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THE LIBRARY 
 
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 PRESENTED BY 
 
 PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND 
 
 MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID 
 
Digitized by the Internet Arciiive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/bookofhighromancOOwillrich 
 
THE HIGH ROMANCE 
 
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 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NBW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO - DALLAS 
 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE BOOK OF 
 THE HIGH ROMANCE 
 
 A SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 BY 
 
 MICHAEL WILLIAMS 
 
 Nfttt Qark 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 1918 
 
 AU rights reserved 
 
COfTRIGHT. 1918 
 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published, April, 1918 
 

 TO 
 MARGARET 
 
 There is a story inside the story written in this book, my dear 
 Peggy; a secret story, written within and beneath and through the 
 other one, as in a code understandable only by you and me. It is the 
 story I could not write as it deserves to be written even though my 
 skill were all that as a young man I used to think it was. More- 
 over, it ought not to be written even if I could do it; because books 
 belong to the world but our love does not. Yet the book comes 
 from our love, it is ours, like our children; but if we sent our chil- 
 dren out into the world, to do some piece of work, or to carry a 
 message, still would we know that no matter how well they might 
 acquit themselves, their best and their loveliest belonged to us, be- 
 longed to the fireside — that fine flame of odorous pine and oak and 
 sea-drift which has illuminated so many of the best pages of the 
 inside-story. If, however, I were to have attempted to relate that 
 never-ending romance which is all our own: the story that simply 
 refuses to slacken in interest; you know, I am sure, the paragraph 
 in the written story, the outside-story, where the other, the secret, the 
 inside-story, would begin. Exactly how you would start it, I of 
 course cannot tell; but for me it begins with a lonely, wild-hearted 
 young poet staring in strange astonishment at a gypsy-faced girl — 
 (bom and bred in New England, where did she get that impetuous 
 energy of life?), in a cream coloured waist, and a ra-a-ather short 
 skirt, with the most bewitching little feet, curled up on a couch in 
 a Boston boarding house (imagine it, romance, the high romance, 
 in a Boston boarding house; but so it was). It would continue in 
 a wizardry of moonlight, in a park where tall, dusky trees under a 
 violet-purple sky laughed and whispered together in the warm, 
 perfumed summer breezes, and it would be starred with mystical, 
 musical words — like Norumbega, and Franklin. The first makes 
 me dream of the music of wood-wind and violins — like those in 
 Tristen and Isolde, do you remember? The second is like the chime 
 
 MS18331 
 
of silver bells and cymbals, and suggests players moving in wood- 
 land masques upon a forest bank. Are they names of places, I 
 wonder, or magical words, part of an enchanter's spell? And 
 there would be chapters containing other strange words and names; 
 Nemonie, for example, and why it stands for love-in-friendship; 
 and Mamie, and Tippyann; and why Manchester and Manchester 
 Green bring back the thought of deep things, of things belonging 
 only to the secret book, the inside-story. And, also, it would have 
 to explain why in the very greatest chapters of all the true books 
 of the high romance it is written that the love and the union of 
 husband and wife are types and figures of the love of God for 
 the soul, and their union; but this is like unto the story that Paul 
 brought back from the third heaven: equally as true and equally 
 as untellable. But this I know, and this I may say, namely, that 
 if there has been granted to me so great a thing as even to suggest, 
 even to hint at, the reality and the beauty of the high romance, I 
 owe, next only to God, the thanks to my wife. 
 
PART I 
 THE OUTWARD WAY 
 
THE BOOK OF 
 THE HIGH ROMANCE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE CRYSTAL HOUSE 
 
 1. My Father 
 
 MY father was a sailor who had worked his way 
 from before the mast to the captaincy and own- 
 ership of a brigantine plying in the West Indian trade 
 from Halifax, Nova Scotia. I do not know much 
 about his family origin, or his early life; but it runs 
 in my mind that his father had been a Welshman, an 
 officer in the British Navy, who for some unknown 
 reason retired from the service and settled in Cape 
 Breton, where he married, and died not long after- 
 wards. My father began his sea-faring life when he 
 was a boy of sixteen; at first going out with the fish- 
 ing fleet, and then to deeper waters, and the far places ; 
 acquiring sufficient education, at last, through his own 
 unaided efforts to gain first a mate's, and then his cap- 
 tain's papers. He was a very tall, dark-featured, 
 handsome man; who looked much more like a mili- 
 tary officer than a sailor, so erect did he carry him- 
 self. His fellow sailors called him "The Gentle- 
 
 3 
 
4 The High Romance 
 
 man." He was in the prime of life, and going with 
 the fair tide of his fortunes, when he sailed away 
 upon his last voyage, from which he never returned, 
 and which was the beginning of my own adventures 
 in the high romance of life. 
 
 I was then fourteen years old, and the eldest of six 
 children; five boys and one girl. We lived in a com- 
 fortable wooden house standing in a quiet street that 
 ran from the foot of Citadel Hill — the fortress that 
 dominates the city — southward for a few miles, end- 
 ing not far from die military graveyard. 
 
 Some distance beyond the graveyard began the for- 
 est of spruce, hemlock, and maples which covered 
 Point Pleasant, the extremity of the peninsula on 
 which the city lay, dividing the great harbour into two 
 unequal portions. From the upper windows of the 
 house there was a far glimpse of the harbour mouth 
 and the sea. The sound of the surf could be heard at 
 tidal hours, and the air of the street was surcharged 
 with seasmell. The shutting down of thick fog was 
 frequent; causing a chill and melancholy obscurity, 
 accentuated by the dismal sound of horns and bells. 
 I would feel an instant depression of spirit as the air 
 darkened and dampened and the horn on Devil's Is- 
 land began to groan from its hoarsened throat. I 
 hated foggy weather, not because of darkness, for I 
 loved the night, so long as there were stars, or the 
 moon; but the tenebrous vagueness of the fog — the 
 sense also of its menace to those upon the sea, ob- 
 scurely offended me. 
 
 Hundreds of schooners and brigantines in those 
 days made Halifax their home port, plying to and 
 from the West Indies, exchanging the salt codfish. 
 
The Crystal House 5 
 
 lumber, and ice of that northland country for the rum 
 and molasses, sugar and fruits, of the tropics. The 
 vast harbour, the shores of which up to the very streets 
 of the city were covered with sombre forests of spruce 
 and hemlock, was enlivened by puffing, fussy tug- 
 boats and scores of white sails furling or unfurling, 
 and by the rattling of anchor chains, and the hearty 
 voices of sailors and fishermen tramping round their 
 capstans, or working about the wharves, singing old 
 chanteys or swearing in the strange dialects of Cape 
 Breton and Nova Scotian Scotch, French, or Irish. 
 Water Street and the quarter adjacent were crowded 
 with West Indian warehouses, marine store deal- 
 ers, grog-shops, and the children-stuffed tene- 
 ments of families humbly dependent in one way 
 or another upon the moody and capricious 
 sea. 
 
 Morning, noon and night I heard with constant 
 pleasure the clear, brisk bugle calls ringing out from 
 the barracks near Citadel Hill. Troops frequently 
 marched through the city. The scarlet uniforms of 
 infantrymen dotted the grey of the streets with bright 
 spots. 
 
 Halifax in my time was the headquarters for the 
 British-Atlantic squadron as well as a garrison town. 
 It was made lively with sailors and fishermen seeking 
 compensation for the toil and danger of the sea. 
 There was the fluttering of flags, the throbbing of band 
 music, the blare of bugles and drumming, from the 
 war-ships and from a score of forts and barracks. 
 Strong and contagious currents of vital passions, and 
 the intangible yet potent sorceries wrought by the 
 spirits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, circulated 
 
6 The High Romance 
 
 in its sea-freshened atmosphere. Men there came 
 together who knew all the ends of the earth and the 
 sins and joys and sufferings thereof; men of the world- 
 encircling army of England who had protected or 
 fought for its flag in Burmah, Afghanistan, or the 
 Indies east or west; and sailors who knew the ports 
 and islands of all the seas. 
 
 Twice I went with my father long voyages, when I 
 was very young, visiting Trinidad, Jamaica, and other 
 West Indian islands. But my memories of my father 
 especially concern themselves with his returns from 
 the sea. Then what fun, excitement, wonder, and ro- 
 mance! For when he came home from a voyage, 
 life in our home — as in so many other homes of 
 that city of the sea on such occasions — became ex- 
 alted, vividly coloured, swift of movement. If it was 
 summer, he would drive from the wharf in an open 
 carriage; if it was winter, in a sleigh, with the bells 
 all a-jangling, the carriage or sleigh stuffed full of 
 gifts. There would be fragrant crates or baskets of 
 strange, tropical fruits: pineapples, cocoanuts, alli- 
 gator pears, mangoes, Jamaica oranges, sugar-cane 
 from Trinidad; curious shells, which we children put 
 to our ears in order to hear the sound of far away 
 waters ; branches of coral ; pieces of silk ; and Spanish 
 shawls. 
 
 Fellow captains began the next day to come to this 
 house where during its master's long absences no men 
 save the priest or the doctor would be seen; only 
 women: the wives or the widows of seamen. These 
 big, rough men shook the house with their tread and 
 their voices; they made it suddenly seem very small. 
 They drank French wine from Martinique, or rum 
 
The Crystal House 7 
 
 from Barbadoes, and smoked richly odorous cigars 
 smuggled out of Cuba or Puerto Rico. 
 
 . . . Then my father would go away again, and 
 life slackened, and drooped and paled. 
 
 2. My Father's Last Voyage 
 
 When I was about thirteen years old, my father 
 bought a ship of his own, mortgaging the house in 
 Queen Street to pay for it, and took my mother and 
 the two younger children with him on a long voyage. 
 Two other children were placed with relatives, while 
 Ernest and I, the two eldest, were sent to the boarding 
 school conducted by the Jesuit Fathers in New Bruns- 
 wick. 
 
 One day, some three months after entering the 
 school, while on a high swing in the college recreation 
 grounds, I fell, and broke my leg. I was placed in 
 the infirmary and word of the accident was sent to 
 my father's agents in New York — the port he was 
 expected to call at on his homeward voyage from 
 Jamaica. 
 
 When my mother heard of the accident nothing 
 would satisfy her but to leave the ship at New York, 
 hurry to me by railway and take me home; there to 
 be coddled while my leg mended. My father was 
 opposed to the plan. I was receiving the best of care 
 at the infirmary of the college. I would be all right 
 just where I was. 
 
 He wanted my mother to stay on the brigantine and 
 go back with him to Jamaica. He had been offered 
 a contract to take a cargo to a Central American port. 
 It would be more profitable than the Jamaica voyage, 
 
|B The High Romance 
 
 but yellow fever was then prevalent along the Central 
 American coast. 
 
 So my father said that if my mother remained with 
 him he would take the Kingston offer; if she returned 
 to Halifax, he would take the Central American 
 freight. He had no fear of fever for himself, but, 
 of course, he would not expose his wife and children 
 to Yellow Jack. 
 
 My mother tried to win on both points — ^to return, 
 and at the same time to get my father to consent to go 
 to Kingston and not to Central America. He could 
 not be moved, however, and at last my mother decided 
 that she must go back to me. She really felt little 
 fear for her husband. The wives of sailors are like 
 the wives of city firemen or railway engineers — they 
 get used, after a while, to the dangers their husbands 
 run and take small account of matters that would 
 appal the wives of other men. 
 
 So my mother took the train for New Brunswick, 
 and not many days later my father sailed for Colon. 
 On board, acting as one of the crew in order to learn 
 seamanship, was my half-brother Matthew, my father's 
 son by his first marriage. 
 
 My mother duly reached the college and took me 
 home to Halifax, where I completed my period of 
 convalescence, and then hopped around on crutches, 
 rejoicing over my brothers, who had to go to school, 
 while I did not. 
 
 3. How My Mother Dreamed Strange Dreams 
 
 Dreams had at one time played a large part in my 
 mother's life. She was at this time very young, 
 
The Crystal House 9 
 
 hardly more than a girl, and beautiful; a loving 
 mother. She was a Welshwoman — of the strange, 
 Celtic blood that has produced seers and visionaries 
 since the dawn of history. As a girl, she had been 
 subject to dreams of flying. She would seem to 
 make strange and awful flights through the air, visit- 
 ing countries she had never heard or read of. From 
 these dreams she would wake exhausted, frightened, 
 and trembling. As she grew older, however, the 
 dreams ceased and for many years her sleep had been 
 untroubled; until this night. 
 
 Our house, as I have said, was not far from Citadel 
 Hill, which holds — or did hold, twenty-five years ago 
 — a quite peculiar place in the lives of the wives and 
 children of sailors, because it was the custom to hoist 
 on the flagstaff surmounting the ramparts the signals 
 of arriving ships. They would be sighted from Sam- 
 bro Light, thirty miles beyond the harbour, to the 
 south, and their coming announced by telegraph. 
 
 It was now drawing nigh the time when my father 
 might be expected, and every day we ran into the 
 street a dozen times to see if "his flag" was flying. 
 
 . . . And many were the women in that seaport 
 town who watched day after day, until their hearts 
 sickened, for signals that never were displayed — ^the 
 signals of vessels which had sailed to the Port of 
 Missing Ships. And sometimes it happened that a 
 signal would be shown, and yet the ship would never 
 arrive. 
 
 ... I remember how once we were gladdened by 
 the appearance of a signal which denoted the ap- 
 
10 The High Romance 
 
 proach of a vessel on which the elder of my two half- 
 brothers was second mate. On his next voyage, he 
 was to go with my father as first mate. His ship 
 came so near the harbour as to take a pilot aboard. 
 Yet she never came into port. 
 
 It was near sundown when she had been sighted. 
 That night, there came on a blinding storm of snow 
 and wind. The ship disappeared with more than 
 twenty men. Her wreckage never came ashore. She 
 must have struck a rock and sunk into the depths; or 
 else was run down by one of several large steamers 
 which left or entered port that night. . . . 
 
 But now, to tell the dreams my mother dreamed, 
 dreams which have so deeply puzzled me. . . . 
 
 She dreamed, on the first occasion, that she was 
 awake and sitting in her room at night, where there 
 came a fluttering and tapping of something against 
 the window glass. Inexplicably startled, she hesi- 
 tated for a long time, but at last slowly approached 
 the window. 
 
 There, through the glass, she saw by the dim light 
 of the lamp, a small, black bird with a cross vaguely 
 marked in white on its breast. It was a bird strange 
 to that northern land, but similar ones my mother had 
 seen in sub-tropical countries. 
 
 She felt an anxiety to observe it closer. She tried 
 to open the window to let it into the room. At this 
 moment, however, it turned, and winged its way into 
 the darkness. 
 
 My mother was deeply perturbed. It seemed to 
 her that the appearance of the bird was ominous — but 
 
The Crystal House 11 
 
 ominous of what, she could not tell. And even while 
 she stood there, brooding on its coming and its mean- 
 ing to her — for that it meant something to her she 
 felt sure — the room faded before her eyes, and she 
 was far from it, and far from the city. 
 
 As she looked, she recognized the new scene. She 
 was before the door of my school in New Brunswick. 
 She had come to take me home to recover from the 
 effects of my accident. As she entered the hallway, 
 a group of priests came forward, dressed in their 
 long, black cassocks. They were whispering together, 
 and were seemingly very much disturbed. From 
 the depths of the college there came the sound of 
 low, mournful singing and muttered prayers; all most 
 inexpressibly dreary. 
 
 I was carried out to her in the arms of two of 
 the bigger students, and my mother ran forward to 
 embrace me. Just then a messenger came rushing 
 into the hall, calling loudly on my mother's name. 
 He was shouting: 
 
 "You are to go home at once! The Captain is very 
 ill! He wants you!" 
 
 A priest came to my mother and told her a cab 
 was at the door. Into this my mother and I were 
 hurried. We were driven swiftly to a wharf. 
 
 This was a highly incongruous detail, for the col- 
 lege was situated in an inland town. 
 
 It seemed to my mother that the ship rushed on at 
 a high rate of speed through a stormy sea, under a 
 black, cloud-filled sky. But of time she had no 
 idea. She could not tell whether it took years or 
 seconds to make the voyage. It ended at a wharf in 
 the harbour of Halifax. There was a cab waiting. 
 
12 The High Romance 
 
 and into this she and I were hustled by waiting men, 
 and then the cab was driven in wild haste through a be- 
 wildering maze of streets. 
 
 As we drew near our house, a bell began to toll 
 dismally. The street was filled with a throng of peo- 
 ple. They pressed about the cab, stopping it, and 
 crying out: 
 
 "You are too late! You are too late! The Cap- 
 tain is dead!" 
 
 The shock of the announcement awoke her, with a 
 cry on her lips that rang through the still house, and 
 tears streaming down her face. Even the realization 
 of the fact that it was only a dream did not suffice to 
 shake off her terror and grief. The next day, she 
 told her dream to several of her friends, and said she 
 feared it foreboded trouble. 
 
 Her friends sensibly laughed at such superstitious 
 ideas, and when, a few days later, my mother received 
 a letter written by my father from Colon, saying all 
 was well, she was poignantly relieved. . . . She 
 did not stop to think that this letter had been a long 
 time coming from Colon, and that much might have 
 happened since it was written. 
 
 Some weeks afterward, we children were playing 
 in the street before our house, when one of the priests 
 attached to the cathedral called on our mother. 
 
 A few minutes later a flustered neighbour gathered 
 us together and took us into the kitchen, bidding us 
 to be "very good, and not make a noise," because our 
 mother was not well. The door of the kitchen was 
 locked, and from behind the locked door came the 
 sound of a woman crying. . . . 
 
 I still remember how I huddled, with two of my 
 
The Crystal House 13 
 
 brothers, close against that locked door, little chil- 
 dren all of us, and how we wailed in our uncompre- 
 hending fear, and cried out for our mother, and beat 
 upon the barrier between us. 
 
 . . . The priest had brought the news of my 
 father's death. 
 
 At the first definite words he uttered, my mother 
 arose from her seat with a cry that rang through the 
 house: "I know he is dead — my dream told me that!" 
 
 Yes, he was dead — and, so far as later investiga- 
 tion could show, allowing for the difference in time 
 between Halifax and the point where the vessel was 
 when death came to my father, he had died at the 
 hour when my mother had dreamed her weird dream. 
 
 He had caught yellow fever in Colon, but struggled 
 against the disease, until he was many days out at sea. 
 Bad weather obliged him to expose himself, for it 
 unfortunately chanced that the first mate was an in- 
 competent sailor. The day he died, however, the 
 weather was fine. 
 
 My father was in his berth when, realizing, no 
 doubt, that his hour was at hand, he arose, walked 
 unassisted to the deck, and laid himself down. 
 
 In plain sight of my half-brother Matthew, and of 
 the mates and the sailors, all of whom afterwards told 
 of the occurrence, a small, black bird with a white 
 cross marked on its breast suddenly appeared and 
 perched on my father's bosom, some stray bird blown 
 off from the shore that alighted on the ship. 
 
 The awed sailors watched it. They afterward de- 
 clared that the dying man's lips moved as though he 
 
14 The High Romance 
 
 spoke to the bird. Death came to him soon after- 
 ward, and then the bird, frightened by the approach 
 of the seamen, arose and fluttered away from the 
 ship, and winged its course toward the unseen shore. 
 
 A lock of hair was cut from the dead man's head, 
 for his widow. They put him in the canvas coffin of 
 the sea and launched him into the deep. He first 
 went to sea as a boy; the most of his life was passed 
 on blue water, and I think it well that he should still 
 be rocked by the waves and know the deep peace of 
 the ocean depths. 
 
 Such was my mother's dream. So far, although 
 strange, there is nothing that cannot be explained by 
 telepathy — by saying that perhaps my father's 
 thoughts, reaching out strongly toward my mother as 
 he died, influenced her thoughts, even in her sleep, 
 and caused her dream. 
 
 This may be so — but how shall we explain the fol- 
 lowing? 
 
 Six months later, my mother dreamed another 
 dream. 
 
 It seemed to her that she was sitting in a room in 
 her house, with my brother Ernest in her arms, and 
 that Ernest was a baby — although he was in fact a 
 boy of ten. 
 
 Then it seemed to her that she saw through a 
 nearby window a cloud coming down out of the sky 
 and approaching the house at a speed which terrified 
 her. But she could not cry out or move. The cloud 
 came to the open window; it streamed through like 
 smoke or fog; then approaching her it formed again 
 
The Crystal House 15 
 
 into a denser mass, and then opened, and she saw the 
 figure of her dead husband, dressed as she had often 
 seen him dressed in hot weather on ship-board in the 
 tropics — in trousers, and shirt, in his stockinged feet, 
 collarless and bareheaded. 
 
 He said nothing, but looked at her sorrowfully, and, 
 coming near, reached down to take the boy from her 
 arms. 
 
 She shrank back and attempted to cling to the 
 child — frightened, yet she knew not why, although 
 even in her dream she knew her husband was dead. 
 But he gently, yet irresistibly, loosened her hold on 
 the boy and took him into his own arms. 
 
 Then the cloud closed about him and the child, 
 and moved away, and my mother awoke with a cry. 
 
 This dream came to her on a Thursday. 
 
 The next Sunday was Easter Sunday, and on that 
 day, while playing on the rotten ice covering a dis- 
 used quarry hole in Point Pleasant Park, my brother 
 fell through and was drowned. 
 
 4. Questions Which No Boy Can Answer 
 
 So the presence of death made itself felt very 
 early in my life. 
 
 I remember, with special vividness, a day when I 
 was playing with a group of boys before our house, 
 before my father's death. We were very noisy, for 
 the game was "Devil Steal the Sheep," and every one 
 was engaged in thumping the adversary of mankind 
 — an old and favourite game among the Canadian 
 boys, in my time, but I have never seen it played by 
 American children. We were screaming in laughter. 
 
16 The High Romance 
 
 yelling and running about; but save for our activities 
 the street was still and empty. It was a hot, summer 
 afternoon. The place was one remote from traffic. 
 There was a grocery store on the comer, but no busi- 
 ness was going forward. If we children had been 
 still, there would have been profound silence . . . 
 and then the silence came, we grew still. 
 
 A man appeared, walking briskly round the comer 
 into our street. He suddenly slumped and fell upon 
 the ground. He dropped as an old coat might slip 
 loosely from a peg. He lay upon the ground like 
 a garment sprawled out. 
 
 A man ran out of the grocery, other men hastily 
 following, and we children deserted our game and 
 scurried at their heels. 
 
 "Stand back — give him air — ^loosen his collar — get 
 some water! Who's got a flask? — get away from 
 here, you children! One of you run for the doctor!" 
 
 But one man twisted his head over his shoulder, 
 looked up and said, "Never mind the doctor; send 
 for the priest!" 
 
 What a queer thing! The man was dead! 
 
 And I remember how the children, an eddy of 
 excited life, shrank back in sudden terror of this limp, 
 disheveled heap on the ground. 
 
 The silence, I say, had come. It had come for the 
 man on the ground; and for me. I backed away 
 from the group, still gazing fixedly at the dead man. 
 There was a queer feeling in the flesh of my cheeks, 
 as though the skin had crawled tightly together. 
 
 What did this thing mean? 
 
 The man walked round the comer of the street on 
 a sunny afternoon; a man who was going home to his 
 
The Crystal House 17 
 
 family, or to his work, or perhaps on his way to see 
 the cricket game on the Common. He walked round 
 the comer — round the corner into a sunny street, and 
 . . . there was no sun, no cricket, no street, no 
 family. 
 
 But there was death! 
 
 And what is death? 
 
 "What does it mean when you die?" I asked some- 
 body, our housemaid, I think. 
 
 I had run into the house to tell the news. 
 
 "Oh, if you die and are a good boy, you go to 
 heaven!" 
 
 "Did the poor man go to heaven?" 
 
 "If he was a good man, dear. I hope to gracious 
 he was — poor soul — what a terrible thing! . . . 
 You must not ask any more questions. . . ." 
 
 Was she right?" 
 
 Must we not ask questions about death? 
 
 Is it folly to ask questions? 
 
 But I could not escape such questions. They were 
 constantly suggested by the many soldiers' funerals 
 which passed through our street. 
 
 There would come, all at once, the sound of the 
 music from far away, borne on the wind. There 
 would be the slow, dull boom of a drum. I would 
 hasten into the street. 
 
 The procession passed very slowly, as if reluc- 
 tantly, the men bearing their rifles in unnatural po- 
 sitions behind their backs, with the muzzles pointing 
 to the ground. The dragging shuffle of their heavy 
 boots was even more lugubrious than the rumbling of 
 the muffled drums, and the mournful music that made 
 me feel a sad, feverish excitement. The coffin went 
 
18 The High Romance 
 
 by on a gun carriage, outlined starkly beneath a flag. 
 If the dead man had been an officer his orderly led his 
 horse behind the coffin, saddled and bridled, but cov- 
 ered even to his head with a black cloth which gave 
 the riderless animal an aspect strange and heraldic. 
 So they would pass. Men in the street would stop 
 and lift their hats. Presently, from the distance, 
 would come the sound of three volleys of blank 
 cartridges discharged over the open grave. Some- 
 times I would follow the procession to the grave- 
 yard, and would draw as near to the scene as I dared, 
 my heart throbbing painfully as the volleys shook the 
 air. Then the earth rattled on the coffin. The voice 
 of the clergyman — a strange figure in his black cas- 
 sock and white surplice among the red-coated soldiers 
 — ^would be heard reading the burial service. A sin- 
 gular awe and wonder penetrated me when I heard the 
 words: — 
 
 "When this corruptible shall have put on incorrup- 
 tion, and this mortal shall have put on immortal- 
 ity, . . . Oh, death, where is thy sting? Oh, grave, 
 where is thy victory?" 
 
 But when the soldiers returned, their heads were 
 
 erect and high; their rifles pointed upward; they 
 
 swung along to the liveliest of quickstep marching 
 
 tunes, while the tightened drums, stripped of the black 
 
 crepe, rattled sharply as the sticks snapped down upon 
 
 them. 
 
 • •••••• 
 
 . . . One day I remember running out into the 
 street close to the soldiers. Addressing one of them 
 whose face looked good-natured, although deter- 
 minedly serious, I timidly asked: 
 
The Crystal House 19 
 
 *'Mister Soldier, what made the other soldier die?" 
 
 Looking at me solemnly (and aware that no officer 
 was observing the episode), the man whispered 
 huskily: 
 
 "Because he could not get enough air to breathe, 
 sonny — so mind you don't run short yourself!" 
 
 Then he winked. But I had not yet been initiated 
 into the occult significance of a blinking eyelid, and 
 I retreated to the sidewalk, pondering upon this 
 singular item of new knowledge, namely, that men 
 die because they cannot get enough air to breathe! 
 
 I was profoundly puzzled. This was most strange 
 and mysterious! Gazing upward, where, suspended 
 beneath a blue 'dome, brightened by brilliant clouds 
 a number of gulls were tracing slow, wide curves of 
 gliding flight, it was impossible to imagine, still less 
 to see, an end to the air. The sky, I knew, was not 
 a solid roof enclosing the world ; for this I had learned 
 in school, along with other valuable things intended 
 to help me through life, such as that Washington was 
 the capital of the United States, and that two and two 
 made four. There was air on all sides, up and down 
 and from side to side ; miles and millions of miles of 
 air. Why then could not men get all the air they 
 needed? Why should they die? What was it, really 
 and truly, to die? What did the clergyman mean 
 when he said that "This corruptible shall put on incor- 
 ruptibility? ..." 
 
 . . . Fascinating and impenetrable mysteries! 
 For years they brooded over my mind. But I at last 
 gave up my attempts to ask questions concerning them. 
 
20 The High Romance 
 
 For I learned that either grown-up people were as 
 ignorant as myself or else it was wrong to seek such 
 knowledge. 
 
 "You're too young to ask silly questions." 
 
 "Little boys should be seen and not heard." 
 
 "Run away and don't bother me!" 
 
 "What a queer child you are, to be sure! Leave 
 those matters alone and you'll be better off." 
 
 So I was told, and, by and by, my curiosity, retreat- 
 ing abashed from futile efforts to appease its hunger, 
 remained voiceless, awaiting a more favourable time. 
 I read more and more. I spoke less and less of the 
 things which went on within my heart and mind and 
 soul. 
 
 5. I Begin to Face the World 
 
 The death of my father left us in absolute poverty; 
 and my mother opened her home (it was heavily mort- 
 gaged) to lodgers and boarders, beginning her long 
 fight to rear her children. Not long afterwards, I was 
 taken from the public school and put to work in a 
 wholesale dry goods warehouse, and began my long 
 fight to rear my children, — my brood of dreams; 
 dreams that unrestingly struggled for birth as shapes 
 of art. 
 
 My first memory is of a dream, of a dream-idea for 
 a story concerning a crystal house in which music 
 played and beautiful people walked amid crepuscular 
 corridors and gardens. There was a sound of water; 
 there was the stir of wind in the bushes. I did not 
 talk of it as other children talk of their fancies — I 
 brooded; and as soon as I could hold a pen, I built 
 the first wavering sketch of my house, on paper, with 
 
The Crystal House 21 
 
 ink, in words. I learned to read and write at an 
 early age, and my conscious memories begin with this 
 act of literary creation. 
 
 . • • One day in school my teacher asked the boys 
 to repeat any verse they knew in which the word 
 cherubim was used. Several of them repeated lines 
 from hymns. I remember stumbling through a quo- 
 tation from Paradise Lost. The teacher stared, and 
 bade me remain after school was dismissed. I won- 
 dered what mischief, unknown or unremembered, I 
 was to be punished for. But the teacher wished to 
 talk with, not at me. The raw-boned, Scotch-Irish 
 enthusiast walked up and down the deserted school- 
 room reciting his own rhymed version of Pyramus 
 and Thisbe. He discussed literature with me, the 
 hobbledehoy. He lent me a copy of Spenser's Faerie 
 Queen. He wished to see my writings. I walked 
 home slowly, luxuriously; and was too excited with 
 my silent happiness to eat my supper. 
 
 The teacher raged heatedly against the decision 
 when he learned, a few weeks later, at a time when 
 his pupil was being specially prepared by him for the 
 High School, that I was leaving him — a kind friend 
 of my widowed mother had obtained work for the 
 orphan in a wholesale dry-goods warehouse. 
 
 I made no outcry. I did not rebel. I did not 
 understand. I would earn enough to clothe and help 
 to feed me; the "opening was a splendid one"; I 
 would become "a drummer," a travelling salesman no 
 less, by and by, if I proved a good boy, faithful and 
 industrious; some time (who should say nay?), I 
 might be a member of the firm. The kind friend 
 of the family, reassuring my doubting and sorrowing 
 
22 The High Romance 
 
 mother, hastened to qualify this optimistic view by 
 pointing out the exalted splendour of such a destiny. 
 
 6. The Shadow 
 
 So I left school and went to work in the warehouse. 
 On the day I started my new life, while walking 
 through a small, public park that had once been a 
 burial ground, I was brooding over a poem. It was 
 to be about a captain, who, trying to steer his ship 
 through a storm, amid dangerous reefs, is thrust from 
 the helm by a stranger who appears on the deck. My 
 idea was that the stranger was a stowaway, hiding in 
 the hold ; a man who knew the perilous waters through 
 which the craft went staggering, and who came to 
 the aid of the captain. But suddenly my idea 
 changed. I seemed to see the figure on the tilted 
 deck, pushing the captain aside. How I thrilled when 
 I observed that beneath the sou'wester worn by the 
 stranger there was visible no face. The apparition 
 was no man! Who then, could he be? Who but 
 death? 
 
 It was as though from the earth of the little park, 
 under the shade of the tall trees nourished by the 
 bones of the dead, there emanated a subtle and com- 
 pelling suggestion of mortality that insensibly entered 
 my mind as the morning air entered my lungs. In 
 the grove of cool, murmuring elms — their heads 
 warmed by the sun — beneath the brooding earth, the 
 dead lay thick; and in the whispering leaves, in the 
 blades of green, sweet grass, moving to the wind, the 
 dead re-entered life, were again made part of it — life 
 that is not complete without death. And if dead 
 
The Crystal House 23 
 
 flesh may suspire into new life through the mysterious 
 veins of the soil, of the trees, the grass, the atmos- 
 phere, a volatile yet essential element of the eternal 
 chemistry of creation, may not perished hopes and 
 dreams, forgotten in the depths of the soul, mystically 
 influence the birth of new aspirations and quicken the 
 womb of the spirit? I had dreamed, almost uncon- 
 sciously, of what the life of the schools, of culture, 
 might mean to me; and my hopes had died; and per- 
 haps their phantoms mingled with the aura of mor- 
 tality that on this morning of spring sunshine so 
 strangely aff'ected me in the transformed graveyard; 
 bringing to me for the first time what I was never to 
 forget: the feeling of the part played by death in the 
 aff'airs of life. 
 
 There was no sadness, far less fear, in the new 
 idea. No thoughts are sad to an artist in the act 
 of creating; only joy accompanies that function of 
 quint-essential life. Joy is the will to live. And my 
 boy's heart thrilled with the delight of the fresh 
 incentive, of the new thought, the powerful idea, the 
 element that gave my work (my work-to-be!) strength 
 and dignity; a necessary shadow, an essential colour 
 — a something that I had hitherto lacked. There 
 must be rain in the air for the glorious bow to shine 
 forth its splendour. Against the shadow of death, 
 the colours of life would more vividly glow. . . . 
 
 Slowly I passed on through the grove — ever after- 
 ward to be remembered with the tenacious faculty that 
 records the images of those places where our deepest 
 thoughts and most enduring impressions come to us 
 — on to the warehouse. To start me aright in the 
 career th^t should lead me to a drummer's sample 
 
24 The High Romance 
 
 case, they gave me a broom and a watering pot and 
 bade me sweep the floor of the second-story stock 
 room — a huge place, seventy yards long by forty 
 wide. 
 
 That night my pen chafed the broken blisters on my 
 fingers. 
 
 7. Years Of Bondage 
 
 In this warehouse, I worked for five years, from my 
 thirteenth to my eighteenth year. It was, however, 
 captivity with compensations. In that sleepy sea-port 
 town — not even characteristic of Canadian commer- 
 cial activities, but, as a military and naval station, 
 dominated by British traditions and customs — com- 
 mercial life was not the maelstrom in which lives 
 swirl jostling, sinking, and rising, yet all imprisoned, 
 as in the cities of the States. The head of the firm 
 was a kindly Irish-Canadian member of Parliament 
 whose father, the founder of the house, was a baronet; 
 his eldest son was a partner; he supported pensioners; 
 he trained what were virtually apprentices; he was 
 very good to his employes and his example was fol- 
 lowed by his chiefs of departments. There was one 
 — Eduard Ryan was his name — whom I wondered at 
 because always he was singing as he went about his 
 work: the work which to me was so distasteful. He 
 was very kind, and to kindness I was sensitive as a 
 plant is to sunshine; but I avoided him, because he 
 was an ardent Catholic, and he kept urging me toward 
 religious duties and practices for which I had no 
 slightest inclination. 
 
 I was stock-clerk of one entire floor of the vast 
 four-storied building. I had to sweep the depart- 
 
The Crystal House 25 
 
 ment once a week; dust the goods daily; open and 
 empty the cases and bales; maintain my counters in 
 neat array; and from the stock pick out the goods 
 ordered by the drummers on the road. A great deal 
 of my time I was alone; and I lived a singular life 
 among the thousands of boxed neck-ties, the corsets, 
 collars, soaps, — the "dress-goods," the "linings," the 
 "embroideries," and the rest. Hardly a day passed 
 that I did not bring into my place of work books 
 borrowed from the Public Library, concealed under 
 my coat. I secreted them in various places. I also 
 kept manuscript volumes hidden away — made from 
 old sample books discarded by the drummers; and on 
 the leaves blotched with dried mucilage and patches 
 of fabrics torn out to make room for words, I pen- 
 cilled my naive little tales and poems. . . . The 
 artist will make use of anything. 
 
 My favourite reading, writing, and dreaming place 
 was by a window at the rear of the building. The 
 window opened on a court at the bottom of which 
 I could watch craftsmen bent over their benches and 
 tables. One was a jeweller; and sometimes there 
 would flash in that dingy well amid the brick stores 
 the scintillant fires of gems, or the gleam of gold. 
 There was also a metal worker, whose hammer 
 chinked musically; and in the autumn and winter 
 evenings the glare of the fire from his little forge 
 would flicker luridly upward, reddening the walls, 
 and swaying on the ceilings of the room, causing 
 me to thrill strangely, and vaguely to dream of stories 
 of mystery and adventurous romance. 
 
 I made no friends. I was as solitary as a pigeon 
 in a flight of crows. None knew of my secret dreams 
 
26 The High Romance 
 
 — until a fat-headed drummer came across my book 
 of poems, told the others, and made a joke of the 
 matter, a joke that affected me like some shameful 
 indignity — my soul was bared before grossly laugh- 
 ing men; and I felt as a young girl might when 
 affronted by some immodest act; 
 
 The bell in my department rang my signal; I went 
 to the manager's desk and was solemnly rebuked for 
 wasting my time. Nevertheless, small fault was 
 found with my work. I earned my wage — ^five 
 dollars a month. Each year my salary increased 
 until I was finally receiving five dollars a week! and 
 I came one degree nearer the end of my career — 
 the drummer's room upstairs where sample trunks 
 are packed, and the brisk commercial travellers fore- 
 gathered, gossipping and exchanging pornographic 
 stories. 
 
 But I never reached that end. Perhaps it was 
 mere chance that intervened. Or could it have been 
 that the architect of the house of crystal — ^that force 
 beyond the child that had breathed into the forming 
 brain its mystic plans — reaching out for a new 
 builder, another maker of things, felt that its appren- 
 tice had served years enough of bondage in this 
 place? . . . 
 
 8. Adolescence 
 
 For a period of more than a year, I ceased to write, 
 and read little. Life was subtly, powerfully asserting 
 its claim upon my body, as well as upon that peculiar 
 use it demanded of my spirit. There were times 
 when I felt choked to the point of suffocation within 
 the four granite walls of the warehouse, into which 
 
The Crystal House 27 
 
 the sunshine and air came only through the few opened 
 windows. 
 
 Every day at noon a cannon was fired from the 
 ramparts of Fort St. George, on Citadel Hill. While 
 its explosion was shaking the air, hundreds upon hun- 
 dreds of pigeons would mount from the streets in 
 swirling, interweaving, rising and falling intricacies 
 of flight, the sunshine gleaming on their feathers of 
 white, of pale purple, of softly iridescent blues and 
 greys and mauves. Then they would mass, and sweep 
 in long, looping curves to and fro — an arabesque of 
 life traced upon the sky, a thrilling rhythm made 
 visible. At last, reaching the roof of the Post Office in 
 the market square, they would separate, and settle with 
 fluttering wings and pink, reaching claws, while their 
 soft, liquid cooings came distinctly to my ears as I 
 stood, fascinated, at a window. At these moments, 
 the sense of my captivity would well up behind the 
 starting tears, like a wave that carries spray on its 
 crest. 
 
 Or from this upper window I would watch the sail- 
 ing ships and steamers going to and fro in the har- 
 bour; schooners from the fog-held banks of New- 
 foundland, laden with fish; vessels from Europe and 
 the United States; brigantines from the warm islands 
 of the Caribbean Sea; craft from all the ends of the 
 earth. I felt beneath my feet the heave of the sea, as 
 I had known it in my childhood voyages with my 
 father; I remembered the wondrous islands, where 
 palm trees waved and I plucked tropical fruit; the 
 coolies of Trinidad; the negroes of Barbadoes; the 
 leap and flash of flying fish; the spouting of a whale; 
 the hurricane off Cape Hatteras; the rum my father 
 
28 The High Romance 
 
 smuggled from Jamaica which the sailors stole and, 
 drinking, fought through a sudden storm blasphem- 
 ing, each man-Jack of them drunk most gloriously, 
 — all this I recalled in vivid recurrence of the original 
 sensations, picture after picture flitting before my 
 eyes. 
 
