Tramping on Life Part 120

"If you go up there to join her, remember that I gave you fair warning."

I could endure it no longer, the torment of not seeing her, of not being with her....

As her favourite sonneteer, Santayana, writes--lines she often quoted--

"Love leads me on, no end of love appears.

Is this the heaven, poets, that ye paint?

Oh then, how like d.a.m.nation to be blessed!"

I informed Ruth, Darrie, Penton that I was going to New York in the morning....

Penton immediately whisked out of my sight, full of uncontrollable emotion....

Darrie and Ruth almost fell upon me, trying to persuade me not to rejoin Hildreth. I evaded by saying that I was now on my way to Europe, that possibly I might see her before I went, but--

I had an hour till train time. My MSS. was packed again, my Josephus, my Homer, my Shakespeare, my Keats, my bath robe.

I thought I would escape without saying good-bye.

But Penton came down the front porch, stood in my path.

"Johnnie, a last warning."

"I want none of your last warnings."

"Are you going to Hildreth?"

"I'm tired of being a liar. I've never lied so much in my life ... yes, I'm going to Hildreth ... and I'm going to persuade her to live with me, and defy the whole d.a.m.ned world--the world of fake radicals that talk about divorces when the shoe pinches them, as well as the world of conservatives," I announced harshly.

"I've done all I could!" he responded wearily, "I see you won't come to your senses--wait a minute!" and he turned on his heel. He had asked me to wait with such solemnity that I stuck still in my tracks, waiting.

He disappeared into the big house, to re-emerge with, of all things, _the coffee percolator_!

"Here!" he exclaimed, holding out the object to me ceremoniously and seriously, "you can take this to your G.o.ddess, this poison-machine, and lay it on her altar. Tell her I offered this to you. Tell her that it is a symbol of her never coming back here again."

Here was where I too lacked a sense of humour. I struck the coffee percolator out of his hands. I stalked off.

On the way to New York I built the full dream of what Hildreth and I were to effect for the world--a practical example, in our life as we lived it together, of the rightness of free love....

We would test it out, would rent a cottage somewhere, preferably on the Jersey coast near the sea sh.o.r.e ... autumn was coming on, and there would be lovely, crystal-clear weather ... and the scent of pines in the good air.

Perhaps Penton, Hildreth and I could all three join in amicable accord, over the solution of our difficulty, along radical and idealistic lines.

I hurried to the address given me by Hildreth. She was not in, but her mother was ... a plump, rather good looking, fas.h.i.+onably dressed woman.

Evidently the mother did not know of the relations.h.i.+p between me and her daughter.

"So you are the poet Hildreth has told me about?" after we had discoursed for upwards of an hour--

"I can easily see how Hildreth has grown so fond of you," and she patted me on the head as if I were a schoolboy, in motherly fas.h.i.+on.

"Mother's rather stupid and old-fas.h.i.+oned ... there'd be no use trying to explain the situation to her. The best thing we can do is to persuade her that Daniel needs her, down in Eden ... that will remove her from the flat, so we can have it all to ourselves for a few days, in order to plan what is to be done next."

Next morning Mrs. Deuell, Hildreth's mother, as innocent as a new-born lamb as to what was up, permitted herself to be s.h.i.+pped off to Eden, to take care of Daniel.

Instead of planning, however, and marshalling our resources, Hildreth and I abandoned ourselves to the mutual happiness and endearments of two love-drunk, emotion-crazed beings on a honeymoon....

The bell rang. In walked Darrie.

"Well, Darrie!" and Hildreth embraced her friend. And I was glad to see her, too. I knew that, in spite of the high pressure we had lived under during the past summer, Darrie was trying hard to be just, to be friend to all of us....

She laughed at the disorder of the place ... dishes unwashed ... food scattered about on the table....

"What a pair of love-birds you two are."

"And has Penton accepted the situation?"

"I came up to tell you that he has ... it has made him quite sick, though!"

"Poor Mubby!" Hildreth e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

"--but he has sent me to tell you that you can go away together wherever you please, that he won't molest you in the least."

"It's too incredible!" cried Hildreth, almost disappointed, "you don't know him ... he's changed his mind, I am sure, since you left."

"He said he would follow me by Sat.u.r.day (it was Wednesday) leaving your mother in care of Daniel."

"Does mother suspect?--"

"No ... not at all."

"If the entire world fell about mother's ears, she wouldn't know."