Tramping on Life Part 107

When all were gathered, as still as at the opening of a prayer meeting, Grahame came in, and, with his son and other friends, took seats opposite Jones. Grahame, who had been master of ceremonies and ring master for the afternoon circus, had not changed his dress of knee-britches and ruffed s.h.i.+rt.

The debate was prolonged and fiery....

Jones launched into a gallant attack on Grahame, and was replied to evasively. Don Grahame wanted to punch Jones's head for what he called slurs cast at his father's good name....

Penton made a famous speech reconciling, almost, the irreconcilable parties.

And so we adjourned.

Penton and I accompanied Jones home. All the way the latter was arguing against Baxter's plea, that he be more lenient with Grahame....

"You look out, Penton," Jones warned with genial firmness ... "Grahame has been trying to persuade people in this community not to bring shoes to me to be mended ... a dirty attempt to starve me out ... Oh, no!... I haven't the slightest trace of persecution mania....

"And you'd better look out, Penton, and not play tennis this Sunday, for I'm going to strike back at the tennis-playing sn.o.bs here, of whom you're one."

"Jones, what do you mean by that? Surely not a bomb to smear us all over the courts!" Penton joked.

"A bomb, yes ... it will be a bomb of sorts ... but I warn you you shan't play games on Sunday any more. I'll see to that ... not that I've unexpectedly grown religious, but that I mean to strike back as pettily as the way in which I'm being persecuted."

"I suppose he means the Blue Laws," Penton commented seriously, "but surely he can get no one to enforce them."

But Jones found a facetious officer of the law or so, down in Philadelphia, who were as glad of a chance to molest a radical colony as of an opportunity to put over a good joke....

Baxter, Grahame, Bedell, and others of the prominent members of the community were haled in to court ... and, to the surprise of everyone, sentenced to forty-eight hours hard labour on the rock-pile, in the workhouse....

And Jones sang triumphant s.n.a.t.c.hes of song and hammered away merrily at shoes in his little shack along the road, while unused hands gathered water blisters making big stones into little ones, with other and heavier hammers.

The newspapers made a great to-do about the matter. The affair was just serio-comic enough to attract nation-wide attention. And the story was a good one--the story of the anarchist-shoemaker who invoked the use of archaic, reactionary laws, in his battle against his less radical antagonists, the Single Taxers and Socialists.

Story after story was also written about our curious little colony.

Penton Baxter shared honours with the shoemaker. Reporters swarmed over his front porch and into his house to interview him, on the triumphant return of the party when they had served their forty-eight hours.

Penton gave out interview after interview. And, to his credit let it be said, though he revelled in the notice accorded him, he also effected two serious results from what had begun as almost a practical joke ...

he started a fight on the absurd Blue Laws by focusing publicity on them ... and he exposed the bad prison conditions his unknown fellow prisoners lived under, who had _not_ gone to the workhouse in a jocular mood because of resurrected Blue Laws.

Jones was willing to let the matter rest, as well as were his other opponents ... but Baxter kept the fight going as long as he could. He was accused of loving notoriety. His att.i.tude toward it was mixed. He did love notoriety ... he enjoyed every clipping about himself with infinite gusto. But he also used publicity as a lever to get things done with, that would otherwise never have been noticed. The others were willing to consider what had happened to them, as a private affair.

Penton gracelessly used that, and every private adventure for propaganda--turned it sincerely in the way he thought it might benefit people....

He gave the papers a very bad poem--_The Prison Night_. I remember but one line of it--

"The convict rasped his vermin-haunted hide."

"Come, get into the group; I want the papers to tell the public about you, too," he urged me, prophetically, as I stood on the outskirts, while three camera men were focusing on him, as he stood, expectant, blandly smiling, and vain-glorious.

"Boys, I want my friend, the poet, Mr. John Gregory, in the picture, too."

"Oh, all right!" they a.s.sented indifferently, which injured my egotism.

But I was too adroit to show it. I still demurred with mock modesty.

Penton would have been franker.

Finally, at his urgency, they snapped us, our arms about each other's shoulders.

In the light of subsequent events, they were glad of that picture.

Our tennis-playing, Blue-Law martyrs, as I have said, were held over night in the workhouse ... or maybe two nights, I do not exactly remember which ... and when they came back they were full of the privations of jail-life, and the degradation of the spirit and mind suffered by prisoners there. To me, their att.i.tude seemed rather tender-foot and callow. It was something that would have been accepted off-handedly by me. I had been in jail often, not for a cause, as I punned wretchedly, but _be-cause_. I did not accord hero-wors.h.i.+p to Penton when he returned, as the women of the household did.

For a week it quite reconciled Hildreth with him....

But on the first night of his absence Hildreth and I took a stroll together in the moonlight.

Long the three women and myself had sat in the library, while I read aloud from a MSS. volume of my poetry, which I intended submitting to the Macmillans soon. For Ruth knew Mr. Brett and promised to give me an introduction to him. And I was to make a special trip to the city on the money I had saved from my weekly remittances ... for Penton would not permit me to spend a cent for my keep while I visited him. And I had already been with him three weeks....

I read them many love poems--those I had written for Vanna....

"Why," commented Hildreth, "these verses sound like what a very callow youth would write, who never had experience with women ... I mean by that, intimate knowledge of them."

I flushed and sat silent.

"Some day, when you've lived more," remarked Ruth, "you'll write love-poetry more simple, more direct."

"Though infinite ways He knows To manifest His power, G.o.d, when He made your face, Was thinking of a flower!"

I read.

"There again you have an instance, of what I mean ... you are only rhetoricising about love; not partaking of its feelings."

"But I wrote all these poems about a real girl," and I told them the story of my distant pa.s.sion for Vanna.

"No matter--you're a grown-up man who, as far as knowledge of women is concerned, has the heart of a baby," observed Hildreth.

--"in these days of s.e.x-sophistication a fine thing!" cried Ruth.

"Yes, when out of the mouths of babes and sucklings come quotations from Havelock Ellis and Ellen Key!" cried Darrie.

"Good! Darrie, good!" Hildreth applauded....