Desires, long latent, have been aroused in me and become more aggressive the more obstacles they encounter.... I now have the desire to go about and see and hear everything. I wish to take part in everything—to dance, skate, play the piano, sing, go to the theatre, opera, lectures and generally mingle in society. As you see, I am no idler whose purpose is to chase all sorts of foolish things, as a result of loose ways. This is not the case.
My present unrest is a natural result following a long period of hunger and thirst for non-satisfied desires in every field of human experience. It is the dread of losing that which never can be recovered—youth and time which do not stand still—an impulse to catch up with the things I have missed.... If it were not for my maternal feeling I would go away into the wide world.[[39]]
38. I had been looking for Margaret, for I knew she was a striking instance of the “unadjusted” who had within a year come with a kind of æsthetic logic to Greenwich Village. She needed something very badly. What I heard about her which excited me was that she was twenty years old, unmarried, had never lived with a man or had any of that experience, had worked for a year on a socialist newspaper, and a socialist magazine, was a heavy drinker and a frequenter of Hell Hole, that she came from a middle class family but preferred the society of the outcasts to any other. Greenwich Village is not composed of outcasts, but it does not reject them, and it enables a man or woman who desires to know the outcast to satisfy the desire without feeling cut off from humanity. Hell Hole is a saloon in the back room of which pickpockets, grafters, philosophers, poets, revolutionists, stool-pigeons, and the riff-raff of humanity meet. Margaret loves this place and the people in it—so they told me—and there she did and said extreme things in which there was a bitter fling at decent society.
So that night, when she came with Christine, I invited her to go with me to Hell Hole to have a drink. She drank whiskey after whiskey and showed no effect. As soon as we were seated in the back room alone she started to tell me about herself. I forget what unessential thing I said to get her started. She knew by instinct what I desired and she told me her story with utter frankness, and with a simple, unaggressive self-respect.
“I belong to what is called a respectable, middle-class family. My father is a prominent newspaper man. Whenever I was ill, as a child, he gave me whiskey instead of medicine. This began at the age of four. One of my childish amusements was to mix cordials and water to entertain my little friends with. We lived in the city, and I had from four years of age the run of the streets. At six or eight I knew everything—about sex, about hard street life. I knew it wrong, of course, for I saw it but did not feel it. I felt wrong about it all, and feared it, wasn’t a part of it, except as an observer. I saw no beauty or friendliness in sex feeling. I think it was this that kept me away later from physical intimacy with men; it couldn’t appeal to me after my early life in the street. I know it doesn’t always happen so, but it did with me.
“When I got to be thirteen years old my father reversed his attitude towards me; before then, all freedom; after that, all restraint. I was completely shut in. Soon after that I became religious and joined the church. I had a long pious correspondence with another girl and used to brood all the time about God and about my transcendental duties. This lasted till I was sixteen, and then life, ordinary external life, came back with a rush and I couldn’t stand my exclusive inner world and the outward restraint any longer, and I wanted to go away from home. So I worked hard in the High School and got a $300 scholarship in Latin and Greek. With this I went to a Western College and stayed there two years, working my own way and paying my expenses. I read a lot at this time, and liked revolutionary literature; read socialism, and poetry that was full of revolt. I took to anything which expressed a reaction against the conditions of my life at home.
“I stood well in my studies, and suppose I might have completed the college course, except that I got into trouble with the authorities, for very slight reasons, as it seems to me. I smoked cigarettes, a habit I had formed as a child, and that of course was forbidden. It was also forbidden to enter the neighboring cemetery, I don’t know why. One day I smoked a cigarette in the graveyard—a double offense—and then, in the playfulness of my spirit, I wrote a poem about it and published it in the college paper. In this paper I had already satirized the Y. W. C. A. A few other acts of that nature made me an undesirable member of the college and my connection with it ceased.
“After an unhappy time at home—my father and I could not get on together; ever since my early childhood he had been trying to ‘reform’ me—I got a job on the socialist Call, a New York daily newspaper, at $—— a week. It was hard work all day, but I liked it and I didn’t drink—I didn’t want to—and lived on the money without borrowing. Later I went on the Masses, and there I was well off. [Then I went to Washington to picket for the suffragists and got a jail sentence, and when I returned the Masses had been suspended.] It was at that time that I began to go with the Hudson Dusters “I want to know the down and outs,” said Margaret with quiet, almost fanatical intenseness. “I find kindness in the lowest places, and more than kindness sometimes—something, I don’t know what it is, that I want.”[[40]] 39. There came a day when my wife heard that there was an Atlantic City not far from Philadelphia. So I granted her wish and rented a nice room for her in a hotel there and sent her with the two children to that seashore....