"P. R., whom you have also met in London, has got himself into trouble by making inflammatory speeches in Germany. When they talked of arresting him, he immediately claimed American citizenship. But if he ever turned up in America again they would clap him in jail so quick it would make his head swim. He, together with McQueen, was arrested here some years ago for helping start the New Jersey riots, but he skipped his bonds, to the great disgust of the bondsmen, who were comrades in the movement. The movement in the whole United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia was divided into factions over this affair, and very nearly went to pieces. But it was ridiculous to arrest him in the first place, for he could not incite a feather to riot. He is one of those flamboyant wind-bags, with a terrific command of high-sounding phrases, eloquent gestures, and fine eyes—the kind sixteen-year-old girls admire—to think I once loved him, or thought I did! He is a big little physical coward and prides himself on being the realisation of Nietzsche's Uebermensch.

"The movement in Chicago is about to resume its usual winter activity by the opening of the Social Science League this Sunday evening. There are many cultured people in this city who think the Social Science League is too crude and vulgar to grace with their presence, therefore it has been resolved to establish another society of a more exclusive order, in which may be discussed important questions in a more subdued, rational, and artistic way. It is especially desired that only the 'artistic' anarchist be admitted to this new society. The crude element of anarchism is to be excluded as much as possible, but what cannot be excluded is to be subdued. If this is impossible, it shall be expelled. All illustrious lights will speak there. Terry has been invited, but has refused on democratic grounds, and sticks to that 'bum' society, the S. S. League.

"One of the girls who has gone over to the 'swells' is Mary. She is a factory girl and an important little person, who prides herself on the amount of culture she possesses, and the famous people she has met and talked with. I introduced her once to a literary man, but she did not know he was so, at the time, and only nodded coldly. But when she found he was the famous Mr. F—— she was angry at me for not putting her 'next' and was much distressed, for here was another famous man whom she had nearly talked with.

"Another girl whom I know has done a wonderful thing with a certain man. He is a great, strong German, who guzzles beer and bullies the other fellow in his arguments about anarchism. When I first knew him, several years ago, he was married to a nice non-resistant sort of a girl, whom he treated awfully bad—without intending to. For he is really generous and good-hearted, but is firmly imbued with the idea, which he thought was the beginning of anarchism, that one must be firm and have one's own way and do all that one wants to do, without allowing any scruple of conscience or morals or delicacy to interfere; that to be a man and an anarchist one must never allow a petticoat to come between you and your desire. So he did what he wanted, regardless of anybody. He was a sort of brutal Overman; one could not help admiring the kind of barbaric splendour there was about him. And his poor wife idolised him and would stand everything from him.

"Now he is here with another girl. Talk about a change! He has turned from a lion to a mouse. She is a little bit of a thing, only nineteen, rather silly and not very attractive. She is pretty in an outward way, but her features are unlit by any glimmer of feeling or thought, or even good nature—a slothful, empty sort of prettiness. She makes him walk a chalk-line, and it is contemptible and ridiculous and pitiful to see that big man cringe before this poor, pretty, empty little thing. Once in a while he tears himself away, and a glimmer of his old self returns; for an hour or two he plays his old role again, but if she finds out about it, it is very unpleasant for him. It is strange how weak women can subdue at times these big, husky creatures. But the more they succeed, the more dissatisfied they grow, until at last they feel contempt for the man they have subdued. The girl in this case feels that way about this big, powerful man. If he would assert himself, she would love him, as she did when she saw how he bullied his wife and all others. But at bottom we women are pleased, for it is a triumph for our sex, though we feel a little jealous because not one of us could have been the lion-tamer, instead of this weak little creature. Terry is wild about it, and tries to lead the enslaved Hercules into evil ways and keep him out at night, but all these things have lost their charm for the big man, who now would rather stay at home with the little girl. She, however, finds things very tedious, particularly in the day time, when her big man is at the factory, for she has nothing to do. So she passes her time at Esther's house.

"I would go crazy were I in Esther's place. Poor Esther, she doesn't know what to do, either, for she cannot be always ill. She takes pleasure in being an invalid, but she can't use this plea for sympathy all the time, people get tired of it. But Esther is fortunate in having somebody to whom she can tell all her aches and pains and their history. She has found a unique occupation, in scrubbing. She starts Monday mornings and finishes Saturday afternoons, and then on Monday starts again. I was with her a week, and that's the way she spent the days. Perhaps she is like Mary Maclain and finds a peculiar inspiration in this fascinating task. If you were a woman I would write more about Esther's scrubbing, which is very wonderful, but you probably would not understand. Jay, her lover, comes home from work every evening, and, after eating the chaste evening meal of rice and beans, lights his corncob pipe, settles himself comfortably in his chair and listens carefully to the description of the aches and pains which have afflicted Esther that day. These pains continue in spite of all the beautiful scrubbing. He suggests different remedies until his pipe is finished, then he calmly retires to his library and reviews a book and reads several pamphlets, writes an article for 'The Demonstrator' or 'The Appeal to Reason' or some other radical paper and attends to his voluminous correspondence with the leading radicals of the day. Then he retires for the night, also Esther, after the farewell scrub of the dishes, table, and the rest, and the kids, too, go to roost. When I was there, I also went to bed, though it was only about half past eight.

"About half past five in the morning a most infernal alarm clock emits a most hellish noise. Jay and Esther tumble from their couch, light the lamp, and resume their occupations. After a very chaste breakfast Esther continues her scrubbing and Jay finishes his correspondence and puts in the rest of the time until seven o'clock, when his work in the factory begins, in studying the new language, Esperanto. Oh, I spent a most charming and delightful week there; I could hardly tear myself away."

One of Marie's amorous episodes led her to Detroit, with a "fake" anarchist, of whom there are many. After a week or two of dissipation and disillusionment, Marie returned, very ill, to the "Salon," where Terry received her with his usual stoicism, and acted as trained nurse. Repentant and disgusted, Marie wrote me from her convalescent bed:

"I am still far from well, but am much better. My illness was caused by too much dissipation, which I plunged into for relaxation. For some weeks previously I had got a particularly large dose of my environment. Terry and I live in surroundings which would kill an ordinary person. Our little home is not as bad in the summer time. We can have the windows and doors open, but now in this cold winter we must all live in one room, a very small room, where there is a stove. The dampness penetrates right through the walls and the wind comes through the holes in the window panes. Sundays are the hardest days for me. Then Kate, queen of the kitchen, is here, and she delights in cooking all sorts of things on that day, so for the remaining six days our home smells of her culinary operations—most abominable, this odour of stale cookery! And what a mess our rooms are in on Monday morning! You wouldn't comprehend, even if I told you. I have to clean up all this, and I wish I could fly away every Sunday. At times I get so tired of this way of living. I hope some day I may find a large barn with a hay loft: I would immediately abolish Kate and her cookery and would be comfortable for once in my life.

"So I ran away, for a time, partly for relief, partly because I was rather taken with a Detroit anarchist who was visiting us. Though he was a comrade, he was really a Philistine, which I did not see till afterwards. I saw only that he was young and lusty and wanted a lark, as I did, so I went with him on an awful tear, and returned terribly done up, as you know.

"I have been lying here in this little room for three weeks. I thought surely I should die, and I was neither glad nor sorry. It was curious, this sensation of approaching death. All these days Terry sat opposite me at a table reading or writing. I could see him distinctly at times, at other times everything was misty or completely dark, only his voice reached me from such a long, long distance. He sat there like an implacable fate, with calm, cold eyes, gazing above and beyond me. Between two slow heart beats I felt it was almost a duty to call him and bid him farewell, but some strange sense of shyness held me back. I tried so hard to think of what I might do, and the most grotesque and comical things suggested themselves. At one lucid moment I had the brilliant idea of becoming a jockey!

"Other ways of passing my life revolved ceaselessly in my brain, and now at last perhaps I have found it. Now that I am better I am reading Swinburne aloud, in bed. The sound of my voice carried along with the music of his matchless rhythms is to me a delight and a wonder. I have discovered that the Garden of Proserpine should be read only when one is in a reclining position. Then one's voice conveys more perfectly the weariness of all things mortal and the sweet delight of rest. I find I must practice breathing more deeply, if I wish to render the voluptuous, sinuous lines. Don't you think this is a great ambition, to read Swinburne well? I am so glad to find something to do, something I love to do. Perhaps I may escape from all by this.

"It is now five days since I started to write to you, but I still lie on my back and dream and have not found my place, and never shall. Swinburne's never-ceasing, monotonous rhymes have palled upon me. Even this is sordid, and then, if so, what is the rest?—the daily life filled with brutish and shallow men and women? When I can no longer endure poetry and daily life—it is then that I rush into brutal dissipation, from which I awake sick in mind and body, without hope or desire for anything but sleep: and then, once more, the Garden of Proserpine reveals itself to me, or some other thing of beauty. It is an eternal round.

