IV
Springtime in Florence! “Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehn?” Could any man walk under Tuscan skies in March and fail to be happy? George D. Herron had a villa on the slopes towards Fiesole, where he lived in what peace he could find; Thyrsis spent a couple of weeks with him, and talked over old times and the state of the world, with the great cataclysm of World War I only two years and a half in the future. Carrie Rand Herron played Schumann’s Widmung in the twilight—and for her a death by cancer was even nearer than the war.
Was Thyrsis happy? In truth, he hardly knew where he was or what he was doing. Places and events went by as if in a dream, and nothing had meaning unless it spoke of pain and enslavement, in America as in Italy. The grim castle of Strozzi was an incarnation in stone of the Beef Trust or the Steel Trust. Crowds of olive-skinned starving children with sore eyes, peering out of doorways of tenements in the back streets of Florence, were simply Mulberry Row in New York. Galleries full of multiplied madonnas and crucified martyrs spoke of Tammany Hall and its Catholic machine, with Catholic cops twisting the arms of socialist working girls on the picket line; Catholic archbishops striding down the aisle of a hall commanding the police to arrest women lecturers on birth control; Catholic judges sitting on the bench in black silk robes, punishing socialist muckrakers for being too decent to their erring wives.
Milan: a great city, with many sights, but for Thyrsis only one attraction—a socialist paper in an obscure working-class quarter, with an editor who was translating Thyrsis’ books. And then Switzerland, with towering snow-clad mountains and clear blue lakes—and another socialist editor. Then Germany, and one of the Lietz schools, a new experiment in education, where Thyrsis had arranged to leave his son: a lovely spot on the edge of the Harz Mountains, with a troop of merry youngsters living the outdoor life. Nearby were miles of potatoes and sugar beets, with Polish women working in gangs like Negro slaves. There was another school in Schloss Bieberstein, for the older boys, fine strapping fellows, bare-legged and bare-armed, hardened to the cold, and ready for the slaughter pits; in three years most of them would be turned into manure for potatoes and sugar beets.
Then Holland, where Frederik van Eeden had undertaken to help Thyrsis get the freedom that was not to be had in New York. A lawyer was consulted and put the matter up to the startled judges of the Amsterdam courts. Under the Dutch law, the husband was not required to prove that he had beaten or choked or poisoned his wife; he might receive a divorce on the basis of a signed statement by the wife, admitting infidelity. But what about granting this privilege to a wandering author from America? How long would he have to remain a resident of Holland in order to be entitled to the benefit of civilized and enlightened law? The judges finally agreed that they would admit this one American to their clemency—but never again! Amsterdam was not going to be turned into another Reno!
V
A visit to England. Gaylord Wilshire was living in Hampstead, endeavoring to finance his gold mine in London. The great coal strike was on, and Tom Mann, editor of a syndicalist newspaper, was sent to jail for six months. Wilshire, who by now had come to despair of political action for the workers, leaped into the breach, and he and Thyrsis got out several issues of the paper—the contribution of the latter consisting of a debate in which he opposed the leading idea of the editor. Apparently that satisfied the London police, for the eccentric Americans were allowed to argue without molestation. The newspaper reporters came swarming, and it was a novel experience for Thyrsis to give interviews and read next morning what he said, instead of how he looked and what he ate and how his wife had run away with a “box-car poet.”
Some things he liked in England, and some not. A ghastly thing to see the effect upon the human race of slow starvation continued through many centuries! Here were creatures distorted out of human semblance; swarms of them turning out on a bank holiday to play, having forgotten how to run, almost how to walk; shambling like apes, drooping like baboons, guffawing with loud noises, speaking a jabber hardly to be understood. They lay around on Hampstead Heath, men and women in each others’ arms, a sight new to an American. Whether they were drunk or sober was difficult for a stranger to tell.
The miners’ strike committee held its meetings in the Westminster Hotel; and just across the way were the Parliament buildings, and labor members to welcome a socialist author. John Burns took Thyrsis onto the floor of the House to hear the debate on the settlement of the coal strike, a full-dress affair reported all over the world; Asquith versus Balfour, or rather both of them versus the working masses of Britain. This was what capitalism considered statesmanship—this hodgepodge of cant and cruelty, bundled in a gray fog of dullness. Thyrsis sat in a sacred seat, where no visitor was supposed to be, and gazed upon rows of savages in silk hats, roaring for what little blood was left in the veins of half-starved miners’ families. He clenched his hands until his nails made holes in his skin.
When the great lawyer Asquith was in the midst of his sophistries, the young American could stand no more; he half rose from his seat, with his mouth open to say what he thought of these starvers of British labor. Half a dozen times he rose, with words starting from his throat, and half a dozen times he sank back again. They would have arrested him, no doubt, and his protest would have been heard. But it would also have gone to Amsterdam, where the polite judges had still to decide the problem of the custody of Thyrsis’ son!