 Most clearly of all would I remember a naked 
 youth in Jamaica who came riding at dawn to the 
 beach with six spirited horses that went rearing and 
 plunging into the water of the bay, their manes blow- 
 ing out above them, their hoofs threshing, while the 
 youth, his bronze body gleaming, strong and lithe and 
 swift, dived from their backs, swam beneath the 
 bellies of the horses, climbed upon their necks; sure, 
 confident, masterful. That boy did not work amid 
 corsets and soaps and dress-goods, cooped up in a 
 warehouse — not he! 
 
 A drummer appeared; or a customer; or the ele- 
 vator rumbled upwards with goods; and from my 
 brooding reveries I would be called to work — 
 
 But no! I was called from work! 
 
 — In the summer mornings I often rose at day- 
 break, and went to a wharf in the harbour to plunge 
 into the water, into the cool, fresh morning flood. 
 This wharf was near the spruce forest beyond the 
 city. The air was surcharged with sea-salt and fir- 
 balsam. The vast mouth of the harbour yawned 
 sleepily, still veiled in morning mist, upon the At- 
 lantic; — the Atlantic; that great sea whose name al- 
 ways stirred me like the master-word of a necro- 
 mancer's spell. The water lipped and lapped on 
 the beach, murmuring and whispering — Oh, of 
 what? There were forts and batteries in the forest; 
 
The Crystal House 29 
 
 red-coated soldiers appeared, to fish from the rocks 
 for flounders, smoking their clay pipes and laughing. 
 I was sure that if I could only stay and talk with them 
 I should hear rare stories of warfare and wanderings 
 in far lands. 
 
 Or vagabonds from the town walked slouchingly 
 along the roads; they lit fires on the sand and dug 
 clams; gathered periwinkles and mussels, and dulse, 
 that edible sea-weed, and concocted for themselves 
 wonderful breakfasts. There was one lame drunk- 
 ard who would steal a bottle of milk on his way to 
 the shore for the day, and his fish or clam-chowder 
 was famous. 
 
 Curlews and kingfishers skimmed the level reaches 
 by the brackish pond; the gulls began their foraging; 
 the fishermen from Herring Cove were putting out 
 to the banks; anchored ships got under way; brassy 
 bugles blared drill calls from the forts; a detachment 
 of Royal Engineers marched at ease along the road, 
 the young officer in command, smiling to himself and 
 thinking of the dance at Government House the night 
 before. . . . 
 
 But time will not linger for dreamers; I had to go 
 home, eat breakfast, get to the warehouse at eight 
 o'clock, and sweep my department, amid the muddy 
 smell made by the water sprinkled on a dusty floor. 
 
 9. The Words That Would Not Come 
 
 . . . Saturday afternoons and Sundays were my 
 own, all my own; and they were devoted to rambles 
 in the woods, and along the shore. I carried a book 
 but read little. Sometimes, in the midst of a fit of 
 
30 The High Romance 
 
 brooding, I would start into intense physical activity 
 and race at top speed, leaping from rock to rock; or 
 climb a tree and swing to the ground again from a 
 bending bough. Or in a secluded place I engaged 
 in some mysterious play of make-believe such as 
 might have pleased a boy of ten — my lost childhood 
 living on in my elder blood, struggling to attain the 
 joys of which it had been deprived. Or, my mood 
 modulating to the key of mystic dreams, suddenly 
 as I was walking, or stretched on the grass, in the 
 sun, my open book neglected, in the summer air there 
 would come the wavering semblance of the house of 
 crystal, and through its shadowy though not gloomy 
 corridors, through the gardens of dim colours, the 
 sounds of music, and the influences of perfumes, there 
 would pass vague and mysterious figures. Some 
 were Queens or pale Princesses of romance, followed 
 by their maidens. How unlike was their walk, undu- 
 lant, soft and light, to the tramplings of the Royal 
 Engineers, the slouching step of the envied vagabonds, 
 the rolling gait of sailors! What was in their eyes 
 that troubled me, that hinted at stories such as sailors 
 and tramps and soldiers did not know? Why did my 
 heart beat hurriedly, why did my breath come faster, 
 why did my blood become warmer, so that I felt it 
 running through my veins? 
 
 And often the day passed, and the stars appeared, 
 and night was upon me before I turned homeward. 
 Stars, or the moon, shedding pale light on the wide 
 harbour; a white thread of tinkling foam on the black 
 sand; the trees sighing strangely; the water soughing 
 amid the shoal-rocks off shore — and I would fuse into 
 one vast flood of feeling all things that aff'ected me. 
 
The Crystal House 31 
 
 The house of crystal would waveringly change to 
 new shapes and receive new guests. The sailors, 
 fishers, vagabonds and business men would mingle 
 with the fair women, amid the music; and invariably 
 while some revel was going on, and the windows shone 
 with lights, while vague love-scenes were enacted in 
 the misty gardens, and wine flowed at the board 
 within — invariably the shadow would appear, he 
 whose face could not be seen, he who on the tilted 
 deck of the dream ship had thrust the Captain from 
 the tiller. ... 
 
 One night just as I thus thought of death inter- 
 rupting the revels in the house of crystal, I emerged 
 from a clump of trees, and my shadow appeared, 
 bobbed for a breath on the glimmering dust of the 
 roadway, and then suddenly was absorbed in the 
 darkness by the hedge. I stood still, stricken by a 
 thought. Even as all men had shadows of their 
 bodies, so also had they shadows of their souls, of 
 their essence, projected from their bodily forms into 
 space; and these shadows were their deaths! . . . 
 
 But upon the writing paper I could not ensnare my 
 thought; I could not build, only dream. The magic 
 words would not come. In despair, I threw aside the 
 pen and crept into bed, crying like a girl-child, con- 
 vinced that something had happened to me, and that 
 never again would I write. 
 
 10. Music Consoled Me 
 
 And more and more I plunged myself into all life 
 that I could enter. 
 
 One real, potent pleasure I received through mem- 
 
32 The High Romance 
 
 bership in the band of one of the local regiments of 
 volunteers. The acme of my pleasure came when the 
 regiment went route marching. 
 
 In the big parade ground the long line would break 
 into company formation, then into fours, marking 
 time; the proud colonel would nod, and an important 
 major shout: " Quick march!" 
 
 "Rub-adub-adub-adub-adub ! Rub-adub-adub-adub- 
 adub!" 
 
 Twice the drums roll loudly, inspiringly; the big 
 drum booming, the kettle drums snarling, followed 
 by the full-voiced crash of brass and wood-wind as 
 the band, fifty strong, step forth, leading the line. 
 The gates of the parade ground open; the expectant 
 crowd in the street is parted; the volunteers dimly 
 see the faces of their admiring or envying friends, 
 sisters, sweethearts. . . . The moment is tense; I 
 thrill, as, with small boys holding oil-torches that 
 smoke and flare ruddily to light the music cards of 
 the bandsmen, the regiment pours out from the 
 armoury, the trampling of their steady feet sounding 
 like unto huger and hollower drums than those that 
 pound before them. Above, there is the high, purple, 
 starry vault of the summer sky. The sea-wind is 
 blowing, full of smells of the sea; it bends the flame 
 and smoke of the torches backward. I march in one 
 of the ranks of the clarinets; but I rarely play the 
 instrument, although I hold it to my mouth. I am 
 listening to the others, entranced by the sound; fas- 
 cinated and stirred to my heart by the romance of 
 this nocturnal expedition; and although I keep step 
 sturdily, I walk as one in a dream. The tossing 
 crimson of the torch-light; the gleams of brass and 
 
The Crystal House 33 
 
 German silver, of pipe-clayed helmets and scarlet 
 tmiics; the rhythmic thud of the feet behind me, the 
 sense of the irresistible onwardness of the regiment 
 holding me and compelling me forward; the dim 
 thoughts of war; thoughts that this battalion had 
 marched into battle, and that again it might do so, 
 I with it — all this got into my blood like fever. 
 
 Twice a week I went to the bandroom for practice. 
 I was a music- lover, but not a musician; for a long 
 time I did not advance beyond the stand of the third 
 clarinets ; but I was quite content to be there blowing 
 monotonous notes of accompaniments! "tul-lul-lul-lul- 
 la! Tul-lul-lul-lul-la!" over and over again, among 
 the fifty players, mostly young men of the city, clerks, 
 mechanics, small business men, but all musicians on 
 these nights, and smokers and beer drinkers to a man. 
 And with real love, deep earnestness, they would blow 
 into the rumbling or cracking brass, the sweet or shrill 
 sounding wood or reed, tunking the stretched sheep- 
 skin, clashing upon the cymbals, standing in a circle 
 at their wooden music stands beneath the malodorous 
 oil-lamps around which clung and eddied blue-grey 
 wisps of tobacco-smoke, producing a semblance at 
 least of the magical sounds of music; and at times 
 as I stood there with the clarinet held silently at 
 my mouth, my senses would seem to swim, to bathe, 
 to dive, to immerse themselves in the torrent of tone 
 that issued from this assemblage of puffed-cheeked, 
 sweating men. 
 
 11. The Stock Boy Turns Editor 
 
 So this year, my nineteenth, passed, and still I 
 was lonely, still I lived the life of a solitary. I had 
 
34 The High Romance 
 
 family aflfections; family cares, duties, ties; I even 
 had a few acquaintances that might be termed friends. 
 But what a man wants; what a man will travel the 
 wide world over to find, is sympathy, and apprecia- 
 tion of his work — whatever the work may be. Two 
 plumbers meet — and they can commingle in sympathy 
 as they can solder a joint together. So with a states- 
 man, a singer, a hunter, — ^what not. I, like most 
 artists, could become interested in any man, and in 
 any man's work; I could understand the peculiar 
 problem of the drummer, of the band-master, of my 
 mother, my sister, my brothers, my friends; but none 
 could understand mine ; I lived, so far as all my asso- 
 ciates were concerned, in the fourth dimension. 
 
 At the end of this year my eagerness to read and 
 write returned as insensibly as it had left me; and 
 I became acquainted with a book-seller interested in 
 literature who wished to start a little magazine. The 
 book-seller engaged to find advertisers enough to pay 
 the printing bills; I undertook the editorship — ^which 
 meant that I tried to fill the pages of the pamphlet 
 with my own work and some matter clipped from 
 English periodicals. I was not to receive any pay ; by 
 and by, we agreed, the magazine would be profitable; 
 then I would have a salary; I would be a free man. 
 
 I prepared the matter for the printer; some of my 
 verses ; an essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, the ruling 
 literary god of my firmament at that time (R. L. S. 
 had just died); and a sheaf of clippings. Leaving 
 the stock-room at odd times during the day, with cap 
 hidden under jacket, I would steal out the back door 
 where the goods were handled and run at the top of 
 my speed to the printer. My first proofs were won- 
 
The Crystal House 35 
 
 derful to me as treasures from the cave where Ali 
 Baba spake the magic word of fortune. I corrected 
 them by means of the page on proof-reading which I 
 tore from the back of the old dictionary at home. 
 
 And one day while I was patiently following the 
 foot-steps of a drummer about the warehouse, drag- 
 ging a huge wheeled basket in which I was placing 
 the goods selected to fill the drummer's order, I sud- 
 denly heard from the street without the shrill voices 
 of newsboys calling out the name of my magazine. 
 
 What a moment! Something thrilled within me to 
 the very core of my being; in the depths of my nature 
 something stirred, erecting itself. It seemed to stand 
 amid all the darkness, all the doubts, all the uncer- 
 tainties, upright and indestructible, the centre of all 
 things; something that dominated — like the figure 
 I in a medley of letters, around which the others may 
 be grouped or after which they may be marshalled — 
 like I prefixed to the letters c-a-n d-o; or the letters 
 w-i-1-1; — I will; I can do! I had accomplished some- 
 thing — a deed akin to what I desired to do; I had 
 planted a seed of will, and a flower had sprung from 
 the soil of circumstances; and, this being so, on this 
 highway I would travel; and the future opened in a 
 flash before me like a landscape seen by lightning at 
 night. . . . 
 
 But the drummer said : "For God's sake, kid, get a 
 move on! What's the matter, anyhow?" And in 
 words of the same sense my employers spoke to me 
 soon afterwards. I could not "serve two masters"; I 
 could not expect to edit a magazine in the time which 
 they, my employers, hired from me; they had noticed 
 that my usefulness had been steadily decreasing; in 
 
36 The High Romance 
 
 short, would I take four weeks' notice, or leave at the 
 end of the present month with an extra month's salary? 
 I accepted the latter alternative. I left the ware- 
 house without emotion, save a faint regret in that 
 never again would I loaf and dream, read and write, 
 in the corner by the corset counter; even my sense of 
 freedom did not reach elation; perhaps because my 
 poor mother took the dismissal so much to heart. It 
 meant more work and worry for her; but I am afraid 
 I did not think of that. I plunged into the work of 
 the magazine; but it lived for only three numbers. 
 The book-seller found that the advertisements did not 
 pay the printer. And he was newly married; his 
 wife did not care for me ; indeed, I readily divined — 
 as, without thought or effort I divined the moods of 
 others — that she was jealous. She was a pretty girl, 
 tall and almost stately, and the bookseller was a little 
 man, dyspeptic and be-pimpled; nevertheless she 
 wanted him all the time, jealous even of his thoughts. 
 I remember smiling and marvelling; then I sighed and 
 wondered if ever a woman, entering life from my 
 house of crystal, would desire me as the pretty girl 
 desired the little book-seller. 
 
 So the magazine died, and went the way of other 
 dreams. 
 
 It had gained for me, however, several precious 
 things. 
 
 From faraway England came a letter from a real 
 Author: a world-renowned writer, to whom I had sent 
 a copy of my magazine containing my first published 
 
The Crystal House 37 
 
 story; telling me that I must persevere. "You are 
 an untrained writer, but unquestionably you have 
 power. Keep on," wrote the great English writer. 
 I carried that letter in my pocket for many years. 
 I still treasure it in my heart. It was signed, Israel 
 Zangwill. (It was twenty-five years ago when you 
 sent me that letter, my dear Mr. Zangwill; and no 
 doubt you long ago forgot it — but kind deeds never 
 die.) 
 
 Also, I gained a friend; and discovered an author, 
 at one stroke. For in the same street where I had 
 lived all my lonely boyhood years, there had been 
 living a fellow writer, and we had not known each 
 other; another dreamer, and we had dreamed apart. 
 But now I met him! I published his first story. 
 And from the United States, from the editor of a 
 magazine celebrated for its literary quality, came a 
 letter to my contributor praising his work; asking him 
 for stories. So William Holloway's career began; 
 and in time his work was well known in many maga- 
 zines. And our friendship has endured through all 
 the years since we met, and in a little room, the two of 
 us only, formed the Pine Tree Club — devoted to the 
 discussion and promulgation of Literature: our own 
 in especial. 
 
 But, alas, this did not last long, and soon we sep- 
 arated, and I did not see or hear from my new friend 
 for nearly ten years. 
 
 For now we left Halifax, for Boston; where we had 
 relatives, and where, we believed, there would be 
 better paid work for all in a great city with room for 
 all who came, with theatres, concert-halls, schools. 
 
38 The High Romance 
 
 books, magazines: the Atlantic Monthly! — a city 
 where I was to become a famous writer, with life made 
 rich with work, with liberty to create my dreams; 
 with the pursuit of happiness at last begun under 
 favouring auspices. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE HOUSE OF IRON 
 
 1. Boston 
 
 OUR romantic illusions in regard to Boston soon 
 were dispelled. 
 
 Instead of our spacious, airy house in its own big 
 yard near the harbour beach, we lived in a five- 
 roomed tenement, among the crowded tenements of 
 Roxbury. 
 
 The wages we boys earned as errand lads, or the 
 like, were larger, indeed, than we earned in Canada — 
 but the purchasing power was so much less. Our 
 mother was obliged to leave the home each day, and 
 work over a sewing machine down-town; returning at 
 night to take up the house-work for the large family. 
 
 For several bitter years I lived in Boston in wretch- 
 edness, in humiliation, in swinking bodily toil, in 
 grinding poverty. 
 
 Utterly without business education, or business fac- 
 ulties, with a heart full of dreams, but with a mind 
 almost wholly untrained, and destitute of friendship 
 or influence, I was quickly submerged in the depths 
 of unskilled labour. 
 
 I could not even secure a clerkship in a department 
 store; the best I could do was to tie up bundles in the 
 packing-room. 
 
 Afterwards I got emplovment above ground as a 
 
40 The High Romance 
 
 clerk in a tea store, but my lovable and picturesque 
 employer drank himself into bankruptcy, and again 
 economic necessity hailed me to labour underground 
 as a porter in the filthy, rat-ridden, dank sub-cellar 
 of a five-and-ten-cent store. 
 
 I had no leaning toward any craft or trade — save 
 that of writing, and in that, only instinctively; sans 
 practical ideas, I was totally ignorant of how to enter 
 upon the life of letters in the United States, save by 
 writing, and writing, and then writing; but what I 
 wrote at that time was almost entirely without appeal 
 to the magazines. 
 
 Do you know what a five-and-ten cent store 
 is? Some Americans have made millions of dollars 
 out of them. They exist by selling the cheapest of 
 cheap and nasty goods to the poor, and to the would- 
 be economical. They do not advertise, but seek a 
 position in all the cities they enter where they can 
 gain the advantage of the advertising done by the 
 great department stores. They employ the cheapest 
 of girl-labour. One of their characteristic tricks is 
 to fill a window with, say agateware sauce-pans that 
 could not possibly be bought elsewhere for less than 
 twenty-five cents, together with a placard stating that 
 this "bargain" will be available on a day several 
 weeks ahead. On the appointed morning there is a 
 string of women sometimes a block long in line before 
 the door is opened, and all day long the store is 
 packed with struggling, jostling, cross-tempered wom- 
 en. Now mark the full beauty of the idea! The 
 saucepans are placed on a small table far up the 
 
The House of Iron 41 
 
 store, in its centre, where only a few people can get at 
 them at a time — and the rest must willy-nilly flood 
 the store, and await their turns — and buy other goods. 
 The cheapness of the trash tempts the pennies away 
 from the poor. A woman will enter to buy a five-cent 
 corkscrew and come out with it and three crooked 
 saucers for a nickel, a shaving cup for a dime, and 
 so on; perhaps a dollar will go. 
 
 My employment as porter in this place was the 
 best I could find. Of business I knew nothing, save 
 how to sweep floors, take care of goods, and wait 
 on customers; but at this latter occupation I had 
 never been proficient, never successful; I could not 
 create with my tones, my words, gestures, and manner, 
 that subtle atmosphere in which a buyer, insensibly 
 yet irresistibly, is led by the real salesman to the pur- 
 chase of wares. The little suggestions of look and 
 tone; the easy fibs and bigger lies; the tricks of per- 
 suasion, the onleading wiles — all these I could not 
 master. 
 
 — I was one of a gang of twenty men and boys 
 driven by a foreman of half African blood. The 
 foreman was tall, strong, swarthily handsome. When 
 he doff"ed his overalls at night and stepped out into 
 the streets the figure of an aristocrat of Abyssinia 
 or of Numidia who should not have been wearing 
 American clothes (well as his fitted him), but who 
 should have been driving slaves with a seven-thonged 
 whip through the torrid sand of some equatorial 
 desert. In the gang there was a drink-broken grey- 
 beard who had once preached on predestination from 
 a pulpit in Scotland. There was a lean, saturnine 
 Westerner who at night was a professional poker- 
 
42 The High Romance 
 
 player in the cheap hotels of the equivocal West End. 
 He worked by day merely as a blind. The cellar 
 was as a jungle wherein he hid in the hours of the 
 sun. There was an aging, silent, neck-bent man 
 who once had owned a grocery store; and although 
 he was neither strong nor agile, he laboured harder 
 than any of the others for his nine dollars a week. 
 The rest was riff-raff, — the rag-tag and bob-tail of 
 the drifting unemployed. Continually they were 
 coming and going; constantly getting drunk and 
 fighting on the job; sometimes stealing; and being 
 discharged and hired from day to day; sometimes 
 from hour to hour. Recruits never failed this gang 
 of unskilled, the unplaced, the nondescript, the in- 
 efficient. 
 
 We toiled furiously — because the foreman was 
 there; and well did he select his pace-makers. He 
 had eyes of amused scorn, and a voice like poisoned 
 wine. He would tell you in vibrant, musical accents, 
 and smilingly, what a misshapen, malingering, putty- 
 boned hound of the gutters you were as he handed you 
 your time-slip and sent for another man. And 
 through the cavernous cellar his sweetly sonorous 
 tones would purl in a romantic song. He delighted 
 in telling his love-stories to his favourite hanger- 
 on, his pimp, so that others could hear him; and in 
 low snarling words many of the slaves, angry at the 
 thought of white girls smiling at him, would whisper: 
 "The nigger! The dirty nigger!" He knew this, 
 but lounged among us in confident dominance. He 
 had the same indifferent, cynical scorn for us sweat- 
 dirtied slaves of the sub-cellar, whom he drove to 
 mean tasks, as the non-drinking saloon-keeper has for 
 
The House of Iron 43 
 
 the alcoholics who line the bar, dribbling foolish 
 maunderings — and supplying him with a living. 
 
 From the street, far above, the barrels, crates, bales, 
 and boxes were ever rmnbling down on the elevators. 
 We received and opened them, distributing their con- 
 tents through the maze of departments in the vast 
 store overhead. All day long we ran or walked or 
 shuffled — according to our energy, our temperament, 
 or our degree of proximity to the foreman, floorwalk- 
 ers, or manager — loaded with dishes, candy, dolls, 
 wash-pans — any of the ten thousand and one things 
 sold in the store. Others laboured with the hammers 
 and nail-pullers, bent above the barrels and boxes 
 under the flaring arc-lights, encircled by hectic halos, 
 that hissed in the dark, dust-laden air that was like 
 unto prismatic scum on the surface of a stagnant pool. 
 There was a smell, acrid and powerful — ammoniacal 
 — of damp straw, of rats, of sweat, of tobacco juice, 
 of whiskey and gin, of steam and gas and coal fumes. 
 
 I was one of those who ran to and fro with the 
 loads. That was my job from eight o'clock in the 
 morning until noon; from one until six o'clock. I 
 would much rather have never left the cellar. Down 
 there I toiled among fellow slaves; down there I was 
 alone and unseen — the other slaves did not count. 
 But to come up from the cellar and stagger with a 
 load through the crowds of women, and make my 
 way among them to behind the counters where the 
 shop-girls whisked their skirts to make room for me 
 to pile the goods away — I whose dream was of 
 women moving harmoniously through the corridors 
 and gardens of a house of crystal — I who had not 
 known of women buying and selling, chaffering, steal- 
 
44 The High Romance 
 
 ing, brow-beating, back-biting, shuffling, struggling — 
 this was what made me dream agonies at night. 
 
 2. Gleams From The Palace of Art 
 
 And I had come to Boston to read books in 
 the Public Library, and write songs and tales for 
 which I was to get enough money to support my 
 mother and sister! I brought as contents of my war- 
 chest in the descent upon Boston, a number of poems; 
 the half of a novel; the sketch of a play; and a round 
 score of short stories. They were nearly all about 
 the sea. Unfortunately, they were not concerned 
 with piracies, melodramatic storms, rescues and ad- 
 ventures; but dealt with what you think and dream 
 of the ocean; what you suppose the sea hoarsely 
 whispers to itself, and what the gulls watch as they 
 soar and dip off-shore. My father had died and 
 been buried at sea; his father had been a sailor. I 
 had been bom on the shore and lived there for nearly 
 twenty years. There was salt in my blood; there was 
 a kelpie in my heart; there were storms and calms, 
 depths and mysteries, fogs and boundless horizons 
 in my soul. 
 
 Why, then, was I not a sailor instead of a slave 
 in the cellar of a ten-cent store? But why do not 
 saints go to Heaven? They stay on earth to show 
 the way to God; and I was land-bound because I 
 wished to sing the desire of the sea. 
 
 By night I sat up till all hours reading and writing 
 or went prowling through the more crowded city 
 streets, taking, in Baudelaire's phrase, baths of multi- 
 tude, and meeting with curious adventures, singular 
 
The House of Iron 45 
 
 acquaintances; and learning much queer lore about 
 life. At this time, remember, I was still a growing 
 boy, and it's a good thing that my physique possessed 
 the stamina, the innate strength that it must. I was 
 always reading; carrying books in my pocket to read 
 in the noon hour among the loafers in Boston Com- 
 mon, the fishermen on Tea Wharf, the teamsters 
 around Fanueil Hall Market, for I can always make 
 myself easy on a curbstone, a doorstep, the string- 
 piece of a dock. I was a constant patron of the 
 Public Library, and on Sundays would often visit the 
 Art Gallery on the side of Copley Square opposite 
 the Library. There I haunted a comer where hung 
 a number of William Blake's drawings, and Bume 
 Jones' "Chaunt D'Amour." I dreamed curious, 
 vague dreams before Blake's pictures, those pictures 
 in which gods and souls move in unearthly rhythms 
 amid swirling eddies of air, fire and water; and I 
 drank of a morbid, and at that time unanalyzable, 
 pleasure before the "Chaunt D'Amour"; thinking to- 
 day that the fever of sickness then springing up in 
 my body influenced me to recognize those consumptive 
 dreamers, swooning life away in languid ecstacies by 
 the stagnant moat, as fellows of myself! Whistler's 
 etchings brought a more tangible joy. Here was the 
 beauty of real life, of the actual, of the everyday, 
 transmuted by art; and they made me at once humble 
 and ambitious . . . could not words be wrought in 
 a like spirit? Yes, I would think, but I am so 
 ignorant, I have no skill, and I must spend my time 
 sweeping floors, opening crates, lugging goods. . . . 
 Nevertheless, since it is the case with me that if I 
 should be placed in the electric chair I should cer- 
 
46 The High Romance 
 
 tainly spend some of my last minutes in dreaming 
 of how the shock of the lethal current, the twitching 
 of the stricken body, and the thoughts of the doomed 
 soul might be rendered in words, even then I was 
 considering how the fellow helots with whom I 
 sweated and sickened could be utilized as literary 
 material. . . . 
 
 I had no friends, I who love friends. An old 
 companion of my boyhood was in Boston, but we 
 drifted apart in the city ways. My most constant 
 companion was my landlord, a queer alcoholic Irish- 
 man who lived in one of his own tenements and knew 
 Shakespeare by heart, but nothing else; and he knew 
 the bard only as Poll Parrot knows the human 
 language, with no comprehension of ideas. We 
 struck up an odd kind of convivial comradeship, for 
 he was a kind-hearted man, and my friendships are 
 not dependent on my ideas (thanks for that goodly 
 gift, Life!). Over liquor-slopped tables in the 
 back room of barrooms we carried on interminable 
 discussions of Shakespeare, and quarrelled; for I am 
 Celtic myself, and relish a ruction. 
 
 And my poems and stories, sent to the magazines, 
 returned. The whistle of the postman would peal 
 its signal in the dark, grimy, narrow hall-way of the 
 seven-storied rabbit warren of a tenement house where 
 we lived in five little rooms; and I would run to the 
 door to snatch the big envelopes from the letter-slip 
 before the other should have a chance to see them. 
 They all came back, every one. 
 
 ITiere was something wrong with my work; it was 
 
The House of Iron 47 
 
 bringing no money, to say nothing about place and 
 name. And I must work — I must earn money! 
 The cost of living in the city was frightful — the rent, 
 the coal, the gas, the food, the clothes — everything 
 was expensive; you had even to pay car-fare to get 
 to and from your job. My brothers were finding 
 difficulty in securing and keeping employment, though 
 they, unhampered by my particular ambition, were 
 succeeding better. Yet they earned little, — at best 
 they could only get positions as messengers and office 
 boys. Soon, perhaps, even my sister might have 
 to go into a store, my little sister, my pretty sister, 
 and when I thought of this possibility, and of the 
 girls in the ten-cent store, paid three or four dollars 
 a week, moiling behind the counters, beneath the 
 earth, under the glaring arc-lights, in the dust and 
 fetid, sweat-tainted air, tempted by the lewd men 
 who haunted the stores, driven by task-masters, 
 jostling together in an outrageous promiscuity — when 
 I thought of all this, I suffered bitter pain; and 
 knew that whatever the cost to myself I must hold on 
 to my job in the basement; must fight with others 
 for that job; must follow the pace keyed up by the 
 foreman unto the last peg — unto the point where my 
 heart strings would snap as a fiddle string snaps when 
 drawn too tightly. 
 
 3. A Gleam of Joy 
 
 And on the stretched strings of my heart singular 
 tunes were played by that force in life to which I was 
 an instrument. I sang no longer the desire of the 
 sea; I related no more naive little legends of what 
 
48 The High Romance 
 
 I supposed the sea hoarsely whispers to itself and 
 what the gulls watch as they soar and dip off-shore. 
 The salt of my blood savoured no rhyming words, 
 but got into my secret tears; and the kelpie that was 
 in my heart instead of singing, wailed. The feature- 
 less shadow — the apparition glimpsed so many times 
 before, companioned my thoughts now, instead of 
 merely visitmg them. 
 
 The house of crystal grew faint, withdrew into 
 far-off mists, and in the times when I divined its 
 outlines, their soft shimmer, their opalescent hues 
 were not visible; they were harsh; they darkened; and 
 it seemed to me that it was becoming a house of iron, 
 filled with brazen clangours, in which hurried, 
 writhen phantoms of despair jostled in a drive of the 
 dead. Every night I wrote, slowly, with pain and 
 trouble, sometimes far into the late hours; occasion- 
 ally until the grey dawn-light feebly struggled down 
 the shaft. Grim, mordant, bitter, hopeless themes — 
 hard, bleak, iron words. 
 
 I did not try to sell these stories; I had no further 
 hope of that kind. They were written because — ^be- 
 cause I had to write them, even if I had been the 
 one man in the world who could read. 
 
 And while I was in the full swing of my night 
 work, a change came into my life. The manager of 
 the store had been watching me; saw that I worked 
 hard ; saw that I was not one of the mob of hopelessly 
 inefficient; and one day, to my amazement I was 
 made floor-walker in one of the smaller departments, 
 where twenty girls (girls from sixteen to sixty years 
 old) sold tinware and kitchen utensils. My wages 
 were increased to twelve dollars a week; the manager 
 
The House of Iron 49 
 
 told me that if I made good I should be given a 
 better position; that, in time, if I should prove a 
 capable, faithful, and industrious employe, I might 
 be made the manager of one of the firm's many 
 stores. 
 
 But I was never so employed. Perhaps it was 
 mere chance that intervened. Or could it have been 
 that the architect of the house of iron; the artist who 
 played upon the stretched strings of my heart — that 
 force beyond me that had breathed into the tormented 
 brain its mystic plans, which had reached out for a 
 new builder, another maker of things — felt now that 
 its apprentice had served enough time in bondage in 
 this place? 
 
 One day I went to the Common to eat my lunch, 
 and sat there on the bench on the Park Street Mall — 
 those benches of the unshaven, the benches of the im- 
 employed; where loafed the drifting members of the 
 unplaced, the nondescript, the ineflBcient, the purely 
 unfortunate, — the anonymous mob from which my 
 fellow helots were recruited and into which they so 
 quickly fell back. After eating my sandwiches, 
 languidly — for of late I had had no appetite; I had 
 been languishing in queer fits of depression, of fever, 
 and of listlessness — I idly picked from the ground 
 a wind-blown newspaper, several days old, and 
 glanced over it absently. Suddenly my eyes light- 
 ened; I read with interest, with growing excitement, 
 at last, absorbedly, the contents of a coliunn on the 
 back page. There were quotations from poets new to 
 me; a short story translated from the French; a 
 nmnber of witty, spirited paragraphs written in a 
 singularly lucid and musical prose. 
 
50 The High Romance 
 
 Philip Hale, in the Boston Journal, and his daily 
 column, "Talk of the Day!" 
 
 I had been deeply — though for years uncritically, 
 uncomprehendingly, disappointed in American cur- 
 rent literature. There was so little artistry in the 
 fiction; so obvious a lack of style, force, originality, 
 beauty. How indifferently the magazines compared 
 with Henley's New Review, for example, to which I 
 was devoted when Wells, and Charles Whibley and 
 Joseph Conrad and Max Beerbohm and W. B. Yeats, 
 and others of that great group of writers were appear- 
 ing with the first fruits of the modem movements! 
 
 Of course, there were exceptions. There was 
 Stephen Crane, for example, among writers, and 
 Frank Norris. There was the Chap Book and the 
 Lark, among periodicals; a few spirits here and there 
 refusing to yield to the curse of commercialism, the 
 malediction of Mammon, which is the blight of 
 American magazines — of most English ones, too, for 
 that matter. And now I had made this great dis- 
 covery, in this wind-blown newspaper! 
 
 How eagerly I devoured it, this food my nature 
 craved, this food that stimulated and refined my 
 appetite for art, and nourished my soul! 
 
 I am not by any means singular in my admiring 
 opinion of Mr. Hale's artistry, my appreciation of 
 his splendidly lucid, colourful and musical prose 
 style, and of his vital, illuminating wit and irony; 
 and those who are competent to judge also speak 
 wonderingly of his vast erudition. I know that he 
 has been of far-reaching and inspiring influence, 
 especially among young writers; and if ever I do 
 good work I shall know who helped me most to do 
 
The House of Iron 51 
 
 it. Every day thereafter I bought this newspaper; 
 and at the end of the week, I sent one of my stories, 
 anonymously, to the editor of the column. 
 
 It was printed the next morning! I read it on 
 the car while hanging to a strap, amid my fellow- 
 workers. 
 
 What a moment! Something thrilled within me, 
 to the very core of my being; in the depths of my 
 nature something stirred, erecting itself. It seemed 
 to stand firmly amid all the doubts, the darkness, the 
 uncertainties, upright and indestructible, the centre 
 of all things; something that dominated — like the 
 letter I in a medley of letters, around which the others 
 may be grouped or marshalled; like I prefixed to 
 the letters c-a-n — d-o; or to the letters W-i-1-1; I can 
 do! I will! I had accomplished something, a deed 
 akin to what I desired to do; I had planted a seed of 
 will, and a flower had sprung from the soil of cir- 
 cumstances. This being so, on this highway I would 
 travel, and the future opened before me in a flash, 
 like a landscape seen by lightning at night. . . . 
 
 4. The Red Hieroglyphic 
 
 But the manager said to me, "I'm sorry; I shall 
 have to take you from your present position; you are 
 far too easy with the girls; they are becoming de- 
 moralized in your room — Oh, yes; you may return 
 to your old place." 
 
 And I returned, at the smaller wage, to toil amid 
 the slaves of the gang; under the flaring arc-lights en- 
 circled by hectic haloes as they hissed in the dark, 
 dust-laden air, that was like unto prismatic scum on 
 
52 The High Romance 
 
 the surface of a stagnant pool; amid the smell, acrid 
 and powerful, of damp straw, of rats, of sweat, of 
 tobacco juice, of gin and whiskey, of steam, and gas, 
 and coal fumes. 
 
 Yet even there joy entered my heart. Twice a 
 week or so throughout the summer months a story of 
 mine was printed in the newspaper. 
 
 Once or twice, too, letters appeared, commenting on 
 some particular tale. Also, I sent a poem to the 
 Transcript, and one day two copies of that great paper 
 came to my tenement, copies containing my poem ! I 
 carried the clippings in my pocket, and oftentimes I 
 would take them out, and read — as a dram-drinker 
 steals to his bottle. . . . 
 
 — The weakness that had come upon me in the 
 spring increased. 
 
 By night I would sweat and cough. 
 
 At last, one night, in the depth of winter, some- 
 thing clicked in my throat; my mouth filled with a 
 peculiar taste; I got up, lighted a lamp, — and the 
 something was red ; a scarlet hieroglyphic of ominous 
 portent was scrawled upon my handkerchief — and it 
 dampened, and it spread. ... 
 
 Through the rest of the dark hours I was un- 
 troubled by cough or restlessness. Wrapped in 
 singular, imperturbable calm, I lay sleepless; and my 
 room-mate was the Shadow, faceless as ever; but I 
 was sure that if its countenance were visible it would 
 show a smile. . . . 
 
 The next day I lost my wages of a dollar and a 
 quarter by not showing up at my job. Instead, I 
 
The House of Iron 53 
 
 went to the City Hospital; where, after hours of wait- 
 ing, I at last found myself stripped to the waist, taking 
 my turn to be examined between an old negro and 
 a giant of a Norwegian sailor, both of them coughing 
 like machines, while two physicians went over us 
 with a stethoscope, and with their questions and their 
 eyes. I did not mind their stethoscope, but their cold, 
 calm, searching eyes afflicted me with a gnawing fear 
 I had much difficulty in concealing. 
 
 "You may dress," one told me. I obeyed. Then 
 they weighed me. Nothing more was said until I 
 mustered courage enough to address the chief of the 
 two physicians. 
 
 "Ah, do you think, doctor — do you think — ^that 
 blood — ^was it — ^was it — " 
 
 "Yes; it was from your lungs," he said — 
 
 I felt a shock like a blow struck, ridiculously 
 enough, as even then it seemed to me, in the pit of 
 my stomach, instead of my heart (I was not aware 
 of the existence of one's solar plexus in those days!) ; 
 a blow that dizzied me, and for a moment all sounds 
 seemed far away, and the persons around me dim 
 and distant; but I gulped at the water held to my 
 lips, and said, "Thank you, doctor, for your advice," 
 when I was told that I must leave my employment and 
 go somewhere and live in the open air. I left the 
 hospital holding a card in my hand, which I did not 
 look at until I reached the street. Then I read the 
 top line, printed in large letters "ADVICE TO CON- 
 SUMPTIVE PATIENTS"; and suddenly I began to 
 run — I ran as fast as I could, as though I could thus 
 escape the Pallid One, the Infector of Crowds, the 
 White Plague of America. 
 
54 The High Romance 
 
 5. Friendship Again 
 
 This happening, at any rate, released me from one 
 captivity, even if it placed me in another form of 
 bondage. They let me go from the sub-cellar; I had 
 grown too weak for that job. 
 
 And then, one afternoon, I carried into execution 
 a thought which had long been in my mind, and kept 
 putting off, and playing with day after day. I 
 mustered up courage to call upon the editor of 
 Talk of the Day, I had often walked through 
 that block in narrow crooked Washington Street which 
 later I was to know so well, where the newspapers 
 are congregated; and gazed at the windows of the 
 Journal^ and wondered what it was like, inside there. 
 
 But this day I actually ventured inside. It was a 
 place just like most newspaper quarters, from Boston 
 to San Francisco: dingy, dirty, dim, and complicated 
 as to stairs, passages, rooms. 
 
 But finally I got to the editorial offices. I enquired 
 for Mr. Hale. 
 
 "Who is it wants to see him," asked the Cerberus 
 at the door; the usual supercilious office boy. 
 
 "Tell him it is the Quietist," I said. 
 
 This was the name I signed to my tales and 
 sketches. Somewhere or other I had read a para- 
 graph about "Molinos the Quietist," and the name 
 and ambiguous title (for I had then not the remotest 
 notion of who Molinos really was, or what Quietism 
 could be) pleased me, and I adopted them as my 
 pseudonym. 
 
 A man who seemed to me to be about nine feet high 
 (he actually was no taller than myself), came to the 
 
The House of Iron 55 
 
 door, and I knew (because he loomed so gigantically) 
 that this was Philip Hale! 
 
 "Are you the Quietist?" he demanded. 
 
 I nodded. I cannot remember if I spoke. 
 
 "Good Lord!" he exclaimed. "And I thought you 
 were an old man, with solemn whiskers, who had 
 been everywhere, and seen everything. Come in! 
 Come in." 
 
 So began our acquaintance. He soon extracted my 
 story. And then my stories began to be paid for: 
 out of his own pocket, I afterwards discovered, as the 
 Journal did not pay for outside contributions to this 
 column. 
 