"I often think that the only way for me to be in harmony with the scheme of things would be to go down into the gutter. Some years ago during my brief period of—prostitution, I suppose—I felt a strange importance. It was death to me, but something real, too. I was fulfilling a need of society, a horrible need, but a need. And then, too, all my men friends often go to these houses. All the nice, intellectual men are to be met there—men from all ranks of life—men a girl like me could never meet in any other way. During that brief time, at moments between a sleep and a drink, I used to have this fancy, which sometimes makes me shudder now, as I think of it, and yet somehow seems such a fine satisfying protest—a feeling that some day I would be seen waddling about the streets of Chicago, known to all the denizens of the under world as Drunken Mary! I saw myself fat and repulsive, begging nickels from the passers-by and perhaps strangled at the end by some passing hobo for the few nickels in my stocking. And am I essentially worse than you, or my lady, or anyone whom Society protects and honours? To me poet and pimp, politician, reformer, thief, aristocrat, prostitute are one. Caste and class distinctions are too subtle for my poor brain and too outrageous for my heart, which still tries to beat with and for humanity."

Terry refers only in a line or two, characteristically, to this adventure and illness of Marie.

"She is seriously ill, the result of a mad adventure. As I exist for others when they are in pain, I am her trained nurse. She is now recovering from the drugs, the debauching, and the raving madness of sleepless nights. I will give you an account sometime of a strange piece of magic charlatanism, practiced under the guise of beautiful art!...

"I think her growing recovery is largely due to the inability to secure a doctor to christen her disease. I feel rather worn with domestic drudgery, cooking, laundering, wrestling with disease without and demons within. Still, as a trained nurse who can go sleepless for three weeks, I do not look upon myself as a failure."

Marie's health improved slowly, due in part to the unsanitary conditions of her home. She wrote:

"The roof of this miserable shack leaks all the time. The other day the owner came around in his automobile. I was speechless. It made me mad to think of that hound, riding in his car which we had paid for. Oh, the miserable people who live in these two houses: old, decrepit women who earn their living by washing clothes for others. It would make your blood boil to see them. And then to see that fat dog in his auto, accepting money from them and not ever giving them a whole roof in return. When I saw him I wanted to say so much. I could only choke. Oh, when you hear of the brutality of the mob, don't believe it. The mob may indeed, under the impulse of the moment, burn and destroy; but think of the cold brutality of a judge sitting on his bench and calmly condemning some poor wretch to be killed, and this with no emotion. How can this be? The revolutionists in France were the kindest beings, in comparison. They had personal injuries to avenge, and all they did was to strike off an enemy's head and that was the end. There was even a chance of being saved, if the doomed one could find the right expression, some little sentence that would affect the brutal (?) people. But this could not happen before a judge!

"The trouble with the poor is, they have not enough imagination. They are not refined in their cruelties. They could never invent the Bull Pen, but would only quickly destroy. It is raining to-day, and I have been moving about trying to find a dry spot where I can continue writing without having a large splash come down on my nose. But I guess I'll have to give it up. Oh, that cursed landlord! I'd like to do something to him, not so much for myself as for those poor old things, they are all rheumatic and stiff, but continue to live here because, poor souls, they think the rent is low. Ye gods, the place is not fit for dogs to live in, and yet he charges all the way from five dollars up for these filthy, worm-eaten, rotten holes. And yet the old decrepit inhabitants of this rich man's house unbend their stiff knees in profound salaams whenever he appears."

But in these leaky rooms of Kate's there was often much jollity and gaiety, when the "Salon" had its sessions, and proletarians of the pale cast of thought sat and smoked their cigarettes, drank their beer, kissed their girls, and talked of philosophy and literature and social evil and possible regeneration. Then they were always happy, whatever the subject of their talk. Marie wrote me to my villa in Italy:

"You write of your beautiful gardens and seem quite happy. We too are well and happy in our little old joint; you are the only one missing to make our circle complete. But perhaps sometime you can be with us, with a can on the table and good talk going round, and then I'm sure you will not miss your Italian garden. Emma Goldman and Berkman have been visiting Chicago, and we had some jolly good times while they were here. She is a good fellow, when she is alone with a few choice friends. Then she lets herself out. The other day we gave a social for these two celebrated ones. Positively, no police, reporters, or strangers were admitted. Next day there was a hue and cry in all the papers, dark conspiracy, and so on! But all we did was to have a great time: everybody was drunk before morning, and everybody felt kindly toward the whole world, and would not have cursed even the greatest 'exploiter.' We finished the evening or rather the morning by an orgy of kissing. It was quite interesting and innocent. Smith has at last begun to return my affection. I think he likes me a little now. At least, he calls here frequently, and he told me once he would like to tear me limb from limb! This remark made me shudder, not unpleasantly. It must be good to be torn in that way by such a nice man.

"The rose-leaves you sent from Italy retained some of their sweet smell. The rose is my favourite flower, and I like to imagine that perhaps some day my dust will be soil for roses. Last summer I found a poor little stillborn thing which had been hastily thrown aside, near a place where Terry and I were camping. Some poor little 'fleur de mal' which I covered from sight, in the sand, and marked the place with some stones and flowers. The next year I found some wild white daisies growing there. This made a deep impression on me and strengthened my hope that I, too, might become soil for roses, flowers of love.

"Henry is a rose, too, in his way. He is getting more picturesque every day. At the Emma Goldman social he was ornamented with a new straw hat, which had a very high crown and narrow brim with little black ribbons for the side. Also, an enormous tie, the ends of which fluttered gaily and coquettishly in the wind. His curling black locks nearly reached his shoulders, and he has vowed never again to cut his hair, as a protest against the conventions of society. I left the social with him, and as we walked down the street in the morning he was a target for all eyes. He was talking philosophy and love to me, but this changed to fury. He flung his arms about, and shouted to the crowd: 'Oh, you monkeys, sheep, dogs,' and several other kinds of quadrupeds and birds. Henry is a peculiar man, but he is as sincere as anybody living and is a friend of that wonderful man, Kropotkin. When Kropotkin was in Chicago some years ago a reception was given him at Hull House. Poor Henry eagerly hastened there to see his friend—dressed in unbecoming and informal attire. He had not seen Kropotkin for years, and so anxious was he to meet him again that he forgot his raggedness. But the dear, sympathetic settlement workers were decidedly polite in showing Henry the door. But, at the psychological moment, Kropotkin appeared, threw his arms around Henry, kissed him, and carried on like an emigrant who runs across an exile."

FOOTNOTES:

[2] See "The Spirit of Labour," Chapter 4, called "An Anarchist Salon," for a description of some of the principal members of this society.—H. H.

[3] This is worthy of some of the mythological-Christian paintings of Mantegna, where the vices are being scourged by the indignant virtues.—H. H.



CHAPTER X

More of the Salon

"I have been imagining you in Paris," wrote Marie, "having a delightful, bohemian time. My ideas of Paris are all derived from reading Balzac, who has certainly created the most delightful, gay and mysterious, sad, mystic, sordid, everything one could wish in a city of dreams and realities.

"When Terry brought me 'Evelyn Innes,' by George Moore, the other day, I dug into it with zeal and delight, and was surprised and pleased with his subtle psychology, during the first part of the story; but psychology can be carried to the point where it becomes incomprehensible, stupefying and monotonous. I finally grew indescribably weary of the problems of Evelyn's soul, but I kept on to the end, and then sank back on my pillow exhausted. I think I shall stop reading for a while, lest I have literary indigestion. I'll try to be satisfied for the time with Swinburne and Shelley. Our anarchistic poet lectured on Shelley, the Poet of Revolution, the other night, and I was disappointed. He did not do justice to Shelley either as a revolutionary poet or as a poet of beauty. I think Shelley should be spoken of with a delicate passion, which our anarchist poet lacks. He tried hard to speak with fervour, but there is no fire in him, and what is a poet without fire? Perhaps it was as well, for what's the use in casting pearls before swine? For the critics in the audience arose and condemned Shelley because he was a socialist, or because he was not one. Some of these critics seized upon the word libidinous. Oh! there was their clue! The lecturer arose like an outraged moralist to repudiate the scandalous charge of libidinousness. I was so disgusted I vowed I would never go to another meeting.

"I have indeed been going to so many 'humanity lectures,' and clubs, such as the Shelley Club, where the divine anarchist B——misinterprets the great bard every week to his flock of female admirers, and had been reading so much Swinburne and other sublime things that recently I have had a reaction, and there is nothing now at the Salon except Nietzsche. He is a relief, although I feel that if I were to keep on with him I should go mad. When I feel my brain begin to turn, I start scrubbing or some other stupid thing.

