and I moved into the rooms, where the old man lived, too, and I began my work as a bar-tender.

"I did not regard this job as work: it was really graft, for I had decided that my old friend, not long for this world, did not need all of his money and that I might as well turn part of it toward Katie, to help maintain a common house for us all. So, every night, after the day's work, I turned the roll that I received behind the bar over to Katie, who tucked it away in the bank. I don't know whether the old guy knew about it or not, if he did, he did not care. He died after two or three months, but Katie had increased her bank account by three or four hundred dollars."

Terry is strenuous about this story. He is evidently anxious lest it be thought that he later became a mere parasite on Katie. He prides himself on having taught her to steal from an unkind world, but he does not like the idea that she has slaved for him without any help in return. Katie did not prove to be a good pupil. She was not naturally "wise," in the slang sense, but gained what she gained by hard labour. Even while she was housekeeper for the old guy she felt she earned all the money she tucked away.

"I worked hard for the old man," she said, "and I only got about one hundred and thirty dollars for all my work. I thought I made that much."

There is a slight difference in the amount received, in Terry's account and in Katie's, but it is clear that it was not very much. It is interesting and characteristic that Terry wants it to appear to have been "graft," while Katie looks upon the money as honest wages, received in an unconventional way.

Nick was definitely deserted, and the new "salon" formed, with Terry and Marie as the bright particular stars and Katie as the happy means of living, if not in luxury at least in independence. They lived on her eight or nine dollars a week with the comfortable feeling that there were several hundred dollars tucked away in the bank, the result of Katie's savings and Terry's ideas.

The salon was of a more select and higher order intellectually than had been the Rogues' Gallery. The people who frequented the three little slummy rooms on the West Side where Terry, Marie, and Katie lived were mainly anarchists in theory, and occasionally one or another of them was so in practice. They mainly consisted of rebellious labourers who had educated themselves in the philosophy of anarchism.[2] They had ideas about politics and government and the relation between the sexes. They were indeed all "free lovers," and quite naturally so; the rebellious temperament instinctively takes as its object of attack the strongest convention in society. Anarchism in Europe is mainly political; in America it is mainly sexual; for the reason that there is less freedom of expression about sex in America than in Europe: so there is a stronger protest here against the conventions in this field—as the yoke is more severely felt. While I was in Italy and France I met a number of anarchists who on the sex side were not ostentatiously rebellious. They were like the free sort of conservative people everywhere. But in political ideas they were more logical, sophisticated, and deeply revolutionary than is the case with the American anarchists, who, on the other hand both in their lives and their opinions, are extreme rebels against sex conventions. It is only another instance of how unreason in one extreme tends to bring about unreason in the other. Our prudishness, hypocrisy and stupid conventionality in all sex matters is responsible for the unbalanced license of many a protesting spirit.

So there was many an "orgie" in the salon—sexual and alcoholic: and many wild words were spoken and many wild things done. But these same extreme people were gentle and sensitive, too, and emotionally interested in ideas. They went to lectures on all sorts of social subjects, they read good books of literature and crude books on politics, they grouped together and enjoyed to a certain extent their communistic ideas. They published their anarchistic newspapers and they welcomed into their ranks people who otherwise could have attained to no consolatory philosophy—who would have had no society and no hope. And they did not do it for the sake of charity—hollow word!—but from a feeling of fellowship and love. You, reader, who may think ill of thieves and prostitutes—too ill of them, perhaps: if you can come to see that social differences are of slight value in comparison with the great primal things and the universal qualities of human nature, you will perhaps be better if not more "virtuous" than before, and may be kinder, less self-righteous, and do far more good, no matter how "charitable" you are now inclined to be. You have never been able to arouse the real interest of the proletariat, for the simple reason that you have never been really interested in them. But you do arouse their hatred and their contempt. They ought not, of course, to hate and despise anything, especially anything that means as well as you do. But they, though they are anarchists, are human, all too human, sometimes, like the rest of us. Here are some of the ideas of the salon about you, about us, let me say, as voiced by Terry and Marie. To begin with, Terry: about our "culture" he writes:

