Tramping on Life Part 128

"d.a.m.n it, Jerome, you don't understand, you don't get what we radicals are driving at...."

"I'll take a chance with my job and quash this interview--that's how much I like you, Johnnie."

"Oh, I know you mean well enough ... most of you boys have treated me rather well, according to your lights ... it's the d.a.m.ned lead-writers and re-writers and editorial writers--they're the ones that do the damage."

"You want me to go ahead then?"

"Yes, that is the only way."

"It is a big story, a real scoop." Miller was again the newspaper man who had scored a beat on rival newspapers....

"Can't you stay over night, Jerome? We can make room."

"I must catch the next train back ... I'm off now ... there's the taxi I arranged to have come and take me ... it's out there now ... good-bye, Johnny, and G.o.d help you and your little girl."

Hildreth came in soon after Miller's departure, looking like a fresh-faced girl of twelve.

"Did--did your friend think I was good-looking?"

"Yes, I am sure he thoroughly approved of you."

"To-morrow another Roman holiday begins."

The result of that interview was worse than I could have surmised. All the batteries opened fire again. The Kansas papers called me "the shameless tramp" ... reporters spilled from autos and rigs all over the front stoop. After giving a few more interviews in the mad hope that this time they would get it straight, I saw that the harvest was even greater abuse and defamation ... and, as Hildreth had predicted, she came in for more than her share of the moral indignation of people who sold that precious ware at so much a line, or were paid salaries for such work....

We practically deserted our house so the reporters could not find us....

Many of the reporters never came near the house. Instead, lurid stories were concocted in the back rooms of nearby roadhouses. And, failing to find us at home, interviews were faked so badly that they verged on the burlesque ... where not vulgar, they were vicious ... words were slipped in that implied things which, expressed clearly, had furnished ample grounds for libel.

Hildreth and I were pictured as living on frost fish almost entirely; the fish that run along the ocean sh.o.r.e, and, growing numb with the cold of autumn, are tossed up on the sand by the waves....

I was depicted as strident-voiced ... belligerent ... waving my arms wildly. It was said that, full of threats, I had taken a shotgun menacingly from a rack ... that a vicious bull dog lay between my feet, growling ... that I went, sockless, in sandals ... had long, flowing, uncombed hair....

Once a party of three reporters, from a big metropolitan paper,--two men and a woman, after stopping at a nearby road house till they were well lit,--drove about in a livery rig till they finally located us at the house of Mrs. Rond....

All the old nonsense was re-written ... things we had never said or even had in our thought ... vulgarities alien to Hildreth's mouth or mine....

The final insinuation--a sly touching on the fact that the Rond family was on intimate terms with me, and that the young daughters were attractive-looking, and seemed to favour the ideals I expressed with murmurs of approval ... thus the story afterward appeared....

Mrs. Rond, after a peculiarly impertinent question of the woman member of the party, realised by this time that the three reporters were more than a little tipsy, and ordered these guardians of the public morality out of the house....

In the first place, they had wormed admittance through a fraud to Hildreth and me ... the woman falsely pretended that she was a friend of Hildreth's mother ... a great stroke of journalistic enterprise.

Mrs. Rond's rebuke was so sharply worded that it got through even their thick skins....

I must say, though, that the behaviour of these three was not characteristic ... generally the newspaper men and women were most considerate and courteous ... even when they afterward wrote unpleasant articles about us. And often I have had them blue-pencil wild statements I had made, which, on second thought, I wished withdrawn ... and during all the uproar I never had a reporter break his word, once given.

"Say, Mr. Gregory, that's great stuff, do let us keep that in the interview."

"Please, boys, draw your pencil through that ... it doesn't sound the way I meant it."

"Oh, all right"--a sigh--"but it's a shame to leave it out."

The last and final outrage--perpetrated by the papers by orders from above, I am sure....

Even the second uproar had died down.

Always the "natives" in West Grove and round about, our neighbours, behaved considerately, let us alone ... we were greeted politely wherever we went....

But now, Mrs. Rond informed me, strange men were appearing on the street corners, conducting a regular soapbox campaign against us....

Some of them were seen to get on and off trains going to and coming from New York....

Goaded and spurred by these mysterious outsiders, the village people began to act aloof, and the more ignorant of them sullen toward us ...

but as yet it was only in the air, nothing concrete to lay hold of.

Mrs. Suydam had run away with her plumber ... the interviews she gave out showed that it was our case mainly that had impelled her to launch forth in imitation ...

Others, in a wave of s.e.x-radicalism, were running off together all about the country ...

But it was Mrs. Suydam's case that interested me and Hildreth most ...

she was a dainty, pretty little slight thing, as Hildreth was--I could judge by her pictures....

"Hildreth," I urged, "let's drop Mrs. Suydam a note encouraging her ...

she's probably without a friend in the world, she and her man ...

they're trying to oust her from her flat ... she's being hounded about."

"My G.o.d, Johnnie dear, let's _don't!_ ... they'll only give our letter to the papers ... let's let well enough alone once more ... the grocer boy pa.s.sed me in the street to-day and didn't tip his hat to me."

I was sitting at Mrs. Rond's tea-table having afternoon tea with her.

She had sent one of her girls over to the cottage to tell me she wished to see me "alone" ... "on a matter of great importance."

The cats, who had trailed her eldest daughter, Editha, across to our place, followed us back again with sailing tails in the air.

Mrs. Rond poured me a cup of strong tea.

"Drink that first, then I'll give you a little information that won't be so very agreeable to you."

The glimmer of satiric yet benevolent humour that was never long absent from her eyes, lightened there again, as she rolled and lit a "Plowboy."

"Have you noticed a change in the weather? A storm is blowing up. I'm speaking figuratively ... I might as well out with it, Johnnie,--there's a report, growing in strength, that a mob of townspeople is scheduled to come your way to-night, some time, and treat you to a serenade of protest and the traditional yokel hospitality of mobs ... a coat of tar and feathers and a ride on a rail beyond the town limits."