"Though Nietzsche says some very bitter things about women, who have no place whatever in his scheme of things, except perhaps for the relaxation of the warriors, yet there is something dignified in his very denunciation. His attitude toward our sex is so different from that of Schopenhauer, and many other philosophers. They usually take the 'rag and a bone and a hank of hair' attitude, and are disgusting. But Nietzsche warns men that women are dangerous, and danger, in Nietzsche's philosophy, is a sublime thing. Also, we must become the mothers of his Overmen.

"Terry, too, is much interested just now in Nietzsche; quite naturally, for Terry is one of those 'men of resolute indolence' who will not work without delight in his labour. He talks a great deal just now of a plan to seek some cave and there try to become an 'Overman.' I pointed out to him that that was difficult, for to become an Overman he must of course 'keep holy his highest thought,' without being disturbed by the struggle for existence, and that, like Zarathustra, he must have an eagle and a serpent to minister to his wants. And I suggested that I might be his eagle, for Zarathustra says that woman is still either a cat or a bird or at best a cow. I prefer to believe that I am a bird, and as such could minister to my sweet Overman. But Terry wouldn't have it so, and replied that of course I was a bird, in a way, but he would rather have me as a pussy, or as a combination of cat, bird, and cow. I thought that too cruel, so now I am determined to be none of them, but to become an Overwoman, and so be a fitting relaxation for my warrior, my Overman. 'Tis but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and I think, in this letter, I have made that step."

Marie's moods are many, and in her next letter she wrote in quite a different vein:

"I almost wept when reading your letter about the baby. Perhaps it was because of the line, 'A little daughter was born to me.' It recalled to me this Christmas time many years ago when I was a little child and I heard the story of the little Jesus. 'And unto us a child was born.' How those words ring in my ears! So vividly come back to me the pity I felt when I heard the story of the poor little infant born to be crucified. It always made me cry—out of pity, the pity of it all! And I wonder if we are not all, all of us, born to be crucified.

"But I suppose I must congratulate you on assuming the responsibility of fatherhood for the third time. You might long ago have studied pre-natal influences and the rights of the unborn. I hope you have not neglected these sacred duties. It surprised me that you wished for a girl, for not long ago you expressed the opinion that women were soulless creatures without memory! Suppose your daughter should not be an exception, how would you feel then?... You have been very active. As for me, I fear my only activity will be that of a dreamer. I differ from the dreaming class only in one respect and that is, in making confidences, which dreamers never do. They shrivel up into themselves. They usually create their own sorrows, which have no remedy except the joys they also invent. They are natural only when alone, and talk well only to themselves."

In the same letter she plunges into the gossip of the Salon:

"I don't blame Scott for his carelessness. The poor fellow has been suffering terribly because of his wife, who has left him and gone off with a new love to a new home. Scott has been quite heroic about it, but he suffers. You know how in our radical society men and women try to deny that they are jealous, try to give freedom to each other. But whatever our ideas may be, we cannot control our fundamental instincts, and poor Scott is now a wounded thing, I can assure you. But he speaks beautifully of his wife—even packed up her things for her and escorted her to the new place.

"Scott came here the other night with your friend the journalist, Fiske, who has become quite a part of our little society. I am sorry to say that he is quite sad, too, but for a different reason. The poor fellow seems to be suffering from lack of literary inspirations. He has a habit of asking people what shall he write about. He asks Terry, and even me, and in pity I am trying to write up the old women in our tenement for him....

"I see a good deal of Thompson and his wife Minna. Now that Thompson, who was a famous radical, is more prosperous, he is growing careful and conservative. The glory of her husband is reflected in Minna. I don't call at their home so much as I did, because I made what they call a break there the other day. I thoughtlessly introduced myself as Miss L—— to someone of his relatives or relatives' friends, after she had already introduced me as Mrs. C——. And Thompson informed me next day that it was inconvenient to explain such things to conservative people, and that I ought to be more careful in dealing with the unenlightened ones. I suppose I ought to think more of the reputation of my friends."

Marie likes the Jews of the Salon, many of them, very much, but there are some she doesn't, as the following shows:

"Things are rather dead in the 'movement,' just now. But there is something doing among the Jewish radicals, who, you know, are very important in any radical movement here in Chicago. No wonder things are lively when the Jews have such a leader as Mr. Kohen, whom one might believe to be the long wanted Messiah, destined to lead his race into the promised land, which is evidently Chicago. There was a hot time about three weeks ago in the Masonic Temple meeting when this modern prophet demonstrated to us who were not Jews that they (he and his friends) were the chosen people who would not only liberate themselves but also us from the yoke of capitalist oppression; and contrary to all previous rules, they would do this without any consideration of moneys; all that Mr. Kohen expected in return was due appreciation. I suppose I ought to be grateful to Mr. Kohen, but somehow I am not. I ought, too, to be grateful to our Jewish Madonna, Esther, but there again I am not. Poor girl! she is really the Madonna of the Chicago movement. All the sorrows and troubles of the Salon rest upon her poor shoulders, and she silently suffers, sacrifices and redeems. Then there is little Sara, another chosen one. It is she who is chosen to make men miserable for the good of their souls. She has been very pensive since the great poet B—— left, for now she has no one to worry about. I suggested to her that she might worry about Terry, if she liked, and she said she would try, with a weary little sigh. It was she who one day explained to me at great length that all love except sensual love was of a transient character. If, she said, man swears he loves you, but does not show any physical interest in you, you can bet that his passion is of that intangible sort that has the radiant tints but also the evanescence of dew!...

"I am going to a ball next Sunday night. It's on the Jewish holiday in memory of the time when poor Moses led the Jews from Egypt and they had to eat unleavened bread. All the orthodox Jews will spend the day praying in the synagogue, without tasting food or drink. They make up for it the next day, though, you bet. The ball is given every year by the radical Jews, usually right in the Ghetto, and nearly always the followers of holy Moses jump on those who no longer follow, and there's a hot time. Last year the radical Jews, mostly anarchists, had to have police protection! The police are good for something, after all! What should we do without them? We would exterminate each other without delay!"

Perhaps Marie's temporary "grouch" against the Jews was partly due to the irruption into her Society of three new and attractive Israelites of her own sex—an event happening about that time. In one of these newcomers, Terry, it appears, was somewhat interested, and Marie has often admitted that her philosophy of freedom is powerless to overcome her "fundamental emotions." Writing of Miss B—— she said: "She is a regular little Becky Sharp, very demure and quiet, and proper and distinguished. All the women hate her, and the men flock about her, for she is pretty and a free lover, of course. She comes once or twice a week to our salon, and then Terry is always present, and they get along famously. She talks of 'the realm of physics,' or 'of biology,' and I admit it bores me, her voice is so monotonous. She takes evident pleasure in Terry's society. Perhaps I am a little jealous, but it does not make me feel any different toward him, and that is the main thing, the only thing I really care about....

"I must admit that I grow tired at times of the 'movement.' Kate says she has cut it out altogether, and Terry goes to the meetings very seldom. I dutifully attend the lectures, where they talk about the same old things in the same old way, and also the socials and visit the comrades once in a while. But they do get on my nerves sometimes. I prefer to stay at home, in the inner circle of the salon, reading and sucking at my cigarette when I have one. I scrub the floor once in a while, just because of sheer weariness from not doing anything.

"Terry has been writing an article on 'the general strike,' but did not finish it. He is like me in lacking energy enough to carry out any plan or purpose unless great pressure is brought to bear upon him either from within or without. I am sure that if he continued to feel strongly about the general strike he would go on to finish it. But he has a great distrust, really, of the 'labour' movement and of labour leaders. He believes that all social improvement must come from the workers, but how many difficulties there are! One of the greatest is the lack of good leaders. I myself have not much hope for the workers as long as they remain sheep who are lost without leaders, are dependent and led either by honest men who know not clearly how, where, or why, or by intelligent men, whose intelligence usually takes the form of trickery and self-interest. The intelligent honest ones seem not to be cut out to be leaders, or successful in any way. Sheep are led or driven most easily by those who can make the most noise, and they follow as readily over the precipice as over the road. The slightest thing serves to frighten and scatter them in all directions, in outward confusion and helplessness, unless the burly insistent watchers are for ever at their heels. Leaders of such a herd must often be unscrupulous to have any success, must use their intelligence for all sorts of devices, often cruel and unjust, to keep their flocks from wandering: any means justifies the end, which is the good of the cause.

