You can imagine what a hold that gave her in our family arguments. The heroine of my story was a daughter of the mining camps named Mary Burke. I had failed to describe what she looked like; Craig sought in vain to find out from me, because I didn’t know. Likewise, Craig insisted that Mary Burke was naked, and thereafter for the rest of our lives the revision of my manuscripts was known as “putting the clothes on Mary Burke.”
Anybody who heard us in that little leaky cottage would have been quite sure we were getting ready for a divorce; but we made an agreement about all our quarrels—whenever one of us got too excited, the other would say “Manuscript,” and the excitement would diminish.
When the rains stopped, I would go out and meet the idle rich, playing tennis on the courts of the immense and fashionable Coronado Hotel. Craig would never go; she had met enough rich people to last her the rest of her life. But I had to have characters as well as tennis, and I watched the characters playing at polo and other expensive diversions. I wrote a novel about some of these people that has never yet been published—Craig never got around to putting clothes on the characters.
As far as I can recall we had only one visitor that entire winter. Jane Addams wrote that she wanted to see me, and I was surprised and pleased. I had seen a good deal of her in Chicago because I had had my meals at the University Settlement all the time I was getting material for The Jungle. What she had come for now was to ask me about Emanuel Julius. Her niece, Marcet Haldeman, had become engaged to marry him, and what sort of man was he? He was editor of the Appeal to Reason and had been the means of making The Jungle known to the American masses. I am not sure whether I had met him at that time, but I could say that he had a brilliant mind and was, like myself, an ardent socialist.
I may as well complete the story here by saying that the marriage took place; and that after the tragic death of J. A. Wayland, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius bought the Appeal to Reason with his wife’s money and built up a great publishing business, including many hundreds of titles of the five-cent Little Blue Books that did so much to educate America. But, alas, Julius took up with a secretary, and Marcet divorced him. Julius drowned in his swimming pool, and no one knows whether it was a suicide. The good Jane Addams did not live to see these painful events. A son survives, a good friend.
II
We decided that we wanted to get away from ocean winds; and I had met a tennis professional who lived in Pasadena and who assured me I would find plenty of tennis there. So we made the move and found ourselves a brown-painted, two-story house on Sunset Avenue, a remote part of the town. It was covered with a huge vine of red roses, and roses were as important to Craig as tennis was to me.
The house stood on the edge of a slope, with the valley of the Arroyo Seco to the west. It was unfurnished, so Craig would walk several blocks to the streetcar, ride a couple of miles downtown, and then wander about looking for secondhand furniture shops. That way she got three chairs with ragged upholstery for our living room, two beds for upstairs, and packing boxes for tables and bureaus. We were able to do all those things because Brett had accepted King Coal and paid a five-hundred-dollar advance. After that magical achievement, Craig was boss of the family.
Pasadena in the year 1916 was a small town that called itself “City of Roses” and was called by others “City of Millionaires.” These last occupied the wide, elegant Orange Grove Avenue, with palaces on both sides and two very elegant hotels for the winter visitors. We had no thought of the rich, and never expected them to have any thought of us in our humble brown cottage overlooking the sunset. The beautiful roses and the sunsets were enough for Craig, and as for me, I had started The Coal War, a sequel to King Coal, with more about Mary Burke and her clothes. I had learned now!
But wherever there are millionaires there are also socialists—they are cause and effect. The socialists came to see me and invited me to speak at a meeting in support of a proposed co-operative; of course I went. I had found a woman secretary to type my manuscripts—another necessity of my life—and in the course of the evening this lady came to my wife and whispered a portentous sentence: “Mrs. Gartz wants to meet you.”