IX
Harry Kemp came to see us in Battle Creek; he was on his way back to college after a summer’s work on the oreboats of the Great Lakes. He had a suitcase full of manuscripts, an extra shirt, and a heart bubbling over with literary excitements. He met Corydon for the first time and found her interesting; Corydon, for her part, was maternal to a forlorn poet.
The fates wove their webs, unguessed by any of us. It happened that at the Kellogg Institution, just down the street, there was a young lady from the Delta district of Mississippi—she had accompanied her mother and a cousin who were undergoing treatment. Mary Craig Kimbrough was the name of the young lady, and one day when she was walking with her cousin, the cousin remarked, “Would you like to meet an author? There goes Upton Sinclair with his wife.” Said the haughty young lady, “I don’t think he would interest me.” But the cousin insisted. “Oh, come on, I met him the other day, and he’s not so bad as he looks.”
She called the author from across the street, introductions were exchanged, and we chatted for a few minutes. The propagandist author, being just then excited over fasting, and having no manners or tact or taste or anything of that sort, informed an extremely proud young Southern belle that she was far too thin and needed a fast and a milk diet. It was the first time in her whole life that a man had ever addressed her except in the Southern mode of compliment.
I invited her and her cousin and her mother to come over to Macfadden’s that evening, where I was to give an outdoor talk. They came; and I was in a jovial mood, telling of the many queer ideas I had tried out in my search for health. The audience rocked with laughter when I set forth how, in the course of my first fast, I had walked down a hill from the institution, and then didn’t have the strength to climb back. No one was more amused than the young lady from Mississippi.
I remember that we took a walk up and down the piazza of the sanitarium, while this most sedate and dignified person—then twenty-five years of age—confided to me that she was troubled in her mind and would appreciate my advice. She revealed that she found herself unable to believe what she had been taught about the Bible. This was a source of great distress to her, and she didn’t know quite what to think of herself. Had I ever heard of anyone similarly afflicted?
I assured her with all necessary gravity that I had heard of such cases. This was a relief to her; there were few such persons in the Mississippi Delta, she declared. The development of her faithlessness had become a cause of anguish to her family; her mother would assemble the ladies of all the local churches in her drawing room, and the straying sheep would be called in and compelled to kneel down with them, while one after another they petitioned the Deity for the salvation of her soul. When they had finished, they would look at the fair sheep, and wait to see the effect of their labors; but so far the medicine had failed.
I assured the young lady that I also was a lost soul, and gave her the names of an assortment of books—T. H. Huxley’s essays among them. She duly bought them all, and when she got home, a brother discovered her reading them and took them away to his law office, where only men could be corrupted by them. He himself soon gave up his faith.