"Perhaps it is a good sign that people from the higher walks of life are beginning to take notice of the workingman's problem, and maybe the ideal leader will come from above, but even so I doubt if that will help much. I have a feeling that all movements dependent on leaders must necessarily fail. Of course, I know that the people of the 'higher life' fear the stupidity and brutality of the mass of workers, and argue that leaders are necessary to guide and restrain them. This is only partly true; there is hardly any doubt about the stupidity of the mob, but they are not at all so brutal. True, during times of strike they will throw stones and slug strike-breakers, but they are not nearly as brutal as the 'scabs,' who are incited, aided, and protected by the employers and police, and who lack the emotional exaltation which often inspires the workers to this violence.

"During the teamsters' strike I witnessed a scene where the strikers hustled the scabs, overturned several huge wagons loaded with beef, in the centre of one of the poorest districts of Chicago, where the people were suffering from want of meat, but the wretches did not even have sense enough to help themselves from this plentiful store which was left on the street guarded only by one or two policemen. And there would have been no danger of arrest, for the policemen could easily have been swept aside by the rest of the mob. It made me mad. I felt like shouting at them, 'you fools, why don't you help yourselves?' How differently a hungry bunch of kids would have acted!"

Terry, in his very different way, wrote on the same subject:

"I never knew a sincere, not to say honest, labour leader, from business agent up. Poor proletaire! forever crucified between two sets of thieves—one rioting on his rights, the other carousing on his wrongs. Labour plods while plunder plays, thus runs the world away. But if he should take it into his thick head to be his own walking delegate some day!"

This strange master of the "salon," this poetic interpreter of the philosophy of the man who has nothing, has, in spite of his pessimisms, a profound mystic hope. He wrote:

"That toiling humanity—the labour movement—to me is a thing so vast, that whatever other movements try to exclude themselves from it, they must be swallowed up in it. All other things are but the shadows cast behind or before the ever-marching phalanx of the unconquerable, the imperishable proletaire. This is the hope which sends its thrill through us when nothing else can. At the bottom of my heart I know I am living but for one thing, and my life has been nothing but a preparation for this. Of and for myself I have accomplished nothing: for to be ever ready and alert is not accomplishment.... I see a profound hope in the proletaire, for to him is granted that intense, wistful awareness of his common lot and life with his fellows. His very crowding in factories and tenements, salons, unions, and brothels, brings it home to him. Yes, this very lack of space must remorselessly rub it in, even by dumb, physical close contact. The friction resulting from ten living in one room must make one of them phosphorescent—and capable of giving light to humanity. The tenement houses are harmless boxes of lucifers as long as none is ignited. The inhabitants are wofully benighted, but they possess wonderfully the quality of brotherhood, of oneness, hence arises their wonderful psychology and their aesthetics, so full and overflowing with pathos, so piercing, it carries one to that borderland where comic and tragic make marriage.

"This strange crowding in our consciousness of things that do not seem to come from us and yet are of us—this clamouring consciousness is what drives me to despair and makes me feel I have not the form or shadow of things, though I may have the substance. Yet I am determined to strain my self-consciousness even to the breaking point; for though I know madness lies that way, there stands my Ideal, beckoning. I must grasp this great common thing which comes from all of us, from us crowded proletarians, and yet is not in any one of us. Together we enjoy and suffer more than any one of us alone. There is, I believe, something deeper than the deepest woe: our racial consciousness is there and we must find it. At moments of great insight we are suddenly made aware of this, the mysterious unity of the Race, but it is flashed and gone and we must await another crisis. It is only in moments of sublime sorrow that the depths of the racial consciousness is heaved up to us. Joy cannot do this, for joy is narrow and wants us to do away with sorrow; but sorrow never wants us to do away with joy. Keats always beheld joy in an external attitude of farewell and this is profoundly and perfectly mystical and real: joy is swallowed up in something deeper, away down in the common racial consciousness. We must all strive to be men beyond essential harm; else, standing blindly before the meaning and destiny of the race, we should go mad. Most of us try to think, intellectuals; fear to abandon ourselves to alarming states of feeling where reason is crowded to the wall. And yet I feel that by abandoning ourselves completely to mere feeling lies our only hope to find the logic of the race that no individual reason can master.

"Let me tell you of something that recently happened to me which shows how strong this race feeling is, as opposed to merely individual or family feeling. I heard that my mother was dying. I had become reconciled long ago, had seen many things more clearly; for if joy is of the heart, sorrow is of the soul, by which we see. I wonder if woman has a 'lake' in her heart. I used to think my mother had, and when I called to see her once more, the old love-longing caught me by the throat. My presence seemed to help her some, but, though moved, I had passed beyond the family boundary-line, and was engaged in stripping myself of everything not belonging to the soul. If I wish to be something more than myself, I must be prepared to lose all, even myself. And what is my family and my mother?"

Terry does not like to use the word "religion." But he certainly belongs to the type of the religious man. One of the most marked characteristics of the religious temperament is this abandonment of personal and family ties, this indifference and often hostility to social law, "this emotional devotion to something intangible." All the anarchists and social rebels I have known have, more or less, the religious temperament, although a large part of their activity is employed in scoffing at and reviling religion—as they think the God of theology has been largely responsible for the organisation of social and political injustice. But the deeply religious spirits have often been hostile to theology, as well as to all other complicated forms of society. Here are some religious words:

"There must be some meaning," wrote Terry, "for all this ancient agony. Oh, that I might expand my written words into an Epic of the Slums, into an Iliad of the Proletaire! If an oyster can turn its pain into a pearl, then, verily, when we have suffered enough, something must arise out of our torture—else the world has no meaning. On this theory, all my pangs are still to come. I too will arise out of my sacrificial self and look back on my former bondage in amaze, even as I now look down on the dizzy slums where I am and yet am not! It cannot be that I came up out of the depths for nothing. If I could pierce my heart and write red lines, I might perhaps tell the truth. But only a High Silence meets me, and I do not understand. In letting myself down to the bottomless, I discovered I could not stand it long enough. I am dumbly dissatisfied. I feel like a diver who has nigh strangled himself to bring up a handful of seaweed, and so feels he must down again—and again—until he attains somewhere the holy meaning of Life."

Terry feels that somehow deep in his life he has been crucified, that society has nailed him to the cross:

"I was alone on the cross and with bloodshot, beseeching eyes beheld the world objectively. Yet I was aware of a harmony beyond me, though not in me or around me."

It is this "harmony beyond," this religious sense of "something far more deeply interfused" which, ever conscious in the idealist's mind, makes the concrete vision of everyday fact so ugly, leads to anarchism of feeling profound and constant.

But in this world, which as a whole the heart rejects—"my heart," said Terry, "is the last analysis of all things"—the idealist sees things of beauty which constitute for him the elements of perfection, elements which in some future state he dreams may be fully realised in a social whole.

"I saw a fine thing from the window to-day," Terry wrote, "a thing of sheer delight, the complete transfiguration of a human being. An Italian street labourer came into the yard and sprawled on the grass to eat his own lunch. He was bandy-legged from being coaxed to stand alone too soon. But he had a most wonderful face; all the mobility which toil had banished from his form must have sought refuge in his eyes and his caressing countenance. Catching sight of some children playing 'house,' he jumped up and in a most charming way offered them all of his cakes and went back to his luncheon. The children instinctively brought him back some of the cakes, which he not only refused, but offered them the rest of his food. They gathered in a semicircle while he spoke to them. There came something in his face and attitude which I have seen many 'cultured' people vainly attempt. He absolutely was one of them; the children stood spell-bound, dazed at the sudden transformation of a man into a child. The imagination that can become one with its object is a high form of unconscious art and rests upon the heart and the mass feeling of the race. The ancient folk-lore and ballads must have arisen from some such fusion as this. How unfair, at least unwise, it is to judge the individual action of the proletaire, when he is made for action in the mass."

This vague philosophy and transcendental ethics pass naturally enough, at times, into the feeling of violent revolution, where bomb-throwing, if not advocated, is emotionally sympathetic.

"Just now," wrote Terry, "there is strong predisposition among the 'reds' to resort to Russian methods. It needs only the occasion, which must be waited for, and cannot be created. When the 'error' is great enough, the 'Terror' will surely rise to the occasion. Were it not for my faith in this, I should be glad to see Humanity lapse back to whence it came."

In the idealist there is a growing impatience with the world; in his attempt to react even against Nature and some of the necessary qualities of men there is such inevitable failure that no moral revolutionist or anarchist can indefinitely endure the struggle. He is destroyed by his fundamental opposition to the world which he seeks to destroy. Therefore, impatiently, weakly, he sometimes breaks out—with a bomb—even against his philosophy and his temperament.

