II
Upon my return to New York in the autumn of 1902, after the writing of Arthur Stirling, I met in the office of the Literary Digest a tall, soft-voiced, and gentle-souled youth by the name of Leonard D. Abbott; he was a socialist, so he told me, and he thought I might be interested to know something about that movement. He gave me a couple of pamphlets and a copy of Wilshire’s Magazine.
It was like the falling down of prison walls about my mind; the amazing discovery, after all those years, that I did not have to carry the whole burden of humanity’s future upon my two frail shoulders! There were actually others who understood; who saw what had gradually become dear to me, that the heart and center of the evil lay in leaving the social treasure, which nature had created and which every man has to have in order to live, to become the object of a scramble in the market place, a delirium of speculation. The principal fact the socialists had to teach me was that they themselves existed.
One of the pamphlets I read was by George D. Herron; it moved me to deep admiration, and when I took it to my editor and critic, Paul Elmer More, it moved him to the warmest abhorrence. I wrote to Herron, telling him about myself, and the result was an invitation to dinner and a very curious and amusing experience.
I was in no condition to dine out, for my shoes were down at the heel, and my only pair of detachable cuffs were badly frayed; but I supposed that a socialist dinner would be different, so I went to the address given, a hotel on West Forty-fourth Street. I found myself in an apartment of extreme elegance, with marble statuary and fine paintings; I was received by a black-bearded gentleman in evening dress and Windsor tie—a combination I had never heard of before—and by an elegant lady in a green velvet Empire gown with a train. One other guest appeared, a small man with a black beard and mustache trimmed to sharp points, and twinkling mischievous eyes—for all the world the incarnation of Mephistopheles, but without the tail I had seen him wearing at the Metropolitan Opera House. “Comrade Wilshire,” said my host, and I realized that this was the editor of the magazine I had been reading.
We four went down into the dining room of the hotel, and I noted that everybody in the room turned to stare at us, and did not desist even after we were seated. Dinner was ordered, and presently occurred a little domestic comedy that I, the son of an extremely proper mother, was able to comprehend. The waiter served our meat, set the vegetables on the table, and went away to fetch something else. I saw my host look longingly at a platter of peas that lay before him; I saw his hand start to move, and then he glanced at his wife, and the wife frowned; so the hand drew back, and we waited until the waiter came and served us our peas in proper fashion.
Before long I learned the tragic story of my new friend. A Congregational clergyman of Grinnell, Iowa, he had converted a rich woman to socialism, and she had endowed a chair in Grinnell College for him. Being an unhappily married man, he had fallen in love with the rich woman’s daughter, and had refused to behave as clergymen were supposed to behave in such a crisis. Instead, he had behaved like a resident of Fifth Avenue and Newport; that is to say, he had proposed to his wife that she divorce him and let him marry the woman he loved. There ensued a frightful scandal, fanned red hot by the gutter press, and Herron had to give up his professorship. Here he was in New York, with his new wife and her mother, preaching to the labor movement instead of to the churches and the colleges.
An abnormally sensitive man, he had been all but killed by the fury of the assault upon him, and before long I persuaded him to go abroad and live and do his writing. He went, but not much writing materialized. During World War I he swallowed the British propaganda as I did, and became a confidential agent of Woodrow Wilson in Switzerland, and made promises to the Germans that Wilson did not keep; so poor Herron died another death. His book, The Defeat in the Victory, told the story of his despair for mankind.
He was a strange combination of moral sublimity and human frailty. I won’t stop for details here, but will merely pay the personal tribute that is due. I owe to George D. Herron my survival as a writer. At the moment when I was completely exhausted and blocked in every direction, I appealed to him; I gave him Arthur Stirling and the manuscript of Prince Hagen, and told him about Manassas, which I wanted to write. I had tried the public and got no response; I had tried the leading colleges and universities, to see if they would give a fellowship to a creative writer; I had tried eminent philanthropists—all in vain. Now I tried a socialist, and for the first time found a comrade. Herron promised me money and kept the promise—altogether about eight hundred dollars. How I could have lived and written Manassas without that money I am entirely unable to imagine.