 Later on, he introduced me to Mr. Edward William 
 Thompson, then connected with the Youth's Com- 
 panion; and Mr. Thompson tried his kindest best to 
 help me shape my peculiar craftsmanship so that I 
 could earn some money through it; and, indeed, I 
 did succeed in writing a number of stories and verses 
 which the Youth's Companion bought. 
 
 But my health was steadily declining, I had 
 hemorrhage after hemorrhage; and Mr. Thompson 
 and Mr. Hale got up a small subscription fund, and 
 saved my life by enabling me to leave Boston and go 
 to North Carolina. ... 
 
 And these good friends did more than that. They 
 gave me something, at least, of what I longed for — 
 that which a man will travel the wild world over to 
 find — appreciation of his work; the fellowship of his 
 peculiar kind, insofar as it might be extended by 
 veterans of the pen to a raw and most crude beginner. 
 
56 The High Romance 
 
 — Years later, when I collected my Quietist tales 
 in a volume, and Bliss Carman tried to make a cer- 
 tain firm of publishers live up to a promise to pub- 
 lish them (which they did not) I made a slight sign 
 of my gratitude to Mr. Hale by dedicating the book 
 to him. But the publishers would not publish it: 
 they said it was too morbid and unhappy. So I 
 dedicated, instead, my son to Philip Hale; giving him 
 the name of his father's friend. There is nothing 
 morbid or unhappy about this latter offspring, any- 
 how! 
 
 6. I Go South 
 
 I went by boat to Norfolk, Virginia, and thence 
 to North Carolina. That journey was a joyful ad- 
 venture, in spite of my weakness. 
 
 The great sea took me back to its bosom, for a 
 space, and whispered the old, soothing stories; and 
 the brooding pine-wood received me as its neophyte. 
 
 Again the stars shone in high, arching domes; once 
 more the sun poured out the wine of life, and the 
 moon distilled the ichor of dreams; the flowers grew 
 for me; the wind talked to me, in the trees, in the 
 grass, in the bush, voices of the vaster life that moves 
 in the forms of men and women. 
 
 And all the men and women, the soldiers, the 
 tramps, the floor-walkers, the shop-girls, the business 
 men, now moved as they had not moved before — 
 humanly, individually; not as mere puppets of a 
 sardonic Shadow; and I saw them in the light that 
 
The House of Iron 57 
 
 had shone upon me out of the heart of my friends 
 — the light of human kindness. 
 
 Ah, where should I be were it not for the kindness 
 of men and women upon whom I had no claim save 
 that I was poor, and they gave me to eat and drink; 
 and fallen, and they raised me up ; and sick, and they 
 came to my assistance? 
 
 Long ago, an impotent failure, I should have 
 yielded utterly to the waiting Shadow, and the House 
 of Iron would have shut its door upon me for ever. 
 
 Friendship — kindness — mutual aid! 
 
 These carried me out of the sub-cellar, away for 
 ever from the toilers and the moilers; but I knew 
 they were still my brothers and my sisters. I saw 
 that they were doing as I had done — ^toiling for the 
 use of the life that was in them, as the conditions of 
 the world imposed; toiling in those ways because 
 they must, as perhaps they would not if in them 
 spoke as clearly as in me the call to their real work 
 — to the work in which there is joy. And upon me, 
 too, again might come captivity unto bitter, unlovable 
 tasks. Well, if so I must not moil blindly as 
 before. Death, the seeming enemy, had proved 
 my friend — ^had been my rescuer; had inspired the 
 necessity of the struggle for life. Whatever hap- 
 pened to me in the future, I was and should remain, 
 free, because my soul was free. In the midst of all 
 the doubts, darkness, and uncertainties that sur- 
 rounded me, there was something to which I could 
 rally — there was myself; and there were others. I 
 was not alone any longer. And if I had been helped, 
 so also might I help. 
 
58 The High Romance 
 
 Assured of my function I knew myself to be one 
 of the many builders of the crystal house, which the 
 house of iron vainly tries to hide; the house of life; 
 buih of its sorrows and joys; the abode of the dreams 
 of men; and even if death claimed me at my labour, 
 some other builder would make out of my doom 
 something of beauty for the tabernacle of man's far 
 vision — ^would shape a storied window — or, perhaps, 
 place a column in its court; a memorial appropriate 
 and inspiring — erect and dominating, like the letter I. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 SHAPES OF DEATH 
 
 THIS flight southward was my last encounter with 
 my shadowy adversary — or my Friend (I knew 
 not which) during this first period of my boyhood 
 and my youth; a period which was only the prelude 
 to fardier and stranger adventures, and deeper, and 
 higher romance; but during my stay in North Caro- 
 lina I was placed in a position of intimacy with the 
 Shadowy Watcher. 
 
 Not for a long time yet, however, was I to learn 
 anything more than the outer, surface aspects of my 
 ambiguous companion. 
 
 I have already spoken of my emotions when the 
 scarlet hieroglyphic announced the coming of the 
 white plague upon me; and so I will merely repeat 
 that to the best of my recollection, my feelings could 
 be summed up in the word "indifference." At least, 
 consciously I was indifferent, although it is obvious 
 that subconsciously I was not; for I made decided 
 efforts to escape the doom that was threatened. 
 What I mean is, that in the face of the actual prob- 
 ability that I might fail in my fight, I seemed un- 
 moved, and uncaring. I have often asked myself 
 why this was so; why I, who vibrate to life deeply 
 and continually in so many directions, should have 
 felt that cold carelessness in the face of death. Per- 
 
 69 
 
60 The High Romance 
 
 haps it was because life at that time held little of joy; 
 there was nothing in Boston or my Boston life that 
 gave me abiding satisfaction, or seemed worth while 
 living for. Any one who had to work as I worked, 
 and where I worked, certainly could have little reason 
 for regretting leaving it even by the last door of 
 all. 
 
 The little town where I lived in the South was a 
 town of death. Nearly every day in the busy season, 
 the winter months, when the hotels and the boarding 
 houses were crowded with victims of tuberculosis, was 
 marked by a death. The train that passed through 
 at midnight for the north was popularly known as 
 "the stiffs' express," since it rarely happened that 
 when it stopped a long box was not lifted into the ex- 
 press car. Men and women would come to this town 
 who were beyond all hope of being saved; having 
 simply been ordered south by some physician who 
 wished to get rid of them. It was pitiable beyond 
 words; and ugly beyond painting. And of those who 
 came, by far the most were utterly ignorant of what to 
 do to be saved. They seemed to consider that there 
 was, or that there ought to be, some miraculous or 
 magical quality in the mere "climate" of the place 
 which would save them, or which ought to save them, 
 without the necessity on their part of doing anything at 
 all. And so they would stay indoors, and the men 
 would haunt the billiard rooms and bowling alleys 
 amid the dust and tobacco smoke, and the women, 
 all those that were able, would exert themselves danc- 
 ing in airless, dusty rooms at the hotels, or sit up 
 
Shapes of Death 61 
 
 late at card parties, and when the coughing, and 
 the sweating, and the wasting away of tissue and of 
 flesh did not stop, but continued, then the querulous 
 complainings would arise on all sides, "I don't think 
 much of the climate of this place — it's a fake!" 
 To back up the supposed magical quality of the 
 "climate," the only thing the most of these exiles 
 from life would do was to swill enormous quantities 
 of various deadly drugs. The odours of creosote and 
 of whiskey were at all times strong. They dosed 
 themselves, and gargled themselves, and thrust their 
 noses into evil smelling clouds of smoke supposed 
 to be a cure for asthma; but they did not sleep 
 in the open air, they did not live in the open air; 
 and so, of course, they died. And the house and the 
 rooms they died in were haunted; they left their dis- 
 ease behind them; there is no doubt in the world that 
 many a weak person coming to this town from the 
 north was infected with disease from the germs left 
 behind by the dead. The consumptives crawled or 
 stalked through the streets, or sat around the post- 
 office, or the bowling alleys, or on the verandas of 
 the hotels; and constantly they hawked and they 
 spat. Of all the knowledge which modem science 
 and progressive human experience has placed at the 
 disposal of the sufferers from the worst of all Ameri- 
 can diseases, there was apparent in this place but 
 the merest shadow. Here and there you found a 
 physician or a patient who had some idea of the 
 value of open air; but the rest seemed to fear it as 
 they feared the white plague itself. They talked of 
 "Draughts," and "chills," and "breezes," and "night 
 air," ^s if they were talking of assassins concealed 
 
62 The High Romance 
 
 everywhere about their path awaiting the fitting 
 moment to assault them. And so, as I say, they died; 
 they died; and the midnight train was "the stiffs' 
 express." And as this town was, so are hundreds of 
 others of such places throughout the land. It must 
 not be supposed that the truth which is established to- 
 day, that in the air is life for the consumptive, has 
 by any means been recognized in any widespread 
 fashion. 
 
 The town was too horrible (and too expensive) and 
 after a while I went to live in a one-roomed shack 
 a mile or so from the town, directly opposite a board- 
 ing house where a number of poor labourers lived. 
 Not far away, on the opposite side of the road, there 
 was a ramshackle box factory. One morning I was 
 thrown out of my bed by some concussion, or shock, 
 the cause of which I knew not. Bewildered, I ran 
 to the window, and looking out, saw some people 
 running across a field; and was impressed at once 
 by the strange aspect of the landscape. Just what 
 lent this air of strangeness to the view, I could not 
 at first determine; until all at once it ran across my 
 mind with a shock, "Why, the tall chimney of the 
 box factory is down!" I hurried into my clothes, 
 and ran along the road. The box factory was in 
 ruins. The boiler had exploded, they had hauled 
 one dead man out of the wreck of splintered and 
 shattered boards and bricks, and now they were 
 digging amid the wreckage to get out another man 
 who was groaning. These two men were the engineer 
 and his fireman. If the explosion had occurred half 
 
Shapes of Death 63 
 
 an hour later, some thirty or forty girls and boys 
 would have been blown up along with the building. 
 As I got up to the place they had found the groaning 
 man, and I helped to carry him to the boarding house, 
 where he had lived. By and by the doctor came, a 
 little German Jew, who was a consumptive himself, 
 and a man of quite extraordinary ability; but of 
 morals that made him the abhorrence of the com- 
 munity. He and I always got along very well, how- 
 ever, since his "housekeeper" and his brandy 
 debauches meant little that was abhorrent to me. He 
 pounced upon me at once to help him; and he had 
 a tough job on hand, there was no doubt of that. 
 The injured man had swallowed steam; he was a 
 tremendously powerful young man, and he was 
 thrashing about the bed in an agony. The people in 
 the house were useless with bewilderment and excite- 
 ment. I had to help the doctor while he examined 
 the man ; but we had to call upon the others to assist 
 us. It took five or six of us to hold the man down 
 upon the bed. The doctor said there was no hope 
 for him, that he would probably die in an hour or 
 two. As a matter of fact, he lived for twenty hours; 
 and even the continual administration of morphine, 
 could not keep him quiet. I was with him from the 
 time he was brought into the house until the time 
 he died, since I was the only person in the neighbour- 
 hood who did not have to work, and so I remained, 
 at my friend the doctor's advice, to be of what service 
 I could. There was not a clean towel, nor a piece 
 of decent linen in that poor house; so I brought over 
 from my shack one of my night shirts to put on the 
 sufferer and some other articles of the kind. Dur- 
 
64 The High Romance 
 
 ing the day, there was little for me to do, but assist 
 about the bedside; but through the night that followed, 
 I was alone most of the time, and that night was 
 hideous. 
 
 The young man's parents had been sent for and 
 might come at any time. Every time I heard a step 
 without, or whenever the door was opened, I expected 
 to see a sorrowful, poor mother, and the father. 
 The thought of the father did not disturb me very 
 much; but the notion of meeting the mother of this 
 tortured creature on the bed made me flinch every 
 time it came to me. He was a dreadful sight ; burned, 
 and scarred, blackened, and blood-bedabbled. 
 
 All night long he tossed in delirium, moaning, and 
 his lungs rattled every time he breathed; and only 
 once during the night did he seem to have a gleam 
 of consciousness; and that time he looked at me and 
 said my name. The utterance of my name frightened 
 me. I remembered how I jumped and stared at him, 
 inwardly trembling. I had never seen a man die; 
 except that one man who dropped dead in the street 
 when I was a child; I had never watched or waited 
 by the bedside of one dying; I had never felt life 
 go out of a human body. This was now my experi- 
 ence, for shortly after dawn, when a dim, wan light 
 struggled into the room, making the red glow of the 
 oil lamp seem sickly and morbid, a strange change 
 came over the aspect of the boy — ^he was no more 
 than a boy in years, for all his huge size and terrible 
 strength. Although no amount of washing had 
 availed to remove the black stains etched upon the 
 flesh of his face by the fire and explosion, yet now 
 a perceptible pallor spread over it under the veil of 
 
Shapes of Death 65 
 
 the grime. I saw his hand grope upon his breast, 
 and I took the hand between my own; his eyes opened 
 and shut and his mouth opened and shut, and then 
 I felt him die — the departing life beat and trembled 
 and twitched in all the little nerves and muscles of his 
 hand, although the hand itself no longer moved; but 
 all the nerves vibrated like piano strings when you 
 run your fingers over them; a figure of speech which 
 expresses as closely as I can the actual movement 
 of the tendons of his wrist, but which does not at 
 all depict the singular emotion which this movement 
 communicated to me. For a moment I felt as though 
 through these twitchings and tremblings he was trying 
 to speak to me, to communicate some message; but it 
 soon died away; the eyes and the mouth closed, then 
 the jaw dropped, and he was dead. 
 
 Not long afterwards his father came; it seemed 
 that his mother could not. A little, humble, work- 
 bent man, he stood and looked a moment at what was 
 on the bed ; and then turned away without a word and 
 without a sign. Then came those who perform the 
 last offices for the dead, and I, too, went away. . . . 
 
 I returned to my shack, and tried to get some sleep ; 
 but I could not do so, and all day long I moved 
 about in a state of nervous tension. That night I at- 
 tended a meeting of the local "literary club" — a 
 quaint collection of rustic young men and young 
 women who went in for "studies" of various authors 
 of the day. The little town was of course very much 
 excited by the disaster; and I, as an actual participant 
 in the scene, was greatly in demand. I had to relate 
 my story so many times, that at last I began, almost 
 
66 The High Romance 
 
 unconsciously, to embroider it with comments. The 
 fact that the young man had died in my night shirt 
 was a circumstance which added a piquantly macabre 
 touch to my narrative. I can still remember the very 
 young and silly kind of pleasure which I took in 
 astonishing the young women who acted as if they 
 were delightfully shocked, by saying: "Oh, well, 
 the poor fellow was an honest soul, and I am sure he 
 will return that night dress of mine when he is through 
 with it. He cannot need it where he is going, you 
 know, for I don't believe they wear them up above, 
 and down below the climate does not permit of the 
 indulgence." I stayed at the club until the last 
 member left, for I knew by the way I felt that a sleep- 
 less night was before me ; but by ten o'clock the party 
 had broken up and by eleven o'clock the last loiterer 
 had left the closet in one of the local hotels where, 
 despite the prohibition laws of the county, one could 
 get something to drink. I still lingered talking with 
 the hotel keeper, but by twelve o'clock I was home- 
 ward bound. My road lay along the railway track 
 for a mile out of town, and then the shortest way to 
 my shack was to plunge to my right through the 
 grounds where the ruins of the box factory were 
 strewn about. When I reached this place I was sud- 
 denly seized upon by one of those unaccountable 
 gusts of atavistic superstition that at times seize 
 upon us all. I simply loathed the notion of passing 
 through the wreckage of that mill. My flesh shrank 
 from the ordeal, as though grimy fingers of spectres 
 were reaching out to touch it. And a grimly whimsi- 
 cal fancy popped into my head, and tormented me as 
 many grave reasons for real fear have not done: 
 
Shapes of Death 67 
 
 "Suppose he is really waiting for me, somewhere 
 among the shadows, with that night dress?" And I 
 seemed to see the pallor of that piece of linen in every 
 patch of light among the scattered fragments of the 
 factory. To go roundabout the factory grounds 
 would have taken me off my course several hundred 
 yards; and rather than give in to my fit of super- 
 stitious trembling, I braced myself and pushed 
 across the grounds. 
 
 I reached my shack and unlocked the door, and 
 entered, and struck a match to light my lamp — and 
 the next instant I had started back against the wall, 
 transfixed, and quivering with horror. There before 
 me, in the red flare of the match, I saw — sure enough! 
 I saw my night shirt. It had been returned. It had 
 come back! And I felt certain that the one I loaned 
 it to must also be present. Only by a powerful 
 effort of will was I able to steady myself and refrain 
 from rushing blindly out of the shack. 
 
 Once I had lighted my lantern, however, it was 
 certain that to outward vision, at any rate, the dead 
 man was not present. Hanging over the foot of the 
 bed was the night gown, however. 
 
 As I afterwards discovered, the poor woman who 
 kept the boarding house had taken the night shirt from 
 the comer where it had been thrown by the under- 
 taker; and had washed and ironed it out, and then 
 had brought it to my shack, reaching in through the 
 window, which was never locked, and placing it upon 
 the bed, to be ready for me when I required it. Her 
 thrifty soul objected to wasting a perfectly good 
 garment. . . . 
 
68 The High Romance 
 
 When I went north again with the hole in my lungs 
 temporarily stopped up, I drifted into newspaper 
 work as a reporter; and thereafter I had many deal- 
 ings with the shadow; indeed, I became, as most news- 
 paper reporters are, one of his busy chroniclers. 
 Suicides . . . murders . . . wrecks ... fires . . . 
 accidents, of many sorts; how many volumes would 
 my newspaper accounts of these make up, I wonder? 
 A shelf full at least. 
 
 At night, in a crowded and mephitic courtroom, 
 watching curiously a handcuffed man while he stands 
 up at the bidding of the clerk of the court: "Look 
 upon the jury! Jury look upon the prisoner! Do 
 you find him guilty or not guilty?" 
 
 "Guilty," says the foreman; and a growl of voices 
 rumbles through the room — a man has been con- 
 demned to death by his f ellowmen for the slaying of 
 another. Everybody feasts morbidly upon the sight 
 of the man who is to be hanged by the neck. . . . 
 Thrice have I witnessed such a scene, in Boston or 
 New York, and once have I heard the voice of a mob 
 of ten thousand cheer a verdict of "not guilty" in a 
 famous case. They were cheering the escape from 
 death, not the proving of innocence. 
 
 And I remember one horrible night — ^horrible in 
 the retrospect, for at the time I was callous enough 
 — when I took part in a death watch in Charlestown 
 jail, in Boston. A murderer who was to be the first 
 victim of the electric chair in Massachusetts was dy- 
 ing of consumption; would the doctors succeed in 
 keeping him alive long enough to go to his man-or- 
 
Shapes of Death 69 
 
 dained doom, or would the bacilli of tuberculosis 
 cheat the chair of its prize? The time of the elec- 
 trocution was drawing nigh; and the bacilli were 
 working hard — how would the contest result? It 
 was a pretty problem — wonderful story for the "yel- 
 lows." Hundreds of thousands of readers were in- 
 terested; the sheriff's office was thronged with report- 
 ers from various papers and news associations; and 
 we sent in bulletins by telephone to our offices, and 
 swapped stories and cigars with the officials, and 
 wondered if the dying man would die after our papers 
 had gone to press and thus throw the story to the 
 evening editions? It would be a shabby trick on his 
 part, to be sure! 
 
 — And once, permitted to enter the prison beyond 
 the office, I heard the doleful, beastlike, choking cry of 
 the frenzied, fevered, fear-tortured, ignorant Italian 
 peasant for whom the great Hoe presses stood waiting, 
 and whom managing editors were discussing in a 
 dozen editorial offices — his story was selling papers; 
 he was a circulation booster. . . . 
 
 And his horrible cry reverberated through the iron 
 silences of the house of horror; and it tailed off into 
 a groaning cough. 
 
 But he lived to be electrocuted ; the editors and the 
 business managers being duly grateful. 
 
 Serving many newspapers, I have known the 
 morgues of cities from New York to San Francisco as 
 intimately as most men know their bedrooms; I have 
 counted the shapeless dead as they were dragged out 
 from railroad wrecks, or carried out from a great 
 
70 The High Romance 
 
 city hotel that had burned; I have followed the hunt 
 after murderers; and bent with the coroner, some- 
 times before the coroner, over the suicidal victims of 
 carbolic acid, pistol, knife, rope, drownings. And 
 always my editor was eager for the story of it; he 
 sought zealously the reason for each murder, suicide, 
 accident, but how seldom were the real reasons even 
 hinted at! 
 
 I remember one good story I found of a death under 
 an elevator in a department store. . . * 
 
 But I was young at my trade, at the time, and so 
 my error was found excusable when I tried to get my 
 story into print — a story of culpable negligence on 
 the part of the management of the store — a store that 
 was a big advertiser! 
 
 That story was not told. It was one more of the 
 many needless deaths that occur by the thousands. 
 I have heard coroner's juries solemnly rebuke rail- 
 way companies, and newspapers shriek for the dis- 
 trict attorney to do something after some peculiarly 
 horrible wreck; but nothing is ever done, nothing 
 really essential. . . . 
 
 For nothing can be done until the axe shall be laid 
 to the root of the tree that yields this everlasting crop 
 of needless and horrible deaths — the tree of selfish 
 Profit. Men and women are killing each other con- 
 tinually, by murder, disease, suicide, or "accidents," 
 that are more truly crimes, because they will not give 
 up selfish profit-seeking and run trains, and do all 
 business, and print newspapers, not to make money 
 for themselves at the expense of others, but as parts of 
 a loving service of man by man. ... 
 
Shapes of Death 71 
 
 But if all these truly unnecessary shapes of death 
 were eliminated, would there still not remain many, 
 many forms of painful and sudden and horrible 
 deaths, cutting lives off from the daylight and the 
 sun, and causing endless grief and pain? 
 
 Yes. 
 
 Then there is a mystery here which no human solu- 
 tion of the subject appears to reveal? 
 
 It does indeed thus seem to be. 
 
 Yet I cannot, I do not, nor shall I ever rest, until I 
 find aji answer to this mystery of death! 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE YELLOW GOD 
 
 1. Grub Street 
 
 FOR eighteen months I remained in the south. 
 During the first few months I suffered many 
 breakdowns; but after that my favourable environ- 
 ment, and my youth, and the vigorous constitution 
 which underlay the weakened organism, combined to 
 restore me. I earned my living in a variety of ways. 
 For a time I edited a weekly newspaper for an ab- 
 sentee proprietor. He returned unexpectedly one 
 day, and found the office occupied by a group of jolly 
 loafers who were helping me to dispose of a jug of 
 native wine sent as payment for an advertisement; as 
 other advertisements paid my board, and my barber- 
 ing, etc. He was properly shocked by this orgy, for 
 he was a devout Presbyterian or Methodist, or some- 
 thing; and we parted company. 
 
 Hard times followed, interspersed with joy days 
 when the very occasional checks for successful stories 
 came. I carried the chain of a surveyor's party 
 running the line of a projected railway. I picked 
 blackberries in the harvest season, at a penny a quart; 
 and in other vagabondish modes I managed to get 
 along. 
 
 I remember one tough time when credit was re- 
 fused me at the grocery store. But the milkman was 
 
 72 
 
The Yellow God 73 
 
 more patient, and continued to deliver a quart of milk 
 each morning. When the embargo began, I had half 
 a loaf of bread in my cupboard, a can of cocoa, a 
 package of cornstarch, and a bag of sugar. 
 
 So I boiled a pot of cornstarch, and ate it with 
 milk and sugar and bread, and defied all grocers. 
 The second day it occurred to me to flavour my some- 
 what savourless pudding with cocoa and sugar. The 
 result was ravishing. Brillat-Savarin himself could 
 not have been prouder of his choicest culinary crea- 
 tion than I of this chocolate pudding! 
 
 By the end of five or six days of cornstarch, choc- 
 olate pudding and milk, I was not so full of gusto. 
 In fact I was not very full of anything. When night 
 would come, I walked to the postoffice — to see if any 
 relief had arrived. I kept away from the streets by 
 day, ashamed to face my creditors. 
 
 Then came a check for fifty dollars! 
 
 What a meal I had, at the local hotel! 
 
 Yet in spite of such hardships, and of even more 
 serious handicaps; my frequent alcoholic excesses, 
 for example — my strength returned; and at last I went 
 back to Boston, and resumed my eff^orts to gain a foot- 
 ing as a writer. 
 
 It was a difficult period for me, a period of transi- 
 tion and unsettled conditions in all ways. 
 
 The work which I had done for Philip Hale's col- 
 umn had been produced with an almost complete 
 spontaneity. Ideas, or, more exactly, moods which 
 expressed themselves in the form of very brief 
 sketches or tales — fantastic, ironic, mordant in tone — 
 
74 The High Romance 
 
 came to me from I knew not where; and I wrote them 
 down right away, with few changes or revisions. Un- 
 questionably, they possessed literary, artistic, merit; 
 but only by such an editor as Philip Hale could they 
 find recognition or acceptance. 
 
 With the ordinary publications, the magazines and 
 newspapers, I was absolutely out of it with this kind 
 of work. Many editors, it is true, wrote to me prais- 
 ing this or that, approving the literary merit of my 
 work, the power of its style, etc. But my tales and 
 sketches were "unhappy," or "morbid," or "unpleas- 
 ant"; they were therefore unsalable, and I had not 
 yet learned how to write the commercialized stories 
 which have made our American magazines so medi- 
 ocre and futile; in fact, I could do very little success- 
 ful work of any kind at that time, or for years later, if 
 I approached my subject consciously. 
 
 In those first years, however, in my Quietest 
 sketches and tales, I was (within my own limitations, 
 which were palpable) quite distinctively an artist; a 
 maker of things of beauty for beauty's sake. I did 
 not dream of writing for money first, or success. 
 
 Indeed, I was doubly out of touch with the pre- 
 vailing notes of American "literature." (God save 
 that word, which now applies to railroad time-tables, 
 political advertising, real-estate pamphlets, as well as 
 to the fine art of poetry or prose.) For if there were 
 then very few writers in our country who thought and 
 lived and worked in the spirit of art, and fewer editors 
 or publishers to encourage or foster them, there were 
 on the other hand plenty of writers — and they grew 
 steadily in numbers and influence — who were strongly 
 possessed by the spirit of social service; writers who 
 
The Yellow God 75 
 
 considered their writing primarily from the point of 
 view of social criticism and re-construction. And for 
 a long time I was also quite outside this stream of 
 tendency. 
 
 So I drifted along, baffled and ignorant, bitterly in 
 revolt against the prevailing conventions; the timid 
 respectability of some periodicals; the crass vulgarity 
 and cheapness of spirit of the greater number. 
 
 For a little while I became a literary hack for one 
 of the most crude of the popular magazines; the fan- 
 tastic "Black Cat"; rewriting short stories, and con- 
 cocting others; crazy tales of murder and mystery. 
 
 Fortunately for my chances in the struggle for exist- 
 ence, I possessed a certain facility which while it 
 often militated against good work, helped me to pro- 
 duce magazine tales that would sometimes sell, though 
 not enough during many years to enable me to live 
 thereby. 
 
 So I naturally drifted into newspaper work, for the 
 yellow press; going, in time through the various 
 grades from cub reporter to city editor. 
 
 How well I remember my first assignment! It 
 was on a Sunday, and I was sent to a negro church in 
 the South End of Boston, where a sensational preacher 
 was expected to proclaim against the tyranny of the 
 white race. 
 
 I met a fellow reporter in the frowsy, malodorous 
 conventicle; a beginner like myself. But how differ- 
 ent a one! A Harvard man, fastidious and refined, 
 his head, like mine, stuffed with reading and with 
 literary dreams ; but not with unassimilated stuff, and 
 with his faculties trained to utilize and apply his read- 
 ing and his thoughts and observations. I wonder if 
 
76 The High Romance 
 
 Walter Prichard Eaton ever recalls that meeting in the 
 negro church? 
 
 I discovered in myself an ability to obtain and 
 write the news; and somewhat rapidly advanced, until 
 I was drawing the munificent wages of fifteen dollars 
 a week, and was signing my stories from time to 
 time. Also I had found congenial associates, and in 
 the Cabot Club, and the Bell-in-Hand, I drank ale (and 
 stronger stuff) and ate mutton pies and talked about 
 books and writing with men of that type which the 
 Press seems always to attract; men, that is to say, of 
 genuine literary gifts, some of whom succeed in real- 
 izing their talents, while others, either too superficially 
 armed for the battle, or merely fascinated by the gla- 
 mour of printer's ink, or else cursed with a weakness 
 for strong drink or drugs, merely sink through circle 
 after circle of illusion to the gutters, and the Mills 
 Hotel, and the morgue. How many of these have I 
 not known and companioned in Boston, New York, 
 San Francisco! How many have I not seen go 
 utterly down and finally out. Some few were true 
 artists, no matter what faults they possessed. Others 
 were nothing but scallawags. But others were vic- 
 tims. They were not equipped to strive with mam- 
 mon and to contend with their fellows for the rewards 
 of the market place. They were dreamers of the 
 beautiful, searchers after the ideal, lost knights of 
 the grail quest, waifs and estrays from the paths of 
 the high romance — yet better men, brighter souls, 
 warmer hearts, by far, than many of those who go by 
 in their motor cars as in chariots, dressed in the pinch- 
 
The Yellow God 77 
 
 back purple and the imitation fine linen of commercial 
 success. 
 
 Is there any branch of human effort which has been 
 more basely prostituted to mammon than modem lit- 
 erature? 
 
 Oh, you under dogs of Grub Street, you victims of 
 the press, you with whom I drank deep and held high 
 talk — much futile, foolish talk, I confess, but with 
 moments of splendour — I think that even the tavern 
 door may open nearer to the road of the Quest than 
 does the door of a bank — and I honour you more than 
 I do the skillful writer who sells himself. 
 
 2. A Matter Of Reticence 
 
 It was while I was in the midst of Bohemia-in- 
 Boston (imagine the conflict of atmosphere) that 
 something happened which was of palmary conse- 
 quence, yet something which is impossible for me 
 fully to relate, or even adequately to estimate as to 
 its influence and place in my life. 
 
 Which brings me to a frank confession of a failure 
 in my effort to chronicle my spiritual adventures. 
 For, after all, I have discovered that it is out of the 
 question to tell all your life to others. There are 
 things that belong too intimately to you and to those 
 near and dear to you to be given publicity, no matter 
 how delicately, how discreetly. There are heights 
 which are too high and depths too deep, to visit in 
 company with others, when you travel, in retrospect, 
 in the country of the soul. 
 
 Yet when I began this book, and in many versions of 
 
78 The High Romance 
 
 it which were written before this one, my plan was to 
 tell "all," "everything," "my life just as I lived it, 
 gloomy or sad; yes, everything. . . ." 
 
 It can't be done. 
 
 Poe says the paper would scorch and bum if one 
 really told all his life. Maybe it would in my case. 
 But, anyhow, I have discovered rather late in life that 
 there are things that cannot be told; and good things 
 are even more difficult to divulge than bad. 
 
 It is for this reason that I must pass by the magic 
 and the beauty of that summer when I found at last 
 a companion . . . that summer when as a "cub" re- 
 porter, receiving a salary of fifteen dollars a week, 
 blankly unaware of the responsibilities and duties of 
 real life, I married. ... 
 
 "What a fool you must have been," do I hear you 
 say? 
 
 Yes; no doubt I was foolish; and the reasonable 
 side of my own nature looks backward, and is full of 
 wonder; but for good or for bad, prudence and 
 worldly reason do not rule me. 
 
 My heart, and my soul, look backward, and regard 
 the present, and then smile into the future, — and 
 they rejoice . . . that piece of "foolishness" was to 
 be worth more to me in the end than most of the calm 
 and reasoned actions of my life. 
 
 We went, soon afterwards, to New York, where I 
 continued newspaper work. \ kept at it for the next 
 five or six years; with intervals during which we made 
 expeditions into country places where rent and living 
 were cheap in order that I might again, and yet again, 
 
The Yellow God 79 
 
 and again, try to make my way by writing for the 
 magazines. 
 
 Also I embarked with Bernard G. Richards upon 
 a singular adventure which was not very lucrative but 
 was surcharged with manifold interest. I had met 
 Richards in Boston, at a time when he was voicing the 
 spiritual life and aspirations of the Ghetto in those 
 wonderful essays, "The Discourses of Kiedansky"; 
 so beautifully written, so vibrant with intellectual 
 power, and at the same time romantic as only litera- 
 ture drawn from authentic life experience may be. 
 We formed a "Jewish-American Literary Bureau." 
 Richards translated articles from Russian and Yid- 
 dish newspapers which I transposed into newspaper 
 English and sold to the Sunday Sun and other papers. 
 But most of our "work" consisted in sitting in the 
 curious cafes of the East Side; and talking, talking, 
 talking by the hour with the Russian Jewish radicals 
 whose intense intellectual and artistic life supplies 
 such a sharp contrast to the mediocre and vulgar 
 tastes of so large a part of our native Americans. It 
 was the time when Jacob Gordin was the leading fig- 
 ure in East Side drama; and when the far-reaching 
 work of the Russian Revolution was at its most active 
 stage of propaganda. For most of one winter I prac- 
 tically lived on the East Side, and thus learned its 
 life at first hand — even as I had become acquainted 
 with other aspects of New York's singular pageant 
 through passing a year as a reporter at the Mulberry 
 Street police headquarters, and another year at the 
 Criminal Courts, and other years in general work, 
 here, there, and everywhere. 
 
 And from these experiences I tried to extract mat- 
 
80 The High Romance 
 
 ter for my art. As yet, no other or higher reason 
 for my existence had begun to dawn upon my soul 
 than my desire to transmute my life into terms of 
 literature. 
 
 But the same conditions already described still pre- 
 vailed: I sold quite a number of machine-made stories, 
 but not enough for our support, and I could not sell 
 the things I considered to be the products of my art; 
 and more and more I had to labour at the machine 
 style in fiction. In such labour, however, there is no 
 joy; in this drudgery there arises in the heart and 
 soul no song; and I cannot achieve success in work I 
 do not love, in work that does not march forward to 
 the inward music of the soul. And even in my 
 sketches, be they as "grim" as the editors assure me 
 they are, there was music at their making, — the tones 
 of truth. 
 
 But after each effort to force my work to recog- 
 nition, I was beaten back; my hour had not struck. I 
 was obliged to return to the city and go into the har- 
 ness of newspaper work. 
 
 I left the city, once more, shortly after the birth of 
 the latter of my two children, and during that time of 
 trouble and anxiety I worked for heaven only knows 
 how many hours daily and nightly, writing a book; — 
 one of the several forerunners of this one. 
 
 Then, still labouring frantically, like a man in a 
 fever-dream, and punctuating my work with coughs, 
 I wrote a short story and sent it to a magazine editor 
 under an assumed name. I was well nigh desperate 
 of ever making good under my own name. A literary 
 agent told me my case was the most extraordinary he 
 had ever encountered, in that so many editors knew 
 
The Yellow God 81 
 
 my work, believed I had talent, but felt that I 
 was hopeless for their purposes; some of them, indeed, 
 refused any longer even to read my stuff. I was 
 considered incorrigibly headstrong, densely imper- 
 vious to reason. I would not — because I could not 
 — take the advice they showered upon me in scores 
 of letters to write more in accordance with conven- 
 tional models, conventional ideals. I persisted, they 
 complained, in bothering them with stories that were 
 "unpleasant," or "unhappy," or "morbid." They all 
 recognized power in the handling of the work, and 
 originality of ideas and themes, and literary merit 
 (I quote the editors;) but this, it seems, was not 
 enough. So, really afraid that I was taboo, I sent 
 in, as I say, the new story under a false name. 
 
 3. Red Hieroglyphic Again 
 
 — And one morning as I was tramping through the 
 wet snow to the post office to see what manuscripts had 
 returned, something clicked in my throat; I tasted a 
 peculiar taste, well known to me, — and I remember 
 stopping and staring at that scarlet hieroglyphic of 
 mine enemy, there on the snow, as Crusoe stared at 
 the footprint. I visited the doctors. They all told 
 the same story. The old infected place in my lungs 
 had healed, but there was a new break; tuberculosis 
 was upon me. 
 
 And just then there came a gleam of great hope; 
 or what would have been a great hope, if it had come 
 before my breakdown. The magazine accepted my 
 story. S. S. McClure, its editor — one of the few 
 really discerning editors our magazine field can show 
 
82 The High Romance 
 
 — himself wrote glowing words of praise. He sent a 
 check, and asked for more work. 
 
 But for the present I wrote no more stories. I had 
 more important work. I had my life to fight for — 
 my life and my family and my art. 
 
 The check helped materially to swell the meagre 
 contents of my war-chest; for again I was taking the 
 field, going to the open, to do battle with my sinister 
 and insidious foe, the shadow; and it is only in the 
 field, in the open, that one may hope to overcome 
 that haunter and infector of crowds, of houses, of 
 cities — for when he fights from ambuscade he always 
 wins! 
 
 This time I went to Texas. Since I was obliged to 
 go somewhere, why not choose a new place, why not 
 the sun-drenched romantic plains of the great South- 
 West? So I argued, with pleasure, — yes, there was 
 pleasure for me even in that going forth, as there is 
 always when I may raise the song of the Open Road. 
 Zest of life has never left me, even at the worst of 
 times. I say "y^^" ^^ li^^ ^^ matter what thorns 
 may be in the bed of our espousals; no matter even 
 if death (her lean bully, according to Henley) is 
 lurking behind the door. 
 
 In San Antonio, Texas, I bought a tent and pitched 
 it on a hilltop outside that "city of the sun" — where 
 for twenty-nine days after I arrived the sun was not 
 seen; where "northers" howled across the plains, 
 down from out of Kansas, and rain streamed, and 
 sleet lashed, and ice formed morning after morning in 
 the water pail. 
 
 In the lee of my tent, beneath the projecting fly, 
 which I had made six feet longer than the tent cloth 
 
The Yellow God 83 
 
 itself, I set up my bed; and nightly turned in with 
 all my clothes on even to my boots and hat, and with 
 my overcoat on top of all, wearing, at times, two 
 suits of underwear, and yet sometimes I was forced 
 to get up and stamp about to warm myself. But 
 despite all this I began to improve in health; and 
 when my Lord the Sun (0 thou cherisher of life!) at 
 last came back, what an orgy of sun-bathing did I 
 indulge in! 
 
 As spring advanced I sent for my family, (there 
 were two children, now), and we camped out together. 
 My health grew steadily better, and I was able to do 
 a good deal of writing, very little of which, however, 
 I was able to sell; and even when you pay no rent 
 your family, to say nothing about yourself, must eat, 
 and be clothed ; and money lent by a friend to my wife 
 was all that kept us going, then and many times before 
 then, and later; so as it chanced that a railroad adver- 
 tised a low rate to San Francisco, my wife and I 
 decided to try our fortunes in that city, where I once 
 more entered newspaper life. 
 
 4. San Francisco 
 
 I had been only a few months in romantic and 
 lovable San Francisco — a city most congenial to me 
 — when our prospects suddenly improved; from a 
 financial point of view, anyhow. 
 
 Late one night, or, rather, early one morning, I 
 was playing poker in the back room of a saloon, with 
 several other men of my paper, when there entered 
 a cub reporter who said the managing editor was 
 looking everywhere for me, and wanted me at once, 
 in his office. 
 
84 The High Romance 
 
 Suspending our game, we looked at each other. 
 Our glances intermingled, electrically communicating 
 our common emotions of surprise, wonder, vague anx- 
 iety. Above the green-covered table, above the scat- 
 tered chips, and cards, the whiskey glasses, the pipes, 
 cigars and cigarettes, through the vitiated, grey atmos- 
 phere surcharged with tobacco smoke, our uneasy 
 glances wove jointly a message, clairvoyantly under- 
 stood by all, and most adequately voiced by one, who 
 said: 
 
 "What in hell's broke loose in the office now?" 
 "You can search me," said the cub reporter, and 
 departed. 
 