He is led into contradictions. One of them touches upon his feeling of "class consciousness." Terry at times, as a transcendental moralist, rises above this feeling, but his special instinct as a "labour" man often asserts itself against and in contradiction to his passion for the oneness of the race. In my intimate association with him I sometimes saw that, much as he liked me, he felt that I was of another "class." In the work which resulted in my book, The Spirit of Labour, I frequently came in discouraging contact with this "class" distrust of me—in him and in others. Marie alone seemed free of it, in her relation to me, and yet she wrote:

"I think we have a peculiar sympathy for each other, and yet I realise that in some subtle way there is not that perfect understanding there ought to be. Just think of what extremes we two come from—how different our social environment! I know you understand as nearly as is possible for one of your class, and yet I doubt if you can really sympathise with the ideas of anarchism which springs naturally from only one class—the labour class. Do you not hesitate sometimes and doubt that all men are worthy of the better things of life, the coalheaver as well as the banker and artist? Even I hesitate sometimes, when I see the coarseness and ignorance of these poor plodders of earth, and when I think of all the really great things that slavery has accomplished. But who knows how much greater things might be, if done freely by free men? When I remember that these poor plodders have never had a chance, I relent and feel so sorry and so hopeless. How often Terry and I have walked along the boulevards, admiring the beautiful homes of the rich. Oh, it used to make me wild! I felt that I belonged to humanity, and yet I could only enter these beautiful homes as a servant, an object of contempt—an object of contempt supposed, moreover, to have morals, and religion, too!"

Of "class consciousness," Terry wrote: "Class feeling has always been a deep problem to me: it emanates from profound depths. This reflection concerns you. Many of your 'labour' friends here seem to regret that there were many things they could not tell you; not that they had any conscious lack of faith in you as an individual; indeed, they had great faith in you as a person. Their distrust of you was a class distrust; they dreaded to betray the interests of their class. They felt a fundamental antagonism, not to you as an individual, but to you as a member of your class. From their Social Sinai they enunciate the eleventh commandment, 'Thou shalt not be a Scab!', and the other ten commandments do not seem to them so important. But you, they think, cannot feel this commandment as they do, so passionately, so fully. To them, it is the keynote of solidarity; to you, partly at least, a principle of division, of separation.

"No wonder our class—the thinkers among them—rejects the morality of your class—property morality, and the rest meant only to make property morality as strong as a law of God. I made at one time the fatal mistake of the many simple labourers who are organically honest. I spent most of my best life in seeking a solution of our hard lot from those above me. After a loss of many feathers and some brave plumage, but no down, I must in all humility beat my way back to the traditional lost ideals of our organically incorporated class.... Perhaps the most conscienceless class who seek to solve the insoluble is the 'cultured' class. But most of them seem to me like artistic undertakers officiating at the 'wake' of Life. With their platitudes, their prudery, and their chastity, they make for death. These languid ones desire to have life served up to them in many courses. Greed lies at the bottom of their being, and so they preach content to the masses, though for the workers they have nothing in their shallow souls but contempt. This cultured leisure class has had the time and cunning to perpetrate one great and tragic trick. They have made social falsehoods so complicated that they themselves neither understand nor wish to understand.... Why is it that in all the great authors I detect an air of condescension, marking their contempt for those who make and keep them what they are? With what fine contempt the 'rube' is surveyed by the faker who has plucked him! Must I put these classic souls of art in the same category? The art for art's sake people—these make me sick. It is at best an argumentative confusion springing from the fact that in the perfect work of art there is such a fusion of form and substance as to resist dissociation and defy analysis. Perhaps this fact accounts for Tolstoi's contempt for some of the classic art. It seems to me that most classic art is one of two things: either it smacks of smug content and over-fed geniality or it is permeated with a profound pessimism. The philosophers are worse than the artists; they are the ringleaders of the betrayers of humanity. Art at least makes the atonement of beauty for its mistakes, but this cannot be said of philosophy.

"Herbert Spencer, for instance, who represents the high-water mark of a philosophy that will not hold water, pours out the vials of his bottled-up wrath on the poor unfortunates of London who are compelled 'to make a living' by tips in opening the carriage doors or holding the horses of the wealthy. He had nothing but loathing for the pregnant girl who tries to break her 'fall' by taking advantage of the 'poor laws.' For the workingman, who sincerely tries, at least, to settle the 'affairs of State' in the pot-house over a mug of ale, Spencer had nothing but contempt; but to the parliamentary people who settle the same 'affairs' over champagne and prostitutes, he played the lick-spittle.... The recantation of his 'Social Statics' is the worst case of intellectual cowardice on record.... He went down with final contempt for the workers who served him, gave him his daily bread, made his ink, pen, and paper and bound the twenty volumes of his philosophy of falsehood! May his 'works' rest in oblivion!...

"In dismissing Spencer, it is worthy of note that the very thing which made him pause in the righting of social wrongs is the thing which will cause the Revolution, namely, the complicated nature of social falsehoods. In recanting his published truth on the land question, he admitted that, although the legal title to land was obtained by murder and dispossession of original occupants, the matter was now too complicated to be dealt with. If this be so, if justice cannot be done because of the difficulties in the way, then all hail to the simplicity and elemental justice of a Red Revolution!...

"Yes, sometimes I feel like the crudest of the revolutionists, although I call myself a philosophical anarchist. Sometimes the jails seem to yearn for my reception, and I question my right to be at large. Nothing but a decreasing cowardice leaves me at liberty. And if I could not do more for my soul behind the bars than I have done in front of them, then I am fit only for durance vile. I, who have out-fasted the very flies till they fled my room, dread but one thing in the life of a prison—that I should have no time for reflection and repose! but out of a born anarchist it would make of me a compulsory Socialist, condemned to work for the State—a veritable dungeon of disgrace.

"It is not so much that I love life, though as a rule the poor, who are so close to life, worship it in a way that puts all other things to scorn. I know nothing that reaches farther up or deeper down than this. It is only in the gutter that life is truly worshipped. And that is why I search for my last faith there—in the gutter, whence all faith really springs.

"And yet to have faith even in the gutter is an act of deep imagination. In the rotting rooms beneath me lives a worker with a family of six girls and one boy. Capitalism has crucified his carcass for fifty years and now 'laid him off.' He has been looking for work for the last month. I watch the insanity in his restless, aimless movements, and I feel desperate enough to try to get him a job. Unfortunately, he does not drink; so his pipe, ever in his mouth, is the only obstacle between him and the mad-house, or the poor-house. Every morning at six o'clock, his sandwich dinner concealed in his pocket, he makes a brave show of walking away briskly in his hopeless search for work; for there are too many younger men. His assumed activity is only put on till he turns the first corner, for he tries to conceal his lameness and decrepitude, especially from his wife, who strains her gaze after him. Just before starting off he takes the superfluous precaution to put some shoe-blacking on his hair which shows white about the temples. He comes back after a six hours' search, about noon, his neglected dinner still in his pocket. He has tramped ten or twelve miles with no open shop for him. He does not blame anyone, but regards it all as an accident that has happened to him in some unfortunate way. He broods over this till I can see it in his eyes; but I don't dare say anything to him. He is too old, and I might only make his trouble worse. If I were a sculptor I would put him before the world in a material almost as hard and I hope more enduring than itself. His arms never hang down by his side, but seem to be set in the position required by his last job, shovelling. It reminds me of the time, thirty years ago, when I was laid off, and the madness first got in and crouched behind my eyes....

"Yes, I suppose I am mad. It is true that if I cannot have the intellectual red that heralds the approach of Dawn, then I want the red light of Terror that ushers in the Night. My feelings have been clamouring for many years against my cowardly better judgment. I believe some day they will break loose and throw me, as from a catapult, even up against the stone wall of atrocity we call Society."

Thus the idealist becomes frenzied at times at the incredible difficulties in the way of a total revolt against society, even against nature. We shall see how the absolute nature of his anarchism led Terry further and further along the path of rejection, "passing up" one thing after another, even letting anarchism as a social enthusiasm go by the board and making his continued relation with a human being, even with Marie, a practical impossibility.



CHAPTER XI

The End of the Salon

Terry's love for Marie was partly due, as we have seen, to his passion for social propaganda: that she represented the "social limit" was a strong charm to him. She, woman-like, always insisted on the personal relation, and for a long time his interest in her personality as such, combined with his social enthusiasm, was strong enough to keep the bond intact. When, however, his social enthusiasm paled, and his merely individualistic anarchism became stronger, his interest in Marie weakened. The times grew more frequent with him when he doubted the social side of anarchism itself—when this social propaganda seemed as hollow and as unlovely as society itself; and when he saw the weaknesses and vanities of his associates, how far they were from realising any ideal. Then, more and more, he was thrown back upon himself, for as his hope in the new society weakened, his hope in Marie as an embodiment of it weakened also.