"There is not much doubt about the sapping influence of culture. It seems that narrowness of range means intensity of emotion. This is seen in the savage, the child, and uncultivated men as well as other animals. I might even go farther and say we see it in such titans as Balzac and Wagner, who seek to compress all the arts into their own particular art. The mind that finds many outlets generally overflows in dissipation of energy instead of digging a deep single channel of its own. And yet to focus our feelings to one point may be a dangerous accomplishment. For instance, the fulminating fire of Swinburne's radium rhymes, while harmless to himself, may become dangerous through me or some other 'conductor.' Unfortunately, the inability to foretell the ultimate effect of any given idea produces that form of inhibition called conservatism, and to this vice people of so-called culture are especially prone. It takes recklessness to be a social experimentalist or really to get in touch with humanity. Our careful humanitarians, our charitable ones, never do, for they stick to their conservatism. How we do fashion our own fetters, from chains to corsets, and from gods to governments. Oh, how I wish I were a fine lean satirist!—with a great black-snake whip of sarcasm to scourge the smug and genial ones, the self-righteous, charitable, and respectable ones! How I would lay the lash on corpulent content and fat faith with folds in its belly; chin and hands[3]; those who try to beat their breast-bone through layers of fat! Oh, this rotund reverence of morality! 'Meagre minds,' mutters George Moore, and my gorge rises in stuttering rage to get action on them. Verily such morality as your ordinary conservative person professes has an organic basis: it has its seat in those vestiges of muscles that would still wag our abortive tails, and often do wag our abortive tongues.

"To arouse such fat ones to any onward flight it may take the tremendous impact of a revolution. It may take many upheavals of the seismic soul of man before the hobgoblins of authority are finally laid in the valley.

"How many free spirits have been caught and hampered in the quagmire of conservatism. Yet they have the homing instinct of all winged things: they return to the soul and seek to throw off the fat and heavy flesh of social stupidity. Many great free spirits there have been who possess this orientation of the race and have brought us tidings of the promised land. How many thundering spirits have commanded us to march by the tongued and livid lightning of their prophetic souls, but how few of us have done so! Why, to me, this world is a halting hell of hitching-posts and of truculent troughs for belching swineherds. The universe has no goal that we know of unless Eternity be the aim; let us then have the modesty of the Cosmos, and no other modesty, and be content to know our course, and be sure to run it.

"I have tried for freedom, indeed, everywhere, but I find the 'good ones' always in my way. How well I know the cost of my attempt! My heavy heart and my parched and choking throat, they know! I may indeed beat my breast alone in the darkness in a silent prayer for freedom and hear no response from the haunting hollows of the night. Such hungry freedom I had and have; and I could share it only with the outcasts of the world: the fat and rotund charitable ones would none of it. This freedom is possessed only by him who is afflicted over much with himself because he has been crazed by others and made mad by his escape from them. I suppose I am mad, for to believe myself perfectly sane in a greatly mad world is surely a subtle species of lunacy. And yet I am compelled to act towards others as if they were more sane than I. To feel as if one were eternally in a court-room trial, with lean lunatics for lawyers and fat philistines for judges, this is life.

"I am only one of the human victims who studies his own malady because he likes universal history. The world has thrown me back upon myself and made me at times what is called mad. After being down-hearted for some time, I grow superstitious and imagine that some strange and fatal spell is hanging over us all. Even my own acts and thoughts take on the futility of nightmare, and Nirvana is very welcome, if I could be sure of it, but I had rather stay what I am than start life all over again in some other shape, with a possible creeping recollection of my former existence. I have at times startled intimations that I lived in vain in some former unhappy time; so I shall try to postpone the eternal recurrence as best I may."