 Our paper was one where "shake-ups" were fre- 
 quent. Office politics were fierce and venomous. 
 We were at that time approaching a crisis. I had 
 been engaged in reporting a "story" which was a 
 matter at issue between the contending parties; so no 
 doubt I was to be drawn into the controversy. 
 "Wait for me, boys," I said, "I'll be back." 
 Taking a handful of cloves and cinnamon from the 
 bowl on the bar as I passed I emerged into a silent, 
 echoing street deep down among towering office 
 buildings. At the comer, I remember nodding to 
 Con Maguire, the cop; and I exchanged salutations 
 with the drivers of three night-hawk cabs, with Black 
 Tom, the seller of hot sandwiches, and with Darby the 
 Hog, the obese keeper of Little Bohemia, the dance- 
 hall, from which the muffled sounds of shuffling feet, 
 and of piano, comet and banjo, brassy and acidulous, 
 throbbed out. Tuming the corner, I was midmost of 
 one of the white light streets of the town. From a 
 hurrying automobile there came defiant declarations 
 
The Yellow God 85 
 
 of alcoholic enjoyment. Two young men ostenta- 
 tiously in evening dress were quarrelling drunkenly 
 with a cab driver, while from the depths of the vehicle 
 two women laughed shrilly. Electric signs advertised 
 cafes, billiard halls, restaurants, and theatres, these 
 latter closed now, but several music halls were still 
 thronged and lighted; and from their widely opened 
 doors the stages were visible, also the audiences. 
 Lamentable comedians evoked raucous laughter by 
 strokes of wit, strokes accomplished with a stuffed club 
 smiting the enormous paunch of a German, or with an 
 ax that clove the property skull of a Tramp ; women in 
 tights flourished weary legs above the heads of the 
 beer-drinkers at the slopped tables on the floor, singing 
 in shrill voices and coquetting in ghastly fashion with 
 the spenders and the openers. The tired, irritable 
 waiters hurried through the crowds with their trays, 
 and shook sleeping drunkards, and short-changed the 
 sodden and the careless. There were four of these 
 halls within a space of one hundred yards, and the 
 women of the night and the men of the night went from 
 one unto the other. There were the smells of alcohol, 
 stale beer, the steamy smells from underground 
 kitchens puffing from vent-holes, the smells of tobacco, 
 of musk, of patchouli. 
 
 The strange old woman from the East passed me 
 close — she who was said to be the rich wife of a 
 State Supreme Court justice. Her face was ghastly 
 with paint and powder, her costly clothes were in dis- 
 array; upheld by drugs she passed, diamonds at her 
 throat, her purse full of money, known in all the 
 big towns of the land as the woman of all the vices. 
 Kid Montanya, the Mexican lightweight pugilist, sur- 
 
86 The High Romance 
 
 rounded by a retinue of parasites, passed me as he 
 hurried from saloon to saloon, hall to hall, on the 
 wave of intoxication that had carried him off his feet 
 after his last fight; his pockets full of gold and silver, 
 — with both hands he would at times scatter it in the 
 music halls; gold and silver would sparkle and glitter 
 through the smoky air and men and women would 
 scramble in the muck of spilled beer, dust, and cig- 
 arette ends, on the floor. Supervisor Jaxon and a 
 group of lawyers, politicians and chorus girls came 
 more or less staggeringly from out the restaurant of 
 the highest prices and entered automobiles for a wild 
 spin through the park to the supper waiting at the 
 ocean road-house famed of sports. And here and 
 there, up and down, to and fro passed all the noctam- 
 bulists, of big and little degree, avid or weary, rest- 
 less, or stolid, doing daily business, or questing 
 frenetically the joys of the night. And through them 
 all I passed, who knew them all; as I knew the bus- 
 iness men by day in the tall office buildings, as I knew 
 the clergymen and the folk of the churches, and the 
 workers in the factories back in Petrero. And over- 
 head in a sky without a stain of cloud, blue as the 
 deepest of sea water, remote and passionless shone 
 the watching stars. 
 
 "Hello, Mike!" 
 
 A man shuffling unsteadily across the street spoke 
 in husky accents; and my eyes came down from the 
 stars and met the bleared eyes of my accoster, Ike 
 Davis, a copy reader. "Come and have a drink." 
 
 "No, thanks, not just now, Ike," I said; "the boss 
 wants me." 
 
 "Yes, by golly, yes! that's so!" said Davis, his 
 
The Yellow God 87 
 
 blood-shot alcoholic eyes glittering in the rays of the 
 arc-light overhead. "There's hell popping tonight." 
 
 "What's the particular rumpus, Ike?" 
 
 "Hell, / don't know! Another run of brain-storms, 
 I suppose. That shop's a madhouse, anyhow; regular 
 dippy-ward, between the Big Boss East, and all the 
 combinations here stabbing each other in the back. 
 I can see poor Bell's finish; and Blinn's, too; Scarratt 
 has had his knife out for a long time; and he'll get 
 them. He'd get me, too, if he could, but he can't. I 
 worked for the Big Boss, and made good, long before 
 he sneaked into the game. Why, once the Big Boss 
 said to me — " 
 
 But I had often heard the story of what the Big 
 Boss said to his favourite old toss-pot of a copy 
 reader. "I must break away, Ike," I said. "I'll see 
 you later." Old Ike nodded and shuffled away 
 toward the all-night saloon opposite, and I entered 
 the building and was carried up to the editorial floor 
 by the sleepy elevator man. 
 
 In the big city room were the night city editor, the 
 copy readers, sitting in a circle at a big round table; 
 two cub reporters on the late watch; Romaine, the 
 dramatic critic in evening clothes, finishing his 
 special for Sunday which should have been ready two 
 days before, and a squad of copy boys. The last 
 edition was going to press in ten minutes. 
 
 "Well, it's about time you showed up," the youthful 
 night editor called out irritably. 
 
 "What's the matter?" 
 
 "Mr. Murcher wants to see you. He's in his office 
 now — " 
 
 The ni^bt editor ceased abruptly. The door of a 
 
88 The High Romance 
 
 private office half way down the long room had quickly 
 opened, and from the doorway there protruded a 
 bulky head and face; a head round and covered with 
 a shock of short, coarse, black hair; a face red as raw 
 beef, mottled with redder pimples, a face lickerish, 
 humorous and cruel, powerful, violent and ruttish, 
 the face of John Scarratt, the news editor of the Daily- 
 News, who was once its office boy, who had been 
 managing editor after managing editor come, reign, 
 abdicate or be overthrown, and had seen city editors 
 come and go by the score. 
 
 "This way," he called out to me in his harsh voice. 
 Then Scarratt continued speaking to some one within 
 the room: "Here he is now," and stepped out of the 
 doorway and closed the door as I approached the 
 private office. He looked down the long room over 
 the heads of the bent copy-readers, looking at the man 
 huddled over his proofs at the city desk. And Scar- 
 ratt grinned; he grinned, spat noisily on the floor, and 
 went out to take a drink. 
 
 I walked over the soft, rich carpet of Managing 
 Editor Murcher's private office toward the flat-top desk 
 by the great window overlooking the street. 
 
 "Sit down; I want to talk with you," said Mr. 
 Murcher. 
 
 He was one of the most successful of the various 
 editors in the service of the Big Boss, the owner and 
 manager of the paper, and also one of the least pub- 
 licly kno^vn. And he was the one managing editor 
 who managed John Scarratt instead of being man- 
 aged by Scarratt. 
 
 I sat down, and looked enquiringly at Mr. Murcher. 
 I already saw that I was not to be "called down," that 
 
The Yellow God 89 
 
 I was not here to "stand on the carpet" and be re- 
 buked. Well, then, there must be some special 
 assignment for me. . . . 
 
 "How old are you?" asked Mr. Murcher. 
 
 All hazy thoughts vanished in my shock of surprise, 
 "I am nearly thirty," I answered. 
 
 "Older than I had thought; older than you look, 
 — and old enough to bear responsibility," remarked 
 the editor. 
 
 "I hope so," I said. 
 
 "Old enough to bear responsibility — " he repeated, 
 scrutinizing me closely. "Mr. Williams," he con- 
 tinued, with a sudden change of key; "I want to tell 
 you something, and to make a proposition — " 
 
 I listened for ten minutes in silence. At the end 
 of that time I walked out of the private office into the 
 city room. 
 
 Then I stopped, stock still. Suddenly, from deep 
 down beneath the earth, in the bowels of the building, 
 there mounted the first note of a sound ; the first, deep, 
 troubling, throbbing note of a sound profound, far- 
 reaching and significant. The final form locked, the 
 last stereotype rushed into place, the foreman had 
 started the presses; and the last edition of the paper 
 was in the printing. Coal burned, water boiled, 
 steam mounted, rods raced, wheels turned, rolls of 
 white paper (for which forests had been felled) spun 
 out their endless ribands; ink smeared the bright 
 plates, which touched with the precision of fate the 
 appointed spaces; and from the ends of the machines 
 dropped in their thousands the newspapers, — filled 
 with the records of the doings of men and women, with 
 the events of American life: murder, marriage, birth, 
 
90 The High Romance 
 
 betrayal, dance, invention, business, politics, games 
 . . . life, life, life. 
 
 Intently I gave ear, thrilling bodily as the whole 
 building thrilled to the grinding of the machine; my 
 muscles and nerves tensely strung. The birth-song 
 of the news of the day! — dear Lord, what a dithyram- 
 bic chant of pulsating life! and by what a mystic 
 concatenation was I now hearing it in the minute when, 
 from out the inchoate mass of the tenders of the great 
 machine of the news, I had been selected to act as one 
 of its directors! 
 
 Yes. 
 
 I was now the city editor of my journal. 
 
 The editorial room seemed incredibly strange as I 
 looked about it, glancing at the weary copy-readers, 
 at the back-bent night editor, at the office boys. All 
 its familiarity had fled; for here where I served in 
 careless, accustomed skill, I was to command. . . . 
 
 City editor . . . what a queer chance! I had 
 always wished that some day I might be city editor; 
 not for long; not so to remain; but just to reach the 
 goal aimed for by so many reporters, to taste that 
 triumph, to drink of authority, responsibility, power 
 — those strong drinks of men! and to read one more 
 significant page in the book of life before turning to 
 my real work — the building of the crystal house. 
 
 The night editor called to me as I dreamily passed 
 the city desk; but although I heard him I did not 
 stop. 
 
 Poor fellow! Scarratt's knife had reached him — 
 and he didn't know it as yet. And Blinn, the day city 
 editor, who had once been Murcher's particular pet, 
 he, too, was to go. Neither was "fired," and that was 
 
The Yellow God 91 
 
 good; for I would have disliked to be forced into the 
 places of men put out of a job. Blinn was going to 
 take the head of the copy desk; Bell was going to the 
 capital as the correspondent; politics were his real 
 field, said Murcher. The double city editor system 
 was to be abandoned for the time. I was to manage 
 both jobs. This would not last long, Murcher had 
 promised. Just as soon as a competent man could 
 be found he would be put on at night — that is, if I 
 "made good." 
 
 I raised a face of mute wonder to the stars (at 
 which, however, I now was not looking), as I thought 
 over the scene in the office. I had no idea that those 
 "higher up" had been watching me so closely, and 
 that my work had been liked so well. 
 
 Unheedingly, unseeingly, I passed through the 
 street. Yet the sub-conscious memory recalls the 
 scene most vividly. Long lines of covered wagons 
 were standing at the curbs and streams of men and 
 youths were already bundling the papers into them, 
 to be carried to ferries, to trains, to distributing sta- 
 tions here, there, and everywhere, so that the news of 
 the day should usher in the day for hundreds of miles 
 around. I bought a copy of the paper — my paper; 
 and what a new sense the word had! Through the 
 scattering and disappearing noctambulists I passed 
 on to the saloon in the room back of which my former 
 comrades were still playing poker. 
 
 How strange they, too, seemed, as I stood in the 
 door for a moment, looking at them, before they 
 noticed my return. How tired they looked, in spite 
 of their interested faces; how haggard and how lined 
 their faces — and all were young men, the most even 
 
92 The High Romance 
 
 younger than I. And just for a breath, there in the 
 smoke-thickened, liquor-tainted air, in the midst of 
 the hour near dawn when the tide of life runs slack 
 and the dying die, to me there came a fear, and it 
 whispered through the flush of my triumphant mood: 
 the fear of exhaustion: the fear of becoming played 
 out. The game was so unresting, so violently head- 
 long, the pace so unrelaxing. Never any rest, never 
 any solitude, never any time for absorption, for con- 
 templation, for the digestion of the news gathered so 
 omnivorously, and so voraciously; gathered crude, 
 dispensed crude — and would I, even I, who dreamed 
 of extracting from this mass of crude facts and expe- 
 riences the essential element of Art be able to do so? 
 . . . but the words of the fear were merely whispered, 
 chillingly, indistinctly, and then the fear passed by. 
 I reached out and poured a drink, and the players 
 stared. 
 
 But they did not know what moved me, because I 
 was to keep the secret of my promotion until New 
 / Years, two weeks later. 
 
 Fortunately, the "shake-up" was not a catastrophe. 
 Nobody, this time, lost his job. There was merely 
 a changing about of positions. For me, it meant that 
 for increased pay I shouldered unending work and 
 responsibility. 
 
 For in the service of the yellow god of sensational, 
 commercialized journalism there is no cessation; the 
 machine stops never; its directors and tenders never 
 rest. And I never rested. My life sped like a series 
 of biograph pictures. 
 
The Yellow God 93 
 
 Between ten and eleven in the forenoon I was at 
 my desk reading the morning papers marked by an 
 assistant, comparing what my paper contained with 
 what the rival newspapers contained; deriving im- 
 mense satisfaction from the "scoops" scored by us; 
 wincing bitterly over the "scoops" scored by the 
 others. Then as the reporters appeared, there was 
 the anxious and important task of assigning to each 
 man that story for which in my judgment he was 
 best fitted. There were the department reporters to 
 talk to on the 'phone — the ship news man, the police 
 court men, the criminal court men, the city hall man, 
 the Federal bureaus man, the society men and women, 
 the suburban correspondents. Then as the evening 
 papers appeared, edition after edition, there were all 
 the new developments of the day's grist of news to 
 handle. Always the telephone bell was ringing, and 
 reporters called in from a score of places to announce 
 events big or little which I must weigh, sift, and judge. 
 And ever there was a stream of callers filtering 
 through the reception room without; professional 
 tipsters trying to sell stories; men and women with 
 various axes to grind; aggrieved persons threatening 
 libel suits; cranks and stark lunatics. The "higher 
 ups" would appear during the afternoon with sug- 
 gestions, with criticisms, with orders, with brilliant 
 yellow ideas for stories which already I had "cov- 
 ered" in some other fashion and now had to attack 
 from some new point of view. Then as the afternoon 
 waned, there was the gathering of heads of depart- 
 ments which the irreverent and the scornful dubbed 
 the "Paresis Club"; consisting of managing editor, 
 news editor, telegraph editor, "make-up" man, he who 
 
94 The High Romance 
 
 put the paper together amid the clamour of the com- 
 posing room in the last hurried, feverish hour of the 
 day, and the head of the art department. Then all 
 the stories of the day were discussed, criticized, and 
 weighed, and the space to be given each, and the treat- 
 ment to be accorded the important stories, or those 
 reflecting the paper's policy, were decided upon; news 
 editor, and telegraph editor, clamouring for space 
 which I considered due to my city news, and the make- 
 up editor fighting us all, with his: "We have eighty 
 columns of ads — cut your stories down, cut 'em down; 
 and make all those two-column cuts one column. Cut 
 to the bone!" 
 
 And generally, after all this anxious deliberation, 
 our plans went to pieces long before midnight — shat- 
 tered by the advent of the always recurring Unex- 
 pected. Somebody would surely be murdered, or 
 some train would wreck, some cashier flee, or wife 
 elope, or millionaire be raked with a muck-rake, or 
 some King sneeze thrice at church; and the careful 
 schedule would be smashed into flinders. Over 
 buzzing wires from all the ends of the earth would 
 come the news — the news — the news; throughout the 
 length and breadth of the city men and women were 
 forever weaving the news, — the news — the news. 
 
 And often when the columns were filled, and ar- 
 ranged and the presses, oiled and ready, stood waiting 
 for the forms, then . . . "Ting-a-ling-ling" the tel- 
 ephone bell would spring its alarum, — a great fire was 
 raging in the tenement district, and "heroes" were 
 being made amid the smoke and flame; or there was 
 a collision on the bay, or a gun-fight to the death in 
 a music hall. Then would the make-up editor curse 
 
The Yellow God 95 
 
 the universe, and fast-fire typewriter operators banged 
 their machines to dictation made by a reporter at a 
 telephone, or by myself, and the front page was given 
 another dress. And sometimes news of such moment 
 "broke" so late, that the order for an "extra" was 
 given, and then the grey daylight would be abroad 
 before I would leave the desk. 
 
 So it went on, day after day, night after night, and 
 for me it probably would eventually have brought 
 another breakdown if I had remained long at the city 
 desk. 
 
 But that was not to be. 
 
 The end — or the beginning of the end of that ad- 
 venture — came on April 18, 1906. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE CITY THAT NEVER WAS 
 
 1. April 18, 1906 
 
 I WAS in Coppa's restaurant the night before, dining 
 with James Hopper and Xavier Martinez. They 
 were patrons of the place; members of the Coppa 
 group ; I was a newcomer, and Hopper had taken me 
 to dine in the queer little cafe where for a few happy 
 years there had dwelt a spirit akin to the true-blue- 
 Bohemianism of English taverns in the long ago, and 
 that of the Paris cafes in the days before Montmartre 
 became a side-show of the commercialized vice of 
 Paris. The little "Lark" that sang so blithely, and 
 whose lyric voice carried so far (I remember it 
 reached me away off in Canada, where I was living 
 when Bruce Porter and Gelett Burgess and Porter 
 Garnett and the others sent it winging from the Golden 
 Gate), was itself a "lark" of that gay little company 
 of writers and painters and newspapermen who fore- 
 gathered in Coppa's, under the weird frescoes, at the 
 tables set apart for their use by a host who knew that 
 artists must eat even if they didn't have the price, and 
 who saw to it that they did. Wherefore, the names 
 of bonanza millionaires, and frock-coated politicians, 
 and many others who in their generation seemed fixed 
 in the seats of the mighty in San Francisco, hath per- 
 ished from the records, or decorate sumptuous tombs, 
 
 96 
 
The City That Never Was 97 
 
 maybe; but the name of Joe Coppa is a living name 
 and will be passed on from writer to writer, and 
 painter to painter, down the corridors of time, and 
 pagans will pledge his memory (at least until the bug- 
 aboo, Prohibition, comes) and Christians will pray 
 for his friendly soul. For we who write and you who 
 read do both in vain if ever we forget that cities and 
 men do not live in wealth and material power and 
 pride, but in things that are lovely and of good report. 
 
 From Coppa's, that night, I went back to my office; 
 for my day's work was only beginning. Not until 
 long after midnight would my day be over. Hopper 
 — that most authentic artist, wielder of a beautiful style 
 — and I had been talking, I remember, of what chiefly 
 interested us; which thing was distinctly not the news- 
 paper work which we both were doing; it was art — 
 in particular, the art of writing. We had met some 
 little time before, up on the top of Telegraph Hill, 
 reporting some murder or other. Both agreed, how- 
 ever, on the spot, and often afterwards, that if a 
 writer must do reporting in order that the body shall 
 have its bread and its raiment while the soul goes 
 adventuring in other realms, why certainly, no other 
 city can off"er such solace as San Francisco. And by 
 and by, we knew, the time would come when the news- 
 paper office would only be remembered as one remem- 
 bers a dream strangely mingled of pain and pleasure, 
 romance and deadly drudgery, swampy evil — and a 
 few, far flights toward the stars. 
 
 There once was a time, and old San Francisco 
 richly knew it — and Boston, and New York, and the 
 other cities — when the newspaper was what it should 
 be; when, save for the few out-and-out blackmailers 
 
98 The High Romance 
 
 and political henchmen of the pen, who are always 
 to be found near the press, the newspaper rested upon 
 a basis of ethics; when editorial writers were truly 
 concerned in expressing moral ideas; when there 
 were journalists in the proper sense, and literary men 
 of first class quality, thinkers, artists in style — men 
 like the Golden Era group: Bret Harte, Mark Twain, 
 Prentice Mulford; Noah Brooks; James King of 
 William; that stalwart and romantic personage, 
 Ambrose Bierce; Henry George; James V. Coffey; 
 Arthur McEwen; Edward F. Cahill; Edward H. 
 Hamilton; and James Tufts. 
 
 A few are still with us. Hamilton and Tufts are 
 yet in the game. Hamilton, one of the truest stylists 
 who have ever graced the pages of the American daily 
 press; Tufts, a great editor whose genius was throttled 
 by the vulgarity of the yellow press. The decline of 
 the newspaper in San Francisco — or anywhere else — 
 is not due to the reporters, the writers, the editors. It 
 is due to the curse of commercialism; the turning of 
 a great force for enlightenment and enjoyment into 
 a mechanism for making dollars, or playing politics, 
 or obtaining personal power. 
 
 There were authentic poets, too, in those by-gone 
 days ; such singers as Joaquin Miller, Charles Warren 
 Stoddard, Ina Coolbrith, and the other men and women 
 who under Bret Harte and later editors gave the Over- 
 land Monthly a place with the Atlantic Monthly in the 
 hierarchy of American occasional literature. But the 
 fatal curse of profit-chasing had fallen upon the press, 
 not only in San Francisco, but almost universally in 
 the United States, long before 1906. Most news- 
 papers existed for cash first, or the promotion of per- 
 
The City That Never Was 99 
 
 sonal interests; all other interests trailed a long way 
 after these; and with this fall from an ethical plane 
 came a coincidental invasion of screaming sensation- 
 alism and crude vulgarity. 
 
 A few lonely figures — and, here and there in our 
 country, but not now, alas, in San Francisco, a few 
 newspapers, still possessing their souls, survive from 
 that earlier epoch. Perhaps if we are able to over- 
 throw the rotten fabric of commercialism which mas- 
 querades as civilization, the true newspaper will come 
 again into its own, in San Francisco as elsewhere; but 
 as we walked through Montgomery Street that bland 
 still April evening in 1906, Hopper and I had good 
 reasons for agreeing that when it was not corrupt the 
 newspaper was stupid and vulgar, a mechanism for 
 making money, and no longer an instrument of culture 
 or of education. 
 
 Caruso was singing Don Jose in Carmen, that 
 night, with the Metropolitan Opera House company. 
 My paper was "playing it up," as we say, and when I 
 reached my desk there was a long list of reporters to 
 assign to various portions of the grand opera story; 
 a corps of women to do "society" features; hustling 
 interviewers who were to gather from "well-known 
 men-about-town," "first-nighters," and other kinds of 
 "prominent citizens," their opinions and criticisms of 
 the occasion. Frank Mulgrew was one of those re- 
 porters, and we have often chuckled together since 
 over his interviews that night with Jerry Dinan, the 
 Chief of Police, and similar connoisseurs. "What do 
 I think of Caruso? Will I talk for publication? 
 Sure! You know what to say, Frank — fix it up for 
 me." We published columns of the stuff next mom- 
 
100 The High Romance 
 
 ing — next morning when . . . but I'm coming to that 
 a bit later on. 
 
 It was two or three o'clock in the morning when 
 I shut up my desk, and left the office. I dropped in 
 at the Old Crow saloon, that "barrel house" so 
 favoured by newspaper workers. Ike Allen, the tel- 
 egraph editor, was already there, and he introduced 
 me to Joe Mansfield, a brother city editor. Jimmy 
 Britt, the lightweight champion pugilist of the day, 
 and his brother, Willus, were of the group. A little 
 later, leaving Jimmy Britt doing a cakewalk around 
 and about the barrels which served as tables in the 
 Old Crow, to the huge delight of everybody, I walked 
 up Geary Street to my apartment, just the other 
 side of Larkin, not far from Van Ness Avenue. Few 
 and far between were motor cars, in 1906. In the 
 night hours, fantastic horses drew shambling, ambig- 
 uous looking cabs, handled by drivers who knew every 
 house in all the Queer Streets of the Latin Quarter, 
 of the Barbary Coast, of Chinatown; and knew equally 
 well all the residences of those who maintained Queer 
 Street as a going business through their habitual pat- 
 ronage. 
 
 I am not one of those to whom the name San 
 Francisco is an evocation of all that is disreputable, 
 all that is bold and shameless in sinning, as it seems 
 to be for those who draw their limited ideas of the 
 city from the pages of critics who only saw the mere- 
 tricious, or the corrupt, aspects of old San Francisco. 
 Every city has these aspects; but most cities are sed- 
 ulous in whitewashing their charnel-houses, in hiding 
 their shame. San Francisco is very frank, even in 
 her sinning; especially was she so in days gone by. 
 
The City That Never Was 101 
 
 In the foolish fashion of most young men who 
 would writers be, I spent and wasted many, many 
 nights "studying life" in that blaring block in Pacific 
 Street where roared the high tide of Barbary Coast, 
 or through the sinister alleys and musky streets and 
 lanes of Chinatown and the Latin Quarter, and I 
 watched from the close point of view of a city editor's 
 desk the inner workings of corrupt politics, always 
 such a curse in San Francisco. Wherefore I might 
 write, out of a fund of experience, singular chronicles 
 of the shady side of Queer Street, in this city. But 
 San Francisco's real life was not fully reVealed in 
 these accidentals. A very wise old book which some- 
 times I read when all other books fail me, says, in 
 Latin which I can't read, but which fortunately has 
 a translation paralleling its columns, that "God . . . 
 in creating human nature, hast wonderfully dignified 
 it, and still more wonderfully reformed it"; and 
 whether I mingle with the life of Boston, or of Tucson, 
 New York, Chicago, Vineyard Haven, Reno, or San 
 Francisco — whether in city or country, among rich or 
 poor, I find that evil always is easy to discover, but 
 good is less obtrusive. Perhaps the worst blunder 
 an observer of life can make would be to think that 
 evil is the predominating quality in any particular 
 city, or any particular person. The most subtle ar- 
 tistic intelligence I have ever met — that of Harvey 
 Wickham, my closest comrade in my San Francisco 
 adventures — did more to show me this consoling truth 
 than any other influence. We roamed together 
 through the underworld, and together we watched the 
 stars of many a dawn fade like silver music from the 
 disappearing darkness. 
 
102 The High Romance 
 
 That morning, in San Francisco, as I walked home, 
 Barbary Coast was still wide awake and seething; all 
 the dark places in Queer Street were doing a thriving 
 business; a revised version of the old Vigilante Com- 
 mittee had its secret agents at work trailing the steps 
 of grafting politicians, and in Grant Avenue, the 
 night before, where the anarchists and the Socialists 
 and the religious freaks were wont to do their spout- 
 ing. Seventh Day Adventists were predicting the de- 
 struction of this modem Sodom and Gomorrah; this 
 "Paris of the Pacific," as one loud-mouthed person 
 called her — his feeble mind not holding the thought 
 of the Paris of Notre Dame, or of the Louvre, or 
 Pasteur or of Puvis de Chavannes, but the Paris which 
 used to be maintained by the dirty dollars of such 
 Americans as he. But this meretricious San Fran- 
 cisco, this San Francisco of Barbary Coast and the 
 cosmopolitan stews — what was it compared to the 
 mighty city of decent people who were sleeping in 
 that still, silent, balmy hour before the dawn; the city 
 of such great works, of such beauty, of such romance 
 and spirituality, of such future greatness? No, no, 
 no! Let somebody else write about Barbary Coast, 
 and ambiguous restaurants, if they will; I celebrate, 
 out of my heart and stirred to my soul by faith and 
 hope and love, the true San Francisco, the city where 
 the trails of the high romance of my soul led to so 
 many brave adventures! 
 
 2. The Springs Of Goodness 
 
 I particularly remember the singular sensation I 
 experienced of realizing how still, now, and how 
 
The City That Never Was 103 
 
 silent, the city was. It seemed as though I were in 
 the very centre of a circle of stillness and silence. 
 
 Now and then, this profound silence would be 
 broken by a sound beginning very far away, like the 
 rumour of a sound. It would then come near and 
 nearer, rise to its highest, and then pass, and grow 
 lower, softer, and fade away — like the ghost of a 
 sound. . . . Automobiles coming home with merry- 
 makers from the beach resorts. At that time, the 
 fashion in motor horns ran to something that reminded 
 me, especially at night, of some strange animal — a 
 sort of melodious, gobbling sound, rising and falling, 
 and with something ominous under the rather musical 
 effect. 
 
 And as I heard the motor cars, one by one, with a 
 sort of clock-work regularity, passing by, I could 
 imagine, with a vividness like a moving picture play, 
 the scenes in the roadhouses by the beach beyond the 
 great park where the smooth broad roads glimmered 
 pale beneath the high, black trees. At sloppy tables 
 I saw the drinkers, while on the polished floors men 
 and women danced — or, rather, they "ragged," as 
 they call the up-to-date perversion of the dance; while 
 the piano player, a young, pallid fellow with a fuming 
 cigarette stuck to his lower lip, banged out the rag- 
 time music. 
 
 But the last of the motor cars passed by. The 
 intensified silence drew its circle closer about me. 
 
 Night was passing. Dawn was at hand. The 
 southern and eastern parts of the sky were paling, 
 and there the stars were dim. Elsewhere, however, 
 the stars were still big and clear, and the sky darkly 
 and profoundly blue. A couplet from Wordsworth 
 
104 The High Romance 
 
 came into my mind : "Dear God ! the very houses seem 
 asleep; and all that mighty heart is lying still!" 
 
 No doubt, within many indeed of these quiet, dark- 
 ened houses — in Chinatown, or the Tenderloin quar- 
 ter, for example — evil was awake and busy — as hor- 
 rible dreams may go on behind a sleeper's placid fore- 
 head — but outwardly all was calm, and broodingly 
 silent. There came upon me a keen realization of 
 the wonder of the city's suspended consciousness. 
 There was a singular magic in the suggestion of rest 
 that emanated from those shadowy congeries of va- 
 cant, criss-crossing streets, and houses darkly slum- 
 bering. In this curious space between night and day 
 it seemed to me that sleep had finally conquered all 
 resistance, had worn down the stubbornness of the 
 most determined noctambulists, just as a quiet, 
 strong-willed nurse or mother might subdue her ob- 
 streperous children. 
 
 A sense of awe came next. I felt as if I must be 
 the only person left awake in all San Francisco, and 
 as if I had no right to be awake. I felt like an 
 intruder. It was as if I had blundered into some 
 lodge-room or chapel where a secret rite was about 
 to be celebrated. There was something in all this 
 quietude which troubled me deeply. The city no 
 longer seemed merely resting, placidly slumbering, 
 relaxed and at peace. It became to me like a city 
 held in a trance. It brought back to me the uneasy, 
 curious, feelings I had once experienced when I saw 
 a hypnotist put a number of men and women into 
 deep entrancement and without using any audible 
 words plant his suggestions in their minds. Only 
 now I felt my awe more profoundly. I seemed 
 
The City That Never Was 105 
 
 aware of strange things happening behind the veil of 
 the dusky dawn and the unbroken quiet of the city's 
 sleep. I seemed to be on the point of actually know- 
 ing just how all the hundreds of thousands of men 
 and women and children slumbering all about me 
 were being surcharged, like so many living batteries, 
 with new energy generated by the tremendous, invis- 
 ible dynamos of sleep and silence. Streams of fresh 
 life were pulsing into them all for the use of the 
 coming day. Power for thought and for action. 
 Power more potent, and infinitely more subtle, than 
 all the electrical currents that could be generated by 
 a hundred Niagaras! And soon these living batteries, 
 each with a place in the vast, complex, living machine 
 of the city, would awaken and take its part in the 
 diurnal working of the great organisms and so expend 
 the energy now pouring into them. 
 
 This energy, I wondered — as who of us hasn't won- 
 dered! — from where did it come? And what, really, 
 was it? And where was it driving the human ma- 
 chines? 
 
 This everlasting, triadic question to which there is 
 no answer — the whence, and why and where! 
 
 How futile to ask it. 
 
 It was just as futile as it would be to go upon one 
 of the city's many hills, and ask the why and where- 
 fore of the tides of the sea, or the system of the 
 stars, or the secret of the rising sun. 
 
 And yet, as I dreamed my way homeward through 
 the silent city under the mystical stars, I was seized 
 with a deep, thrilling impression that I was about to 
 understand the cosmic mystery — that the secrets of 
 the sky and of the earth and water, and the secret of 
 
106 The High Romance 
 
 man, were about to be revealed. There was the 
 thought that between the sleepers in the city, and the 
 stars and the sea and the earth, there was in this mo- 
 ment the closest kind of communion — as though the 
 tide of life flowing into the sleepers was gathering its 
 force from sea and air and earth and stars — and 
 that now: this instant, all were in rapport — and had 
 come to a crisis; like a clock that had reached its 
 time to strike the hour. 
 
 And this mystical moment left the glow of a thought 
 in my mind, as a meteor leaves a trail of light, though 
 its central brightness disappears. It seemed to me 
 that I understood at least one chief factor that 
 entered into the wonder of the city's sleep. This 
 factor was my realization of how united at this 
 moment all the hundreds of thousands of individual- 
 ities were in the condition of sleep. So far as 
 ordinary consciousness was concerned, and the 
 ordinary aff'airs of life, egoism — that potent source 
 of human discordance — was in abeyance. All the 
 warring and irreconcilable elements that spring from 
 egoism were withdrawn from manifestation. 
 
 What would be the result should the sleepers 
 awaken bereft of egoism — united in waking life as 
 now they were united in slumber — and if they should 
 employ in unity and for unity the energy they were 
 now deriving together from the secret springs of 
 sleep and silence? 
 
 Once more my mind gave up a memory — that para- 
 graph of Goethe's which one reads with yearning 
 wistfulness, and the wish: "'Oh, if it could only 
 happen!" I suppose you know the paragraph; it 
 runs something like this: "There is in man a force 
 
The City That Never Was 107 
 
 — a spring of goodness — which counterbalances 
 egoism; and if by a miracle it could for a moment 
 suddenly be active in all men, the earth would be at 
 once free from evil." 
 
 I was dreaming, as who does not. Dreaming 
 vainly, perhaps, yet I don't disown or repudiate my 
 dream — I only acknowledge that I have not realized 
 my share of it. Yes, that's a good way to express 
 the matter — for my dream was but a share of a bigger 
 dream — which is the dream of tliis age. It is with 
 us all, in greater or lesser degree. It is the dream 
 of human Betterment — the dream of Brotherhood! 
 I don't use the word "dream" as a symbol of some- 
 thing unreal. No — dreams such as this are what 
 Shelley said poetry was — the mirrors of the great 
 shadows which the future casts upon the troubled 
 surface of the present. All the many dreams by 
 which we think to effect the common end are parts 
 and fragments of the one, great dream. Like the 
 co-operating thoughts of one, gigantic mind, they 
 work together to realize the world's desire, even when 
 they appear to contradict and neutralize each other. 
 
 For I believed — and here let me say that I still 
 believe — no matter what anybody may say — no 
 matter how many facts may seem to argue against the 
 truth of my belief — I believed then, and I believe 
 now, that the inscrutable forces of Good are power- 
 ful today with the power of the rising tide. They 
 are changing doubt to hope, and fear to faith, and 
 anger and hatred into love, more mightily, perhaps, 
 than at any other time since when the Prince of Peace 
 and Lord of Love Himself expressed the world's de- 
 sire, when he said: "Thy kingdom come: Thy 
 
108 The High Romance 
 
 will be done in earth as in heaven." The Kingdom 
 of peace and of brotherly love. Good Will, to the 
 sway of which the whole creation moves! 
 
 My credo . . . and we'll get back to the 
 story. . . . 
 
 3. The Shock 
 
 But I was too tired, bodily, and in mind, and soul 
 as well, to maintain my meditation. I had reached 
 my home; I let myself in and got noiselessly to bed. 
 
 I suppose it was nearly four o'clock when at last 
 my excited brain ceased its working, and sleep came. 
 
 And almost at once I came awake again — vaguely 
 wondering what was the matter? 
 
 The big bed in which I lay was trying its best to 
 imitate a bucking broncho and to throw me out of 
 the window, toward which it was lurching. The air 
 itself seemed to be pulling at me, with invisible 
 fingers clutching from all directions at once, but un- 
 evenly; the plaster was falling in big chunks; and 
 there was a vast, crescendic roaring noise, incompre- 
 hensible: a vast sea of sound. 
 
 There was the commingling of the crash of falling 
 walls, the tumbling of millions of bricks, the rending 
 and cracking and splintering of wood, the shattering 
 of window glass by the hundreds of thousands of 
 sheets and panes, and myriads of other sounds. All 
 these were based, as it were, on another, unwordable 
 sound, which was the roaring of the earthquake — 
 the groaning of the very earth itself. 
 
 What a racket! 
 
The City That Never Was 109 
 
 It was like — well, it was like — let me see, now 
 it was like — Oh, heavens above, / don't know what it 
 was like! Nobody knows. Fancy a billion big 
 drays, loaded with iron rails passing along over 
 rough cobble stones, with the rails clangorously fall- 
 ing, and the windows of all the houses being 
 shattered by the concussions, and then fancy — but, 
 no, you can't! Neither can I. That noise is not 
 to be conjured up by fancy — it can only be remem- 
 bered. 
 
 Yet that terrible noise was nothing at all — a mere 
 trifle, a trivial incident, a bagatelle, compared to the 
 impression of the earthquake as earthquake, if I may 
 so express myself. 
 
 But how can I tell you? I really cannot tell 
 you! 
 
 For there was something about that shock that 
 struck, deeper than any sound could penetrate, into 
 the substance of your soul. 
 
 — You know how it is when we try to suggest 
 some tremendous emotion or altogether unusual 
 sense of calamity — we say, "It was as if the earth 
 moved under our feet," or, "It was as if the earth 
 trembled." 
 
 So what can we say — what is there left to say — 
 when the earth in fact does move under our feet, 
 when actually the earth does tremble? 
 
 For we are so accustomed to the earth being — well, 
 reliable, trustworthy: safe, sane, and conservative, 
 so to speak. We are so used to being its boss, to 
 using it as we please, ploughing and digging it, 
 sowing and reaping it, building our cities with its 
 own stuff, brick and stone and wood — without a mur- 
 
110 The High Romance 
 
 mur from it, without any tricks being played with 
 us, such as the untamable sea and the mysterious air 
 and that dangerous character, fire, take pleasure in 
 perpetrating. We're up against trouble all the time 
 in our dealings with water, and fire, and air — but 
 we consider the earth a straight, clear-cut proposi- 
 tion. 
 
 So when it cuts loose. . . . Oh, I give it up!' 
 There aren't any words for what you feel in an earth- 
 quake shock. 
 
 Here's a bit of a hint. Suppose you were on a 
 ship at sea, on a long, long, voyage, so that the 
 motion, the fluidity, the freedom of movement, were 
 part of your very being — you are saturated with 
 motion — and suddenly the water becomes a solid 
 substance, and the air becomes rigid, and the ship 
 stops and is held without a quiver, like a toy ship 
 frozen inside a block of ice. Well, the solid earth, 
 that morning in San Francisco, was behaving like the 
 unstable sea — 
 
 Oh, but what's the use! The feeling simply can't 
 be described. It dates back to chaos — to a time 
 before there was any law and order or solid sub- 
 stance. This upheaval of the primal powers that 
 bind atom to atom, cell to cell, organism to organ- 
 ism, star to star, and universe to universe, through- 
 out all creation in cohesion, and balance, and system, 
 leaves in the mind that has experienced it a memory 
 which is unique, and a sensation which lies altogether 
 outside the limits of category. Only those who have 
 gone through a 'quake can understand me. I'll just 
 add this, however, — that we who have gone through 
 a big 'quake understand what other people can only 
 
The City That Never Was 111 
 
 think they understand, namely, that the foundation, 
 the underlying principle, of all material things from 
 the ultimate atom to the biggest star in the heavens 
 is nothing that can be seen or touched or handled or 
 known by any sense, but is forever imponderable, 
 and unnamable, and eternally inscrutable. We hint 
 at it in such terms as the cosmic ether, polarity, gravi- 
 tation, and so forth, and so on. Some of us, how- 
 ever, are still old-fashioned enough to say, the Hand 
 of God. 
 