Marie's sex interests, always freely and boldly expressed, played, at first, no part in the growing irritability of their relations. Marie's occasional "affairs" with other men, sometimes taking her away from the salon for a time, were taken by Terry in silence. Even when he came face to face with the fact of Marie's absence of restraint in this respect, lack of delicacy and feeling for him, he did not complain. To do so was against his principles of personal freedom; and the fling in the face of society envolved in Marie's conduct pleased him rather than otherwise; also there was in him a subtle feeling of superiority over other men, in the fact that he was without physiological jealousy, or if not, that he could at least control it.

Even Marie's jealousy of him, whenever he was in the society of another woman, he took with a patient shrug. Terry's interest in other women was not a passionate one: in it was always an element of the pale cast of thought, and Marie had no real cause for jealousy. But Terry tolerantly took it as a feminine weakness and tried to shield Marie from this unreasonable unhappiness. On her account he gave up many a desire to talk intimately with some female comrade. But Marie had no such tolerance for him. Not only was she quite free with other men and to the limit, but she often went into a real tantrum of jealousy. One day she followed Terry all over town, fearing that he had an appointment with a well-known radical woman. Marie often acknowledged to me her inconsistency. "But, you know," she would say, "our principles and ideas do not count much when our fundamental emotions are concerned."

This was a true remark of Marie's, and I have often had occasion to perceive the great degree of it throughout the radical world. Men and women often try in that society to be tolerant; they give one another free rein sometimes for years, but generally in the end, the resistance of one or the other weakens; human nature or prejudice, whichever it is, asserts itself, and tragedy results. This I had occasion to see over and over again: how nature triumphed over the most resolute idealism and brought about in the end either ugly passion or pathetic unhappiness.

As Terry began to doubt his deepest hope, as he began to turn away from the ideas about which his salon was formed, he saw and felt more clearly the limitations of Marie's personal character; and her acts began to hurt him. Perhaps he began to lose faith in both—Marie and the Salon—at the same time.

"I am afraid," he wrote, "that the days of the salon are numbered. I am of the opinion that most of our latter-day radicals are on a par with our latter-day Christians. They have grown weary, or wary, of their original purpose. They seem to think Liberty a beautiful goddess who will never come: they willingly believe in her as long as there is no danger of or in her 'coming.' How frantically most of the radicals signal back the 'waiting' reply: the track is not clear for the coming of Liberty!—and they do not want to have it cleared!...

"You will be surprised to know that I have dropped the radicals, with the exception of Thomson, and I fear he too must walk the plank and go by the board. I am becoming quite implacable toward these intelligent people, and the salon will soon be void of my presence. The spirit of it has gone already and cannot be revived. That is why I left my mother's home—because the spirit of home had gone—and why I must leave the salon. I cannot submit to being a discordant spirit; therefore I must be a wandering one.

"So I must leave Katie and Marie. If I could make a living I would work for it, as I did when I thought so. But I shall never work—or toil rather—for sheer subsistence except behind the bars. I am driven to be a parasite, for honest living there is none. The time is up, and I must leave. Several years ago I ruined whatever robustness I had by tending bar so that Katie might knock down some three hundred dollars. At one meal a day and a place to try to sleep, I think that she and I are about even; she also thinks so, though she never says so, to me. She is willing and able to take care of Marie, for she has five hundred dollars in the bank and a great love for the girl."

Terry, sometimes terribly frank, is extremely reticent about Marie; and the account of their misunderstanding comes mainly from her letters:

"I have had such a bad misunderstanding with Terry, or he with me, I don't know which it is. My God, but women can be brutal, though! You ought to read Jack London's 'The Call of the Wild.' You might substitute women for dogs. Some years ago I was a feast for the dogs (women), and now I see much of this same fierce brutality in myself, and poor Terry is feeling it. I have been away with a man, and Terry somehow feels it much more keenly than ever before.

"And yet I love Terry: surely if I ever knew what love means, I love him and have loved him always. Though I am the most brutal person on earth, I am so without intention, without knowing it even, at times. And I am so tired that sometimes I have no feeling for anything, not even for Terry, and he does not understand that. I feel out of harmony with every one just now. It is hardly indifference, rather a terrible weariness. Perhaps my recent reading of Nietzsche has helped to give me a feeling of weary hopelessness. And then, too, the spirit of our salon is gone; I don't know exactly why. Even Terry has changed very much in his feelings and ideas. He is not much interested in the things he used to be absorbed in. He is more cynical, especially of social science, and yet he seems to me to be making a very science of looking at things unscientifically. He seems to be holding his emotions in check, is less impulsive than ever, and is losing much of that delicacy of feeling and expression which was so admirable in him.

"I too am growing cynical, and I hate to do so. I should like to accept people at their apparent value and not always look for motives, as I am getting more and more to do. I should like to approach everything and everybody with a perfectly open heart, as a child does, but I find that I no longer do that, that I am always prejudiced. I am sure that this is due to Terry's influence, for he more and more excludes everything: nothing is good enough for him. He passes up one person after another and he has no joy in life. His personality is so much stronger than mine that I am like a little thin shadow, weaker than water, and he can always bring me around to see his way of looking at people and things."

This note in Marie—protest against Terry's tendency to cut out the simple joy of life—grew very strong at a later time; now, however, it was only suggested, and played no important part.

Indeed, the idea of his leaving her was to her an intolerable thought; and yet there is many a letter which suggests the approaching dissolution of the salon and of their relation. They were both, at times, terribly tired of life: with no strenuous occupation, the word of Nietzsche and of world pessimism, of excessive individuality, tortured their nerves and made everything seem of no avail.

Work takes one away from life, is a buffer between sensitive nerves and intensest experience. Strong natures who for some reason are dislocated and therefore do not work, or work only fragmentarily, come too much in contact with life and often cannot bear it; it burns and palls at once. So it was with Terry and Marie. Without either work or children, they were forced into strenuous personal relations with one another and into a feverish relation with "life."

"I feel so depressed," she wrote; "so many things have happened this last year which seemed trivial at the time, but have had big results, while other things which seemed events have turned out to be only incidents, and very small ones. Thus, a careless remark of mine resulted in a quarrel between Terry and me which did not lessen with time, but grew larger and larger, until now the relations of us two idyllic lovers are anything but pleasant. And a very serious attack of love from which I suffered last summer has passed as quickly and lightly as a breath of wind, while another light love of mine, which came to me last February, has assumed large proportions simply because I have been abused for it by Terry, whom no one could ever displace in my heart. I was bound to defend my lover from the attacks of Terry, whom I had always regarded as above such a common display of irritation in such matters. So this other man became a sort of ideal lover in my mind, and all because of Terry's opposition. This man had wooed me in a great, glorious, godless fashion. He was a big man in the labour world, and he flattered me immensely, but I should never have cared for him, if Terry's nature had not suddenly seemed to weaken....

"I have been so uneasy about Terry lately. He has been talking so much about joining the criminal class. He seems to be losing his interest in our movement and to be looking for some other way of escape, as he calls it. He says his liberty is only a figment of his mind, that he has now reached the time for which he had all along been unconsciously preparing himself. I am, of course, used to this kind of talk from Terry. He has been in the depths of despondency often enough, but nothing ever came of it except a saloon brawl. He would usually seek Harris; they would break a mirror or a few glasses in some saloon, and the next day Terry would have a headache, after which he was usually content to browse around his philosophy in that mild and subtle way of his, for a week or so.

"But now Harris is gone, and Terry does not know any other person quite so strenuous in the fine art of breaking glasses and barroom fixtures in general, so, finding no vent for his accumulated despondency, he may possibly do real things. I feel so sadly for him and wish I could help him. The Lord knows I would be willing to break any amount of glassware with him, but he has not much confidence in my aim, I guess; women never can throw straight. In fact, he has little confidence in me in any way lately, for he never tells me the details of his schemes, but only throws out dark and terrible hints....

"Truly, something may indeed happen this time. He is so anti-social. He positively won't go out anywhere to meet people, won't go to our picnics or socials, and in manner is very strange, distant, cold, and polite to Katie and me. One would think he had been introduced to us just five minutes before. Perhaps he thinks that Katie and I want him to go to work—common, vulgar work, I mean, for Katie has lost her job and we are living in the most economical way, for we don't know when another desirable job can be found. Now, Terry really ought to know that I shouldn't have him work for anything in the world. I know that Katie has not said the least word to him, but he is so terribly sensitive that perhaps he suspects what she may be thinking.

"Katie is despondent, too, and nearly makes me crazy talking of her life, past, present, and future, in the most doleful way. Last night, after talking to me for two hours about the misery of life, she made the startling proposal that she and I commit suicide. 'For,' said she, 'I cannot see anything ahead of me but work, work, like a cart-horse, until I am dead. I'd rather die now and be done with everything, and you had better come with me, for you haven't anything, and if I went alone, what would become of you, such a poor helpless creature; see how thin you are, I can almost look through your bones! Who would take care of you?'

