Tramping on Life Part 101

houses with different, quaint colours ... the "green" in the centre carefully cropped as if nibbled by sheep ... well-kept paths of parti-coloured stone, as if each pebble had been placed there by hand....

Everything here was born obviously of the Arts and Crafts movement, a movement which seeks to teach that each shall make and build for himself ... if clumsily, yet uniquely ... the product to be something at least individual and warm from the maker's personality.

I thought of Jusserand's _English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages_. If the Canterbury Pilgrims, led by jolly Harry Bailey, their host, had burst out from the woods, on horseback, singing and jesting, I should not have considered their appearance an anachronism....

A tousle-headed girl-child in rompers which she was too big for, pointed me Baxter's house, the largest in the community.

There seemed to be no one home when I dropped my suitcase on the front porch....

I knocked vigorously. No one came. I waited a long while.

"A h.e.l.l of a way to welcome me!" I meditated, my egotism hurt.

Again I knocked.

"Come in! do come in!" a gentle voice bade--it was Mrs. Baxter's.

I pushed the door open and stepped in. I set down my heavy suitcase with a thump, on the bare, hardwood floor of the large room in which I found myself--a room spa.r.s.ely furnished, its walls lined with books. It had one large window, under and along which was built in, a long, wide shelf made into a sort of divan, promiscuous with cushions.

Propped up with a disordered heap of these cushions sat Mrs. Hildreth Baxter, in blouse and bloomers; she was reading.

"Why, Johnnie Gregory!" she cried, swinging her graceful, slim legs down, and rising, coming toward me, extending her hand in greeting....

"Why, Johnnie Gregory--YOU here!"

"Yes, didn't you!--"

"I _knew_ I was right ... Penton maintained it was to-morrow you were due--Darrie sided with him--Darrie is a friend of mine who is visiting us, from Virginia--but Ruth, Mubby's secretary," she finished, relapsing into her intimate petting name for her husband, (Mubby is short for "My hubby")--"Ruth sided with me, though we had quite an argument about it."

"And you and Ruth were right!"

"Yes, I was right," she a.s.sented, leaving "Ruth" out, with nave egoism.

"Sit down in the morris chair ... you look dusty and heated ... I'll entertain you ... I'm all alone ... Penton is dictating an article to Ruth. Darrie's washing her hair. I'm the only member of the Leisure Cla.s.s. I'm lazing here, reading Gorky's latest novel."

What an engaging, pretty, nave, little woman this was! I commented inwardly. A sweet aroma of feminine health breathed from her body, bosom, hair--a tumbly black ma.s.s--as perfume breathes from a wild flower.

Strangely enough, I felt calm and happy in her presence; at home, as I had never been with any woman or girl before.

Up to this moment, when alone with a woman, timidity had touched me to ice, while inwardly I had trembled with suppressed pa.s.sion and fright.

Set in the midst of a group of women, I shone. As at the university, when I used to visit whole sorority chapters at once, and, with from five to ten girls seated about me in the parlour, talk brilliantly and easily and poetically with all of them. Left alone with any _one_, my mouth dried like sand, my tongue clove to my palate, I shook all over as with a palsy.

With Hildreth Baxter I was straightway, marvellously, at my ease. We talked of Keats--she seemed to know all of his verse by heart....

Sh.e.l.ley--she quoted his less-known fragments....

"O WORLD! O LIFE! O TIME!--"

"O world! O life! O time!

On whose last steps I climb, Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime?

No more--Oh, never more!

"Out of the day and night A joy has taken flight; Fresh spring, and summer, and the winter h.o.a.r, Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more--Oh, never more!"

"Surely that does not express your feelings--and you still a young and beautiful woman?"

"No, but I am profoundly moved by the sad beauty of it; and by the fact that perhaps Poe got his refrain of 'nevermore' for his _Raven_ as a reminiscence from it."

She laughed engagingly with feminine inconsequence and stooped down to recover a slight, silver bracelet that had slipped off over one of her small hands. I caught a brief glimpse of the white division of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as she stooped over. The vision stabbed my heart with keen enjoyment that pained....

Already we were caught up in a current of mysterious fellow-feeling that was soon to bear us onward to the full ocean of frank love and pa.s.sion.

Though at this time neither she nor I perceived it.

Penton came in ... the little, handsome, red-faced man, with his Napoleonic head too large for his small, stocky body ... his large, luminous eyes like those of the Italian fisher boy in the painting ...

his mouth a little too large ... his chin a trifle too heavy-jowled. His hands were feminine ... but his feet were encased in heavy shoes that made them seem the feet of a six-foot day labourer....

Ruth, his secretary, coming close behind him,--was tall, not ungraceful in an easy, almost mannish way ... slab-figured ... built more like a boy than a young woman dangerously near the old maid. She too wore bloomers. Her face was tanned. It was too broad and placid for either prettiness or beauty, but a mischievous tilt to the nose and large calm hazel eyes kept her this side of mere plainness....

Penton glanced from me to his wife, from his wife to me, in one look of instinctive inquiry, before he addressed me....

"Well, Johnnie, here you are ... East at last ... and about to become a real literary man."

"He's been here a full hour ... we didn't want to interrupt you--" his wife explained.

"Your work is too important for the world"--I began sincerely and reverently.

Baxter beamed. His being expanded under my worship.

He caught both my hands, friendlily, in his.

"Welcome to Eden," then, introducing, "this is my secretary, Miss Ruth Hazlitt; she's been quite keen to meet you ... we've talked of you a lot ... she knows your poetry and thinks you're a genius, and will some day be recognised as a great poet."

Ruth Hazlitt nodded, shy, took my hand in introduction.

"Darrie, oh, Dar-_rie_!" called Baxter ... "a Southern society girl, but a mighty good radical already," he explained to me, _sotto voce_, as we heard sounds of her approach.

Mary Darfield Malcolm came in, in a flimsy dressing gown of yellow, with blue ribbons in it, her hair wet and still done up in a towel. Superbly she trusted to her big eyes of limpid brown, and to the marble-like pallour of her complexion, the twin laughing dimples in her cheeks ...

she added her welcome to the others ... easily, with a Southern way of speech that caught each recalcitrant word by the tail and caressed its back as it came out....

That afternoon, at Baxter's suggestion, he and I launched forth on a walk together....

"There is some beautiful country for walking about here."