Tramping on Life Part 124

Baxter's lawyer soon put a stop to our public amicability ...

"collusion," he warned Penton; "they'll call it collusion and you won't get your final decree."

Tad drew cartoons of us ... a cl.u.s.ter of them ... "_Silk Hat Harry's Divorce Suit_" ... with dogs' heads on all of us ... Hildreth, with the head of a hound dog, long hound-ears flopping, with black jade ear-rings in them ... Penton, a woe-begone little pug....

A box car loomed in the centre of the main picture, "_The Affinity Nest of the Hobo Poet_," I think it was legended ... then I was drawn standing, one leg crossed over the other, the peak of the toe jauntily resting on the ground, hand-in-breast like an old-fashioned picture.

There was a tin can thrown over the shoulder of the tattered bulldog that represented me ... one of my ears went through my hat ... beneath, a rhyme ran:

"I am the hobo poet, I lead a merry life: One day I woo the Muse, the next, Another fellow's wife!"

I brought this up to the cottage we had now procured, down in West Grove, N.J., where we had gone finally to escape the city, and the swarm of reporters that seemed never to cease pursuing us ... for, when we found out that they did not want propaganda, we sought to hide away from them....

Hildreth had been rather gloomy at breakfast that morning, and I thought she would join in a laugh with me over Tad's horse-play. There is a streak in me that makes me enjoy the grotesque slap-stick of the comic artists.

When Hildreth saw the cartoons, she laughed a little, at first; then she wept violently.

Then she wrote a savage letter to Tad, letting him know what she thought of his vulgarity.

"There is one thing in you which I shall never quite compa.s.s; with my understanding," she almost moaned, "you express the most exquisite thoughts in the loveliest language ... you enter into the very soul of beauty ... and then you come out with some bit of horse-play, some grotesquerie of speech or action that spoils it all."

Nevertheless, it was the humanness in me that brought all the reporters who came to interview us to sympathise with Hildreth and me, instead of with Penton.

Yes, we had found our dream-cottage ... back in the lovely pines, near West Grove. At a nominal sum of fifteen dollars a month; the actress who owned it, sympathising with our fight, had rented it to me for the fall and winter ... if we could stand the bitter cold in a summer cottage....

There Hildreth stayed, seemingly alone, with Darrie, who had come down to chaperon her. To the reporters who sought her out when her place of retreat became known, she averred that she had no idea of my whereabouts. In the meantime, under the name of Mallory, I was living near by, was renting a room in the house of a Mrs. Rond, whose husband was an artist.

I came and went to and from my cottage by a bye-path through the pines that led to the back door.

Darrie, as we called her, performed the most difficult task of all--the task of remaining friends to all parties concerned.

The strain was beginning to tell on Penton. A strange, new, unsuspected thing was welling up in his heart, Darrie averred ... his love for his repudiated wife was reviving so strongly that now he dared not see her, it would hurt him too deeply....

His friends, the Stotesburies, a wealthy radical couple, had let him have a cottage of theirs up in Connecticut, and he was staying in it all by himself, doing his own cooking and hurrying with a new book in order to get enough money to defray the enormous expenses he had incurred by initiating and prosecuting his divorce suit....

And now Daniel joined us. Daniel and I agreed with each other famously.

For he liked me. He took walks with me, and we went bathing together after I had done my morning's writing. We crabbed in the Manasquan River, and fished.

Once, when I was galloping along the road in imitation of a horse, with him perched on my shoulders--

"Say, Johnnie, I like you ... I won't call you buzzer any more!"

"I like you, too, Daniel, but don't squeeze me so hard about the neck ... it's choking my wind off."

That was a happy month ... that month of fine, fairly warm fall weather that Darrie, Hildreth, Daniel and I spent together in the little cottage back in the woods, secluded from the road.

The newspapers had begun to let up on us a little. It had grown a bit galling and monotonous, the continual misrepresentations of ourselves and what Hildreth and I were trying to stand for.

Now that I was playing the conventional game of evasion and hypocritic subterfuge, holding a nominal lodging at Mrs. Rond's as one Mr. Arthur Mallory, and explaining my being seen with Mrs. Baxter by the statement that I was a writer sent down by a publishing house for the purpose of helping her with a book she was engaged in writing--

Though everybody knew well who I was, it a.s.suaged the American pa.s.sion for outward "respectability," and we were left, comparatively speaking, alone to do as we wished....

Hildreth was a spoiled, willful little rogue ... once or twice she tried a "soul-state" on me....

Walking through the pines one day, suddenly she sat down in her tracks, began crying, and affirmed in a tragic voice, that she couldn't stand the strain of what she had been through any longer, that she believed she was going crazy.

I immediately plumped down on all fours and began running up and down through the crashing underbrush, growling and making a great racket.

Startled, intrigued, she watched me.

"Johnnie, don't be such a d.a.m.n fool! What _are_ you doing?"

"I'm going crazy, too, I'm suffering the hallucination that I'm a big brown bear, and you're so sweet that I'm going to eat you all up."

I ran at her. She leaped up, pealing laughter. I began biting at her ankles ... at the calves of her legs ... "oof! oof! I'm going crazy too!" She squealed, delighted, her mind taken off her troubles ... she struck me on the head with her open hands, to keep me off ... I bowled her over with a swift, upward jump ... I picked her up and carried her off, kissing her.

"My darling big rascal ... my own Johnnie Gregory!" She caught me fondly by the hair, "I can't do anything with you at all!"

Once again, waking me up in the middle of the night:

"Johnnie, I--I have a dreadful impulse, an impulse to hit you ... I just can't help it, Johnnie dear! I must do it!" and she fetched me a very neat blow in the face.

"You don't mind, do you ... having your own little girl hit you?"

Now, poor Penton would have spent the remainder of the night taking this "impulse" and the act which followed it as a serious problem in aesthetics, economics, feminism, and what-not ... and the two would have talked and discussed, their voices sounding and sounding in philosophic disquisition ... and, before the end, Hildreth, persuaded to take the situation seriously and enjoying the morbid attention given her, Hildreth would have gone off several times into hysterics....

My procedure was a different one:

"--of course I don't mind you following your impulses ... you should ...

but also I have just as imperative an impulse--now that you suggest it--to hit you."

And I was not chary of the vigorous blows I dealt her, a tattoo of them on her back....

"Why, Johnnie," she gasped, "you--hit--me!" and her big eyes, wide with hurt, filled with tears. And she cried a little....

"There, there, dear!" I soothed. Then, with a solemn look in my face, "I couldn't resist my impulse, either."

"You mustn't do that any more, Johnnie ... but,--you must let _me_ hit _you_ whenever I want to."