"After talking in this strain for what seemed to me hours and hours, Katie went to bed and to sleep, and then came Terry from his solitary walk—he usually goes for a walk if there are any indications that Katie will do any talking—and entertained me by carelessly, carefully hinting at one of his dark, mysterious plots. Then he, too, went to bed, and I, too, had forty winks and seventy thousand nightmares."

But Marie, even in this growing strain, never failed in her love and admiration for the strange man with whom she lived. On the heels of the above came the following:

"Terry is one of those characters who has not lost any of his distinct individuality. His is a nature which will never become confounded or obliterated in one's memory. The instantaneous impression of large soul, sincerity, and truthfulness he made upon me at our first meeting has never left me. This impression must have been very strong, for generally these impressions grow weaker, if people live together so closely as poor people must. All his faults, as well as perhaps his virtues, come from the fact that he is not at all practical. In spite of his experience, he does not know the world, and is a dreamer of dreams. His wild outbursts are the result, I think, of his sedentary life. Sometimes we two remain at our home for weeks without venturing out, without hardly speaking to each other, and then suddenly we burst out into the wildest extravagances of speech!"

A few days later there was a wilder burst than ever, and Terry left the salon. Marie wrote:

"Last week we all had a row, and Terry has not been seen or heard of since. The last words he uttered were that he should return for his belongings in a few days. I am dreadfully sorry about it, especially that we could not have parted good friends. I realise and always shall be sensible of the great good I had from him and shall always think of him with the best feeling and greatest respect. The parting has not been a great surprise to me, for it really has been taking place for a long time, ever since he withdrew his confidence from me, now months past, and I have been acting with other men without his knowledge. Nothing mattered in our relation but mutual confidence, but when that went, it was, I suppose, only a question of time. And, at the same time that he withdrew spiritually from me, he seemed to lose his interest in the movement, and grew more and more solitary and hopeless.

"I don't know what Terry is doing, or where he has gone, and I am uneasy. I would not fancy this beautiful bohemian life alone with Katie, and I don't know what to do."

"Terry is still away," she wrote a few days later, "and my horizon looks bleak and lonely. I want to be alone where I can collect my thoughts, but, even when Katie is out, I cannot think, but sit by the window staring at the old women hanging up the clothes which everlastingly flap on the lines tied between the poor old gnarled willow trees. Poor old trees, their fate has been very like that of the old women. They bear their burden uncomplainingly, groan dolefully in the wind, and shake their old palsied heads. Even the sparrows, true hoboes of the air, disdain to seek shelter in their twisted arms. They will die as they have lived, withering away.

"I try to interest myself in household affairs, but that is so stale and unprofitable. Neither can I read: my thoughts wander away and Terry intrudes himself constantly on my mind. I may get so desperate that I will seek a job as a possible remedy: perhaps in that way I could get tired enough to sleep....

"I have been trying to meet Terry, but he is as elusive as any vagrant sunbeam. I feel it would do me a world of good to have a long heart-to-heart talk with him. If I could only see him once a week and have him sympathise with me in a brotherly fashion and hear him say, in his old way: 'Cheer up, Marie, the worst is yet to come,' I should be comparatively happy and satisfied."

Several more days passed, and with the lapse of time Marie's mood grew blacker. Her next letter to me had a deep note of sorrow and regret and remorse:

"Terry has been away since August thirteenth. He came, while I was out, for his things. I fear it is his farewell visit; for he has not shown the slightest disposition to meet me and talk things over. I have tried in every way to see him again, but he has thus far ignored my existence. I had an idea that we two were made for each other, but I have been an awful fool. Last February, as you know, I had an affair, if it may be dignified by even that name, and just for the fun of the thing I went with this light love to Detroit, and came home ill, as you already know. I returned to Terry full of love and regret and most properly chastened by my illness and disappointment; for other men almost always disappoint me. But I found him positively beastly. The way he abused that poor man was terrible, and I had to defend him, for I know that Terry was unjust to him. I begged him to blame me, not the other man, for it was all my doing, but that only made matters worse.

"I know that some people can conceal their obnoxious qualities and show only the sweet and lovely side of themselves. I sometimes like to see the reverse side of the medal, and I expected Terry, as a student of humanity and an anarchist, to welcome any phase of character which might enable him to understand me more completely.

"I must hesitate in attributing Terry's attitude to jealousy, for I have had some affairs before, and he never seemed to care about them in the least; indeed, I often felt piqued, and thought he did not mind because he did not care about me enough. The following two weeks were, I can truly say, the most infernal and awful that ever happened to me, and I wished thousands of times that I might die, and I did come very close to it. I cannot describe that hellish time or give you any idea of Terry's conduct during those weeks. He was no longer the calm, philosophical Terry that you know, but the most terribly cruel thing the mind of man can conceive.

"Now, I know these are strong words, and I don't know if you can imagine Terry that way, or if you can believe me when I say it is so. I have thought of it so many times, and I have come to the conclusion that perhaps while I was away, he and Harris had a great debauch together and that Terry must have taken some dope which unbalanced him for a while."

I do not think it needs "dope" to explain Terry's conduct. Marie, perhaps, could not understand the possible cruelty of a disappointed idealist. When Terry began to see that neither the anarchists nor Marie would ultimately fit into his scheme of things, when his idealistic hope began to break against the hard rocks of reality, he was capable, in his despair, of any hard, desperate, and cruel act.

Marie continued:

"During this awful time I did not blame Terry, dope or no dope. I considered it all coming to me, and even wished it would keep on coming until it killed. But I made up my mind right then and there that if it was fated that I should keep in the game, there should be no more 'affairs' for me. And so help me God I have not had any from that time—six months ago—till the day Terry left me. And that other man's name has not once passed my lips in Terry's presence, and when it was mentioned by others when he and I were there, I grew dizzy and sick.

"In time, these dreadful things were thought of as little as might be, and Terry and I became excellent, though platonic friends, a novel and fascinating relation, wherein sex had no part. Night after night have we sat around this table, discussing books and people, trying to penetrate the mystery of things strange and new to us. I should rather say that he talked, and I was his eager listener. Often, after tossing restlessly on our pillows, when no sleep would come 'to weight our eyelids down,' the rest of the night would be spent in reciting poetry, the inevitable cigarette in one hand, the other gesticulating in the most fanciful and fervid manner. He would recite in passionate whispers—so as not to awaken Katie—for hours at a time, poems from Shakespeare to Shelley, and Verlaine to Whitman, poems tender and sweet, bitter and ironical and revolutionary, just as the mood suited him. His feeling for poetry and nature seemed to grow as his hope for human society grew less.

"So our relations were ideally platonic—the kind you read about in books. Nevertheless, some of the old bitterness remained in Terry's heart, for at times he became depressed and melancholy and so sensitive about the least little thing that I was nervous and in hot water all the time for fear I might inadvertently say or do something to hurt him or make him angry. I admit I am not as placid as I look, and Katie, too, is very inflammable, so you can understand how tense the atmosphere was at times.

"Not very long ago, at the breakfast table one Sunday morning, I urged Terry to come to a meeting of the 'radicals,' adding that he was becoming a regular hermit and that it would do him good to have more social pleasure. He turned on me savagely, called me a hypocrite, and a contemptible one at that, and made a few more remarks of the kind. After a few days of strained politeness on both sides I made bold to ask him for some explanation—and I have got it coming yet!

"These are just the facts. I don't go into all the little details of our many little vulgar rows, about the most trivial things. I am sure, if Terry writes you about this, that his innate delicacy would never permit him to go into these sordid details, too many of which I have perhaps told you. But I am made of rougher stuff than he. I am never quite as unreasonable as he can be at times, but I am commoner."

Terry did, indeed, express himself in a much more laconic way about the quarrel, than Marie. On the day he left, August thirteenth, he wrote me the following note:

"The premonition in my last letter is fulfilled: the salon knows me no more."

A later talk I had with both Katie and Terry throws light upon the precipitating cause of Terry's departure on the thirteenth of August. It was due to Terry's sensitiveness about his money relationship to Katie. On that morning Terry was asleep on the couch, when Katie got up, made breakfast, and she and Marie asked Terry to join them.

"Not me," said he.

"I think you have been eating on me long enough," rejoined Katie. "It's time you got out."

Katie had never allowed herself a remark of this kind before. But she had not found another job and the three had been on edge for some time.

The remark brought about the climax so long preparing.

"I'll go," he replied, "as soon as I have finished this cigarette."

