The verses of this to me marvelous drama would come rolling through my mind like breakers on the Carmel strand; but in the interest of health I put off writing them, and soon they were gone forever. I suppose it is natural that I should think of this drama as the greatest thing I ever had hold of—on the principle that the biggest fish is the one that got away. Curiously enough, the main feature of the second act was to be an invention whereby the hero was to be heard by the whole world at once. Such was my concept of utopia; and now, more than half a century later, the people of my home town sit all evening and listen to the wonders of the Hair-Again Hair Restorer, and the bargains in Two-Pants Suits at Toots, the Friendly Tailor; every now and then there is a “hookup” of a hundred or two stations, whereby all America sees and hears the batterings of two bruisers; or maybe the Jazz-Boy Babies, singing; or maybe the “message” of some politician seeking office.
My rest came to an end, because a stock company in San Francisco proposed to put on my dramatization of Prince Hagen, and the newspaper reporters came and wrote up my “squirrel diet” and my views on love and marriage, duly “pepped up”—though I don’t think we had that phrase yet. I thought there ought to be a socialist drama in America, and I sat down and wrote three little one-act plays, which required only three actors and no scenery at all. Feeling so serene in my new-found health, I resolved to organize a company and show how it could be done. I made a deal with the head of a school of acting to train my company, going halves with him on the profits; and for two or three weeks I had all the comrades of the Bay cities distributing handbills, announcing our world-beating dramatic sensation.
One of these plays was The Second-Story Man. It was later published in one of the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books; every now and then some actor would write and tell me it was “a wonder,” and would I let him do it in vaudeville? He would get it ready, and then the masters of the circuit would say nix on that radical stuff. The second play was a conversation between “John D” and “the Author” on a California beach, having to do with socialism and John D’s part in bringing it nearer—by putting all the little fellows out of business. The third play, The Indignant Subscriber, told about a newspaper reader who lures the editor of his morning newspaper out in a boat in the middle of a lake, makes him listen for the first time in his life, and ends by dumping him overboard and swimming away. In production, the “boat” was made by two chairs tied at opposite ends of a board; the editor sat in one chair, and the indignant subscriber in the other, and the oars were two brooms. The comedy of rowing out into the middle of an imaginary lake while admiring the imaginary scenery was enjoyed by the audience, and when the editor was dumped overboard, a thousand social rebels whooped with delight.
The plays were given seven or eight times, and the theaters were packed; the enterprise was, dramatically speaking, a success; but, alas, I had failed to investigate the economics of my problem. The company had engagements for only two or three nights in the week, whereas the actors were getting full salaries. Distances were great, and the railway fares ate up the receipts. If I had started this undertaking in the Middle West where the company could have traveled short distances on trolley cars, and if I had done the booking in advance so as to have a full schedule, there is no doubt that we could have made a success. As it was, the adventure cost me a couple of thousand dollars.
V
Letters from Corydon informed me that our son had celebrated his winter in New York by being laid up with tonsillitis; also, Corydon herself had not found joy in freedom, and was ready to live according to her husband’s ideas for a while. David Belasco was promising to produce The Millennium in the following autumn, so I telegraphed Corydon to join me in Miami, Florida. I took a train to Galveston, Texas, and from there a steamer to Key West.
My squirrel diet was difficult to obtain on trains, and perhaps I had overworked on my dramatic enterprise—anyhow, on the steamer across the Gulf of Mexico I developed a fever. I remember a hot night when it was impossible to sleep in the stateroom. I went out on deck and tossed all night in a steamer chair, having for company a member of the fashionable set of one of our big cities—I forget which, but they are all alike. A man somewhat older than I, he had just broken with his wife and was traveling in order to get away from her; he had a bottle in his pocket, and the contents of others inside him, enough to unlimber his tongue.
He told me about his quarrel with his wife, every word that she had said and every word that he had said; he told me every crime she had ever committed, and some of his own; he poured out the grief of being rich and fashionable in a big American city; he told me about the fornications and adulteries of his friends—in short, I contemplated a social delirium with my own half-delirious mind. The element of phantasmagoria that you find in some of my books may be derived from that night’s experience, in which fragments of fashionable horror wavered and jiggled before my mind, vanished and flashed back again, loomed colossal and exploded in star showers, like human faces, locomotives, airplanes, and skyscrapers in a futurist moving-picture film.
At Key West I was taken off the steamer and deposited in a private hospital, where I stayed for a week; then, somewhat tottery, I met Corydon and our son at Miami, and we found ourselves a little cottage in a remote settlement down the coast, Coconut Grove. It was April, and hot, and I basked in the sunshine; I took long walks over a white shell road that ran straight west into a flaming sunset, with a forest of tall pine trees on each side. Incidentally, I slapped innumerable deer flies on my face and hands and legs. I do not know if they call them that in Florida—maybe they don’t admit their existence; but deer fly was the name in the Adirondacks and Canada for those little flat devils, having half-black and half-white wings, and stinging you like a needle.
We went swimming in a wide, shallow bay, warm as a bathtub; you had to walk half a mile to get to deep water, and on the soft bottom lay great round black creatures that scooted away when you came near. I wondered if it would be possible to catch one, but fortunately I did not try, for they were the disagreeable sting rays or stingarees. (Having become a loyal Californian, it gives me pleasure to tell about the entomological and piscatorial perils of Florida.) The owner of a big beach-front place tried to sell it to us for five or six thousand dollars, and we talked of buying it for quite a while. I suppose that during the postwar boom the owner sold it for a million or two, and it is now the site of a twenty-story office building full of tenants.