Also Thyrsis met Frank Harris, possessor of a golden tongue. Harris would talk about Jesus and Shakespeare in words so beautiful that only those masters could have matched it; but in the midst of his eloquence something would turn his thoughts to a person he disliked, and there would pour from the same throat such a stream of abuse as might have shocked a fallen archangel. Harris invited the young author to lunch at an expensive hotel and spent four or five pounds on the occasion; politeness forbade Thyrsis to hint his feelings of distress at such a demonstration. He would not partake of the costly wines, and could have lived for a couple of weeks on such an expenditure. Not long after this, Harris published in a magazine his solution of all the problems of health—which was to use a stomach pump, get rid of all you had eaten, and start over again.
Then Bernard Shaw. For eight or nine years Thyrsis had followed our modern Voltaire with admiration, but also with some fear of his sharp tongue. When he met him, he discovered the kindest and sweetest-tempered of humans, the cleanest, also; he had bright blue eyes, a red-gold beard turning gray, and the face of a mature angel. The modern Voltaire motored Thyrsis out to his country place and gave him a muttonchop or something for lunch, while he himself ate ascetic beans and salad, and admitted sadly that his periodic headaches might possibly be due to excess of starch, as Thyrsis suggested. To listen to G. B. S. at lunch was exactly like hearing him at Albert Hall or reading one of his prefaces; he would talk an endless stream of wit and laughter, with never a pause or a dull moment.
After lunch they walked to see the old church. Not even a modern Voltaire could imagine a visitor from America failing to be interested in looking at the ruins of an old church! On the way they came to a sign warning motorists that they were passing a school. Thyrsis asked, “Where is the school?” His host laughed and explained, “This is England. The school was moved some years ago, but we haven’t got round to moving the sign yet. The motorists slow up, and then, just after they have got up speed again, they come to the school.”
Years back, Thyrsis had met May Sinclair, then visiting in New York. Those were the days of The Divine Fire—does anyone remember that novel? Thyrsis had sent it to Jack London, who wrote that if he could write one such story, he would be willing to die. Now in London, Thyrsis went to see May Sinclair at her studio, and listened while she received another visitor to tea and asked him questions. It was a shy youth, a shop assistant in London, who had been invited because May Sinclair was writing a book about such a person and wished to know what hours he worked, what his duties were, and so on. One could guess that the poor youth had never been in such company before, and never would be again.
The class lines are tightly drawn in that tight little island. May Sinclair told me a little story about H. G. Wells, who had begun life as a shop assistant; talking to Wells about the novel she was writing, she asked him some question about the dialect of a shop assistant. Wells flushed with annoyance and said: “How should I know?” Thyrsis thought that was a dreadful story, so dreadful that he covered his face with his hands when he heard it. May Sinclair was distressed, because she hadn’t meant to gossip—she hadn’t realized how this anecdote would sound to an American socialist.
VIII
Thyrsis went back to Holland, which was supposed to be his residence. He was not deceiving the honorable judges of the Amsterdam courts—he really did mean to live in Holland, where everybody was so polite and where, alone of all places in Europe, they did not give you short change, or coins made of lead. It was an unusually cold and rainy summer—the peasants of France were reported to be gathering their hay from boats. Thyrsis sat in a little room, doing his writing by a wood stove, and waiting in vain for the sun to appear. His friend Van Eeden took him walking and pointed out the beautiful effects of the tumbled clouds on the horizon. “These are the clouds that our Dutch painters have made so famous!” But Thyrsis did not want to paint clouds, he wanted to get warm.
Craig came to Holland, and Dr. Van Eeden and his wife introduced her to staid burgomasters’ wives, who were as much thrilled to meet the granddaughter of American slave owners as she was to meet Dutch dignitaries. Because Van Eeden had been through a divorce scandal in his own life, he could sympathize with the troubled pair. An odd fact, that all the friends who helped him through these days of trial—the Herrons in Italy, the Wilshires and Russells in England, the Van Eedens in Holland—had been through the divorce mill.
Frederick van Eeden was at this time in his fifties, the best-known novelist and poet of his country. But the country was too small, he said—it was discouraging to write for only seven million people! He had had a varied career—physician, pioneer psychotherapist, then labor leader and founder of a colony like Thyrsis; he lived on the remains of this colony, a small estate called Walden. His beard was turning gray, but his mind was still omnivorous, and he and his young American friend ranged the world in their arguments.
Van Eeden s wife was a quiet woman, young in years but old in fashion, the heroine of Van Eeden’s Bride of Dreams; she sat by and did her sewing and seemed a trifle shocked when the young lady from Mississippi ventured to poke fun at the ideas of her lord and master. Her two little children were lacking altogether in American boisterousness; their utmost limit of self-assertion was to stand by Thyrsis’ chair at suppertime, and watch him with big round eyes while he ate a fig, and whisper “Ik ok!”—that is, “Me, too!” Thyrsis found the Dutch language a source of great amusement, and he evolved a rule for getting along; first say it in German, and if that is not understood, say it in English, and if that is not understood, say it halfway between.