Tramping on Life Part 46

For two weeks the flame of the revival burned. Some were of the opinion that from the school this time a fire would go forth and sweep the world....

There were prayer-meetings, prayer-meetings, prayer-meetings ... between cla.s.ses, during study-periods, at every odd minute of time to be s.n.a.t.c.hed.

Though, my preceding summer, my chief pastime had been to argue against the Bible, all this praying and mental pressure was bound to have an influence on my imaginative nature....

Besides, the temptation toward hypocrisy was enormous. The school was honeycombed with holy spies who imputed it merit to report the laxity of others. And, once you professed open belief, everything immediately grew easy and smooth--even to the winning of scholarships there, and, on graduation, in the chief colleges of the land.

So, suddenly, I took to testifying at prayer meetings, half believing I meant it, half because of the advantages being a professed Christian offered. And the leaders sang and rejoiced doubly in the Lord over the signal conversion of so hard and obdurate a sinner as I.

One day, as I was marching in line from the chapel, a queer thing took place....

One of the boys whom I could not identify hissed, "Go on, you hypocrite!" at me.

In a few weeks the pendulum swung as far to the other extreme. My hypocrisy made me sick of living in my own body with myself. I threw off the transient cloak of a.s.sumed belief. Once more I attacked the stupidity of belief in a six-day G.o.d, inventor of an impossible paradise, an equally impossible h.e.l.l.

In the early spring I left school before the term was over, impatient, restless, at odds with the faculty ... Stanton termed it "under a cloud." I had my eyes set on another ideal.

Down in the mosquito-infested pine woods of New Jersey Stephen Barton had located. Barton was possessed with the dream of making the men and women of the world physically perfect--a harking back to the old Greeks with their worship of the perfection of bodily beauty and health. I had long been a reader of his magazines, a follower of his cult, and, now that I heard of his planning to build a city out in the open country, where people could congregate who wished to live according to his teachings, I enrolled myself ardently as one of his first followers and disciples....

Barton had taken over a great barn-like, abandoned factory building that stood on the sh.o.r.e of an artificial lake--which, in his wife's honour, he re-named after her, Lake Emily ... his wife was a fussy Canadian woman who interfered in everyone's affairs beyond endurable measure. I was told she used to steal off the chair the old clothes Barton used to wear by preference--paddling along the winding creek in a canoe to his work each morning, his pants rolled up to the knees--and put in their stead a new, nicely creased suit!

Barton's face was wizened and worried ... but, when we took our morning shower, after exercise, under the lifted gates of the dam, his body showed like a pyramid of perfect muscles ... though his legs--one of the boys who had known him a long time said his chief sorrow was that he could never develop his legs the way he wished them to be.

We began the building of the city. We laid out the streets through the pines ... many of us went clad in trunks ... or in nothing ... as we surveyed, and drove stakes. The play of the sun and the wind on the naked skin--there is nothing pleasanter, what though one has to slap away horseflies and mosquitoes ... the vistas through the pines were glorious. I saw in my mind's eyes a world of the physically perfect!

As the laying out of the sites and the streets progressed, dwellers came to join with us ... fanatics ... "nuts" of every description ... the sick....

A woman, the wife of some bishop or other, came to join us early in the season. She had cancer and came there to be cured of it by the nature treatment. She brought with her an old-fashioned army tent, and rented for its location the most desirable site on the lake sh.o.r.e.

She had a disagreement with Barton--and left to consult regular doctors.

She turned over all rights to her tent and to the site to me.

"And mind you, Mr. Gregory," she admonished, "this tent and the place it stands on is as much yours as if you paid for it ... for it's paid for till Christmas."

So, with my Sh.e.l.ley, my Keats, and my growing pile of ma.n.u.script, I took possession. And with covering from the wet and weather over my head and with plenty of mosquito netting, I felt established for the summer.

Every morning I rose to behold the beauty of the little, mist-wreathed lake. Every morning I plunged, naked, into the water, and swam the quarter of a mile out to the float, and there went through my system of calisthenics.

I lived religiously on one meal a day--a mono-diet (mostly) of whole wheat grains, soaked in water till they burst open to the white of the inside kernel....