 At any rate it was shaking the city of San Fran- 
 cisco that bright, still dawn, and beneath the falling 
 timbers and stones men and women and children 
 were being crushed to death by hundreds. At a score 
 of points fire was springing up. And there was no 
 water with which the fires could be quenched in this 
 first stages. The water-supplying system had been 
 put out of business by the shock. I have been told 
 that the water mains were not properly constructed, 
 any more than the ruined City Hall was properly 
 constructed — that in both jobs there had been rich, 
 fat graft. You see? It was as if the corruption of 
 the city's life had corroded its very bones, eaten into 
 its very physical structure, so that in the hour of its 
 calamity it lacked the power to save itself. As we 
 now know, if the fires could have been controlled in 
 those first few hours, huge as was the damage of the 
 earthquake, it would have been a trifle in comparison 
 with that which was inflicted by the fire — that fire 
 which was the worst this fire-ravaged world has wit- 
 nessed, so far as history can show. 
 
112 The High Romance 
 
 4. But the Baby is Calm 
 
 My little daughter was in the crib by the bed. 
 Her mother gathered her up quickly in her arms, 
 and I arched myself above them both, to ward off 
 the plaster, or the universe, I didn't know which. 
 Our baby boy was in the adjoining room, in a crib 
 by the bedside of a friend who lived with us; a 
 lady who appeared a second or two after the start of 
 the trouble, in her nightdress, in the doorway. She 
 was a maiden lady from New England; so you see 
 how unconventional this occasion must have been. 
 She it was who gave a name to it. 
 
 "Earthquake!" she said. 
 
 I had vaguely thought of an explosion; of a sudden 
 and awful storm approaching, or a flood, a tidal 
 wave; but, sure enough, now I understood that it was 
 an earthquake. When you come back from sleep 
 after only an hour, you are not as bright-minded 
 as you'd like to be able to say you were. 
 
 "The baby!" cried the lady in the doorway. 
 
 Then, as neither the plaster nor the universe had 
 crushed us so far, I ceased my imitation of a cat 
 with its back arched, and ran into the outer room. 
 
 The force of the shock had been much greater 
 there. All the furniture was crowding into the 
 middle of the room and trying to play a clumsy game 
 of leap-frog. It was bright daylight of a perfect 
 April day outside, but the blinds were drawn in the 
 room and the light was dim, mild, and milky. And 
 through this placid, opalescent light I saw the wide, 
 untroubled eyes of the baby boy, who was perfectly 
 calm, looking at me. He was like a philosopher 
 
The City That Never Was 113 
 
 from some other planet nonchalantly observing a 
 queer human being in pajamas scrambling over a 
 mountain of furniture, in a room which was appar- 
 ently trying to turn itself inside out. I have often 
 wondered what can go on in the mind of a child in 
 such a moment. 
 
 5. Out in the Street 
 
 The earthquake came a little after five. It lasted 
 eighteen seconds. According to the scientific gentle- 
 men, it appears that the coast range mountains along 
 a line of some three hundred miles shrugged their 
 shoulders, or made a slight gesture, as it were, and 
 cities and towns and villages along that line behaved 
 very much as a child's building blocks behave when 
 he pulls the table cloth on which they are stacked. 
 Mount Tamalpais, a mass of how many billions of 
 tons only science can tell you, shifted its position. 
 Redwood trees three or four thousand years old were 
 split wide open. Torrents and springs of water or 
 sand leaped from the broken and tortured earth. 
 Landslides streamed down the hills. Trees were 
 overthrown. All this, outside the city. As for the 
 city — Well, let me return to my own adventures; 
 it is hopeless to attempt the description of the city's 
 fate, just yet. 
 
 The house I lived in was an old wooden structure, 
 solidly and honestly made. Like all such, it swayed 
 and shook; plaster fell, shelves were emptied; but 
 there was no serious damage. Honestly made steel 
 buildings also stood the racket. 
 
 Before the shock had finished its course by more 
 
114 The High Romance 
 
 than a few seconds, we were in the street; part of the 
 fantastic multitude disgorging out of doorways up 
 and down all the streets of the city. Some, but these 
 were the few, were dressed; house-wives or servants 
 or workers early astir; but the most of us were in all 
 the stages of extraordinary dishabille. There was 
 a vacant lot not far from the house, and to this we 
 ran, and soon the place was crowded with fat men in 
 nighties, women with children in their arms, blankets 
 about some of them, others merely in their night- 
 gowns; and all sorts and conditions of men, women, 
 and children. 
 
 There was a brief pause, as it were ; a scant breath- 
 ing spell, and then, very suddenly, my heart tried 
 to jump out of my mouth, and then seemed to fall 
 back, fluttering like a wounded creature. 
 
 Another earthquake had begun . . . again the 
 earth, and the air, and all that was upon the earth, 
 and in the air, was throbbing, was swaying, was 
 quivering, was palpitating enormously. It was 
 frightful! But thank God, it didn't last so long, 
 nor was it nearly so severe as the first one. Never- 
 theless, it shook down walls that had been weakened 
 by the other shock, and bricks from chimneys came 
 raining down, and people who had ventured back 
 into their houses came rushing out in fresh dismay. 
 Some of them didn't come out again; falling walls 
 or beams pinning them down, killed or badly in- 
 jured, caught, in some places, like animals in pits 
 or dead-fall traps. 
 
 There came a fresh wave of people rushing through 
 the streets, but we remained in the open space. 
 
 And up the middle of the street, a little bit later, 
 
The City That Never Was 115 
 
 there walked two well-dressed men; Orientals, or 
 mulattoes; looking as if they had been up all night 
 waiting for this moment. They were proclaiming 
 the end of the world. It was Judgment Day, they 
 cried; the Book was open, the Book of Life and 
 Death; and they bade us fall upon our knees and 
 pray. And, really, you know — we weren't sure they 
 were not right. Truly, it was like the end of things 
 mortal. Somebody, looking at the wall of fire march- 
 ing toward us, later on; that strangely silent, quietly 
 busy advance of a wall of flame, said: "Yes, it 
 surely must be Judgment Day." Somebody else re- 
 plied: "And this must be the gates of hell." 
 
 It ought to have been a perfectly tremendous 
 moment, I suppose . . . but it wasn't. 
 
 The trouble was, that we couldn't believe our 
 prophet. Daylight, I expect, is not congenial to be- 
 lief in prophets, even when the daylight is one of a 
 day of disaster. There seems to be something in us, 
 something that belongs to our very life — perhaps it 
 is the force of life itself — that utterly refuses to be- 
 lieve in death until death itself says: "Here I am." 
 Even if April 18, 1906, really had been Doomsday, 
 you couldn't have got us to believe it, out there in 
 San Francisco, not if a regiment of black prophets 
 had been on the job. 
 
 I saw a few troubled faces here and there amid 
 the crowd, but the trouble was more what you might 
 feel when somebody acts indecorously than anything 
 deeper. 
 
 "That mutt must be crazy," I heard a fat man 
 wheezing near me. 
 
 "Somebody ought to make him shut up — or knock 
 
116 The High Romance 
 
 his block off," answered the man the fat chap spoke 
 to. "Say, even if he is right what business has he 
 to try to scare folks?" 
 
 Personally, I felt quite indifferent. Maybe the 
 prophet was right. Quite likely he was. But if this 
 was the end of the world — Oh, very well, it was 
 the end of the world — but we might just as well carry 
 on, without any fuss. 
 
 And that, you might say, was the common, the 
 general feeling, not only there in Geary Street, but 
 throughout the city, and not only then, as we recov- 
 ered from the first stunning confusion of the shock, 
 but later on, throughout all the terrible days that 
 followed. It was not that we were indifferent to 
 fears and horrors and disasters; not at all; nor was 
 it that we were endowed with heroic courage to over- 
 come all things. No, that was not the case. We 
 were full of fears, all the time. I think there was 
 hardly one of us who didn't keep in mind the dark 
 horror of a tidal wave. Others, I know from what 
 they told me, felt that at any moment the earth might 
 open and swallow them. The menace of shaky walls 
 loomed always over us. In the first few days, there 
 came more than forty minor shocks, and each shock 
 sent many nervously disordered persons temporarily 
 insane. The sand-hills toward the sea were full of 
 wandering, harmless, mad folk; talking and mutter- 
 ing to themselves, or sitting on the ground staring 
 at the smoke and crimson reflections of the fire in 
 the sky. And we knew the fear of plague, and of 
 pestilence, and starvation, and sudden death. And 
 always there were circulating the most dreadful 
 rumours. We believed them, too, more or less. 
 
The City That Never Was 117 
 
 Why not? Anything might happen, after what had 
 already happened. Anything at all. Nothing was 
 impossible. We heard that Los Angeles had been 
 wiped out completely. Mount Rainier was in erup- 
 tion; torrents of lava were covering the north country 
 with burning lakes. Chicago had been swallowed by 
 Lake Michigan. The catastrophe was country -wide ; 
 maybe it was universal; for London had been smitten, 
 so we heard. There were no telegraph wires working 
 for days, of course, but only a few of us were aware 
 of this. Anyhow, rumours, as we all know, whether 
 false or true, do not need telegraph wires in order 
 to travel about; they seem to use the all-pervading 
 ether, like the waves of the wireless. Or else they 
 spread through telepathy. 
 
 But, all the same, we did not get badly excited. 
 We were bewildered; some of us were bedazed; we 
 were all nerve shaken, and we all had our own 
 particular fears to face — but, taking us altogether, 
 by and large, taking us as a crowd of human beings 
 — as a mob, if you like — as a multitude — we stood 
 everything mighty well. There was a calmness; 
 there was a grave, yet kindly, almost smiling kind 
 of acceptance of the situation on the part of the people 
 as a whole, the memory of which remains with me 
 like the memory of noble and harmonic music. For, 
 after all, you see, there was something in San Fran- 
 cisco which the 'quake could not overthrow, nor even 
 agitate very seriously — and this thing was the in- 
 tangible something which is the spirit of human nature 
 — the spirit of human life — which shows itself in 
 human nature's unbreakable habit of keeping busy 
 at the business of living on in this world just as long 
 
118 The High Romance 
 
 as there is any shred of world left on which to live. 
 What is that inner something? That inmost assur- 
 ance? Mere instinct? Self-preservation? The 
 will-to-live? Or is it Faith? 
 
 Anyhow — we do, we will carry on. Some day 
 we'll know why. 
 
 6. The Flight 
 
 By and by, I ventured back into the house, wonder- 
 ing what moment it would fall in upon me, and 
 secured my clothes. My wife — being one of those 
 extraordinary women whom nothing frightens — except 
 mice — also went back and cooked breakfast. 
 
 Then I started to walk toward the office, but on 
 my way I learned that the fire chief had been killed, 
 that the water mains of the city were out of business, 
 and that great fires had started in many directions, 
 and were joining, spreading, and marching along. 
 So I knew, right then and there, that the real name 
 of this calamity was not earthquake, but fire; and I 
 knew that it would march along without any other 
 force being able to stop it. Not remembering the 
 width of Van Ness Avenue (one can't think of every- 
 thing in such moments, not even a newspaperman!), 
 I thought that the whole city was doomed. So my 
 first duty was toward those waiting for me in Geary 
 Street. On my journey to them I spent what little 
 money I had in buying condensed cream, chocolate, 
 bread, canned stuff, health food (of a particular 
 brand, indispensable to a one year old baby with a 
 weak digestive machine) and trifles of that sort, which 
 I stuffed into the recesses of a canvas shooting coat 
 
The City That Never Was 119 
 
 which I had thrown on that morning, with some vague 
 notion, no doubt, of dressing appropriately. And as 
 I watched the great crowds pouring onward before the 
 drive of flame for the most part so silently, so calmly ; 
 dragging trunks, bed-steads, carts, baby-carriages, 
 easy chairs, bundles, baskets, bags, caged parrots, 
 stuffed owls, books, tools, bed-clothes, loaves of bread, 
 live chickens, statues of the saints, jugs, guns, and all 
 manner of things — as I watched this strange multi- 
 tude, moving through a stranger silence, the silence 
 of a city in which no trolley cars were thundering, 
 I remembered, with gratitude to the giver of all good 
 thoughts, that there were soldiers. Uncle Sam's 
 regular soldiers, out at the Presidio, and that a very 
 good place for a married man and his family to seek 
 for lodging would be a tent near those soldiers. For, 
 like many others, I dreaded looting on the grand scale, 
 and starving mobs, and scarlet anarchy. 
 
 Again we ventured into the house, up to the top 
 floor. From the windows at the back we saw the 
 dome of the City Hall against a sky beginning to 
 blacken with smoke, and lurid with flame; a dome 
 like a sinister skeleton, stripped to its ribs of steel; 
 looking like a gigantic bird-cage; and I saw the flames 
 south of Market Street, and out in the Mission, and 
 toward the foot of Geary Street. 
 
 Then began that awful tramp to the Presidio, push- 
 ing one child in the baby carriage, with the other 
 carried in our arms, or in the foot of the carriage, 
 and dragging all that we could manage to drag, 
 wrapped up in a quilt; up hill, and down hill; that 
 terrible tramp to the Presidio. For a man who had 
 come West in order to patch up a hole in his lungs, 
 
120 The High Romance 
 
 it was tough work; but I didn't think so then. For 
 when you imagine that at any moment the earth may 
 open and swallow you up, at one bite (as we heard 
 it had been doing in many places), or when the sea 
 is expected to send in a tidal wave, as it was 
 libellously accused of having done elsewhere, why, 
 you cease to take much interest in your minor or 
 major ailments. Many a bedridden invalid leaped 
 clear out of bed that morning and didn't go back 
 again; cured by the shock. 
 
 What I chiefly worried about was my lack of money. 
 Strange, I know, that a wandering writer, should feel 
 such a worry; all the traditions of Bohemia go against 
 the fact; but yet, so it was, and the first man I knew 
 by sight was called upon at once to make me a loan. 
 It was Tom Dillon, the Hatter (I present him with this 
 advertisement with immense satisfaction). He didn't 
 know me ; but, just like a true San Franciscan, he did 
 not enquire too closely into this panhandling demand, 
 he simply, out of the goodness of a San Franciscan's 
 heart, put a twenty-dollar gold piece in my hand. 
 (It was a long, long time before he got it back; but 
 if I ever make any money I think I will walk up and 
 down Third Street some night, and give away twenty 
 dollars to the toughest looking hoboes I can discover, 
 and then ask them all to spend at least part of it in 
 drinking the health of Tom Dillon.) 
 
 Then I bought more food. I point with pride to 
 this fact. I proclaim it; I write it down in a book 
 that once in his life, at least, a writing man who from 
 the dim beginnings down all the coloured years had 
 sought the far trails of high Romance through all the 
 western world, was practical! As a result, we did 
 
The City That Never Was 121 
 
 not have to join the bread-line! But there were 
 millionaires, and capitalists, and even canny 
 politicians, who did. 
 
 We obtained a tent, though thousands of late comers 
 were disappointed. All through that night I kept 
 a revolver near my hand, as the thousands of feet 
 went pounding, pounding, pounding — pounding with- 
 out cessation, pounding all night long, pounding like 
 dull yet mighty drumming, pounding like the sustained 
 and awful sussurance of a mighty ocean — as the 
 crowds poured in from the flaming city. Fifty miles 
 inland and far out at sea that tremendous blaze 
 illuminated the night, reflected back from the huge 
 canopy of smoke that overspread the sky, although 
 elsewhere it was a starry night, bland and still. 
 Detonations of dynamite now and then thudded 
 through the pounding. 
 
 With the morning I left my family, and struck out 
 for my office. The three morning newspapers joined 
 forces that day, and produced a joint issue. I got 
 across the bay to Oakland and reported to the superior 
 editors, who were foregathered there, and was im- 
 mediately ordered back to San Francisco in command 
 of a company of reporters and camera men, to set up 
 local headquarters, and begin the task of newsgather- 
 ing. The paper was to be printed in Oakland. 
 
 We obtained a small tow-boat, which the twenty- 
 odd men on board crowded badly. Among our 
 number was Mr. Samuel Shortridge, the lawyer, who 
 had begged his way across in our company as nobody 
 save soldiers, physicians, priests, nurses, newspaper- 
 men, and other regular assistants at disasters, was per- 
 mitted to get back into the city once he had left it. 
 
122 The High Romance 
 
 It was a gay trip. Our skipper turned out to be 
 blind drunk, and our boat went staggering, and turn- 
 ing eccentric half -circles, and now and then trying to 
 turn a somersault, through a heavy sea. At last two 
 of us had to stand on either side of the wheel, hold- 
 ing up our skipper and making him steer some sort 
 of reasonable course for the other side. 
 
 We ricocheted our way close to Alcatraz Island. 
 Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, were blazing 
 like cosmic torches, gigantic tongues of red fire going 
 up straight into the still air beneath the black canopy 
 of smoke. 
 
 Mr. Shortridge has a very deep voice and a 
 singularly impressive deliberation and distinctness of 
 utterance. He is a celebrated orator. He felt moved 
 to make a speech on this occasion. He said, staring 
 at the three burning hills: "Lord God Almighty!" 
 
 I heave heard many speeches; thousands of them 
 I suppose.. Perhaps ten of them were good speeches. 
 But this one remains unique at once in its ap- 
 propriateness and its effect upon those who heard it. 
 All vain words were banished; all useless thoughts 
 were swept away. Today I may string words to- 
 gether, so long after that mighty moment; but then 
 only the high names of God could fit the occasion. 
 
 We landed near Fort Mason. I at once set about 
 the business of hiring headquarters. After several 
 vain efforts I finally succeeded in striking a great 
 bargain ; I hired Harbor View Park, the whole estab- 
 lishment. This comprised a bathing beach, a bowl- 
 ing alley, a bar-room, a well-stocked larder, enclosed 
 by a high fence. It is vanished now. 
 
 I also hired a motor car and sent a reporter — 
 
 \ 
 
The City That Never Was 123 
 
 better known today as Frederick Ferdinand Moore, 
 war correspondent and novelist — to the Presidio 
 for my family. I had heard that the absence of 
 sanitary arrangements among the herded thousands 
 in Golden Gate Park and the Presidio threatened to 
 cause an outbreak of disease. In Harbor View Park 
 we would be safe. 
 
 In less than an hour Moore was back again, with 
 my wife and children. 
 
 Less than half an hour later, a mounted army 
 officer rode to the gate and demanded speech with 
 whoever was in authority. 
 
 "You must immediately vacate these premises," 
 said he, when I appeared. "The United States 
 Army wants them, as a detention camp for contagious 
 diseases. The smallpox patients will be here within 
 the hour." 
 
 We heard and perforce obeyed. Very luckily, 
 right at the moment, a tugboat from Santa Cruz put in 
 at the little wharf, and I at once hired it for a despatch 
 boat, to carry copy and orders back and forward 
 between Oakland and San Francisco. So I sent my 
 family across the bay, together with a large number 
 of other refugees. I did not see wife or children 
 again during the next three weeks. 
 
 Then came the new search for headquarters. It 
 was ended quickly. Mr. Shortridge, hearing of our 
 predicament, solved it out of hand. He placed his 
 own large and beautiful home completely at my dis- 
 posal. He threw in his Chinee cook, to make the job 
 complete. So in this luxurious office, sleeping three 
 in a bed with Ah Fung to cook for us, we lived as 
 newspapermen have rarely lived before. Each day a 
 
124 The High Romance 
 
 special detail went out, not for news, but for grub. 
 The day's work was over at six or seven o'clock, 
 because the copy had to go over to Oakland very early. 
 Then we foregathered from our various jobs, and ate 
 a wonderful dinner, and fleeted the evening hours 
 away with card games, and stories, a punch bowl, 
 and Mr. Shortridge's gorgeous grand piano, the one 
 he had bought especially for Paderewski, his client. 
 Every now and then a shock of earthquake would 
 make the house rock and quiver. Sometimes these 
 blows were so heavy that we went running into the 
 street. Then we would go back again and Freddy 
 Moore, or somebody, would play ragtime, in between 
 the shocks, and we would sing. 
 
 "Through a small Irish town, 
 Marched a troop of renown, 
 In the year seventeen hundred and forty; 
 With a hip, hip, hurray, and a hip, hip, hurray, 
 Tirri-row, did-a-dow, did-a-row-dow!" 
 
 Ours was the only house in all the district per- 
 mitted to bum lights after eight or nine o'clock; and 
 under our glowing windows, on the steps, and along 
 the curb, the neighbours would gather, listening to our 
 songs, and taking comfort, I think, in our jollity. 
 One night we gave a dinner to our host; ah, such 
 a dinner! We brewed an earthquake punch. The 
 whole city was scoured for materials. Somebody 
 went up the hill to Mayor Schmitz's house and re- 
 turned with beer, and a bottle of Scotch. Into the 
 big bowl went beer, and Scotch, and benedictine, and 
 rye, and a bottle of champagne, and brandy, and 
 creme de menthe — anything, and everything. 
 
The City That Never Was 125 
 
 7. The City That Never Was 
 
 But if we newspapermen had special opportunities 
 to be gay, San Francisco in general was also high- 
 hearted despite the darkness, and the dread of doom. 
 
 The fire had on the third day been stopped at Van 
 Ness Avenue. 
 
 How many had been lost in the tumbling of walls, 
 and the destruction of cheap tenement houses, and, 
 still more, in the abominable lodging houses south of 
 Market Street and on Barbary Coast, will never be 
 known till the real Doomsday happens along; but 
 many hundreds are known to have perished. As 
 Mary Austin says: "Large figures of adventure 
 moved through the murk of these days — Denman go- 
 ing out with his gun and holding up express wagons 
 with expensively saved goods, which were dumped out 
 on sidewalks that food might be carried to unfed 
 hundreds; Father Ramm cutting away the timbers 
 on St. Mary's tower, while the red glow crept across 
 the cross out of reach of the hose; and the humble 
 sacrifices — the woman who shared her full breasts 
 with the child of another whose fountain had failed 
 from weariness and fright — ^would that I had her 
 name to hold in remembrance!" 
 
 Those were indeed brave, coloured, splendid days! 
 San Francisco's soul will be richer and stronger and 
 warmer and more human till the end of time because 
 of them. They were days when the dream of Utopia, 
 the fabled epoch of the Golden Age, of human 
 brotherhood, were perhaps as nearly realized as ever 
 upon this troubled world. 
 
 Save for those whom death had struck with loss 
 
126 The High Romance 
 
 and pain, through taking away loved ones, the 
 vast majority of San Franciscans were not merely 
 stoical — they were gallantly brave, romantically 
 chivalrous, superbly generous. In my goings about 
 through the worst of the stricken districts, I saw many 
 instances of loss and disaster, but my memory of those 
 days is not stained with a single incident of cowardice 
 or of meanness. 
 
 The obvious thing to say, is that social conventions 
 and distinctions were laid aside; well, so they were, 
 but that only expresses a small part of the truth. 
 After all, the only place where men are truly, quite 
 literally equal, is in their souls. God made us all, 
 and when the red ruin was raging from the water 
 front on towards Van Ness Avenue, a line of fire ten 
 miles wide, at times, and later, when amid the shards 
 and dust and smoke of the vanished city, men and 
 women no longer felt that doomsday was upon them, 
 they acted toward each other as fellow creatures, as 
 human beings, not merely as employer and employe, 
 rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. 
 
 Will Irwin wrote an excellent description of Old 
 San Francisco, which he called "The City-That-Was." 
 Well, the glimpses of Paradise, or of Utopia, which 
 came to me while San Francisco, riven and shattered, 
 was being bound, as it were, upon the monstrous pyre 
 of its burning, was a vision of the City-That-Never- 
 Was — the city of the world-wide dream — the city 
 which John of Patmos saw descending out of heaven 
 to earth — out of aspiration into accomplishment — out 
 
The City That Never Was 127 
 
 of the ideal into reality — the city of peace and of 
 brotherly love — of the kingdom of God come upon 
 earth. The City that never was — that never, never 
 was — yet which surely is to be — which surely is to be! 
 
 Perhaps I saw everything magnified by my own 
 mood — coloured by my own desire — nevertheless, it 
 is true that for several marvellous days in San Fran- 
 cisco we lived as people might live if they but willed 
 it so — we lived a life of good-will. Nearly all the 
 artificial barriers and distinctions with which we iso- 
 late class from class and person from person were 
 thrown down more effectually than the 'quake threw 
 down the walls of houses — the walls of evil houses and 
 the walls of churches together. For days, there was 
 no use for money — there was nothing to buy or sell. 
 Rich and poor were no longer either rich or poor. 
 The bread line was no respecter of persons. The 
 women of the Tenderloin were cared for by virtuous 
 women. Food was in common. He who had not 
 asked and he who had gave. Your neighbour was as 
 yourself. You did not see the mote in his eye for 
 there was no distorting beam in yours. Generosity 
 — kindness — pity — mercy — tenderness — all the brave 
 and beautiful angels of the heart of man walked in 
 the streets of the shattered city. Oh, yes, there were 
 exceptions, no doubt. I've heard of them — but I 
 did not myself see them — but it is God's own truth I'm 
 telling you when I say that the great disaster which 
 for several days shut off San Francisco from the 
 world that still went on in the ordinary way, brought 
 
128 The High Romance 
 
 out what is best, and what is strongest, and what will 
 finally prevail in mankind — that which is good. 
 Those three or four days, despite all the dreadful 
 things that happened were days of the Golden Age 
 returned again — and to me their memories remain 
 as prophecies of the time to come, when we shall all 
 together so live without change or shadow of turning. 
 
 Indeed, it almost seemed as if Goethe's dream was 
 realized, and that San Francisco had been shocked 
 out of its egoism and had found in the midst of this 
 apocryphal overthrowal the poet's spring of good- 
 ness, and had become quite literally the City of 
 Brotherly Love, the City of Peace — the City-that- 
 Never-Has-Been. . . . 
 
 Ah me! 
 
 It was wonderful to hear city officials who were 
 more than merely suspected of the most brazen graft 
 declare that for them, "The history of San Francisco 
 begins on April 18, 1906!" It was thrilling to see 
 sworn foes and bitterly opposed factions uniting in 
 the new bonds of mutual service. 
 
 It was sublime! 
 
 And it was also evanescent as a dream. 
 
 Violent reformations of cities or of individuals are 
 dramatic, but impermanent. . . . 
 
 I well remember how frantically we had to work, 
 one night not long after the worst of the disaster was 
 over, to hurry the news to Oakland, where our paper 
 was being printed, that the Board of City Supervisors 
 had just jammed through a very nefarious piece of 
 special privilege legislation. . . . 
 
The City That Never Was 129 
 
 — ^And we know how soon afterwards the malodor- 
 ous graft cases made the name of San Francisco scan- 
 dalous throughout civilization. 
 
 No. Apparently it requires something more pro- 
 found, more energetic, than an earthquake, to reform 
 a city, or a soul. An earthquake may destroy; yes; 
 and so will many other things. . . . 
 
 But what will save us? 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 HELICON HALL 
 
 1. Back In New York 
 
 SIX weeks after the shock, my turn came to fall 
 into disfavour with my superiors, and in the 
 row that followed, I quit my post, and returned to 
 the East. For a while I left my family in a country 
 town, while I adventured to New York again; penni- 
 less, yet determined not to retreat to newspaper work 
 save as a last resource. 
 
 A friend (what would have become of me all my 
 life had it not been for my friends?) took me in and 
 gave me shelter until I could earn enough money to 
 hire a room and a typewriter. 
 
 A sympathetic magazine editor realized my position 
 and promised to read and pass upon a story at once. 
 "So go home and get busy," said he. 
 
 I went home; sat up all night (drinking coffee to 
 imitate Balzac in at least one particular!), and wrote 
 two stories. By nine o'clock I was at the editor's 
 office. 
 
 "Come back at ten," said he. 
 
 For an hour I sat on a bench in Madison Square 
 Park juggling with my nerves in an effort to achieve 
 equilibrium of spirit — and of body, too, for I shivered 
 despite the warm September sun. 
 
 I had only one dime left, and my friend's house 
 
 130 
 
Helicon Hall 131 
 
 was far away in the remoter parts of Brooklyn. If 
 the stories did not suit, I would be in a desperate fix. 
 
 Yet, I wanted a drink. 
 
 Should I or should I not spend my dime, and take 
 a chance? 
 
 I tossed for it. Heads came — or tails — I forget 
 which. Anyhow, it meant, "Take a drink." And I 
 did so. I drank to the success of the stories. 
 
 At ten I entered the office. "A cent a word for one 
 yam. So here's a check for thirty dollars; the other 
 story is a lemon. For God's sake never offer such a 
 story anywhere," said the concise editor. 
 
 I thanked him for the check; then my blood stirred; 
 and I offered to bet him a dinner that the story he had 
 turned down was the better of the two; and I would 
 prove it by selling it somewhere else. 
 
 And a few weeks later I had the ineffable satis- 
 faction of asking him please would he cash a check 
 for one hundred and twenty-five dollars, as another 
 magazine had given me three cents a word for 
 the tale despised and rejected of him on the one cent 
 basis. 
 
 I hope the editor did not consider me too cocky, 
 but I fear perhaps he did, to judge by the note he sent 
 me. 
 
 . . . "Was glad to hear you have got the half -Nel- 
 son-strangle hold on the publishers. Get them down 
 on the floor three points and keep them there. It 
 might occasionally help things along if you break a 
 back or two, or slip an ear out of place. In any event, 
 dislocate an arm once in a while, and do a little 
 gouging." 
 
 This letter tells its authorship plainly; only Robert 
 
132 The High Romance 
 
 H. Davis — that stalwart friend of the writers — can 
 do this sort of thing so well. 
 
 2. An Expensive Coincidence 
 
 It was about this time that Madame Fate displayed 
 herself in her most mordantly ironical mood. Yet, 
 for such an accomplished artist in arranging human 
 trouble, it must be said that she did it rather crudely 
 in that she resorted to that expedient which experts in 
 dramatic technic agree to deplore — the long, strong 
 arm of coincidence. Nevertheless, it was a very re- 
 markable coincidence. Even the theatrical manager 
 who — as it were — staged the affair, admitted that 
 fact; and surely his great experience, in drama and 
 in other ways, fitted him to judge the matter. 
 
 I had sold a story to Everybody's Magazine which 
 when published achieved quite a success; mostly be- 
 cause of circumstances having nothing to do with its 
 literary merits. The story dealt wifii an anarchist 
 inventor who devises a machine that will disintegrate 
 the physical atom, or neutralize the power of gravity 
 — I really forget which; but something, anyhow, 
 very dreadful and ultra-scientific. After giving due 
 warning of his purpose by means of signals written 
 on the clouds above New York, he proceeds to 
 destroy the city, this modem Babylon, as he terms 
 it; beginning with the Flatiron Building, and finally 
 wrecking most of the town before he is captured 
 and disposed of. The magazine gave the story 
 several full-page pictures, and it caught the fancy of 
 many readers. The Evening World seized upon the 
 occasion to print a lurid half -page special, based on 
 
Helicon Hall 133 
 
 the idea: "What if somebody DOES discover such a 
 thing, and then — goes to it?" The cigar store in the 
 Flatiron Building borrowed the artist's paintings from 
 which the illustrations were reproduced, and exhibited 
 them in its windows. 
 
 In the midst of all this, my wife said to me: "Why 
 don't you make a play from it?" 
 
 "A play? Why—" 
 
 "Oh, I don't mean a real play; I mean a Coney 
 Island spectacle, or vaudeville stunt. The idea has 
 great possibilities." 
 
 She was right — as she so often is. I agreed with 
 her; which doesn't happen quite so often. Not know- 
 ing the theatrical ropes, I went to a friend who did. 
 He, too, thought that the idea had possibilities. He 
 agreed to collaborate; he to attend to the business 
 3ide, I to write the play, with his assistance in con- 
 struction. 
 
 "The Mortimers are looking for an idea right 
 now," said my friend. "Something to use as the 
 central feature of the new show which will be open- 
 ing soon. I'll get busy." 
 
 A day or two later he called me on the 'phone to 
 tell me that he had seen the press agent for the 
 Mortimers, and the various managers of the theatre, 
 including the man who handled the electrical and 
 mechanical effects. "And they're all strong for our 
 stuff," said my collaborator. "They haven't an idea 
 outside of ours; they all say so. It certainly looks 
 good. Mortimer himself is out of town, but will be 
 back in a day or two. They think he will jump for 
 this. It will mean a run all winter, and all next sum- 
 mer at Coney Island." 
 
134 The High Romance 
 
 I was living directly opposite the theatre in ques- 
 tion, and my wife and I would sit near the window 
 and figure out what we would do with all the royalty 
 money which would soon be streaming into the huge 
 building over the way. Of course, this wasn't Art; 
 but, anyhow, it looked like real money; and even Art 
 looks at her lover with a singular feebleness of ap- 
 peal when her rival. Golden Dollars, begins to make 
 eyes. 
 
 "Hello, hello!" my friend telephoned one day. 
 "Come right down to my office. Mortimer is back, 
 and wants to see you right away." 
 
 I was in his office promptly, you may believe me. 
 
 "You're to see Mortimer at twelve o'clock. Now, 
 remember — don't sign any contract; don't agree to 
 any terms. Leave all that to me. You're simply 
 to talk to him about the play, and how to handle it. 
 Get back here as soon as you can, and I'll get busy." 
 
 I was at the office of the great manager at the 
 appointed time. I sent in my card. I was kept 
 waiting some little while; not long enough to make 
 me feel sliglited, but long enough, oh, quite, to make 
 me understand that it was Mortimer at whose door 
 I sat; the great Mortimer; who was, if not the foster- 
 father of American drama, at least its uncle. 
 
 By and by, I was sent for. I was led through 
 office after office, until at last the sanctum sanctorum 
 was achieved; where the great man sat enthroned at 
 his desk, with his heads of department, ten or twelve 
 of them at least, seated by and about him. 
 
 Most courteously he received me. There was no 
 hint of that haughtiness which great men in the world 
 of drama and literature are fabled to display toward 
 
Helicon Hall 135 
 
 the timid aspirants. On the contrary, no uncle could 
 have been kinder, or more considerate in his man- 
 ner. 
 
 "So, this is the author of that wonderful story!" 
 he exclaimed, heartily wringing my hand. "I read 
 it with such pleasure, Mr. Williams. And it has been 
 so successful, too. Well, well! And now, let us 
 get down to business. We are soon going to open, 
 and we are about to rush work on our central feature. 
 That's where you come in, Mr. Williams. You see, 
 it's most amazing, really — you see, your little idea — 
 why, upon my word, it's a wonderful coincidence, but 
 your idea is absolutely the duplicate of a play which 
 we've had in our safe for the past three months 
 or more. The author, however, is quite unknown, 
 and as your story has created such wide attention, I 
 would like to use your name on our bill-boards and 
 program and newspaper notices, as the real author. 
 It will give you great publicity, Mr. Williams. But, 
 of course, as you are not the author — well, you will 
 see for yourself that I couldn't offer you any 
 money. ..." 
 
 I am afraid my crude. Occidental mind had diffi- 
 culty in taking this in, and assimilating it, in a proper 
 manner. I am even afraid I jumped up and said rude 
 and nasty things about robbery, and coincidence be 
 damned. Why I did not rush at great little Morti- 
 mer, in my hasty wrath, due to my inability to recog- 
 nize the wonderful nature of the literary coincidence 
 which he was relating, I to this day cannot under- 
 stand. . . . 
 
 I went back to my collaborator. He threw up his 
 hands, slumped into his chair, looked at me help- 
 
136 The High Romance 
 
 lessly, and murmured: "Anarchists destroying New 
 York won't be just a magazine yarn, if this sort of 
 thing keeps on!" And so hard was it for him to un- 
 derstand the coincidence, that he sent me to one of 
 the leading lawyers of the town, to see if "something 
 couldn't be done." 
 
 The lawyer listened carefully, then he sighed, 
 offered me a choice cigar, and said: "I wonder if 
 you will take my advice? You are a young man — 
 and one of your names is Irish, so I daresay you 
 won't; but if you could take my advice, you'd go back 
 to Mr. Mortimer, and get the advertising. You 
 haven't a chance on earth to get any money." 
 
 But I could not take his advice. From our win- 
 dows, a little later, my wife and I watched the crowds 
 pouring into the theatre, where the coincidental play 
 ran all winter long; and all the ways we might have 
 used the money we did not get, mocked us like a flight 
 of chimerae. . . . 
 
 But it was a remarkable coincidence. 
 
 3. The Red Flag Of Revolt 
 
 I went on with hack work. I did Sunday news- 
 paper "specials," and more short stories for cheap 
 magazines; I wrote a serial of 30,000 words in five 
 days; and another in twelve days, and sold them both 
 at a cent a word. I wrote a handbook for the use of 
 commercial travellers; I wrote a hundred leaflets for 
 an advertising manager. Soon my family was with 
 me; we rented a flat, and furnished it, partly with 
 new things, partly with furniture left in storage when 
 we went West, AU this was more or less magnificent 
 
Helicon Hall 137 
 
 (for us!), but it was not war as we wished to make 
 war. I was not writing what I wanted to write; still 
 I was a slave to the machine-made in writing. 
 
 So I seized every possible chance to work upon a 
 new novel which I had begun immediately after my 
 return from San Francisco, and at last I finished it, 
 and began to offer it to the publishers. 
 
 Upon the success of this novel we built our hopes. 
 It was making a decidedly good impression. Several 
 publishers seriously considered its purchase; and one 
 house at last said that if I would make the book longer, 
 and strengthen it in certain places, they would issue 
 it among the spring books of 1907. I went to work 
 upon it zealously. At last the dawn of my real life 
 seemed breaking. 
 
 That novel was to speak the magic word, the "Open 
 Sesame," which would throw down the rocky walls 
 hemming me in, and give me the long-sought treasure 
 of success. I called it "The Red Flag of Revolt," 
 and it was drawn very largely from my own expe- 
 riences, expressing my own philosophy. It was in 
 essence a glorification of the power of the human 
 will. Its hero was (of course! ) a consumptive writer, 
 burdened with poverty, crippled by ignorance, sur- *^ 
 rounded with unsympathetic conditions, yet dimly 
 conscious of a higher destiny. He breaks down with 
 a hemorrhage. Instead of regarding it as the signal 
 of failure, the symbol of death, he wills to make it 
 the red flag of his revolt — the revolt of his will, of his 
 soul, against all that would hamper or drag him down 
 to defeat with his message still unspoken. So he sets 
 his will: and goes forth into the wilderness: he fights, 
 and he conquers; he gains love, health, and success;* 
 
138 The High Romance 
 
 the red flag of revolt becomes the brilliant banner of 
 his triumph, the symbol of his personal power, the 
 heraldic device betokening the self-sufficient and dom- 
 inating "I." . . . 
 
 And now, with my hero (a self-portrait, Oh, of 
 course!) I, too, was at last conquering my own way, 
 by the strength of my own will. Or so, anyhow, it 
 then seemed to me. The dawn of a new day ap- 
 peared to be at hand. 
 
 And so indeed it was — only, again, as so often 
 before, it came in a form of which I had not 
 dreamed; it brought the opening of a new adventure 
 instead of the ending of the old. 
 
 4. The Co-operative Home Colony 
 
 While with high hopes I was working upon my 
 novel, I joined the "co-operative home colony" estab- 
 lished by Upton Sinclair and a group of other radicals 
 and "advanced thinkers," at Englewood, in New Jer- 
 sey; a pleasant suburb of well-to-do business and 
 "leisure class" people (as we of Helicon Hall would 
 say), and their parasites and purveyors. It was 
 snugly situated behind the Palisades, overlooking the 
 Ramapo Valley, and only an hour's travel from the 
 heart of New York. 
 