"In the wordy war that followed," said Terry, "we all three went the limit in throwing things up to each other. I told Katie that if it had not been for me and Marie she would not have had anybody to steal for; that I was eating on her stealings and mine, too. And then I left."

Although, as we shall see, this was not the end of the relation between Terry and Marie, it was in reality the sordid end of the idealistic Salon.



CHAPTER XII

Marie's Attempt

While Marie was trying to find some trace of Terry, the latter was wandering about the country.

"I have been tramping about the country," he wrote me, "living most of the time in the parks. This life, where you 'travel by hand,' crowds out consecutive meditation, but I like it because I can go away at the first shadow of uneasiness betrayed on either side. My existence now is so responsive and irresponsible that it comes very close to my heart. I am living a life of contrasts: one week I spent with a rare friend who has many good books and admires me for the thing for which all others condemn me. Strange, is it not, that the one thing which redeems me in his far-seeing eyes is what places me beyond redemption in the minds of others. I have spent some sleepless nights in his fine home, kept awake by the seductions of social life tugging at my heart-strings. So one night I stole away from this seduction and slept with some drunken hoboes in the tall soft grass, where I could have no doubt about being welcome. I might as well doubt the grass as those pals, who without question hailed me as an equal. I, having the only swell 'front,' tackled a mansion, and the Irish servant-girl, to whom I told the truth, gave me a whole hand-out in a basket, enough for all of us. My brother hoboes swore I should be the travelling agent of the gang. But a copper gave me the 'hot foot,' while I was 'pounding my ear' in the woods with the other 'boes, so I straightened and hiked to the stock yards, where I feel more at home with the Hibernians.

"Never have I seen Life more triumphant and rampant, more brimming over with hope and defiant of all conditions, hygienic and otherwise. I am rooming with an Irish family whose floor space is limited, so we all have shake-downs, and in the morning can clear the decks for action with no bedsteads in the way. I am very 'crummy,' badly flea-bitten, overrun with bed bugs, somewhat fly-blown, but, redemption of it all, I am free and always drunk. Still, I am really getting tired of playing the knock-about comedian and shall soon 'hit the road.'

"I am willing to do anything for Marie I can, except to love her as I once did, but never shall again. Even spirits die, and the spirit of the salon is so dead that it is beyond resurrection."

Marie, however, would not believe that the spirit of the salon, or at any rate, as much of that spirit as depended on the relation between her and Terry, was dead; she was more conscious than Terry of the ups and downs of the human nerves and heart and the ever-present possibility of change, and she went to work in a wilful attempt to get back her lover. Her next letter was a triumphant one:

"I am a very happy girl to-day, and I must write to tell you so before the mood vanishes, for I have learned that good moods are very fleeting.... The cause of my happiness is, of course, that I have at last met Terry and we have had a long, delightful talk together, and I hope our misunderstanding is all cleared up. Only, now I am afraid I shall begin to pine and fret because we cannot be together always, though reason and philosophy and logic all tell me that the new relation between us two is the very best, noblest, most ideal—or at least they try to tell me so. It very nearly approaches the anarchistic standard, too.

"There is something fascinating in this new state of affairs. It is just like falling in love all over again: the clandestine meetings, with the one little tremulous caress at parting—which is all we are bold enough to exchange—thrill me; it is the mysterious charm of the first love-affair! It makes my blood sing and dance. I lie awake the whole night thinking of our meetings and trying to bring them vividly back to me.

"And, do you know, what makes me supremely glad is the feeling that Terry is going to love me again, that I am going to win him back. He thinks that love is an enslaving thing and harmful to the soul, but my dear lovely idealist and dreamer has loved me once and he must love me again. I am so in love with love and almost as fanatical about it as the ecstatic artist is about art: love for love's sake, art for art's sake. I never did—and hope I never shall—get over that feeling of awe at the mystery and beauty and elusiveness of that great force in life—love. And I have always felt so sorry for people, sincere people, who told me honestly that they have felt that wonder-in-spring sensation only once in all their lives. It made me think that I had at least one thing to be very thankful for, that I was different from them, that I could experience the divine flame, and experience it continually. If you knew how often I have fallen in love with Terry!

"Poor Terry, I feel so sorry for him, too; he has no place to stay, though he could stay indefinitely at three or four houses that I know of, where his friends would feel only too glad to have him. But he says he does not want again to attach himself to any person, place, or cause, because the time would come when he should have to break away, and then he should have to experience death again. So he intends to move about whenever and wherever the whim suits. But I am sure this life will not satisfy Terry for long, for there is really very much of the hermit in him....

"I am going to see him again in a few days, so I have the pleasantest things to dream of. If I am to win Terry back, I must be extremely careful: one false move would be likely to queer the whole thing. Oh, I am tremendously happy, for I am sure I shall win my dear Terry back again!"

The next letter, written about a month later, has a note of discouragement, and also a slight suggestion of an effort to steel herself against possible developments in the future:

"When I go among the comrades and friends, I must keep such careful watch over myself. I don't want to show them how I feel about our separation. The movement had the strongest conviction that I was so wrapped up in Terry—I was always so frantically jealous of him, you know—that I would surely die, or go crazy, if I were ever separated from him. So they are all guessing at present, and don't know just what to think of me. Apparently I am just the same, in fact some better, for I laugh and talk more, much more than I ever did.

"Terry and I have met several times since I wrote you, and I am almost discouraged, and think at times it would be better for me not to see him at all. I have to be so careful, and it is awfully hard to control my impulses to tell him what I feel! But I dare not do that or he would never see me again, and I hardly think I could stand that. He is so very cold and friendly; of course, he does kiss me when we meet and at parting, but in such an indifferent way, and if I allow my lips to linger or cling to his for just the least part of a second, you ought to see how abruptly, almost roughly, he turns away. And I must not even notice it, and it hurts terribly. I don't understand how anyone can be so dreadfully cold. It makes me thrill all over when I see him bend his head toward me for the customary kiss, and I close my eyes so that I may enjoy more intensely that blissful eternity which I expect, and alas! only one short, perfunctory little peck, and it is all over—before my eyes are hardly closed.

"However, hope has not entirely left me. After being so intimate with Terry for seven years I ought surely to know something of his moods and disposition; and I do hope and expect that he will in time grow weary of roaming about and living the way he does now and that he will begin to yearn for feminine influences and caprices and tyrannies, and I hope, for mine in particular!...

"I should be much happier if I did not care for him so much, and I hope that in time I may have only a strong friendly interest in him. At times I envy him: he is so care-free, without the slightest responsibility toward anything or anybody; he can break from old associations and habits so easily and light-heartedly. I never could have done that....

"I am awfully absent-minded these days; you would laugh at some of the funny things I do. I ride on the cars miles past my street, and wander about and forget where I am going. Sometimes I think of things and then forget I was thinking."

In another six weeks' time came still more gloomy news:

"Our meetings are as uncertain, unpremeditated, and unarranged as his wanderings about the city are. It happened that I was all alone for the whole of last week, eight precious days of freedom, especially from Katie and her woes. I love her, as you know, but she does get on my nerves, at times. So I wrote Terry, asking him to come and visit with me for several days. It must have been my Jonah day, for the letter reached him, and he came and stayed here with me for the whole seven days. During this time we talked a great deal of our life together and of our life since we have not been together, and with his most calm and philosophical air he spoke of our circumstances, past and present. It seemed so pleasant and homelike, so much like the old days, to have dear Terry here with me, and I felt such lazy content to see and hear him, that at times I awoke with a start, for I could not keep myself from the idea that our separation was only a horrid dream.

"So, when he said things that ought to have hurt me dreadfully, I positively couldn't feel hurt. Somehow, the sound of his voice was so pleasing that I missed the sting of some of his pessimistic reflections about our love; it seemed to me that he spoke of others, surely not of our two selves! But now, since he has gone, and I have been forced to think of the things he said, many of the easily accepted but only half understood reflections on our love have come back to me with all their sting. And I must now believe that I have passed out from Terry's life utterly, and that there is no return, nor hope of return. The most I could possibly hope for is an indifferent friendship, for so he has willed it, or perhaps fate, rather, has so willed it. 'Dead love can never return,' he said. And I am now only one of the people he knows! It is so terrible that I must avoid the blow, must seek an independence of my own.

"And I had such high hopes, such dreams of pillowing his dear head on my bosom, and, alas! he would consider that intolerable. And, upon reflection, his head would, in fact, rest very uneasily on my scrawny breast!

"So I am trying to resign myself and to readjust what is left of my life. It seems pitiful, though, that my life has been so commonplace all through. Not one single exception, not one thing that ever happened to me, or that I ever did, has been different from the experiences of all the world. My life with Terry, which I surely expected would be different, would be an exception to the commonplace love affairs of all people, has now ended the same way as everyone else's.