IX
We were broke as usual, but the John C. Winston Company of Philadelphia fell for my proposition of a book, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of Social Protest; they advanced a thousand dollars to make possible its compilation. A good friend, Frederick C. Howe, then United States Commissioner of Immigration, offered us the use of a cottage in the hills above Croton-on-Hudson; so we moved out of our ten-dollar-a-week apartment into a fifty-dollar-a-month cottage on the edge of woods that sloped down to the Croton River. In summer the woods were green, and in winter the ground was white, and George Sterling came and chopped down dead trees for firewood. Clement Wood came to be my secretary and to quarrel with me over all the poetry I put into The Cry for Justice and all that I left out—including some of his. Vachel Lindsay had come to see us in New York, and his book had set Clement on fire; we would hear him roaring through the forest:
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo ...
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you!
Poor dear Vachel! He had been sending me his stuff for two or three years, and I had been praising it; but when I met him he suddenly burst out, to my consternation, “Oh, you don’t like me!” I had to persuade him that I liked him very much indeed. Clement liked him, and liked Walt Whitman too, but he didn’t like Edward Carpenter for two cents. We had fierce arguments, but in the end we got The Cry for Justice put together, and it was published and widely reviewed.
Edgar Selwyn and his wife, Margaret Mayo, lived within bicycling distance, and so I had tennis. Isadora Duncan’s sister had her dancing school nearby, and we met unusual characters there. Floyd Dell and Robert Minor constituted a little radical colony, and we could go there and solve all the problems of the world, each in his own special way.
As usual, I was on the verge of making a fortune; The Jungle was being made into a movie, and I went to watch the procedure in a big warehouse in Yonkers. An odd confusion there—the show was being directed by A. E. Thomas; I took this to be Augustus Thomas and named him as the director, greatly to his surprise. It was a poor picture; the concern went into bankruptcy, and so ended another dream. All I got was the film, and I loaned it to some organization and never got it back. Whoever has it, please let me know!
One incident I remember on the opening night. In the lobby of the theater I found myself being introduced to Richard Harding Davis. He had come back from some expedition and was still wearing khaki. I had read one or two of his books, and had an impression of him as a prince among snobs; but when he heard my name, he held my hand and said, “Ah, now, you are a real writer. I only write for money.” I never saw him again.
I saw the world war coming. I had a friend, J. G. Phelps Stokes, well known in New York as the “millionaire socialist”—you didn’t have to be more than moderately rich to receive that title. I learned that his butler was in England and about to return, so I made arrangements for the butler to bring back my son, David. I put the boy in the North Carolina school of C. Hanford Henderson, whose wise and gracious book about education I had read. That left Craig and me free, and at last there came the long-awaited letter from the Judge, inviting us “home.”