 I was not formally a Socialist, then — or even later 
 on — however much I sympathized with the point of 
 view of Socialism, and thoroughly as I shared its 
 hostility toward commercialism. So it was not as a 
 Socialist that I joined the colony. I went in the expec- 
 tation of finding congenial society, pleasant surround- 
 ings, and relief from the worries and cares of house- 
 
Helicon Hall 139 
 
 keeping in a New York flat, in which I had to do my 
 own work, and where there were two children to be 
 considered when I desired privacy and quiet. Also, 
 of course, there was the interest of the adventure 
 itself. Helicon Hall was a social experiment; and it 
 attracted great attention in the press. 
 
 Upton Sinclair I had known through correspondence 
 for some time. An essay of his attacking the super- 
 ficial and mediocre aspects of American magazine 
 literature had drawn from me a warm message of ap- 
 proval and congratulation. He responded, and we 
 kept up an interchange of letters for some time. 
 Then I drifted westward, and lost touch with the 
 literary world of New York; while Sinclair emerged 
 from his garrets and tents — wherein for years he had 
 been making his fight — and achieved the tremendous 
 success of "The Jungle." 
 
 It was shortly after this event that I returned 
 from wrecked and ruined San Francisco, and found 
 Sinclair famous, and established in Helicon Hall. 
 So I wrote to him asking if his roster of colonists was 
 complete. 
 
 "Come and see for yourself," he replied. 
 
 So we went, my wife and I; we saw; and we were 
 conquered by the varied attractions of the colony. It 
 would be a rare and rather wonderful adventure, so 
 we thought, to live in Helicon Hall. 
 
 So it proved to be, indeed; and if it turned out to 
 be much more of an adventure than in our most ad- 
 venturous mood we would have bargained for, well, 
 there is no sense in complaining; such is the inevitable 
 hazard of all forms of adventure; namely, the risk of 
 getting too much of a good thing. 
 
140 The High Romance 
 
 5. The Suburb, And The Colony 
 
 Both Helicon Hall and Englewood were in their 
 way typical and significant products of the time- 
 spirit. Englewood was a pleasant suburb, secluded, 
 yet convenient, with its Country Club and golf course 
 and private schools and motor cars, and college-bred 
 business men going to and returning from Wall Street, 
 or the Courts, or the great commercial houses of New 
 York, and their fashionable women-folk and children. 
 It was one of the many similar strongholds of the 
 employing, or official and professional classes, near 
 New York; homes of the average aristocracy of the 
 commercial world, not the great millionaires, but the 
 rank and file of the hierarchy of our dollar system of 
 society. Safe, sane, conservative; average, normal, 
 suave, smooth, conventional; all the words and 
 phrases of this ilk belong to Englewood. On the 
 other hand. Helicon Hall, stranded in the midst of 
 all this, like a gypsy van stopping in a Methodist 
 camp-meeting, and tlirobbing with a perpetual brain- 
 storm of radicalitis! 
 
 6. The House Of Strange Souls 
 
 It was a queer place surely; this Helicon Hall! 
 Incongruous, yet ironically appropriate as well, to 
 find it in an ultra-respectable, ultra-conventional, 
 bourgeois suburb like Englewood. 
 
 I've been told — ^heaven only knows with what truth 
 — that it owed its existence to a dream — the dream of 
 a schoolmaster at that! According to the legend, this 
 schoolmaster was plagued by restless ideas and ideals; 
 
Helicon Hall 141 
 
 poor man, the Time spirit had thrown one of its many 
 tentacles about him. He was not content to teach 
 as he had been taught, and to trot along the main 
 highway of his profession, safely, soundly, and con- 
 servatively, and thus make a quiet living, and get 
 through the world with the minimum of botheration 
 and trouble. No; he felt obliged to experiment, and 
 to seek out many inventions; a restless item of a rest- 
 less age. 
 
 The education of boys in aristocracy seems to have 
 been his obsession. His boys were to be made into 
 "gentlemen," after some ratiier vague, neo-Nietzsch- 
 ean notions of gentility and individualism. Each 
 was to have his valet, if he so desired; and each was 
 to be treated with the most distinguished considera- 
 tion, on the part of the tutors, and other servants, and 
 encouraged to express his own innate temperament. 
 
 The plan and construction of the school building 
 which was to be the outward and visible manifestation 
 of the inward grace of American aristocracy was re- 
 vealed to this Nietzschean shaper of souls while he 
 was voyaging on the river Nile. 
 
 Perhaps the spirit of some sardonic old Egyptian 
 adept of black magic overbrooded the spirit of this 
 Yankee "professor," as he dreamed of his new-fangled 
 school, and of the boys in whose persons he would 
 influence his country and his age. Anyhow, he 
 dreamed his dream, and coming back to America — 
 where ideas need only to be money-producing or else 
 starkly fantastic to find support — he secured a patron 
 (probably a patroness!) to back him, and built Heli- 
 con Hall, and started his school for suckling aristo- 
 crats. 
 
142 The High Romance 
 
 It failed. I don't know just why. I did not get 
 all the story. Maybe the dreamer's chemical con- 
 stituents wore out, and he died, or perhaps his im- 
 mortal soul got tired of the task of inoculating the 
 sons of American business men with the virus of an 
 artistic aristocracy, and shook off the clumsy encum- 
 brance of its chemical apparatus and went forth seek- 
 ing other adventures through vistas impossible to 
 New Jersey. I don't know; but, at any rate, Helicon 
 Hall shut up shop as a school. I think it was a board- 
 ing house for a while; but it was empty when Upton 
 Sinclair came along, just after the success of his book, 
 "The Jungle" had made him rich and famous — in the 
 relative sense — and bought it for his "co-operative 
 colony," and he and a mixed assemblage of socialists, 
 "intellectual anarchists," single taxers, vegetarians, 
 spiritualists, mental scientists. Free Lovers, suffra- 
 gists, and other varieties of Ism-ites, moved in and 
 took the place of the neo-Nietzschean schoolmaster 
 and his brood of infant aristocrats. 
 
 Many of the colonists, of course, were writers of 
 one type or another. They expressed their immortal 
 souls, or their chemical reactions, in novels and plays, 
 and poems, and speech; especially in speech. 
 
 Never since the episode of the tower of Babel, I 
 dare say, has there existed a place so saturated in 
 language as Helicon Hall. Everybody there was 
 more or less of the "advanced," or "radical" order 
 of chemical make-up, or of soul development; and it 
 is a scientific fact that this type is continually effer- 
 vescing in monologue, sizzling in conversation, det- 
 onating in debate, fuming in argument, flashing in 
 
Helicon Hall 143 
 
 expressions of opinion, and exploding in many the- 
 ories. 
 
 The Hall was a tremendous, oblong, wooden 
 building with a huge court in its centre roofed with 
 glass, with a fountain and miniature brooks, and rub- 
 ber trees and palms growing twenty or thirty feet high. 
 Little fish of gold and silver swam in the brooks. At 
 one end was a vast fireplace open on all four sides, 
 about which fifty or sixty people could sit or lounge. 
 Near this was a pipe organ. Sometimes by night, 
 when a glowing fire of crimson coals was suspended 
 in the iron basket in the fireplace, and the lights were 
 turned out, and the moon streamed dimly through the 
 glass roof, splashing like noiseless silver water on the 
 palm trees in the court, and some one played a violin, 
 or something on the organ, and the talk mellowed and 
 modulated from sociological arguments to a more 
 meditative mood, then it seemed as if some influence 
 sweet and pensive, friendly and melting, flowed like 
 incense over and through us all; and for a while we 
 could dream that our dreams could and would be 
 realized — and the Socialist lived for the moment in 
 his co-operative commonwealth, and the anarchist in 
 Egoland, and the spiritualists divined the presence 
 of their departed friends in the swaying shadows by 
 the fountain, and all the ideals and dreams and fan- 
 tasies, and all the impossible illusions of that assem- 
 blage of modem dreamers seemed to materialize, 
 seemed to be real things, and the world of fact evap- 
 orated quite out of existence. 
 
 — At other times, though — Ah, then matters were 
 different! For one thing the partitions were of the 
 
r 
 
 144 The High Romance 
 
 thinnest between many of the rooms; and nearly 
 every second room (to draw it mildly) contained a 
 temperamental person with a pen or a typewriter and 
 a message for the world — or else a definite job of 
 literary work to be put out of hand as soon as possible. 
 That flimsy house fairly throbbed with criss-cross cur- 
 rents of diverse temperaments and purposes; also 
 with the shouts and yells of children, and, of course, 
 with Talk, Talk, Talk! In one comer of the second 
 floor, where most of the living rooms were, Grace 
 MacGowan Cooke and her sister Alice MacGowan 
 were industriously dictating novels. A door or two 
 away Edwin Bjorkman was philosophizing amid walls 
 packed to the ceiling with books in Swedish, Nor- 
 wegian, Danish, German, French, and English. 
 
 Sinclair Lewis and Allen Updegraff were down in 
 the cellar, neglecting the furnace as they sought for 
 rhymes or stories. Somewhere else. Professor Wil- 
 liam Pepperell Montagu was working at his problem 
 of a Thinking Machine which was to prove the chem- 
 ico-mechanical theory of the origin of human intel- 
 ligence. 
 
 Never shall I forget the wild night when Sadakichi 
 Hartmann, the German-American- Japanese poet- 
 painter, visited us. Seven or eight feet tall, (or so 
 he seemed) with a face like a grotesque mask. With 
 him was his friend, Jo Davidson, the East Side 
 sculptor, and another friend, the Tramp Madonna, 
 and also a big, black bottle of whiskey. 
 
 He sat by the fire theorizing on Art and Life and 
 Love — Free art, Free life, and Free love, of course 
 — until long after midnight, filling the sonorous shell 
 of the court with talk, — talk — talk; until at last Ed- 
 
Helicon Hall 145 
 
 ward Bjorkman, in a fluttering bathrobe, with flashing 
 eyes and a head looking like the head of a refined 
 and elegant Ibsen, rushed forth from his bedroom and 
 drove Sadakichi and the sculptor and the lady and 
 the bottle out into the bitter night, and into the news- 
 papers next day. 
 
 7. Strange Souls 
 
 The room next to mine was occupied by a stout, 
 elderly widow, whose walls were hung with "spirit 
 portraits," and who was ardent in the faith of that 
 most pitiable of all cults, the Spiritualists. Existing 
 in a continuous tremor of morbid sentiment, she saw 
 forms that the air gave up for her vision only, and 
 faces, smiling or sad, appeared and disappeared in 
 dusky comers, and she heard voices that said: "Deary, 
 I am so happy over here — all your friends are with 
 me, deary!" 
 
 There were Christian Scientists, also ; and "Mental" 
 Scientists — who believed in the transforming power 
 of "affirmations," like the New Thought people, but, 
 they said, in a much more logical, more intellectual 
 mode. An elderly semi-hobo man-of-all-trades who 
 attended to the furnaces after the youthful socialist 
 poets from Yale were relieved from the task, was one 
 of our most advanced radicals. There was a young 
 Southerner who having run through nearly all other 
 formulas was thinking of trying sequestration in a 
 Benedictine monastery. There were, of course, nu- 
 merous feminists, devotees of Mrs. Charlotte Perkins 
 Gilman, and George Bernard Shaw. "Bernard Shaw 
 
146 The High Romance 
 
 says — " was a phrase you heard at Helicon Hall 
 as in less advanced homes you hear, "mother says 
 that . . ." 
 
 And always there was a coming and going of vis- 
 itors, who for the most part were themselves repre- 
 sentatives of the "advanced movements"; singular 
 cults and experiments in life and thought. Lecturers 
 and writers on Sex, on Sociology, on Anarchism, on 
 Dress Reform, Child Training, Vegetarianism, Fletch- 
 erism. Socialism, and all the other modes and mani- 
 festations of the restless mind of the age, all defiled 
 through Helicon Hall, like a Pageant of Eccentrics. 
 
 There were also a few first-class intellects there. 
 Edwin Bjorkman, for instance. I shall always feel 
 a sense of solid satisfaction in my memories of my 
 communions of spirit concerning matters of art and 
 of life with Edwin. He has, indeed, a deep vein 
 of the truest artistry running through his complex 
 temperament of a philosopher-reformer-poet-religious- 
 mystic searcher after the Absolute. And Professor 
 Montagu was not one of the intellectual eccentrics; 
 but his rigid mechanical view of life had no appeal 
 for me. 
 
 Sinclair and the others, in varying degrees, rep- 
 resented interests with which it was not in my nature 
 to affiliate, but yet for a time they all were deeply and 
 sympathetically interesting to me, who came among 
 these radicals, these advanced thinkers and heresiarchs 
 after my lonely years in newspaper offices, and wan- 
 derings here and there in many parts of the country. 
 And Helicon Hall was a vestibule, as it were, through 
 which I entered a curious tract of modem American 
 life, and from it radiated many of the vistas of ad- 
 
Helicon Hall 147 
 
 venture which we shall follow as these pages expand 
 — the tract occupied by believers in strange ideas and 
 the followers of singular systems of Life, which it 
 fell to my lot to explore — I will not say thoroughly, 
 but at any rate most adventurously, as I sought the 
 trails of the high romance which eluded me in Helicon 
 Hall, as it had elsewhere. 
 
 8. The River 
 
 For it was at Helicon Hall that the problem with 
 which so much of my life has been concerned — the 
 problem, namely, of whether we are immortal souls 
 or merely ephemeral products of a casual chemico- 
 mechanical process, began to press upon me with an 
 irresistible urgency. My quest was stimulated by 
 the vertiginous mixture of ideas in Helicon Hall, and 
 also by many solitary communions with silence and 
 solitude, on the verge of the Palisades, overlooking 
 the river, gazing at the great city which has given me 
 so many adventures. 
 
 Helicon Hall stood amid a grove of trees apart 
 from the village and not very far from the top of the 
 Palisades. A short walk brought one to their verge, 
 and I often took that walk, in the afternoon, after 
 working on my novel during the day. 
 
 The snow crunched beneath my tread; the naked 
 trees threw inky shadows; withered leaves clung to 
 a few desolate branches. The broad flood of the 
 Hudson looked drab, or a steely-grey, or a murky 
 brown ; sometimes dabbled with streaks of white foam 
 or blotched with grey fields of drifting ice; and how 
 solitary was its atmosphere! How different from 
 its summer suggestion, when long strings of loaded 
 
148 The High Romance 
 
 or empty barges and canal boats are briskly drawn 
 up and down, and the passenger steamers pass cov- 
 ered with flags, and swift sailboats and rushing motor 
 boats dot it all over with accents of energy. Now 
 there was only the solitary ferryboat crossing from 
 One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Street. In the 
 evening when it was lighted up it somehow seemed a 
 mournful thing, like a funeral barge, very lonely on 
 the immense width of the dusky stream, on which, as 
 it slowly passed from shore to shore, it threw the 
 wavering reflections of its lights. 
 
 Advancing to the very edge of the cliff, I would 
 stand there. Used as I am to New York, there is 
 an irresistible attraction for me in almost all of its 
 aspects, and few of its exterior points of view, I 
 should think, can surpass in interest the one of which 
 I am speaking. 
 
 It is invested with an air of fine style; touched with 
 the influence of something elegaic, something roman- 
 tic, almost psychic; as though some magic casement 
 opened in the atmosphere at this point to permit the 
 vision to pierce beneath the surface aspects of the 
 scene. I suppose the rugged romantic rocks and 
 splendid forest trees of the Palisades, and the broad 
 river, are responsible for the subtle quality of the 
 view of the city from this point; and, also, there is 
 always a sort of hypnotic eff'ect produced by the 
 running water of a river. 
 
 Across the stream there is the pepper box ugliness 
 of Grant's Tomb; there are the squat, mushroom 
 shapes of the huge gas-tanks; a train crawls along the 
 shore trailing a snaky, black ribbon of smoke; the 
 
Helicon Hall 149 
 
 cliff-like formation of the apartment houses along 
 Riverside Drive glitters at a thousand points where the 
 windows catch the light ; beyond these there is the em- 
 anating suggestion, rather than the actual appearances 
 of the crushed-together vastness of New York. And 
 how many times I have wondered at the effect of 
 silence, and of immobility as well; as though all that 
 has been said of the roar of the city, and of its 
 frenzy of action, were fables. It is as though the 
 hypnotic river had woven a barrier of silence around 
 New York, or as though its population had been en- 
 chanted. 
 
 At the hour of sunset the wizardry is intensified. 
 Then the thousands of windows in the tall houses flame 
 or smoulder in lines of blood and of gold; they are 
 blurred and lurid, smoky and fuming; or clear, hard, 
 glittering, and cold, according to atmospheric con- 
 ditions. Or the hour after sunset, when the electric 
 lights along the Drive, and in the windows, begin to 
 shine ; beaming steadily or pulsating, after the fashion 
 of stars and planets ; appearing to be of many colours, 
 all pale, like lemon, and dim violet, and withered 
 lilac, and faint mauve; sometimes diffused and misty, 
 like vague, ghostly radiations; at other times sharply 
 defined, like a myriad of clear, emphatic dots and 
 dashes. 
 
 These were the best hours for one to stand, prefer- 
 ably alone, at this point of view. Or in the nights 
 when the mystery of moonlight transmuted the river 
 from grey water into a flood of ether, and the trees 
 dripped with its magic foam, and the lights across the 
 stream of silver and dusky ether seemed no longer to 
 
150 The High Romance 
 
 be those of New York, but of Sarrass, the Spiritual 
 City, or of Mount Salvatch. 
 
 9. Visions And Desires 
 
 And my thoughts shaped themselves: — "Millions 
 of human beings are massed together over there. 
 Millions, and each one unique ; each one an individual, 
 not-to-be-duplicated spark of immortal spirit clothed 
 about with tenements of flesh and bone; a Soul that 
 can never die; a Person, destined for endless expe- 
 riences, of which living in New York is a mere momen- 
 tary fragment. 
 
 "Or else, they are nothing of the sort; they are but 
 casual ephemera, produced (according to Professor 
 Schaffer of the British Association for the Advance- 
 ment of Science, that most learned man!) as a 
 mechanical result of certain actions and reactions 
 of chemical substances; they are swirling together 
 intricately, over there, each one seeking its own in- 
 stinctive desires (these also being the result of chem- 
 ical agencies), like a swarm of summer gnats!" 
 
 And then a wider vision would come. I would 
 grow almost objectively aware of the population of 
 the great city in a way never to be forgotten. 
 I felt the tides of being moving around and 
 about me; the people going to and fro in the 
 streets, and beneath the streets; and across the North 
 and East rivers and the harbour to Staten Island, to 
 Jersey, and Brooklyn, and Long Island; and under 
 the rivers in the tunnels; and on the rivers in the 
 ferry boats; and in the trolley cars, and the "L" 
 
Helicon Hall 151 
 
 trains, and the subways, and the steam and electric 
 railroad trains, and the cabs, automobiles, stages. 
 Men, women, youths, maidens, girls and boys. To 
 and fro they pulsed. They thronged the theatres; or 
 the parks, or the streets; and their houses, everywhere; 
 from the Waldorf-Astoria or the roof garden of the 
 Hotel Astor to the fetid tenements of the Ghetto. Mil- 
 lions of bodies — bedecked in silk; or hung with a 
 dirty rag; — lithe, well-nourished, gleaming in health; 
 or gaunt, breaking down, torn by the assaults of dis- 
 ease. Millions of souls — from the soul joyously 
 ascending in ecstatic aspirations to the heights of 
 life; to the purblind, wounded, scarred and ignorant 
 soul struggling still in the slime. (But struggling, 
 always struggling to rise, to escape!) To and fro 
 they swept on the tide of life that pulsed through the 
 great town; myriads of them eddying, swirling, 
 jostling together upon interweaving currents of des- 
 tiny; the strong, the weak, the alert, the dull, the noble, 
 the base: each and every one a distinct and different 
 element in the huge alembic — the alembic in which 
 life with innumerable reagents was testing all, and 
 from which would issue the men and women of the 
 future. And of all these myriads the greater number 
 by far were doomed to suffer, were sentenced to 
 ignoble and endless toil, and were banished from 
 beauty. Yet all these poor men and women, and all 
 the others, too, the strong, the haughty, the proud ones 
 of wealth and wider life; all, all were my brothers 
 and sisters; and all were awakening to a dim, troub- 
 ling, bitterly-sweet and ever-growing knowledge of 
 their relationship as brothers and sisters. All were 
 made of the same flesh and blood, and mind and soul; 
 
152 The High Romance 
 
 and they were ever moving forward to a completer 
 realization of this fact of facts — the truth that shall 
 make men free, the truth of human brotherhood. 
 And those who knew the truth must proclaim it far 
 and wide! . . . 
 
 And as I saw, here and there upon the river, lights 
 flashing forth as the darkness grew deeper, I would 
 think of the light-houses on the shore of the sea into 
 which the river runs, and the swords of their lamps 
 that pierce the night; swords of the Will of Man; of 
 man in his long warfare against the dark forces that 
 oppress him. 
 
 . • • . a • • 
 
 Let me be in my little world a sword, Will of 
 Man, a weapon of life! 
 
 So I prayed; and I prayed also: 
 
 When I forget that sad company of the poor and 
 lowly whom I left behind me in the subcellars and 
 stores and shops and tenements from which I have 
 fought upward toward free life, then may life slay me 
 utterly! 
 
 As Life would do, I know, if I proved traitor, no 
 matter how high the apparent place my apostacy 
 might temporarily gain me. . . . 
 
 ■ • • • • • • , • 
 
 And so, too, for the most part, though not so fan- 
 tastically and feverishly, did my comrades of Helicon 
 Hall meditate and dream. Like one of the best of 
 the modem writers whose ideas greatly moved us, H. 
 G. Wells, we desired, one way or another, to add some- 
 thing to the Book of the Samurai. 
 
 Nobody can understand this statement who has not 
 
Helicon Hall 153 
 
 read "Modem Utopia," so for their benefit, unfor- 
 tunate souls! let me recall that in this book Wells 
 points out the fact that no worlds are ever conquered 
 save by men who carry bibles in their hands. Those 
 who find and conquer Utopia, then, must possess a 
 Bible; a Book of Power. In this book will be put 
 such words, said or written by men and women, as 
 embody the idea of the Order; the order of men and 
 women who are at work today re-shaping the world, 
 and who by and by shall rule it. 
 
 And, Wells goes on to say, at first the book must 
 necessarily contain much namby-pamby and mistaken 
 stuff — it cannot be at once made beautiful and noble 
 and perfect. . . . Which is an encouraging remark 
 to some of its would-be contributors! 
 
 The only editors the book can have will be those 
 who need its message. These editors — I may put the 
 case — are the discerning men and women who recog- 
 nize and act upon the Great Idea — which is, that the 
 Will of Man can make a world fit for Man — a happy 
 and contented world of true men and women, a real 
 Utopia. They seek and utilize the inspiration and 
 the plans of those ever-increasing writers who see with 
 Walt Whitman that though each man is unique, yet 
 all men are brothers; and that men can truly make 
 new worlds out of old — all that is necessary is to 
 realize, and act upon the realization of, the truth 
 whispered by the Sea Lady, that "there are better 
 dreams" than this dream of the poor, wretched world 
 we have. 
 
 So, therefore, even my dreams may be useful. My 
 tale of myself in pursuit of my dreams is not a singu- 
 lar and bizarre phenomenon. It is part of a great 
 
154 The High Romance 
 
 group movement, the most characteristic and impor- 
 tant movement of thought and of literature in these 
 troubled times. Which fact gives what I say an im- 
 portance it would otherwise lack. For a multitu- 
 dinous chorus of many voices, many of them out of 
 tune, and uttering frightful discords, it is true, strives 
 today to find unity and harmony as the Voice of 
 Man. . . . 
 
 All who are instruments of the Voice of Life — 
 all those poets, philosophers, musicians, tale tellers, 
 and other creative artists, who are moved by life to 
 be the voices of humanity — consciously, or uncon- 
 sciously, work toward self revelation. And even al- 
 though I realize that my own effort may be in vain, 
 I still think the effort itself may be of some value. 
 
 It is one more story of the human soul facing the 
 ineluctable Mystery. 
 
 For to me the final fact of all facts, the core of all 
 things, whether of a sun sparkle on a wave, or the 
 light of Sirius, the movements of an insect, or the 
 nature of man or superman, is Mystery. 
 
 Nothing can be more self-evident than that all things 
 in life are but parts, phenomena, of the pilgrimage 
 of the soul of man in quest of mystery's Solution. 
 And ever as we pilgrims of the quest, we searchers 
 after the answer to the riddle of existence, solve this 
 or that minor puzzle, our very activities, being actions 
 of life, weave other and more intricate patterns of 
 Mystery — our creative labour generates harder and 
 deeper tasks in the womb of eternity; and ever, al- 
 ways, the great loom of life spins on, weaving the cur- 
 tains that hang before the shrine of the Eternal. . . • 
 
Helicon Hall 155 
 
 — A little picture flashes before my eyes as I write 
 of ourselves being pilgrims of that quest whose object 
 is to find tlie answer to the riddle of existence; a little 
 picture evoked by the word "pilgrims." 
 
 — I see a vast desert; night at hand, and the sands 
 are grey. A caravan has travelled a great distance. 
 It has stopped at many oases; and now, reaching a 
 camping place, it rests, but soon will go on again — 
 on — on — on. . . . And the caravan will reach other 
 oases, but it will leave them, for the caravan must 
 go on. The pilgrims rest; some cook; others kneel in 
 prayer, the brown, lean faces turned toward Mecca; 
 camp fires twinkle, and the stars come out; and around 
 the fires sighs mingle with laughter. And witli intent 
 eyes watching the flames, or lifted up at times to 
 look at the stars, or to peer into the surrounding 
 darkness, the men and women and children gather 
 together; and now appear those who tell fortunes, 
 and who write letters home for the pilgrims, and who 
 sing songs, and tell stories. 
 
 — I, too, would tell a story, my fellow pilgrims, 
 a story of myself, a story of many adventures, some 
 very strange, some very common, some evil, some that 
 shame me, and others tliat gladden me to remember — 
 the adventures of a man who roamed the world in 
 search of his soul. Far away from tliis beautiful 
 shore where now I write did tlie tale of my quest 
 begin — as I will soon relate — far east and north, in 
 bleak New England, where the Pilgrims landed — 
 again that word, pilgrims — how strange! Can it be 
 that I who have hated tlie Puritans of New England 
 
156 The High Romance 
 
 with impatient, hot hatred, can gain a truer vision of 
 them by remembering that they, too, were pilgrims 
 of a quest? 
 
 10. End Of Helicon Hall 
 
 Perhaps those solitary hours of brooding on the 
 Palisades were the best things that I gained by my 
 sojourn at Helicon Hall. Perhaps the sense of great 
 wonder, and the adumbrations of the inner mysteries 
 of Life, which came to me during those hours, with 
 such irresistible persuasions of their power to affect 
 human life, were after all connected closely with the 
 people and the happenings at the Hall. The vistas of 
 many of my spiritual adventures were opened for me 
 in my wanderings by the mighty river, and my sojourn 
 in the fantastic Hall. 
 
 The colony, with its ideals and dreams, its beauties 
 and mistakes, its errors and its ignobilities, ran its 
 brief, feverish course of a few months, — lamentably 
 to end as a flaring story for the newspapers in the 
 disastrous fire that swept it away between dark and 
 dawn one cold, winter morning. 
 
 A red symbol of the dawn! Such was Helicon Hall 
 — symbol of the dawn of a new day and a new way 
 of living; a new life which must come, else the yearn- 
 ing soul of man but deludes him with vain dreams. . . 
 
 And in the fire my wife and I lost our all — our 
 clothes, furniture, our books. . . . 
 
Helicon Hall 157 
 
 And my manuscripts! 
 
 Every shred and scrap of my manuscripts; includ- 
 ing the accepted novel and the book I had written in 
 the year before I went to Texas; seventy thousand 
 words of another book at which I had been working 
 at intervals for more than ten years; the forerunner, 
 in fact, of this book; three short plays, and a mass of 
 stories, poems, prose sketches, essays, note-books; all 
 the literary baggage of my life's work, save for a few 
 unimportant short stories then going the rounds of 
 the magazines. 
 
 The insurance on our property had lapsed; we 
 faced the world that winter morning, the four of us, 
 man, wife, and babies, in our night gear. 
 
 Why had I not saved my manuscripts? 
 
 There was no chance. That great wooden bam of 
 a place was a hell of roaring flame within ten minutes 
 of my awakening; and my awakening came where I 
 was sleeping on a balcony on the third floor, with my 
 books and papers in a room far away at the other 
 end. And my wife and children were downstairs. 
 The children were on the ground floor; my wife on 
 the floor above. She knew the babies were safe; so 
 she came to me; to warn me, just as I was starting 
 to seek her. We bumped together in the smoke and 
 flame — in which two poor souls went out from their 
 bodies on the final adventure of all — and we just 
 barely managed to escape, after one sickening mo- 
 ment of horror when we blundered down the staircase 
 choked with smoke, at the end of which was a locked 
 door. 
 
 Grace MacGowan Cooke and Alice MacGowan, her _ 
 
158 The High Romance 
 
 sister, were badly injured jumping from the windows ; 
 and many others were slightly hurt; while all the 
 writers and students suffered more or less seriously 
 through the loss of their work. 
 
 So ended Helicon Hall. 
 
 Destitute now, and utterly so, with the book that 
 was to open the door of success destroyed, my chance 
 gone, I turned once more to face the bitter struggle. 
 
 I resumed my literary free-lancing in New York; 
 but when summer came we went to the Island of 
 Martha's Vineyard. 
 
I 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE CALL OF THE QUEST 
 
 1. A Hut Upon a Hill 
 
 T was at Martha's Vineyard that the turning point 
 arrived and my Quest of the High Romance defi- 
 nitely shaped itself, and became conscious instead of 
 merely instinctive. 
 
 On a little hill by the shore of this island — where 
 we went nearly every summer — I had built a hut 
 which I used for a work-room. It was not far from 
 our cottage, yet far enough to permit me to escape 
 from children and neighbours — translate, noises and 
 nuisances when one is working! 
 
 It was my wont to sleep in good weather on a mat 
 outside the door of this hut. When the first dawn 
 light came, I would awaken, and as the birds began to 
 sing, I would begin my work. 
 
 And so it was at dawn of that day among days 
 which led me to a new, strange trail in my quest of 
 the high romance. 
 
 In the doorway of my hut — ^that smelled sweetly of 
 new-sawn pine — I stood in the cool crystalline still- 
 ness, and wondered — as ever I shall wonder — at the 
 miracle of sunrise. 
 
 (I am sealed with the sense of wonder . . . for me 
 nothing grows stale.) 
 
 Across the dimly blue-grey water, smooth as silver, 
 
 159 
 
160 The High Romance 
 
 in the lighter sky, there extended a broad, undulating 
 band of rich crimson, from which slowly spread up- 
 ward — like a curtain rising — a ruddy glow, waxing 
 lighter and brighter and more aerial in its ascension 
 to where it was transmuted, in the high alembic of 
 tlie cloudless heavens, into the pure gold of the sun. 
 
 My mood, despite the solemnity of the moment, 
 was whimsical. I felt something that was akin to 
 the shallow flood of complacency that a city man on 
 a vacation in the country might feel as the reward of 
 his unaccustomed virtue of rising early. And as a 
 city business man might indulge in a few leaps, or 
 do physical culture movements, under the stimula- 
 tion of such a mood, I, being a literary person, must 
 needs exercise myself by juggling with a few phrases 
 to celebrate the occasion. 
 
 "My Lord the Sun still sleeps," I said, making as 
 good an imitation of the genuflexion of a Parsee as 
 I could improvise, "in his pavilion magically built 
 by the genii of water, fire, and air. Its floor is of 
 lapis-lazuli, the walls are of purple, the roof cloth is 
 crimson, and the canopy is of gold. But when my 
 Lord deigns to appear, forthwith the pavilion will 
 be dismantled and overthrown, for this arrogant 
 Majesty suff'ers no lesser glories to flaunt before his 
 face." 
 
 Having witnessed my Lord mount the throne of 
 day, I knew it to be time for his subject to go to work 
 — for even devout Parsees, I suppose, have to work 
 for a living; so, considering my devotions accom- 
 plished, I turned and went into my hut, and took the 
 cover from my typewriter. I was at w^ork on a Sun- 
 day newspaper article. The subject was well formed 
 
The Call of the Quest 161 
 
 in my mind; I expected to finish the task that 
 morning. ... 
 
 2. The Inner Voice 
 
 But . . . but something happened. I do not know 
 how to speak of it. For nothing outwardly happened, 
 nothing at all; yet inwardly something quite momen- 
 tous happened. All my life was from that inslant 
 changed; that moment was like the hinge on which 
 invisibly, noiselessly and inscrutably, the door of 
 Time swung open to admit me to a new existence. 
 
 And yet it was all so impalpable, so casual, too. 
 As I have said, I was about to sit down at my type- 
 writer, my mind filled with a sort of light, careless 
 joyousness inspired by the freshness of the buoyant 
 air of dawn. 
 
 Instead of doing so, I turned, all at once, toward 
 the open door — very quietly — as though I had been 
 touched by some invisible hand, — by the hand of 
 somebody who had an urgent message; somebody who 
 wanted me. It was — this is all I can definitely say, 
 an impulse; a new kind of impulse; an impulse to do 
 something as yet unknown; an impulse accompanied 
 by an emotion of clear and thrilling joy — the joy 
 which the beginning of an adventure always brings 
 to the true follower of Romance. 
 
 I stared expectantly towards the door. But there 
 was nothing, there was nobody there; only a clear 
 space of sunshine, and the silence. The thrill of the 
 moment passed; yet I remained there, feeling the 
 sun, and, as it were, listening to the silence, in a 
 sort of dream-condition. I am not as yet a master of 
 moods; I am a poor disciplinarian of my energies. 
 
162 The High Romance 
 
 Into the midst of the busiest humdrum my vagrant 
 dreams intrude; they come — dream shapes, and dream 
 voices, whispering poppied words, and they beckon, 
 they entice my soul to follow them to a far region 
 where only those things happen that are as you would 
 have befall; and I follow them, I cannot help but 
 follow. 
 
 So it was with me in that dawn. The magical 
 draught of light and life, ever pouring from the golden 
 beaker in the sky, entranced me — the wine of white 
 magic was it! And then — and then I knew that the 
 hour had struck. The conviction was suddenly and 
 irresistibly borne in upon me that the time had come 
 in which I must make my testament — my confession 
 of the faith to which I hold — nay, which holds me and 
 will not let me go until I have worked its will, to the 
 fullest extent of my power. And the power comes. 
 The soul does not send its servants forth to fight un- 
 armed and unprotected — it gives both buckler and 
 the sword. I am certain that in this moment of pul- 
 sating life my greatest, my most essential need found 
 imperative voice. 
 
 And I obeyed the call. 
 
 What I had to do became clear to me. I must 
 take a blanket and food, pen, ink, and paper, and 
 go out of my house, go away from family and friends, 
 neighbours and strangers, go away where there would 
 only be the sea and the sky and the lonely land, and 
 myself, and write to my friends — to all my friends 
 — the story of my adventures on my pilgrimage. 
 When I recognized and assented to the call my agita- 
 tion waned; peace was with me; I set about the plain 
 business of my mission. 
 
The Call of the Quest 163 
 
 3. On Taking To The Open Road 
 
 If I were not a writer, I would like to be a tramp, 
 or a sailor, — but, verily, I'm pretty much of a vaga- 
 bond as it is. The open sky — the roof of my house 
 of life — has arched above my bed and board in many 
 a land, on many seas. Canada, North Carolina, New 
 England, Texas, West Indies, California, Mexico — 
 these sonorous geographical names evoke remem- 
 brances of many adventures — they conjure up recol- 
 lections of ships, and camps, work and play, in heat 
 and cold, sun and rain, calm, storm, day and night — 
 perils — pleasures — fights — fires — earthquakes! 
 Great Walt, beloved R. L. S., sombre George Borrow, 
 I, too, may raise a chant of the open road. 
 
 But I was not simply going on a tramp — I had bus- 
 iness in hand; and as my pack was heavy, I was easy 
 with myself, not wishing to get tired, and the first 
 six miles of the journey were made as a passenger 
 on the stage that runs between Oak Bluffs and Edgar- 
 town, the old whaling port at the base of Cape Pogue, 
 the northeast point of the island. From Edgartown 
 I meant to strike out on foot for South Beach, on the 
 ocean side of the island, with an old, abandoned hotel 
 at Katama Bay as my objective point. I felt that it 
 would be well to keep within a mile or two of the 
 deserted house so that I might readily reach shelter 
 in case of a storm. And, indeed, caution was sug- 
 gested by a change in the weather. Already the bril- 
 liancy of the day (a day among ten thousand for 
 clarity of atmosphere and unclouded sun) had faded; 
 clouds had gathered, and I read a threat in this frown 
 of the heavens at the outset of my journey. My mood 
 
164 The High Romance 
 
 subtly attuned itself to the new key of grey. I be- 
 came sober, serious, and somewhat sad. I felt a dis- 
 tinct shrinking back within my mind from the pros- 
 pect of solitude; there was after all something darkly 
 enigmatical in the thought of voluntary loneliness. 
 The stability of purpose that a man's accustomed 
 chair supports, the definiteness that keys up your 
 work at your familiar desk, the comfort of a well- 
 ordered household — could I really work without all 
 that? Perhaps my intention was not wise after all; 
 perhaps it was even foolish — my guiding dream might 
 be a pixie, freakish and malicious, and not a serene 
 messenger from the blue hall of the gods! 
 
 How was I to know? The little devils of doubt had 
 seized me already! As matters stood, every hour's 
 work was of urgent practical importance. I had no 
 money; I needed money; — one day's work must pay 
 for the morrow's food and shelter, fire and light, books 
 and music — all the necessaries of life. My desk was 
 piled high with work. Was it not foolish, recklessly 
 foolish, to run away, at the beck of a dream, from 
 real work? 
 
 And, musingly, I considered that chilling, dark 
 chasm in the dim world of thought which I knew so 
 well, — the chasm that yawns between desire and ful- 
 filment, the idea and its accomplishment; descending 
 deeper, extending wider still, between the ideal and 
 its attainment. I considered it seriously. I recog- 
 nized full well the difficulties, labours and dangers 
 of its passage; and knew that I might thrill to my 
 soul with realization of how goodly a thing I had con- 
 ceived and yet fail most lamentably to demonstrate 
 its goodness. . . , 
 
The Call of the Quest 165 
 
 But even in that time of doubt, of hesitation on the 
 threshold, I knew that doubt and hesitation would 
 be but momentary. Even then, deep within me, be- 
 neath my sombreness, a song of affirmation was thrill- 
 ing as a bird sings above a cloud, in the sun; and when 
 there is a song in my heart all goes well. Nothing 
 daunts the soul that sings ; for then it is in tune with 
 life; and life's truest voice is music, — such music as 
 men hear, or dream, and write down on paper to re- 
 lease again in violins, in drums, in brass and wood- 
 wind, and in human voice. And there is music in 
 the wind moving in the grass, in the brush, and the 
 trees ; there is music in waters falling in rain, purling 
 in streams, crashing on the strand; there is music in 
 all natural sounds, but all is inarticulate — it is song 
 in limbo; song that must rise upward through the 
 heart, the brain, and the soul of man, as through an 
 alembic, before it is made living. Surely, the spirit 
 of life speaks in and through all things; but from 
 man comes its most noble words, its greatest messages, 
 its highest songs, since man is its most perfected in- 
 strument, — though, indeed, merely the chief, the lead- 
 ing instrument in the orchestra. I dream of music 
 as saints dream of heaven. I dream of so placing 
 words together, of so choosing words, that from one 
 unto the other will flow my thought, undulating, chant- 
 ing its message musically. 
 