Thus Terry tries not only to reject the laws of "fat" society, but at times he strives against what he imagines to be the deep laws of the universe: he tries to stem the tide of fate, and this in the name of Truth! It shows how far remote from reality is the truth of the idealist; and yet such an attitude is often forced upon a sensitive spirit by rough contact with imperfect society. Although Terry is the most perfect specimen of the anarchists I have known, yet they all have more or less the quality of idealism so marked in him.

Marie's letters teem with the spirit of revolt, which of course was the atmosphere of the salon. With her it is always less ideal, more personal, more egotistic than with Terry. In one of her letters she told "how she was led to try to get a job again, in order to buy some pretty things." A few days' search, however, disgusted her and brought her back completely to the mood of the salon, and led her deeply to appreciate Hedda Gabler, and to condemn American morality and the "good" people. Of Hedda she wrote:

"Her character always did appeal to me, but last night I was in the mood especially to understand and sympathise with Hedda, to be Hedda, in fact. For a few hours I was as brave and wonderful in thought and feeling as she. It was the reaction from my stupid days in hunting a job. Her disgust with everything, her search for something new and different, the fascination she felt for saying and doing dangerous and reckless things—this I could understand so thoroughly! I was in a very reckless and discontented mood, but I was able to get away from myself and become Hedda for awhile; and this made me think of what a wonderful thing it is, what a power Ibsen has, to produce such emotions by merely stringing a few words together. Why, the very name Hedda, Hedda Gabler! When Eilert says it, what does it not convey! Terry and I had a long talk about it, and about literature in general, so the result was that I became calm, quiet, and reflective—as I love to be, but which I can be only very seldom. I have an almost continuous craving for something new and strange, like Hedda. But somehow reading and thinking about her calmed me. I can find new emotions in books, and this satisfies me for a time, but they are never vital enough to last me long. It is only sterile emotions we derive from literature, and so I turn again restlessly to life.

"But when I turn to life I find for the most part people who are unwilling to give themselves up to life, who will not follow out their moods, or have none. When I am no longer capable of abandoning myself, why continue? Most people seem to me to be dried up. They look as if they never felt anything, so expressionless, so automatic are they, as if they had been wound up to walk and talk, and eat and sleep in precisely the same way for a certain number of years. This seems to be the American type. I suppose you have read of the Caruso affair—how he kissed a woman in Central Park, or wanted to, and the howl it made? The way they all jumped on him, in the name of morality! And you remember what happened to Gorky, when he was here? Why, these American stiffs, what do they mean by morality? Since they are much too cold-blooded for immortality, what do they know about it? This country is composed of pie-eating, ice-water drinking, sour-faced business people. If one with emotions comes to this country, he is of course immoral. If there were no foreigners here, this country would resemble the North Pole.

"I'm glad I am not an American in blood, for then I would not be as interesting to myself as I am now. Sometimes I stand before my mirror and look at myself for a long, long time; it always surprises me that I look so commonplace. Surely, something of what I have in me ought to show in my face. But I know it's there, anyway. I know I'm altogether different from anyone else, I know it with a kind of fierce joy; not better, of course, but different.

"For instance, this regularity and system they talk about! You wrote me to be more regular and the like of that, if I wanted to sleep better. You, too, are a typical American! Just imagine me drinking milk to make me sleep or grow fat! The thought of such a thing makes me shudder. Your remark about amorous sport being a soporific if performed regularly and without excitement made me double up with laughter. But I am quite sure that the performance of such a 'duty' would not induce sleep. I am only moved to such things by new lovers, and then I desire not sleep but wakefulness. And then, too, usually such desires come to me at noon, not at night, and who ever heard of sleeping at noon!

"As for the other physical exercises that you recommend, I do walk along muddy, prosaic streets and work in our household until I grow weary and ask the gods what sins I have committed. My beloved cigarettes, which are as dear to me as sleep itself, my solace when sleep flies, my comfort, you would take these away from me! What would I do without them? I am without them sometimes, when Terry takes some of my tobacco, and then I am angry at him! The only plan I have is to have enough tobacco. Otherwise, I have nothing arranged, no plan. You think there is something fine in having logical arrangements for all things. I have never felt that way. I am only a poor creature of an hour, of a moment, and have never had plans. I would love to be where you are now, in Paris, that home of the planless, the free and joyous and emotional people."

