Tramping on Life Part 123

"Johnnie, it's the best thing to deliver the legal evidence and have it over with. Let me accompany you to where Hildreth is, and--"

"If she set eyes on you," I replied, "she'd fly at you and scratch your eyes out--in her present mood."

"Only _show_ me where she is, then--point out the place."

"If I find you snooping around, you'll need hospital attention for a long time."

"Then you won't help facilitate the proceedings, secretly?"

"No, since you've begun this game, find out what you can yourself. What do you think I am?"

"A very foolish young man to treat me so when I am still your best friend."

"Here comes the north-bound train. You hop aboard and go on back to New York."

Seething with rage, I caught Penton Baxter by the arm and thrust him up the steps....

Next morning came a letter from Darrie, from the Martha Was.h.i.+ngton. We were the talk of the town, she told us.

She had tried to keep Penton from employing detectives to follow us. She advised us to return to New York--we must be out of money by this time....

Hildreth could stay at her mother's and father's flat till we made further arrangements for going off some place together.

"Darling, if we return from what has proven to be a wild-goose chase, will you promise me not to become disheartened, to lose faith in me?"

"Of course not, Johnnie ... I think Darrie offered very good advice,"

she sighed.

Back we turned, by the next day's train, full of a sense of frustration; what an involved, unromantic, practical world we lived in!

Hildreth heaved a sigh of content as we walked into her mother's flat again. Her mother was still at Eden ... alone ... taking care of Daniel, for whom she had a great love.

We had Darrie over the telephone, and soon she was with us, giving us the latest news of the uproar.

The papers were at us pro and con, mostly con.

Dorothy Dix had written a nasty attack on me, saying that I was climbing to fame over a woman's prostrate body ... that, in my own West, instead of a judge and a divorce court, a shotgun Would have presided in my case....

The _Globe_ was running a forum, suddenly stopped, as to whether people of genius and artistic temperament should be allowed more lat.i.tude than ordinary folk....

As Hildreth and I rode down Broadway together, side by side, unrecognised, on a street car, we saw plastered everywhere, "Stop That Affinity Hunt," a play of that name to be shown at Maxime Elliott's Theatre....

I must admit that I was pleased with the sudden notoriety that had come to me ... years of writing poetry had made my name known but moderately, here and there ... but having run away with a famous man's wife, my name was cabled everywhere ... even appeared in j.a.panese, Russian, and Chinese newspapers....

But this was not what I wanted of the papers ... I must use this s.p.a.ce offered me to propagandise my ideas of free love....

So I arranged to meet Penton privately in the lobby of the Martinique.

Hildreth and I were there, waiting, before Penton came the next day.

Appearing, he wore the old, bland, childlike smile, and he shook hands with us as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.

Someone had tipped off the reporters and they were on time, too, crowding about us eagerly. One young fellow from the _Sun_, looking like a graduate from a school of divinity, asked a special interview of me alone, which I gave ... afterward ... in a corner.

That _Sun_ reporter gave me the fairest deal I ever received. He talked with me over an hour, without ever setting pencil to paper ... the other interviews were long over, Penton had left, Hildreth sat chafing....

"Come over and join us, Hildreth."

She sat listening in silence while I continued rehearsing all my ideas on marriage, love, divorce ... how love should be all ... how there should, ideally, be no marriage ceremony ... but if any at all, only after the first child had been born ... how the state should have nothing to do with the private love-relations of the individual....

The reporter from the _Sun_ shook hands good-bye.

"But you haven't taken a single note!" I protested.

"I have it all here, in my head."

"But how can you report me accurately?"

"See to-morrow's _Sun_."

The interview with me was a marvel in two ways: it represented to a hair's breadth everything I had p.r.o.nounced, trans.m.u.ted into the reporter's own style of writing ... it curtailed my conversation where I had repeated myself or wandered off into trivial detail.

"I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas!" I had exclaimed to Hildreth, in the hearing of the reporters.

"Oh, bother Kansas!" replied Hildreth humorously.

For a month "I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas" was a catch-word for Broadway and the town.

When the _Evening Journal_ put us in their "Dingbat Family" I enjoyed the humour of it. But Hildreth was angry and aggrieved.

"You and Penton," remarked she, "for men of culture and sensibility, have bigger blind spots than ordinary in your make-up. Why, Johnnie, I believe you enjoy the comic pictures about this business!...

"The only way to conduct propaganda for a cause is through the dignified medium of books, I am rapidly becoming convinced--not through newspaper interviews; which, when they are not silly, are insulting."