 4. The House of Quiet 
 
 — I was the only passenger on the stage. My 
 driver was a boy of fifteen. As we drew near Edgar- 
 town we fell into talk. Previously, I had been 
 
166 The High Romance 
 
 silently drinking in the beauty of gracious colours 
 suffusing sand and sea, wind-bent oaks, high, yellow 
 grass and tufted rushes — and of the graceful lines 
 traced by the deeply inset bay and low, curving hills, 
 the moorland, and the linked garland of little ponds 
 along the shore. I asked my driver the shortest route 
 to Katama Bay. He gave me intelligent directions; 
 and then asked me what I was going to do down 
 there, where nobody lived. I told him I meant to 
 tramp and loaf by day; and by night sleep under 
 the sky. You should have seen that lad's eyes 
 brighten, and heard how his voice rang the bell of 
 his heart's interest! That was what he'd like to do, 
 you bet, said he; and told me of his own past excur- 
 sions. 
 
 What a pity all boys cannot do likewise, and from 
 time to time go away to the woods, the hills, the waters, 
 and roam them, sleeping where the day's end befalls. 
 No doubt a few would drown; some necks would be 
 cracked by tumbles from rocks and trees; and they 
 might occasionally pot each other with guns not known 
 to be loaded, — but do they not die, the boys, die like 
 flies; die weak, vicious, diseased, by countless 
 thousands in our cities? — thousands whom open air 
 and play might save? 
 
 It was past six o'clock when we reached Edgar- 
 town. My boy driver kindly went out of his way 
 to carry me to a place where he could point out the 
 best route cross-lots towards Katama. 
 
 "Thanks, and good night — good luck, friend!" 
 
 "Good night — good luck!" he sang out in his piping 
 treble. 
 
 I hoisted my bag on my shoulders and set my face 
 
The Call of the Quest 167 
 
 to the open places. I walked across a great, bare, 
 swelling, wind-swept moor. Only a scattered house 
 or two, far oflF, and widely separated; not a soul in 
 sight. 
 
 Now was I indeed alone, in the house of the open; 
 night at hand, sky grey, the rain already being cast 
 into my face in brief spats by a fitful wind that 
 whistled dryly in the stiff, short grass and the scattered 
 patches of brush. Against the grey skyline to my 
 right arose a tall water-tower, impressing solitude 
 upon me like a symbol. 
 
 I had walked perhaps a mile and a half when sud- 
 denly I became aware of a sound that brought me 
 to a dead stop, listening, peering forward — could it 
 be — Yes! It was the low, deep, still, distant boom- 
 ing of the surf, sonorous and profound. Ho! how 
 I thrilled, — how it always thrills me, that sound — I, 
 who was bom by the sea, who have sailed it, who 
 have been threatened many times with death by it, 
 and whose father and brother have it now for their 
 graves. Both father and brother were sailors; so was 
 my father's father, and his father — oh, if I might put 
 the suggestion of that melodious thundering into 
 words, back of all other sounds, like a gravely noble 
 bass accompaniment! 
 
 Shortly after sunset I reached the deserted hotel 
 at Katama, standing on the sand of the bay about 
 a short mile from the sea beach. The sky was 
 quite black save for one little place low down in the 
 west where a dim, faint gleam of gold was fading; 
 it was like the last hope left in a sorrowful heart. 
 A chilly wind, salt and moist, was blowing in from 
 the sea. The booming of the surf waxed louder. 
 
168 The High Romance 
 
 Loose boards clattered in the ruined house. The 
 wind in a cracked voice hummed banshee strains, or 
 in husky accents whispered secretively through the 
 shattered glass windows, the broken chimneys; and 
 wandered through the empty rooms where once at such 
 an hour as this bright lights shone, and men, women, 
 and children laughed out the holidays of their work- 
 a-day lives. Some great night bird, an owl, perhaps, 
 blundered heavily down upon the roof of the veranda, 
 startling me for a breath; and all about me were the 
 queer, strange, anonymous little voices of nocturnal 
 nature. 
 
 I took a bath of solitude. My soul and I sat like 
 two Arabs in silent communion, secrets passing with- 
 out words between us. 
 
 No man knows himself until he goes away from 
 the crowd, and even then he learns but little for a 
 long and weary time. 
 
 The dark, the low-breathing night leaned close to 
 me, like a hooded priest toward a penitent. What is 
 your message for me? Rest — rest — rest — so I trans- 
 lated what I heard, and I laid myself, dear night, upon 
 thy bosom. . . . 
 
 I love the night; but my love for it is like unto the 
 sentiment one retains for an old, past love affair. 
 Truly, for many years I was a noctambulist, and 
 wooed the adorable, moody, secretive mistress of dark 
 hours who is veiled and has jewels in her hair, she 
 whose cool caresses infect you with a singular and 
 restless fever — but now I have a new love and pay 
 court to her frank, joyous, wholesome, warm-hearted 
 sister, day. . . . 
 
The Call of the Quest 169 
 
 5. How Joy Came With The Morning 
 
 I put myself between the folds of my blanket, 
 drew on my sweater, got out my bundle of writing 
 paper, and doubling a towel about it, used that for 
 a pillow; and it pleased me to think I was like unto 
 a soldier lying on his arms in the field. The con- 
 ceit soothed me; and I slept, fitfully, it is true; but 
 at last for several hours. On my final awakening I 
 found the sky hinting of dawn, although it was still 
 overcast, still threatening rain. But the wind was 
 warmer, and there were dim penumbras of colours 
 low in the east, across the black sea; the faint inti- 
 mations of sunrise struggling through the clouds. I 
 took the water pail and a towel and walked toward 
 the sea. 
 
 On the sandy beach the waves were rolling in miles: 
 long regiments of breakers, crested with curling foam. 
 Flying sand and spin-drift stung my face. In this 
 wan, grey light the effect produced on me by the 
 sudden explosions of white wave crests was endirall- 
 ing, it was deeply exciting. I lay down in the shelter 
 of a sand bank to watch the wild yet ordered move- 
 ment of the waves, dancing to their own secret 
 rhythms. I was waiting for the light to increase in 
 order that I might bathe. My wife's last words had 
 been a warning against uncautipus bathing on the 
 South Beach, where the undertow is most powerful; 
 and indeed one look at the swirling of these big 
 smashers was enough to convince me it would be folly 
 to risk swimming in them. But I conceived an idea. 
 There was a fragment of an old wreck on the shore, 
 and it occurred to me that I might wade out to the 
 
170 The High Romance 
 
 lee side of this as one wave receded, cling to a plank 
 and allow the succeeding waves to drench me as they 
 breached against the seaward side of the stout, deeply 
 sunken timbers. 
 
 After a little while the sun cleared a path through 
 the clouds and shone down upon me brightly. The 
 moment was auspicious, I undressed and soon was 
 rushing at the tail of a retreating wave for the wreck. 
 Thigh-deep in the swirling back- rush, I clung to the 
 projecting plant I had marked, and in another in- 
 stant — 
 
 Boom and crash! 
 
 The timbers shook, and a sheet of cold, sharp 
 spray fell heavily upon me. . . . Whew-w! what a 
 shock; and what a morning bracer for a man who 
 once upon a time depended upon dry Manhattan cock- 
 tails! I allowed a few more waves to dash over me, 
 and then raced for the shore, dancing and leaping; 
 warm, tingling all over; and then I scampered back 
 for more. 
 
 After a brisk rub-down I pushed back to the hotel. 
 The sun had again disappeared; again it looked like 
 rain. In a snug corner of the veranda I drew forth 
 my pen and began to work: 
 
 — And in my heart I oflfered up a pagan's prayer: 
 ''Blow, wind of the morning, shine, rising sun 
 upon me! Freshen and fructify me with your keen 
 joyousness, your prepotent vitality, your irresistible 
 life — 50 that from me may spring my testament to 
 life as from this earth there comes the grass on which 
 I tread and the flowers that turn toward the east! 
 
The Call of the Quest 171 
 
 *^For I have come to the shrine of the morning as 
 one who enters a confessional in the holiest of holy 
 Churches, to cleanse my heart by my confession — and, 
 if I am found penitent — and if I receive absolution — 
 / will partake of the communion — and then swear the 
 vow — and upon that shall follow the great Adventure, 
 of which this book is the shadow cast before. . . ." 
 
 6. Mystery 
 
 The next night I slept far away from the dismal 
 ruin that complained to itself all night long, 
 querulously bemoaning its by-gone comforts; even 
 on calm nights it sighed and groaned. I spread my 
 blanket on the sand at South Beach, and listened to 
 the sea; and watched the moon, huge and ruddy and 
 round, coming up out of the water like a slow fire 
 balloon into a sky of rich, dim violet, losing its ruddi- 
 ness and becoming luminously silvern — like a blonde 
 girl losing the glow brought to her slender, white body 
 by a plunge into the sea. 
 
 The moor, with its covering of short, spare yellow 
 grass and its patches of pallid sand, and of dusky 
 brush, was drenched in a mysterious flood of mystical 
 sheen, a glimmering of singularly rich, dim, un- 
 nameable faint hues and suggestions of colours. On 
 the still inner water of Katama Bay the moonlight 
 was entrancing — one's soul plunged deep into that 
 silver current of dreams. A thick, sombre grove of 
 dwarf oaks and scrub pine lay to my right, black 
 and sinister. Now and then, fireflies sparkled in its 
 brooding gloom, unexpectedly and erratically as witty 
 thoughts issuing from a misanthrope. As I strolled 
 
172 The High Romance 
 
 along the beach I heard the laughter of picnicers, and 
 I made a long detour to avoid them. Then in the lee 
 of a sandbank I again spread my blanket, and lay- 
 there contemplating old ocean — that ancient of days, 
 hoarsely talking to himself along the sand — and 
 drinking my fill of the night's freely proffered 
 beauty. . . . 
 
 I think I was nearly asleep, when I heard gay 
 voices, laughter, little ecstatic cries, and I hurriedly 
 sat up. ... I am very glad I was not sleeping! 
 Three girls had stolen away from the other picnicers, 
 and were racing along the hard sand by the very 
 edge of the breakers; their shoes and stockings off, 
 and their light summer dresses kilted up around their 
 thighs. The distance softened their (perhaps) shrill, 
 Yankee voices; the moonlight made their white legs 
 gleam like silver, their draperies fluttered about them. 
 . . . They are not Yankee maids, I cried, they are 
 Nereids! Hark! in the surf the "blue Tritons sound 
 their twisted shells." Old ocean (and who shall 
 blame him?) clutched at their twinkling ankles as 
 they sped along . . . and passed. ... I saw them 
 no more, I was sleeping, I suppose, when they re- 
 turned. . . . 
 
 For a long time, I lay thinking of these communica- 
 tions before I fell asleep. I thought of my friends; 
 I sent my love toward them. My thoughts went up 
 into the air, through the moonlight, and sped on, like 
 homing birds, their homes your hearts, dear friends. 
 And, believe me, there is more than an evanescent 
 conceit in these words, — for how many of my thoughts 
 came from your hearts, were bom and were given 
 life through acts of kindness, of friendliness, on your 
 
The Call of the Quest 173 
 
 part towards me! They are innumerable. We live 
 in our friends. We are all unique beings, each and 
 every one of us, but yet how much we gain, how much 
 we add to what we are and what we do through the 
 inter-play and interweaving of our common dreams, 
 our thoughts, our acts, our sins, our dooms and des- 
 tinies! One man alone would be no man; he would 
 be an It, a Thing; the bees or the ants would capture 
 and put him in a wax case, stuffed and neatly labelled 
 as the monstrous curiosity of the earth. The word 
 man to me signifies family. 
 
 When I awoke on the sand bank in the morning, 
 lightning was flashing and thunder rolling in the east. 
 It was two o'clock. I hastened for shelter from the 
 storm. These electrical phenomena exercise a 
 singular influence upon me, strongly exciting my 
 nerves, and stirring up curious thoughts. And al- 
 though the storm died out in the distance before day- 
 break, I was in a state of mind not braced for the 
 continuance of writing. So I built a roaring fire — 
 the morning was the coldest I had experienced — 
 and stripped by it, and took a plunge. Then I raced 
 back to the fire, and soon I was warm, glowing all 
 over, feeling light and clean and happy, inside and 
 outside. 
 
 And like a Brahmin contemplating the universe 
 with his eyes for ever bent upon his navel, I sat by the 
 blaze, the three elements of fire, water, and air hav- 
 ing their will upon my body — and I was struck into 
 awe by the wonder of this structure of bone, blood, 
 and cell, in which I live. To think of the heart 
 pumping blood through all these veins; the lungs and 
 
174 The High Romance 
 
 all the intricate organism at work in strange 
 chemistry, transforming the air I breathe, the food 
 and drink I take, the sunshine that touches me, into 
 that other mystery — the energy which animates my 
 body's movement, and the thoughts and dreams that 
 move through the strange chambers of the brain! 
 
 Once dressed, I threw myself upon the turf. 
 There was a clump of daisies near me. I thought of 
 their roots, reaching down into the soil, and of the 
 mystic chemistry there operating, to be expressed 
 finally in the blossom of white and gold that seems 
 (or is it fancy?) to be turning toward the East, toward 
 the sun. A gull screamed, wheeled sharply, and 
 dived into the water, seeking its food — a winged 
 mystery in the mystery of the air! And the stars I 
 watched last night, the stars! ... mystery . . . 
 mystery! . . . 
 
 The profoundest chord in the symphony of life is 
 mystery. Where it sounds in art you may know the 
 artist has drawn near the veiled source of all things. 
 
 Voices seemed to whisper secret words; I strained 
 to listen, to mark, to remember. 
 
 No. 
 
 I could not understand. 
 
 I cannot understand. 
 
 I do not think it possible to understand. 
 
 But in all I create may there be intimations of that 
 august, impenetrable Mystery. 
 
 7. Words of the Night 
 
 That same day, I returned to my home. I was 
 temporarily written out, and my strange, new mood 
 
The Call of the Quest 175 
 
 had relaxed its tension, although I had in mind 
 further things I wished to say. But for some time 
 after my return I was obliged to devote myself to my 
 bread-and-butter work. It was not until two months 
 later that I again took up the task begun at Katama 
 Bay. 
 
 Once more I feverishly wrought at my communi- 
 cations, because things that I desired to tell crowded 
 upon my attention at every turn, at every moment, 
 for months after the visitation of that curious wander- 
 lust. I could not meet even the most casual 
 stranger; I could not look to the right or left, up 
 or down, at star or gutter, upon open sea or city 
 street, without finding some new thing; something 
 that I felt I must write about, as though it had never 
 been described before; as though it had just been 
 bom, and I had just been born, and must tell other 
 souls newly bom about all these wonders, all these 
 things, and deeds, and happenings and personages of 
 this mystery-play of human life! 
 
 Night after night I brooded over them; in a far 
 different mood, however, and in very different cir- 
 cumstances, than during my trip into the solitude and 
 beauty of South Beach. 
 
 The storm that threatened but did not descend 
 all the time I was gipsying had now broken in all its 
 violence, and blew day after day and night after 
 night. The house in which I lived, a single-boarded, 
 unshingled, summer cottage, shook and quivered 
 continuously. The doors and windows rattled with- 
 out cessation. 
 
176 The High Romance 
 
 And night after night it was my duty to sit up, 
 sleepless, and see the night through. I felt a deep 
 disturbance of nerve, a feverish agitation of thought, 
 — in reaction, no doubt, from my exalted condition 
 during my South Beach adventure. 
 
 How it went to my heart to imagine — as each night 
 I most vividly did — that out there in the bitter 
 weather men were struggling and strangling, with 
 flooded lungs and bursting hearts. All their agonies 
 in vain, 1 could see them sink; down they went, down 
 into the strange depths beyond which they might not 
 sink; down among the tangled skeletons of the sea; 
 down where the bones of my father and of my brother 
 were swirling to and fro. 
 
 — In the depths of the sea — I told myself — there 
 are great sub-oceanic rivers, with powerful cur- 
 rents (like the Gulf Stream) and these move along 
 bearing with them everlastingly the bodies of the 
 drowned; true rivers of Lethe! . . . And these men 
 who were drowning, they were fathers, or sons, or 
 husbands, or lovers, or friends; and their parents or 
 wives or children or sweethearts or comrades were 
 on shore; and they did not hear the passing cries of 
 the drowning upon the wild wind, yet surely some 
 of them felt strange tremblings — and yearning 
 trouble; and tomorrow or the next day the news 
 would reach them. 
 
 So I, who wrote in the morning, in calm, in peace, 
 of the joys of my new life, my morning life, now 
 in a night of storm wrote of the grim welter of the 
 sea, where in the midst of the surf the withering faces 
 
The Call of the Quest Yll 
 
 of the drowning disappear, like bursting foam bells, 
 and the wild wind howls over them. 
 
 Something had happened beyond the reaction 
 from my other mood to make me feel like this. 
 
 I was watching beside a bed of sickness. My little 
 son was burning in fever. I nursed him by night. 
 In the intervals, when he was asleep or at ease, I kept 
 on with my writing. Every little while, I would break 
 off and go to his side when he moved, or moaned, 
 or cried out, or needed attention. Just so long as 
 I could hold myself to the task, I had kept at my 
 bread-and-butter work, to the articles I was writing 
 for the magazines. But ever since that call out of the 
 dawn I had been singularly excited, or perhaps merely 
 feverish, in spirit. Thoughts kept rushing through 
 my head, even as in that autumn time the wild ducks 
 were rushing out of the mystic solitude of the North; 
 and when I heard the whirring of their wings — my 
 wild bird thoughts! — perforce I stopped my work-a- 
 day toil, and added something, if even but a few 
 lines or words, to the book of my adventures. 
 
 And night after night I wrote, or read, as I 
 watched by the sick boy, and thought or dreamed. 
 
 Like a river of unequal depth and varying strength 
 and rapidity of current, is life; and during those 
 strange nights I rushed through whirlpools and 
 rapids; or in beatific calms, or wild vertigoes of 
 spirit, I swept under sheer rocks, looking up into 
 skies where eagles winged, or shuddered at the pro- 
 found depths over which I floated — an atom, aware 
 of its infinitesimal unimportance. 
 
178 The High Romance 
 
 Yet surely the atom is important to itself, and to 
 otlier human souls? At least I am something to my 
 friends; as they are to me; as we are to each other in 
 this world of which we know so little — this world 
 which, like us, is rushing down the great river of life 
 through the shadow land of eternity. 
 
 Every human soul is an exploration. 
 
 About three o'clock, one morning, the sick boy, 
 after a dolorous spell of pain, went to sleep. What 
 a blessed relief! 
 
 The night had grown colder, or perhaps it was 
 I who was colder. They say, you know, that in that 
 dismal hour before the dawn one's vigour is at its 
 lowest ebb. I felt chilled, altliough I hugged the 
 stove. I felt somewhat down in the mouth, a little 
 nervous, and inclined to be irritable. I could see 
 that I had not yet shaken off all traces of the shock 
 impressed upon my nervous system by the earth- 
 quake, and the fire at Helicon Hall. I still find my- 
 self, in moments when vitality ebbs, troubled by fears 
 of cataclysmic disasters impending. And that morn- 
 ing the quivering of the frail house alarmed me. I 
 dreaded an overthrow, and fire starting up in the 
 rooms from lamps — and I have had my fill of burn- 
 ing houses and of rushing out into cold dawns, home- 
 less and stripped bare! And the rain was leaking 
 dismally through walls and ceiling in half a score of 
 places. This thing I consider damnable; there is 
 something sickly, something suggestive of a mean 
 disease, connected with a house that does not fulfil 
 the true functions of a house; which is, to protect us 
 
The Call of the Quest 179 
 
 from the weather. Do you remember how Edward 
 Carpenter points out somewhere in one of his essays 
 that our house is one of our skins? . . . and a house 
 should be whole for life's sake, for decency's sake, 
 and for honour's sake. . . . After placing basins, 
 cups and other vessels beneath the more copious leaks, 
 I huddled up in a rug near the stove and read 
 Metchnikoff's "Nature of Man"; for I could write no 
 more, I had written myself out. 
 
 Metchnikoff's book is a great one. It is one of the 
 most inspiring and hopeful messages that science has 
 delivered to mankind in the course of many years. 
 It is one of those books from which material could 
 be drawn for the formation of that Book of The 
 Samurai of which H. G. Wells speaks; that book 
 which will be a Bible in the new civilization that is 
 to dawn, a book in which the finest and most hopeful 
 and truest words will be marshalled for the use of us 
 all. 
 
 But in my dismal mood that morning I came upon 
 an appropriately dismal portion of Metchnikoff's 
 otherwise stimulating message; that in which he deals 
 with the subject of death, and the instinctive human 
 fear of death. . . . 
 
 When you have a sick child on your hands you 
 do not like even to see that grizzly word, Death, in 
 print; you avert your thoughts with a shiver from the 
 idea — which is another instance that Metchnikoff 
 might use in support of his contention that there is 
 an instinctive fear of death implanted in human na- 
 ture. 
 
 Nevertheless, the subject of death has always been 
 one of deep interest for me, and I returned to its 
 
180 The High Romance 
 
 contemplation that morning. Indeed, it became 
 uppennost in my thoughts. I laid the big book aside 
 and sat musingly by the fireside; musing and re- 
 membering. Scenes and conversations came vividly 
 to mind; scenes in which Death and myself, or Death 
 and others, played leading parts; conversations in 
 which Death was the subject of the talk. I found 
 myself synthesizing these memories, reflections and 
 inquiries on death, in an eff'ort to define what Death 
 meant to me. 
 
 And as I sat there silently, all these memories be- 
 came vivid pictures, and they defiled before my eyes 
 like a panorama; or perhaps I might say that I sat 
 there like unto a man in a strange house who studies 
 the designs and figures in the tapestry upon the wall 
 of a room of mystery. . . . 
 
 But as I brooded thus, my boy awoke and called 
 me, and I hurried to him. 
 
 "I want a drink," he whispered. 
 
 I put the prepared draught to his scorched lips and 
 he drank avidly. His head sank back on his pillow. 
 He seemed not so feverish as on my last visit. In the 
 dim light in which I kept him, his eyes seemed clear, 
 and as he looked up at me he smiled — a queer odd, 
 piteous grimace; and then, in a voice of unimaginable 
 softness, he murmured : 
 
 "Daddy, I love you!" 
 
 I should like to reproduce the accents of his voice. 
 But I cannot. I try "baby -talk" spelling; writing 
 down, in an effort to be phonetic, "I yuve you;" but 
 this is not right; no, I do not catch it; he did not, it is 
 
The Call of the Quest 181 
 
 true, say "I love you" with just the clearness conveyed 
 by the written words; there was that untranslatable, 
 that adorable lisping accent. . . . But I cannot con- 
 vey the unconveyable. 
 
 This, however, is a fact which can be told, namely, 
 that even in the night, in storm, even when I thought 
 of death, my grey familiar, I was in the midst of 
 life and knew the joy of it. 
 
 And I thought: — 
 
 What a goodly thing it would be for a man to be 
 writing so that he might "pass the time" and keep 
 keenly awake in such a service as this attendance 
 upon a child, and in so doing write something true, 
 write something worthy, write something worth 
 while! . . . 
 
 Can it be, after all, that to do some little act of 
 service is better and more worth while than to write 
 something beautiful? 
 
 Little boy, do you know the answer to this question? 
 You smile as you dream — tell me what you dream 
 about? Of coming life? I dream of it also, and I 
 dream that perhaps again I may be as you are, and 
 know the life that is to be. . . . 
 
 What is that saying I have somewhere heard, that 
 we must be bom again to know the truth. That we 
 must become as little children? But if we become 
 as children, there must somewhere, somehow, be a 
 Father! 
 
 Ah, but that is only illusion? 
 
182 The High Romance 
 
 Yet, illusion has its place. 
 
 Personally I delight to play at make-believe. I 
 imagine myself a true Lavengro; a real master of 
 words; a gipsy word-master; and when I play this 
 game I seem to see myself so weaving words together 
 as to suggest voices that sing like the violins in Tris- 
 tan, or that roar like the surf on South Beach, or shine 
 like certain spaces of star-set sky I can remember, or 
 that are coloured like the slender, black masts of the 
 schooners against the clear golden dawn in Vineyard 
 Haven, when each mast is like unto the spear or ban- 
 neret of a knight, drawn by an artist to serve as a 
 design for the initial letter of a story of adventure. 
 
 Ah, if I could only find words of a beauty like unto 
 the beauty of the lips and the dear eyes of a child! 
 
 But I am a dreamer of impossible dreams. . . . 
 
 Do you know, sometimes I fancy I am able to think 
 the thoughts of a child. I wish I could be sure, for 
 I would write them down; but, of course, I must be 
 mistaken, and I do not want to make myself 
 ridiculous. For one thing, I am always wanting 
 people to play my play; to come into my game. But 
 I must not cherish illusions when there are so many 
 real wonders about me. . . . 
 
 None the less, I feel that my game is much more 
 interesting than most of the stupid games being played 
 around me. . . . Money-making, for example; and 
 the chase after the folly of fame. 
 
 And of all the games I desired to play, the game 
 of games was life itself. Oh, to live as something 
 within me passionately desired to live — ^to live 
 
The Call of the Quest 183 
 
 exuberantly, boldly, splendidly! Ah, it was not 
 enough to dream; and still less worth while only to 
 write down the dreams. 
 
 No; no; there was something in me that rebelled 
 against the best that was offered to me by life as so 
 far I had known it. 
 
 There must be something else; somewhere, or some- 
 how, if I could only find it. What was it? IF here 
 was it to be found? 
 
 But, as the wind howled about the house, I grew 
 weary of my longings after the intangible, the un- 
 known. 
 
 I thought of how the surf must be smashing and 
 shouting upon South Beach. 
 
 And I longed to escape from myself, and go out 
 to the sea and the wind. 
 
 I felt a desire to rush through the sedge grass at 
 the end of Long Pond and gaze out into the hill- 
 broth of white foam, boiling, seething and crashing 
 in the weltering blackness, under the scud of flying 
 rack, with the wind cutting off the white heads of 
 the breakers as if the swords of the Princes of the 
 Air were at war! 
 
 The clock neared four o'clock. Soon it would be 
 day. When I was writing at South Beach, I used to 
 arise at this hour to write of my morning joy. 
 
 Now I sat up in the night writing of my quest after 
 the Grail of Joy. Well, in night as in morning, in 
 sickness as in health, in cold, killing storms, as in 
 the bland, caressing sunshine I must maintain my 
 quest. 
 
184 The High Romance 
 
 Let night make me think of day; let sickness remind 
 me of health. I will fight on against all sickness. 
 I will fight it in other ways than in words. The storm 
 evokes the remembrance of, and the longing for, 
 the warm, gladdening, life-cherishing sunshine; and 
 storm and darkness and disease bring up the thought 
 that from man's life should never go: — 
 
 From storm and darkness and disease, and death, 
 man deliver thyself! 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 A DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL 
 
 1. Boiling The Pot 
 
 THE summer was over, winter was near; the flimsy 
 seaside cottage would soon be quite uninhabit- 
 able; we had no furniture, no roof of our own; it was 
 time to seek shelter for the boreal months. 
 
 For part of the time after my expedition to Katama 
 beach I had been away from the island travelling 
 for a magazine, gathering material for special arti- 
 cles. I had deplorably failed with these, from the 
 magazine's point of view. My articles had been too 
 personal in tone. What the magazine wanted was its 
 own tone, which, it appears, I was unable to catch; 
 as a matter of fact, I was unable to hear it. My 
 articles had interested me so much that I could only 
 write them in my own way. I recognized the right 
 of the magazine to demand its own way; and relations 
 were broken off. One of my commissions had been 
 to visit and investigate a great sanitarium. When the 
 magazine refused to accept my account of this institu- 
 tion, I interested another magazine in the same story, 
 and I decided to go to the sanitarium again with my 
 family, as I could live very cheaply there. As to 
 plans beyond a month or two, I had none. Perhaps 
 we would go to New York for the winter; or maybe 
 we would buy a tent and roam about in Southwestern 
 
 185 
 
186 The High Romance 
 
 Texas, or Arizona, or Southern California; living a 
 gipsy life such as we lived in old days outside San 
 Antonio. 
 
 My mind was working furiously, and so was my 
 hand in writing down what the mind was thinking; 
 there was confusion both in mind and in writing, but 
 amid the welter of ideas, of desires, and the clamant 
 voices of urgent immediate needs, there was always 
 the inner voice of my firmest idea, my strongest de- 
 sire, my most imperious need — the inner voice that 
 commanded the building of my house of crystal; and 
 it seemed to me that only by going away into some 
 country place, or into the wilderness, could I secure 
 the time and leisure necessary. However, first of all, 
 I had to make some money; so, in New York, I boiled 
 the pot for Sunday newspapers, and secured commis- 
 sions from magazines for articles and short stories. 
 
 At this time I once more met Upton Sinclair. He 
 had just finished his novel, "The Metropolis," and 
 was, like myself, desirous of forming some plan for 
 the winter that would be more congenial than living 
 in New York. I told him of my idea of living in 
 a tent in the Southwest, or of travelling with a wagon ; 
 we put our heads together and evolved the following 
 plan, which a magazine approved of to the extent of 
 signing an agreement to accept a number of articles 
 describing our project as it proceeded. I will copy 
 our prospectus, for it shows the state of my mind at 
 that time. 
 
 2. Utopia on the Trek 
 
 "Introduction; The talking out of the plan; 
 introduce the Revolutionist (Sinclair) and the 
 
A Dark Night of the Soul 187 
 
 D ream er (myself) with their families. They have 
 spent their lives in a battle with the evil forces of 
 Society; with poverty, sickness and despair. They 
 have come out of the social pit. One had been a hack 
 writer, living in garrets and shanties. The other 
 began life as an errand boy in a department store; 
 has been a journalist and a literary free-lance; has 
 had a death-grapple with consumption, and cured him- 
 self by the outdoor life. They had won their right 
 to live, and were seeking for some happier way to 
 bring up their children than civilization afforded ; but 
 their efforts ended in a disastrous fire (Helicon Hall) 
 from which they escaped with nothing except their 
 lives and the knowledge they had painfully gained 
 on the road to happiness. They rendezvous at Battle 
 Creek, (a sort of headquarters for the "nature cure" 
 enthusiast) and take stock of their physical condition, 
 and set out once more to seek a way to live out their 
 convictions. 
 
 "Our plan is a perambulating colony, a Helicon 
 Hall on the hoof; a migratory home, warranted fire- 
 proof, and free from landlords and steam-heat, and 
 taxes. Our wives will escape flat-hunting; the serv- 
 ant problem will be solved, and dress will cease 
 to worry us. We shall set out about the first of the 
 year, with a couple of big surveying wagons and 
 teams in South California. We shall have our wives 
 and three children, between the ages of three and 
 six: also a governess and a stenographer and a cook, 
 and two young poets, who will help with the men's 
 work. They are all friends, and all but one or two 
 were at Helicon Hall. We plan to wander here and 
 there, living out-doors all the time, camping now and 
 
188 The High Romance 
 
 then, by the seashore or up in the mountains, while 
 
 we do our writing. We shall go north as the summer 
 
 advances, seeing everything on the Pacific Coast that 
 
 I interests us; the Point Loma Colony; the Carmel 
 
 V group of literary people, the Anarchist "Freeland," 
 
 ^ San Francisco, Berkeley, and the Yosemite Valley. 
 
 (Williams was a city editor in San Francisco at the 
 
 time of the earthquake, and will have interesting 
 
 impressions to review.) 
 
 "The story of the trip will not be in any sense a 
 mere record of travel. It will be an intimate and 
 personal account of a new life experience, that will 
 be a life experience open to all in the new civiliza- 
 tion whose dawn we hope to greet while on the trek. 
 It will be a health pilgrimage, a paean to the out- 
 door life. There will be brown-legged babies, and 
 camp adventures galore; we shall tell how we live 
 and what we eat and how much it costs us, and what 
 are the ideas behind all our ways. We are wor- 
 f shippers of sunshine and fresh air and cold water 
 and the simple life; we use no alcohol nor tobacco, 
 - ) tea nor coffee, nor the corpses of our fellow-creatures. 
 We shall have books and music and a panoramic 
 school for our children; and glimpses of these will 
 appear in our record; but whatever sociological or 
 philosophical opinions may be voiced will begin and 
 end with good humour. 
 
 "The story will be, from first to last, full of 
 enthusiasm and the spirit of adventure. We plan 
 this method of life as something which others may 
 follow, and we expect to follow it ourselves in other 
 parts of the world — next year in England, France and 
 Italy." 
 
A Dark Night of the Soul 189 
 
 3. The Book of Good Health 
 
 Our plans became known and how the press roasted 
 us; the vials of ridicule being poured out, of course, 
 more especially on Sinclair's head; I being com- 
 paratively unknown. However, all this fuss had its 
 commercial value as advertising, so we could afford 
 to shrug our shoulders. 
 
 But there were certain reasons of a personal kind, 
 concerning my collaborator more than me, which pre- 
 vented an immediate start on the trek; so Sinclair 
 proposed that we should all go to Bermuda for the 
 first months of the winter, making our start in Cali- 
 fornia in tlie spring. It would be an expensive proj- 
 ect, to be sure; but perhaps after all no more expen- 
 sive than living in New York, and we could 
 recuperate, financially, while on the trek. So we 
 adopted this plan, and went to Bermuda; and were 
 barely settled in a beautiful bay in Somerset before 
 events befell of a kind which caused my collaborator 
 to feel that the trek plan must be abandoned. We 
 decided to write another book together, to take the 
 place of the trek adventures; a book relating in a 
 popular way those ideas and methods of modem 
 hygiene in which we both believed and which ap- 
 peared to us as part and parcel of the effort of the 
 human race, consciously and by power of will, to 
 banish unnecessary suffering and disease, and to 
 create for itself a real Utopia. 
 
 Good Health, and How We Found It; was our 
 title. 
 
 I was, of course, quite positive that the title exactly 
 expressed the qase — so far as I was concerned, at 
 
190 The High Romance 
 
 least; therefore, was I not plainly called upon to give 
 the world my message? 
 Obviously! 
 
 4. Humpty Dumpty Has a Great Fall 
 
 When the health book was written I returned to 
 New York. The financial panic of 1908 was 
 rumbling like an expiring storm on the national 
 horizon, and I found New York still frightened and 
 very cautious in buying anything. It was impossible 
 to get a magazine to purchase the health book for 
 serial publication; all I could do was to obtain a book 
 publisher. However, there were magazine editors 
 who wanted stories, so once again I sat down to write 
 things to sell. 
 
 An editor of a popular magazine told me one day 
 that he had to have a new serial in hand within six 
 weeks or so, and that he was in despair — ^he could 
 not find the novel he wanted; a novel full of action, 
 with "something doing" in every chapter, and a crisis, 
 at the end of each instalment. 
 
 On the spur of the moment I said: "I'll write you 
 such a novel." 
 
 He said (looking at me over his spectacles, his 
 kind, grizzled face smiling) : "Have you one on the 
 stocks?" 
 
 "No, I haven't; but I can write one." 
 
 "Dear boy, don't try such a thing; because, first of 
 all, you ought not to work like that; and I can promise 
 you absolutely nothing — " 
 
 I said : "I ask for no promise, but I have made up 
 my mind to write that novel." 
 
A Dark Night of the Soul 191 
 
 He said: "Go to it, then, and the best of luck." 
 
 So I went home, and sat down to write a novel in 
 six weeks. 
 
 I resolved not to leave the house until it was written. 
 My wife was to manage the meals. The roof-top 
 was to supply air and exercise, in the coolth of the 
 summer nights. We were living in two rooms on the 
 top floor of a lodging house. I was so certain that 
 I was going to write and sell my novel, that I engaged 
 a stenographer, and day after day, night after night, 
 I dictated or wrote, to the amount of from three to 
 six thousand words daily. 
 
 I had conceived the plot of a mystery tale; jewels; 
 Oriental secret circles of fanatic assassins (an un- 
 conscious plagiarism of Wilkie Collins, no doubt) ; 
 exciting, rapid, tense. 
 
 I had hardly got into the third chapter, however, 
 before the confounded thing that ought to have been 
 a rattling, pot-boiling serial yam turned around on 
 me with a new face — ^the face of my dreams, — and 
 the passion that is in my soul, the passionate quest for 
 truth, boiled up and overmastered me. 
 
 I said to myself with arrogant wilfulness: "Never 
 mind! I'll go on and do both things; I will write a 
 book that will be a popular slam-bang novel; and it 
 will also express my real interests! It will be a tale 
 of material adventures which shall symbolize the 
 higher adventures of the soul. It will be a book of 
 the new and better age, the dawn of which is opening 
 dimly yet certainly in America." 
 
 And with this mood upon me, and daily growing 
 more tense and urgent, I forged ahead with the work. 
 
 Our rooms were next to the roof of the house, with 
 
192 The High Romance 
 
 nothing between us and the sun but the flimsy plaster- 
 ing; and — but you know your New York in the hot 
 days; and the nights were worse; even when we went 
 upon the roof and talked, and watched the dim stars 
 in the smoky sky, or the yellowish moon, and dreamed 
 our dreams. 
 
 And thus I spilled myself out on paper, wasting 
 my soul in feverish words, and as I walked upon the 
 roof, under the towering cliffs of surrounding sky 
 scrapers, in this canyon among mountainous houses, 
 with the hot clamour of the town beating upon and 
 around me, and the lights from Broadway streaming 
 high into the sky, and the lives of four millions boil- 
 ing and seething for many miles in all directions — 
 as thus I walked, I say, there were moments when I 
 felt that I held the city in the hollow of my hand, 
 studying it as a sculptor might study a lump of clay, 
 and that with my fingers I could mould it into what 
 shape I choose. ... I was, you see — the Artist; 
 the new master of the new life of men! 
 
 Having reached which exalted condition, it was, of 
 course, time for a fall. 
 
 It came, in a familiar fashion; a hard, far, shatter- 
 ing fall. 
 
 I remember the moment with stark vividness. 
 
 I was alone in tlie house one very hot afternoon. I 
 was working on a page in one of the chapters which 
 dealt with the efforts of one of i^y characters to cure 
 himself of tuberculosis, when all of a sudden there 
 was a click, or gurgle, deep down in my throat; my 
 mouth filled with something hot, something with a 
 
A Dark Night of the Soul 193 
 
 taste that I recognized ; I coughed and then something 
 spattered the page and the paragraph dealing with my 
 consumptive character — and the something was red. 
 
 Do you remember Crusoe staring at the footprint 
 in the sand of his lonely island? Figure me, staring 
 at this red warning — staring; but I'll spare you any 
 description of my thoughts; indeed, to describe them 
 would necessitate the invention of sentiments ap- 
 propriate to the occasion, since, in reality, my cere- 
 bration was suspended, and, like Crusoe, I stood like 
 one confounded, or as if I had seen an apparition. 
 
 Some of my readers may be soldiers, hunters, 
 adventurers. Blood does not affright you, even your 
 own. That's all right. That is as it should be. But 
 I wish that I could lose my blood on a battle field; 
 in some stand-up-and-have-it-out-and-may-the-best- 
 man-win kind of fight; losing it through some clean 
 fierce sword thrust or bullet hole, rather than in this 
 miserable fashion. It makes me angry to have some 
 confounded blood-vessel spring a leak, and put me 
 on my back; I feel as some commander must feel when 
 one of his trusted men fails him at some critical 
 juncture. I need all my blood in my work. I am 
 ashamed, too, when it fails; because it is a part of me; 
 and I want to be sound — I will be sound — I shall be 
 sound! — I want to be sound through and through, up 
 and down, inside and outside, body, and mind, and 
 soul. 
 
194 The High Romance 
 
 5. The Dark Night 
 
 But I had to go on with my work, anyhow. 
 
 So I pulled myself together; the chief factor in 
 my rally being my sheer incredulity — I simply could 
 not believe that my lungs were affected again. I 
 had been examined several times during the past year; 
 everything was sound and I was in fine shape, the 
 doctors had assured me; my lung capacity having 
 been increased so that it was distinctly above the 
 average. And I had written the health book on the 
 assumption that I was a cured man, a well man; I 
 had written scores of articles on the same assumption ; 
 I had planned and already written a large part 
 of the book of the Crystal House on that founda- 
 tion. 
 