What most people think is good, is worth while, is in good taste, the salon rejected; partly, of course, in the spirit of mere rejection, of revolt, but based nevertheless on a higher ideal of human love than obtains in our society. These anarchists are not historians or practical people and they are not as much interested in what society must be as in what society ought to be; and because they see that society is not what it ought to be, because they as unfortunate members of the labouring class feel that the origin of our society is the root of injustice, they rebel totally against that society, rejecting the good with the evil. They passionately believe that the real and radical evil in our social world is partly kept there by our very justice, by our very morality, our very religion—kept there not so much by what is called evil in our society as by what is called good. They see that much large kindness is prevented by the morality which is expressed in the idea of private property, that much large virtue is denied by the institution of marriage, that psychological truth and Christian kindness at once are not considered by the social court, which looks only to the law—to the complex, historical law, so often meaningless and unjust to human feeling, so often based upon special "interests" and ancient prejudices.

Their situation, as proletarian interpreters of the working class, enables them to see whatever is true in this view with peculiar vividness. For, of course, it is to their interest to see this truth; for truth is only an impassioned statement of our fundamental needs.

The salon was composed of the poor and the criminal, and what kept it together was the human desire to form a society, the norms of judgment of which should give value to the individual members—the deep need of justification.

There were fakirs in the salon, unkind people, unjust people, vicious people; there were mere "climbers," persons who saw their only chance for recognition and livelihood in the espousal of anarchistic ideas. But there were also kind people, relatively just people, and moderate ones, honest and strenuous with themselves. There were none perfect, as there are none perfect in any society. We shall see how Terry became disgusted finally with the anarchists themselves, preferring even insanity and probable death to them.

And Marie's letters are full of satire of her companions, of the perception of their weaknesses and inconsistencies. She never embraces or rejects them so completely as Terry does, for she sees them more clearly; therefore she sees them more humorously, understands them better. Her letters teem with "psychological gossip," so to speak, in which some of her companions seem portrayed with relative truth. One she wrote me, while I was seeing something in London, of an anarchist named Nicoll, who was a friend of William Morris and still edits Morris's old paper, is full of both appreciation and satire of a number of "radicals":

"An old friend of Nicoll's used to talk to me by the hour about him. He, the friend, an ordinary, rather stupid fellow, once helped poor Nicoll, got a room for him and gave him money, after he was released from prison. He felt proud to think that a man like Nicoll would accept hospitality 'from a poor bloke like me,' as he put it. His friendship with Nicoll has been the great event of his life. Whenever anything occurs in the radical movement which recalls ever so slightly the affair of which Nicoll was the scapegoat, his old friend will say, in his funny Jewish Cockney, 'That's always the wey, like Nicoll's kise, for example.' Then he launches forth into eloquent streams of denunciation, for he does not regard Nicoll as at all insane, but on the contrary, 'the finest man ever downed' by aristocrats like Turner and Kropotkin.

"This affair has made our friend pessimistic about anarchism, at times, and inclined to join the socialist party. His life is made miserable by the ceaseless debate of his mind and soul over which of these two philosophies is the best one for the race. He, suspiciously, is always looking for another case like Nicoll's, and is doubtful about all movements, not only anarchism and socialism, but all which preach liberty, justice, and the like, such as Theosophy, Single Tax, Sun Worshippers, Spirit Fruiters, Holy Rollers, Upton Sinclair's Helicot Colony, and Parker Sercombe's Spencer-Whitman Centre. All these he has tested and found more or less wanting. Life grows daily more melancholy for him, as he continues, on account of 'Nicoll's Kise,' to probe beneath the surface of all the cults and movements which profess boundless love for humanity, truth, justice and freedom.