Everybody in our rapidly increasing tent-colony enjoyed a fad of his or her own. There was a little brown woman like the shrivelled inside of an old walnut, who believed that you should imbibe no fluid other than that found in the eating of fruits ... when she wanted a drink she never went to the pitcher, bucket, or well ... instead she sucked oranges or ate some watermelon. There was a man from Philadelphia who ate nothing but raw meat. He had eruptions all over his body from the diet, but still persisted in it. There were several young Italian nature-folk who ate nothing but vegetables and fruits, raw. They insisted that all the ills of flesh came to humanity with the cooking of food, that the sun was enough of a chef. If appearances prove anything, theirs was the theory nearest right. They were like two fine, sleek animals. A fire of health shone in their eyes. As they swam off the dam they looked like two strong seals.

Each had his special method of exercising--bending, jumping, flexing the muscles this way or that ... lying, sitting, standing!... those who brought children allowed them to run naked. And we older ones went naked, when we reached secluded places in the woods.

The townspeople from neighbouring small towns and other country folk used to come from miles about, Sundays, to watch us swim and exercise.

The women wore men's bathing suits, the men wore just trunks. I wore only a gee-string, till Barton called me aside and informed me, that, although he didn't mind it, others objected. I donned trunks, then, like the rest of the men....

Behind board lean-tos,--one for the men, the other for the women,--we dressed and undressed....

One Sunday afternoon a Russian Jewess slipped off her clothes, in an innocent and inoffensive manner, just as if it was quite the thing,--standing up in plain view of everybody. There went up a great shout of spontaneous astonishment from both banks of the lake where the on-lookers sat. But the shout did not disturb the rather pretty, dark anarchist. Leisurely she stepped into her onepiece bathing suit.

Barton was a strange, strong-minded, ignorant man. Hardly able to compose a sentence in correct English, he employed educated, but unresourceful a.s.sistants who furnished the good grammar, while he supplied the initiative and original ideas, and increased the influence and circulation of his magazine. Also he lived strenuously up to the doctrines he taught; fasting, for instance.

Soon after I reached "Perfection City" he launched on his two weeks'

annual fast. Up in the big house where he lived, in the next town of Andersonville (he himself would have been gladder of a mere shack or tent like the rest of us--but his wife negated any such idea) Mrs.

Barton used to taunt and insult him by putting out the best food under his nose, during this time.

Mrs. Barton was a terror. She was ever inviting to her house that kind of people who know somebody "worth while" or are related to somebody who, in their turn, are, perhaps, related to--somebody else!...

In their presence she would patronise Barton by calling him "Stevie!" in her drawling, patronising manner....

When the woman came in among the tents and shacks of our "city" she would, in speaking with any of us, imply all sorts of mean, insinuating things about her reformer-husband....

Barton, they said, met her while on one of his lecture tours....

Their baby ... a little, red object like a boiled lobster ... the anonymous, undistinguished creatures all babies are at that time--the mother used to bring it in among us and coo and coo over it so ridiculously that we made her behaviour a joke among us.

Barton's secretary was a beautiful, gentle, large-eyed girl ... wholly feminine ... soft-voiced ... as a reaction from the nagging of his wife, from her blatancy and utter lack of sympathy with any of his projects, he insensibly drifted into a relationship closer and closer, with this girl ... they used to take long walks into the pines together ... and be observed coming back slowly out of the sunset ... hand in hand ... to drop each other's hands, when they considered that the observing line of vision had been reached.

Lying under my huge army tent, by the sh.o.r.e of pretty little Lake Emily, I dreamed long and often, in the hush of starry midnight, of reconstructing the life of the whole world--especially the love-life between men and women.

Sh.e.l.ley was my G.o.d, not Christ. Sh.e.l.ley's notes to _Queen Mab_ were my creed, as his poetry and Whitman's furnished me my Bible. Through them I would reform the world!

I had not realised then (as Sh.e.l.ley did not till his death), the terrific inertia of people, their content, even, with the cramping and conventional ideas and beliefs that hold them in unconscious slavery....

I think that summer I learned Sh.e.l.ley and Whitman by heart.

And Keats was more than my creed. He comprised my life!