 It was utterly absurd to believe that I was wrong. 
 I was a fool to be afraid. 
 
 I had been overworking in the heat and airless- 
 ness of the city room; this would explain matters; 
 some little blood-vessel had burst; it was a warning; 
 it could be nothing more. 
 
 And so firmly did I hold to this view of the matter, 
 that I did not have a physician examine me; and 
 after a week or so I had well nigh forgotten the 
 episode. 
 
 There were times, though, when the red hiero- 
 glyphic came before my mental vision; then I de- 
 liberately turned away from it. 
 
 My wife, however, wanted me to get away from the 
 city; and so we made up our minds to return to 
 Martha's Vineyard, where I could sleep out of doors. 
 
A Dark Night of the Soul 195 
 
 So we got out of town right away, and at Martha's 
 Vineyard, I finished my book. 
 
 What a book! 
 
 Neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. The 
 most impossible book, I think, that ever was written. 
 In all my long career of writing unsalable manu- 
 scripts I had never created anything quite so impos- 
 sible as this new novel, which finally, I threw in the 
 fire. 
 
 But at the time, of course, I would not recognize 
 facts, and I tried hard to sell the thing. When its 
 failure was palpable, I cursed the editors, and packed 
 my bag for the journey back to New York, back to the 
 market place. 
 
 I well remember that morning! 
 
 I had left my bed feeling irritable and disgusted 
 with myself; precisely why, I did not know. There 
 were a score of reasons for feeling blue, and how 
 was I to decide between their conflicting and sneering 
 claims? They ran through my head, these reasons, 
 intolerably chattering, and quarrelling; exhibiting 
 their vulgarities, their frailties, and disagreeable 
 stupidities with all the naive rudeness, the smutchy 
 brazenness of a mob of ill-bred urchins shrilling their 
 contentions concerning some trivial yet offensive 
 subject. And each one of them, down to the most 
 obscure and feeblest voice, assumed to speak, for the 
 time, with the voice of my very self. Going to my 
 writing room, I drank strong coffee, and smoked a 
 cigarette or two and languidly toyed with my work; 
 and then gave myself up to this mood of disenchant- 
 ment — as completely as I abandoned, without the pre- 
 
196 The High Romance 
 
 tence of a struggle, my hygienic program of absti- 
 nence from drugs like nicotine and caffein and alco- 
 hol, and I said something like this, to myself: 
 
 "What the devil was the use? 
 
 "Here's a pretty kettle of fish. I can't go on work- 
 ing at a magazine article, because the very thought 
 of clattering the keys of a typewriter makes me ill. 
 Yet I know very well that I ought to be doing so — 
 I need the money; and never, never shall I be able 
 to give myself up to the writing of anything better 
 than a magazine article unless I first get some money. 
 And I can't attempt anything better, in such a state 
 of mind as this, for I would be like unto a lover ex- 
 pressing his passion to his mistress through the 
 cachinnations of a bad cold in his head; or like a 
 singer trying to achieve pure tone with a quinsy sore 
 throat; in fine, I am utterly disgusted with myself!" 
 
 And I would not listen to the inner voice which 
 tried to tell me that even out of my grey moods I 
 might weave purple banners; that out of my doubts 
 and despondencies and despairs I might extract the 
 quintessential oil of art. — 
 
 I threw some manuscripts together, and fled back to 
 town. 
 
 In going to New York from Martha's Vineyard, it 
 is necessary to change boats at New Bedford. It was 
 on a Sunday when I made the journey, and travel 
 was so heavy that I found it impossible to procure a 
 stateroom, or even a berth in a stateroom. The notion 
 of passing the night in the fetid atmosphere below 
 decks in the common cabin repelled me utterly, so I 
 
A Dark Night of the Soul 197 
 
 resolved to stay on deck the most of the time, taking 
 cat-naps in the main cabin. 
 
 It was a windless night; the atmosphere clogged 
 with the fumes of the great forest fires burning every- 
 where along the coast from Cape Cod to Maine. The 
 West when the invisible sun went down was thickly 
 horrible with a red like old blood; the air was heavy; 
 sounds like the swash of waves, the throbbing of the 
 machinery, the tolling of a reef bell, the far-off 
 whistle of a passing steamship, came to my ears as 
 through a muffling of crepe. It was a night made for 
 a lamentable and gigantic disaster; but this portentous 
 impression faded as the west died out into grey, and 
 then into black; and, as I sat on deck muffled in a 
 coat, my mind turned to other thoughts. 
 
 I said to myself that I was a pretty poor specimen 
 of a man — of a man such as I wished to be; and was 
 it worth while trying to be other than the scallawag 
 and weakling that at bottom I knew myself to be? 
 
 But was I wholly a scallawag and a weakling at 
 bottom? 
 
 At bottom, did I not also have a goodly share of 
 the qualities which make up a decent man? 
 
 I didn't know; I was sure of nothing; only this 
 was I sure of — ^the big ship was carrying me along 
 with it, on, on, on — towards the unknown, towards 
 life still to be lived ; that was all of which I could be 
 sure. 
 
 And I turned toward this thought. I tried to 
 extract new courage and hope from it. 
 
 Life — life in the future, towards which the 
 throbbing ship was bearing me, — surely it would 
 claim more from me than weak thoughts; more than 
 
198 The High Romance 
 
 the dreams of a feverish artist, more than the troubled 
 meditations and the feeble works of a self-made, 
 perchance self -ruined, egotistical writer. 
 
 Action of a forthright nature would be asked of 
 me as well as the written word. 
 
 What would this action be? 
 
 I did not know; ah, would I ever know? 
 
 When would this restless wandering of body and 
 mind and soul be over? 
 
 Health was fled again. In my heart, despite my 
 obstinate refusal to recognize the fact, I knew that 
 I was breaking down. 
 
 And my work was getting farther and farther away, 
 it seemed, from all chance of success. 
 
 After all my vain dreamings, was I now to face 
 and acknowledge failure most positive and per- 
 manent? 
 
 For more than three hours I walked up and down, 
 that night, on the deck of the boat, trying to get at 
 grips with myself, and to see things as they really 
 were; my troubled soliloquy running something like 
 this: — 
 
 "I am now more than thirty years old, poor and 
 heavily in debt. I am sick, and getting worse, for 
 my youthful energy is failing. I have written much, 
 but nearly everything that amounted to anything was 
 destroyed in the Helicon Hall disaster. The publish- 
 ers and editors apparently believe in my talent, and 
 are helping me to achieve mastery of my instrument 
 of expression; but they do not understand what I 
 want to write; they seemingly want me to write what 
 
A Dark Night of the Soul 199 
 
 they want. They are kind, and try to be helpful, and 
 they are doubtless right in many of their criticisms 
 of my work — yet I know they are not wholly right. 
 Literature is not produced by writing for the market. 
 Art is not commercialism. I must make a definite 
 choice; either I must write for myself, despite every- 
 thing; or write for the market. 
 
 "As for all the mistakes, and blunders, and sins 
 of the past — all that matters little, save as I make use 
 of what has happened. I still hope to turn all that 
 to good account. 
 
 "I am saturated with life. My feet know city 
 pavements equally with country earth and the un- 
 stable decks of ships at sea; I have sat with the poor 
 at bread and water and with the rich at meat and 
 wine; I have been lover and husband and father; I 
 have toiled in the world's work in many fashions; I 
 suffer from the most characteristic disease of the time; 
 I am steeped in the peculiar sins of the age; also, 
 however, I dream the dream of the age, and share 
 at least partially the possession of the virtues of to- 
 day — the dream of true Brotherhood, the virtues of 
 faith, hope, and love. 
 
 "And I know I have ability to write ; I have ability 
 to do even more positive acts. Therefore, I may hope 
 to be a truthful voice of my age, in that I am equipped 
 with knowledge, experience, sympathy, ability; but 
 the crucial question is: — Have I the requisite strength 
 and endurance, bodily, mental, spiritual, left over 
 from the endless and often foolish expenditures of 
 energy in many forms which my life has known; the 
 energy I need in order to shape adequately the utter- 
 ance which a voice of the age must give? 
 
200 The High Romance 
 
 "There is only one way in which I can answer this 
 question — by putting myself to the test." 
 
 And, after all, — I thought — this period of failure 
 is but one more lesson in that course in life's univer- 
 sity, the object of which is to fit me (if the task be 
 possible!) to perform the work of an artist — a lesson 
 the text of which is: "Nothing that happens to you 
 has any value or significance unless it is something 
 you can make use of as an artist." 
 
 Quite true, my soul, I said to myself, thou calm 
 one, serene philosopher! — but, first of all, please 
 stanch the bleeding of the wound in my heart; still 
 that sound as of sobbing which goes on in the shad- 
 owy places of my being. 
 
 It is like the sobbing of a child. 
 
 For there is a child in my heart, eager to play, fain 
 to trust and to love; a child always looking out won- 
 deringly and joyfully upon a world ever new and 
 ever-changing, a world where everything is possible. 
 
 Let me hasten to an ending. 
 I grow weary. 
 
 When I grow weary, I begin to cough. And then 
 I think of things not pleasant to face. 
 
 Yes, I grow weary. The past few months have 
 severely taxed me; I have drawn heavily on my re- 
 serve store of energy; yet I must go on spending for 
 some time at kast, 
 
A Dark Night of the Soul 201 
 
 — The little, blue devils of melancholia make many 
 attempts to seize my soul. 0, shapes of gloom, why 
 do you haunt me? 
 
 So, during those three, long hours, on that bitter 
 night, each second of which was a great misery, I 
 descended into the hell of my own soul and was 
 tormented. 
 
 Three hours! Three times the slow pointers circled 
 the innumerable clocks of the world; and the seconds 
 ticked and tocked. I walked without resting, up and 
 down; I watched the foam-flecked sea; I sought to 
 hide my dark spirit in the darkness of the night; and 
 I drank deeply of my bitter pain. 
 
 I felt myself a tiny speck amid a billion, billion, 
 trillion, tiny specks; restless on the surface of a 
 restless earth; pursuing a blind voyage nowhither. 
 Who was I? What did I matter? Nothing at all. 
 
 Tick-tock: the seconds swung; the three, dark hours 
 accomplished their part in the progress of time's un- 
 fathomable destiny. 
 
 And as each second swung its slow pendulum, 
 there was the gasp of a dying man, or woman, or 
 child; there was the agony of a birth; there was the 
 cry of a new-bom child; assassins thrust or shot; 
 gold was mined; toilers toiled; ships sank at sea; 
 the keels of new ships were laid; poets dreamed; 
 prophets were enrapt — 
 
 So Life surged, throughout the earth: and through- 
 out a billion billion universes, life surged. 
 
 And during those three hours, the earth moved 
 onward a certain space, and swung through a certain 
 segment of its circle on its poles; and so moved and 
 so swung a billion billion worlds. 
 
202 The High Romance 
 
 — And I — the speck of flesh and the spark of spirit 
 — there on the sea, dark in the dark night, drinking 
 my pain — I said to myself that there could be no 
 profit in wasting this strange time which is all the 
 Eternity man can yet dimly know, unless I could bring 
 back with me from my descent into hell a measure 
 of words, to be arranged on paper. I am a reporter; 
 a war correspondent of the war of Man with Darkness, 
 and I will and must report what I find, to the limits 
 of my vision, as best I may; even in the infernal re- 
 gions, blaze they never so damnably! 
 
 Now I must go to work again. How do matters 
 stand? 
 
 Let me try to understand the adventure which was 
 begun at dawn in that mystic moment when I felt as 
 if a hand had been laid upon my shoulder by Some- 
 body who desired me to follow, a Somebody who had 
 a message for me. I followed, thank God! I fol- 
 lowed, although I faltered, I stumbled, I fell, I 
 groaned, I complained, I failed in task after task, 
 still I followed in order to communicate what I might 
 be able to learn: and further communications will 
 follow these stammering and faulty utterances if I 
 may live to shape them; and I believe, despite every- 
 thing, I believe I am to live for many years yet. 
 
 Let me try to sum up! 
 
 • • • • • • • 
 
 I am a dreamer of dreams; and I have been too 
 long merely the slave of my fancies; I who would be 
 the master of my moods remain a led captive, and in 
 
A Dark Night of the Soul 203 
 
 a sense my book is my battle for freedom. Yes, I 
 have dreamed too much, and my waking hours have 
 been barren of fruitful work as I tried to remember 
 and to piece together into words the fragments of my 
 dreams — into words that should evoke something of 
 the lustral beauty of the visions. And time who helps 
 you to realize your dreams if your will be strong 
 enough, but who ages the unworking dreamer in the 
 midst of his dreams, which fade and pass like the 
 vain dreams of slumber, inexorable time goes on and 
 I have little or nothing to show for all my dreams. 
 Therefore, who shall believe in them? Dreams are 
 no literary assets. You cannot play showman to the 
 phantasmagoria of thought. You must dress your 
 puppets ; you must write the play for them. . . . And 
 yet I still believe that my dreams are not pinchbeck, 
 but true gold only requiring pressure in the mint of 
 mental assimilation, and the stamp of the right words, 
 the coinage of art, to win appraisal at high worth . . . 
 
 But when am I ever to essay the great work of 
 realization? 
 
 Upon me, now, as many times before, there falls 
 captivity unto the unloved task. But I shall not moil 
 blindly and bitterly, as in the past. Poverty, and 
 Death's henchman and grey familiars, Sickness and 
 Death itself, my seeming enemies, may even yet prove 
 to be my friends — ^they may be my rescuers; they may 
 inspire me afresh with knowledge of the necessity for 
 this unending struggle for existence. In this period 
 of failure and of imprisonment to illness and poverty, 
 I must not chafe or repine; and whatever happens in 
 
204 The High Romance 
 
 the future, I must not yield. I must remain assured 
 that in the midst of all the doubts, the darkness, the 
 barriers, the uncertainties which surround me, there 
 is something to which I can rally for support — there 
 is my true self: the upright and unyielding I — the 
 only reality of which I can be certain in a universe of 
 illusion and ceaseless change. 
 
 Myself, and own will: that is my creed — with this 
 necessary corollary: that I am one of many others, all 
 of them sparks of Spirit; incarnate items of the Will 
 of Life; and we are brothers and sisters who must 
 strive to console ourselves for our ineluctable, essen- 
 tial loneliness, by mutual service and love; each 
 doing his or her own work; each fulfilling his or her 
 own function; artist, prophet, workman, healer; what- 
 ever the vocation may be. 
 
 Can there be — may there be — Something beyond, 
 and higher, than self -consciousness? Is there per- 
 haps a power greater than that of human will? 
 
 Dimly, feebly, these questions raised themselves; 
 but I only passed them by. I returned to the more 
 fascinating theme — the subject of myself. 
 
 So passed the black night. In this fashion, I con- 
 soled myself. 
 
 But Fact is stubborn material, and resists the 
 moulding of our desirous hopes. I could not escape 
 the consequences of my wilful folly, even if I dis- 
 guised them in the coloured garments of my self- 
 willed interpretations. 
 
 Cold, calm medical science pronounced its verdict: 
 physically, anyhow, I was badly damaged. And so 
 
A Dark Night of the Soul 205 
 
 once more, I left the city, and went into the open 
 places; Arizona, Mexico, California, — defeated and 
 broken down. 
 
 — But, at least, there was art, and there was alco- 
 hol; and when their mingled magic was at work, the 
 golden dreams again were mine, and the shining vistas 
 of adventure opened before me. 
 
PART II 
 THE HOMEWARD WAY 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 A TESTAMENT OF EGOTISM 
 
 1. California 
 
 ALTHOUGH my return to the West was in one 
 sense a retreat after a lost battle, it was not re- 
 luctantly that I went, nor with sorrow; because it was 
 California that offered sanctuary to my wounded and 
 fleeing soul, and there was healing in her protective 
 hands, and consolation in her beauty. Even for ob- 
 tuse travellers, even for the material-minded, there is 
 a magical charm in California which uniquely sets her 
 apart from all other American scenes. For artists 
 and souls awakened to the spiritual and romantic in- 
 fluences of fair, stately, or historic places, the mystical 
 emanation of California's personality is ineluctable. 
 From the beginning, for me, it was a case of love 
 at first sight, and my passion was perdurable. How 
 well I recall my first pangs of pleasure in the journey 
 out of the Texas plains, through the Arizona desert, 
 northward along the vast Pacific's verge, through the 
 coast range hills into the Santa Clara valley, riant 
 with peach and plum trees blossoming in millions, 
 and on to San Francisco. The potent gramarye of 
 this most beautiful among the States cast a glamour 
 upon me which has never waned. 
 
 Who that has crossed the Sierra Nevadas has not 
 experienced this penetrating impression, this wizardry 
 
210 The High Romance 
 
 of a land whose soul is sealed with romantic beauty? 
 But who shall define it? Who may weave the verbal 
 nets which shall capture the delicate birds of beauty 
 which sing in the secret places of the soul? I for 
 one shall not attempt the impossible. The essence 
 of beauty, like the secret of personality, is a true mys- 
 tery. 
 
 The peculiar quality of California's charm is, no 
 doubt, traceable to many material sources and faC' 
 tors— the space relations and splendid shapes of many 
 mountains, the curving lines of the gracious valleys, 
 the immense amplitude of wonderful plains, the op- 
 ulence and mystery of the forests, the clarity and 
 purity of the light, the mightiness of the sea which 
 protects its coast, the mysterious veils of the great 
 grey fogs which hang about its beauty the curtains of 
 illusion, and the ever present power of the ardent 
 sun — Ah, yes, to be sure : but what of the spirit under- 
 lying all these things, the strange spirit which, blowing 
 where it lists, has elected to place a special seal of 
 romantic beauty upon this lonely, lovely land, this 
 California? Its haunting, occult bewitchment yearns 
 and throbs in the songs of many poets, and from these 
 wells of wonder and vistas of high romance which 
 California opens for the thirsty souls of the children 
 of America our literature is being enriched — think of 
 Miller, of certain stanzas of Markham, of songs by 
 Ina Coolbrith, of the verbal splendour and great 
 imagination of George Sterling, of the murmurous 
 monotone, so full of elegaic tristness, of Charles 
 Warren Stoddard, and of the lyrical though sad 
 ecstasy of Nora May French. 
 
 As for the painters, legion is their name, who seek 
 
A Testament of Egotism 211 
 
 to express California. Knight errants of the ever- 
 baffled quest for what can never be attained, they seem 
 as wistful as lovers admitted to the presence of the 
 beloved only to be denied the consummation of their 
 dreams. So the pictures hint; the poems whisper 
 their musical suggestions; there are great revelations 
 in certain pages of Bret Harte; Stevenson at Silerrado 
 and at Monterey wrought pages pulsatory with the 
 psychic presence of California's soul; Frank Norris 
 has mirrored much of its mystery and its striving 
 drama in his novels; Charles F. Lummis, Mary Austin, 
 James Hopper, are prose artists who spread the cre- 
 ative inspiration of California; yet none make known 
 the inner secret; nor may they do so. True beauty, 
 I say again, is a mystery, and mystery is communi- 
 cable but not explicable. I am certain that in that 
 good time which is coming when the United States 
 shall have become a great, true nation bound together 
 by something deeper even than the bond of blood, 
 united by will, California's function among her 
 sister states will be comparable to the function 
 of Italy or of Greece or France in Europe. We of 
 America must make truly our own that which is ours 
 yet now neglected. We must weave into the national 
 consciousness the rich strains of Califomian legend, 
 the high romance of Spanish exploration, of Spanish 
 faith, and of the Boston sailors who sought out this 
 far land, and of the Missouri hunters who followed 
 the trails of sunset over the hills and far away, and 
 through the burning deserts to the limits of the west, 
 blazing the path for the Argonauts of '49. 
 
 California was invented by an artist. Montalvo 
 was his name. He conjured up in the magic mirror 
 
212 The High Romance 
 
 of his art an image which later on more "practical" 
 men made a reality. You will find Montalvo's pen 
 portrait of the soul of this state in his novel, "The 
 Deeds of Esplandian, the Son of Amadis of Gaul," 
 published in 1510, eight years after Columbus sailed 
 forth from Spain, his mission being to fulfil ancient 
 prophecies, or so he believed, by discovering new 
 lands for Christ to conquer. Yet there are solemn 
 pundits who talk about the Genoese as the opener of 
 new trade routes to the Indies, as a mere pawn of 
 "Economic Necessity," that most bizarre and blood- 
 less of all the gods — despite the facts that stare you 
 in the face in the records of Columbus — the great fact 
 being that spiritual and ideal interests led him out on 
 the trails of his high romance. To be sure, he threw 
 sops to the lords of finance and of commerce, by show- 
 ing that, incidentally, his voyage would be good for 
 their business. Poor Columbus! Unescapable com- 
 promise, everlasting entanglement of the ideal and the 
 material! 
 
 In one of the earliest of his reports to Isabella 
 — the great soul who understood his soul when the 
 only ones who else would listen to him were cloistered 
 monks — Columbus gave the name of the Earthly Par- 
 adise to the mesa region lying near the headquarters 
 of the Orinoco River. (Let us also remember that 
 when the early explorers were not apostles, they were 
 very apt to be dreamers and romanticists who went 
 forth to look for the Fountain of Youth, for the 
 Islands of the Blessed, for the land that always seems 
 to lie just over the edge of the receding horizon.) 
 Montalve read Columbus' report. His imagination 
 flamed. He drew forth his pen, instead of a sword; 
 
A Testament of Egotism 213 
 
 he embarked upon the galleon of reverie instead of 
 a ship, and fully a quarter of a century before Cortes 
 saw Lower California, and longer yet before Cabrillo 
 landed at San Diego, Montalvo, the poet, discovered 
 California, and named it, too, leaving it to others to 
 actualize his spiritual conquest. Listen to what he 
 says: — 
 
 "Know then, that on the right hand of the Indies, 
 there is an island called California, very close to the 
 Terrestrial Paradise. . . ." 
 
 (No Calif omian will gainsay this description of 
 place, unless, of course, it is contended by the more 
 ardent lovers that this is the earthly paradise in very 
 fact. Well, it is certainly as close to it as we may 
 arrive.) 
 
 Montalvo goes on to say that of this wonderful land, 
 where precious gems were found in great abundance, 
 and where the only metal was gold, Califia was Queen, 
 and after her was the country named. And this is 
 how he describes her: "Very large in person, the 
 most beautiful of all, of blooming years, and in her 
 thoughts desirous of achieving great things; strong 
 of limb, and of great courage." 
 
 Tons of ink have been used in writing about Cali- 
 fornia; but has any writer ever bettered Montalvo's 
 clairvoyant and verdical description of the soul of 
 this lovely land? 
 
 "Most beautiful, of blooming years, and in her 
 thoughts desirous of achieving great things, strong 
 of limb and of great courage!" 
 
214 The High Romance 
 
 2. Carmel 
 
 At first I did not go back to San Francisco. We 
 settled in the country, in a village called Carmel-by- 
 the-Sea, a few miles away from the railroad, near 
 Monterey, and there I resumed the struggle ; the triple 
 struggle; first, to make a living; second, to succeed 
 as an artist; third — to find that which I was seeking, 
 to achieve my Quest. 
 
 I was in a shattered condition, truly; so also was 
 my Book, the chronicle of the Quest, the legend of my 
 efforts to build, or to find, I hardly knew which, the 
 Crystal House. Its whole point, its meaning, its 
 message, had been that I had conquered; that I was 
 a victor — blow the trumpets, beat the drums! — I, the 
 upright and unconquerable, I. 
 
 And now, here was this upright and unconquerable 
 person bowled over, and the book was deplorably out 
 of harmony with facts. However, I was not ready to 
 admit that I was beaten. I was down, but I was not 
 yet counted out; and so the struggle went on, year 
 after year, with flights to the dry, warm deserts of 
 Arizona from time to time, when once again the phys- 
 ical machine would fail me. 
 
 There was an old, broken-down summer house upon 
 the ocean beach which I begged from its owner, and 
 this I carted back into the pine woods on the slope 
 of Mount Carmel, and converted into a hut. It re- 
 minded me of the hut on the other side of the world, 
 on the Atlantic coast, where the voice of the Quest 
 had lured me forth that mystical summer dawn; and 
 in this hut the Quest continued. 
 
 Here I found how true was that saying of a modem 
 
A Testament of Egotism 215 
 
 mystic, with whom about this time I began to cor- 
 respond, after being keenly interested in his work, 
 together with that of another mystical author who 
 was even more sympathetic to me, because more of 
 an artist. The first was Arthur Edward Waite; the 
 second, Francis Grierson. In one of Waite's books 
 I discovered and made this my own: "The world of 
 mind is wider than the world of matter, as it is indeed 
 older. In the unsounded depths of its oceans lies 
 the past of all the universes; on its heights are stars 
 that we never see in the common daylight of conscious- 
 ness. What fields for exploration — what vistas of 
 great adventure!" 
 
 Yes. It was so. 
 
 In a very literal sense, it was truly in the world of 
 mind, of intellectual effort, that I began to adventure ; 
 that is to say, I began at last, at long last indeed, to 
 consider myself, and the world, and the invisible uni- 
 verse in which I moved, from a less emotional, less 
 impulsive, calmer, and more reasonable point of view. 
 I did more thinking; in fact, it may be said that I 
 began to think. Everything I had written up to this 
 time, and the motives upon which I acted or spoke 
 or wrote, were spontaneous, instinctive, intuitive; 
 whether for right or for wrong. It was as if my 
 reckless soul had run away from its calmer com- 
 panion, the mind; so eager to enjoy the high romance 
 that it simply threw itself into any path, turned aside 
 for any new experience, no meadow escaping its riot. 
 But it had bruised itself; it had weakened, if not 
 broken, its wings; and though still it cried, Onward! 
 in its own interior it knew that it was weary, and some- 
 what dreary, too. 
 
216 The High Romance 
 
 Yet, even then, it could sing: — as it did from a hos- 
 pital bed to which one day I was carried when a hem- 
 orrhage came upon me in the street. 
 
 When I bethink me of my weakened state, 
 I seem a soldier in whose fighting hand, 
 At mid-most stress of battle, snaps the brand 
 While fierce his foe is pressing, all elate 
 Because of his misfortune — while the fate 
 Maybe of all that issues high and grand 
 By this one conflict needs must fall or stand — 
 Lo, if he doth not yield now he is great! 
 
 Lord God of unseen battles, I'll not yield! 
 
 I'll make this bed a forge for a new sword; 
 
 My faith its steel, and pain its point shall grind 
 For knightly service on the world's grim field, 
 
 Fighting for God and smiting Evil's horde, 
 
 As Heine did, a cripple, and Milton, blind. 
 
 Thus the wounded spirit strove; but now my mind 
 was allowed to examine the situation; to look back 
 upon the campaigns, and endeavour to judge the re- 
 sults, and, more particularly, the morale of the fighter. 
 Above all, it did its best to arrive at some clear under- 
 standing of what the long struggle was all about! 
 
 For it felt that at the bottom of the business, back 
 of the weltering confusion of efforts and failures, 
 there was something resembling a definite philosophy. 
 
 While examining the huge mass of manuscripts re- 
 sulting from these attempts to get at myself, and ex- 
 plain myself to myself, and to express the result in 
 terms of art, I have found one paper which today I 
 
A Testament of Egotism 217 
 
 look upon as a man might look upon something ex- 
 cessively fantastic which he has done during a fit of 
 fever, or a nightmare, or when drugged or drunk. 
 It is really almost incredible in its effrontery of self- 
 conceit; yet it so apdy illustrates that fashion in which 
 I tried to apply my philosophy of self-will: my belief 
 in the power of affirmative egotism, to my own life and 
 work, that I shall copy it, although it would please 
 me much better to put it into the fire, here in my hut 
 among the pines of Carmel — the fire that has now con- 
 sumed so great a part of this amazing mass of mor- 
 bidity and poisonous products of selfishness: these 
 excretions of the auto-intoxication of my soul. 
 
 R. L. S. (who used to roam these very pine woods, 
 upon a time, coughing and dreaming, and seeking the 
 paths of his high romance), has said somewhere that 
 the young man who hasn't had courage to make a fool 
 of himself, now and then, hasn't lived at all. Well, 
 I've lived, anyhow! And these are the rules by which 
 I tried to guide my life: — 
 
 My Book Of Canons 
 
 Believing that I am one of those men to whom 
 are given power to affect human life profoundly 
 through their written and spoken words, I deem it 
 necessary to set down for my own guidance towards 
 the performance of my best possible acts of service 
 to mankind, the chief of those principles which I con- 
 sider to be the basis of my work, together with the 
 most essential rules of conduct derived from these 
 principles. 
 
218 The High Romance 
 
 Creed 
 
 I believe in Love. I seek it. I will the Brother- 
 hood of Man. I am a romantic, and an idealist. I 
 believe the beauty and the joy to be found here and 
 there in this present phase of human life may be 
 vastly increased, and made general and common for 
 all; and that most of the ugly and wretched and pain- 
 ful aspects of life may be removed. All Property 
 that depends upon Poverty must be abolished. Life 
 must be re-established on a foundation of Love, not 
 of Profits. Truth must be recognized as man's only 
 safe guide. Mutual aid among men I hold (with 
 Kropotkin) to be the chief factor in evolution, and I 
 deny that the dominating factor is the false idea of 
 the "survival of the fittest," or the "struggle for ex- 
 istence," which are merely excuses for crime, cruelty 
 and stupidity. Mankind is progressing constantly 
 towards a condition of life-in-love, and Art must be 
 made the ruling influence in all things. Then man 
 in general shall know a life wider and deeper and 
 more glorious than any men save a few prophetic 
 artists now dream of. My ideal, then, is to help to 
 advance the race on its journey to its destined end. 
 
 Practical Work 
 
 My practical work is to write as best I may my 
 own thoughts, ideas, experiences, and aspirations. It 
 must never be actuated principally by desires for 
 money or for fame. Yet I must also consider my 
 own claims upon my own efforts. He who succeeds 
 in truly bettering his own condition does the highest 
 
A Testament of Egotism 219 
 
 thing that lies in his power to do for the betterment of 
 , humanity. 
 
 Conditions Of Good Work 
 
 Thoughts, ideas, fancies, creations — these come to 
 me, I know not how; I know not from whither; out 
 of the blue; out of the country of the soul. My mind 
 seizes these in its nets of memory; it shapes them, in 
 words. My hand writes them down. Thus I discern 
 three elements, or factors, working together: the body, 
 the mind, the soul. It is obvious that good work will 
 only be done when these three are one, that is, prac- 
 tically, when body, mind and soul co-operate with the 
 least possible amount of friction, and the greatest 
 possible amount of harmony; in other words, when 
 I achieve the greatest possible condition of health. 
 It follows that therefore it is my duty to be as Healthy 
 as I can. (Oh, for health; for the power of good 
 health!) 
 
 Concerning My Body 
 
 It is now thirty-three years old. It has been shaken 
 and racked and badly damaged by tuberculosis; un- 
 questionably, the germs of the disease are still within 
 its veins and cells, only awaiting the next time I over- 
 work, or dissipate to excess, in order to smash it some 
 more. I have also, since boyhood, soaked myself 
 with nicotine and alcohol. My nerves have been 
 jangled and tampered with. Hence, if any good work 
 is to be got out of this damaged instrument, it is nec- 
 essary to discipline it and master its unruly tenden- 
 cies. 
 
220 The High Romance 
 
 As To My Mind 
 
 Well, first of all, it altogether lacks training, edu- 
 cation, and discipline; but apparently it has an innate 
 ability to transform the ideas generated by the soul 
 — or communicated through the soul, I know not 
 which — into art forms, some quite good, others very 
 poor. Hence, it is plain that I should use my mind 
 to the limit of its power, without, however, injuring 
 it by over-work. I should practice it in Concentra- 
 tion; which is not the forcing of the mind to work at 
 some particular task or other, but is the directing of 
 its attention to the task in hand, whatever that may 
 be, to the exclusion of all competing interests. 
 
 It should be borne in mind, however, that a power- 
 ful impulse to turn from one task to another task may 
 be a signal from the high places of the soul. 
 
 The conscious will should only with great caution 
 interfere in this action and interaction of the mind 
 and the soul in creation and in work. 
 
 My Soul 
 
 All I can say about my soul is, that I know very 
 well there is something within me which is more than 
 the life of the body and the mind, and which will 
 not die with the dissolution of the body. It is not to 
 be expressed in words, but no words are to be ex- 
 pressed without it. It is that which recognizes Beauty 
 and which knows Love. It is that which my work 
 must ever seek and strive to communicate. The law 
 of the soul is love. If I may write true and beautiful 
 words men will gain glimpses of the crystal house of 
 
A Testament of Egotism 221 
 
 the spirit — vistas will open into man's real life, which 
 transcends this material life. 
 
 Conclusion 
 
 I hereby promise myself that I shall try to read 
 this book of Canons daily and follow its rule as best 
 I may. I must add, that many failures do not debar 
 efforts to try again. To write one, little, true and 
 beautiful thing would be worth the longest life-time 
 of poverty, and sickness and sorrow. One thing I 
 must avoid; self-pity: for it is the morphine of the 
 soul, which I must put to one side for ever. 
 
 That bad habit, anyhow, I shall cut out. 
 
 I am, just now, at the bottom of a high and very 
 steep hill — but I shall climb to its top. 
 
 Looking upward, from this valley of failure, I see 
 gleams of a sunshine warmer and purer and brighter 
 than any that appear in my valley. They glint above 
 the edge of the summit, up yonder; and now and then 
 there drift downward breaths of an air that is sweeter 
 and cleaner and clearer than any I have ever tasted, 
 faintly perfumed with scents of unknown flowers. 
 Surely, over the top of this hill, there is an upland 
 country where those things happen that you would 
 have befall; where live those whom you would love 
 to know — yes, and know to love — a region where great 
 adventures are to be had, where romance walks hand 
 in hand with truth, and beauty rules all from a throne 
 made visible at last! A country where the folk do not 
 toil and moil and sweat and cheat and lie and steal 
 and harm each other; a land that is over this hill and 
 far away, the country of tomorrow, the realm of the 
 
222 The High Romance 
 
 future, the kingdom of heaven when it comes upon 
 earth, and of good will done by men! 
 
 To that hill, I address myself. I must win to its 
 height, even if there are many lions in the way, and 
 though there are no paths up the dangerous steeps 
 save those each lonely climber makes, each for him- 
 self. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE QUEST OF TRUTH 
 
 1. Gleams 
 
 AND my hut at the foot of Mount Carmel, sur- 
 rounded by the peace of the pines, with the muted 
 thundering of the incessant surf along the marge of 
 the Pacific ever in the air, was not only a place where 
 my mind busied itself to find the truth concerning this 
 mysterious questing of my soul, it also proved to be 
 a sort of postern door, opening upon secret places of 
 the inner life. Gleams of truth came, very faintly at 
 first, and confused, yet with increasing breadth and 
 force of illumination. I did at last begin to see some 
 part of the truth concerning myself, and my quest, and 
 my Book. 
 
 Indeed, I made great discoveries concerning Truth 
 itself, and the power possessed by those who speak or 
 write Truth. 
 
 I mean, that these were discoveries, for me. For 
 others, they were obvious facts. Which situation 
 gives a writer as he grows older some highly ironic 
 moments, when he looks backward along the vistas 
 of time and beholds himself frantically singing or 
 fighting because of some wonderful thing which is 
 wonderful to none save himself, and the others who 
 happen to be living outside the circle wherein this 
 thing has always been visible and known! 
 
 223 
 
224 The High Romance 
 
 Nevertheless, these discoveries of truth were still 
 most valuable, even when I could see that it was only 
 because I had been blind that I had not made them 
 before. 
 
 For I saw that words of truth spoken by anybody, 
 no matter who, gentle or simple, cultured or ignorant, 
 artist or dullard, were mighty and went on living with 
 mighty force, even when disregarded at the time they 
 were uttered. 
 
 A commonplace? Yes; but some of the most won- 
 derful discoveries in the universe, some of the most 
 marvellous adventures to be chanced upon in the high 
 romance of the soul, come through revelations of the 
 beauty and the force and the tremendous meanings 
 of disregarded commonplaces. 
 
 For instance — 
 
 I was walking with Walter Prichard Eaton through 
 Newspaper Row in Boston, in the days when we were 
 twenty-one — Ah, over the hills of time, and far away! 
 Eaton was displeased with me. We had both been 
 reporting some disgusting murder trial or other, and 
 in order to make my court room story interesting, I 
 had paraphrased one of Walter Pater's most delicately 
 eloquent passages, and applied it to one of the women 
 witnesses; and Eaton, concerned in those days, as in 
 later and more authoritative years, with the dignity 
 of letters, and the responsibility of the writer to main- 
 tain the integrity of literature, was annoyed. But, 
 even more, he was justly sorry for something else I 
 was doing that was wrong. Without any heat, or per- 
 sonal scorn, simply telling the truth, this good cham- 
 pion of good causes, said to me: "Your brain is 
 too fine to be injured, as you are injuring it, with 
 
The Quest of Truth 225 
 
 alcohol." That was all. I made no answer. It 
 went in one ear, and out the other; but, in passing 
 through, with that mystical virtue possessed by the 
 word of truth, it traced an indelible and potent mark 
 upon my soul. Though for nearly twenty years they 
 remained quiescent, those words, they were simply 
 patient, not passive; and in the hour of my need, in 
 the time when I was making my fight, they came to me 
 with helpfulness and with inspiration. They bore a 
 message of faith. They worked the good will of their 
 speaker, in the measure of his intention. And thus 
 it was made plain to me that deeds of intellectual 
 charity, the acts of kindness and of consolation which 
 we may accomplish in spoken or written speech, are 
 to the full as real and tangible as the giving of bread 
 and wine, or money. Wherefore, the good Samar- 
 itans of art and literature walk down the roads of time 
 as long as time shall last, helping the wounded and 
 the fallen. 
 
 Again: — 
 
 I chanced to go to a little California village, on 
 some journalistic adventure, and stayed there several 
 days, and made a most congenial acquaintance with 
 a Catholic priest. Unable in any degree to share his 
 faith, quite outside the circle of his sacramental life, 
 I was still able to appreciate his personal charm. 
 Also there was a bond uniting us. It was obvious 
 that he too had fought with tuberculosis. And though 
 he was a very modest man, I obtained his story. 
 
 For many, many weary years he had dragged his 
 wasted form and failing body from sanitarium to san- 
 itarium, in Colorado, Arizona, California. And the 
 fight went against him. Finally he could no longer 
 
226 The High Romance 
 
 leave his bed; in fact, he could hardly lift a finger. 
 Then to him, stretched upon the bed of death, there 
 came a Thought, on the trail of which he kept 
 his mind during a long, long time. This Thought, 
 was an idea of how he might invent a new form of 
 sputum cup, one which might enable conscientious in- 
 valids to be careful in regard to spreading the con- 
 tagion, yet which would be less of a drain upon their 
 purses than existing contrivances. For years he 
 had thought about such a thing, hoping that out 
 of his own trouble he might make something that 
 would help other people. And now the Idea arrived. 
 He sent out for card-board. With his feeble fingers 
 he bent and moulded the paper into this shape, and 
 that shape; scores, even hundreds of shapes; until at 
 last he evolved the shape that embodied his Thought. 
 (Ah, that's a great moment, in art, in science, in 
 labour— the union of the thought and the mechanism 
 for the thought!) But by this time he was up out of 
 bed, and on his feet. He had switched his mind 
 from his disease to his invention. And he sent out 
 for copper; by and by he set up a little forge in 
 his room; and with his own hands made his own 
 model. Then there came a Congress of the Amer- 
 ican Medical Association, to Los Angeles. He went 
 there; he showed his model to many of the most fa- 
 mous specialists ; they commended it highly. 
 
 He had it with him, this model when I visited him; 
 some day he meant to go to New York, or place it 
 with somebody in New York, to present to the one 
 firm of manufacturers who handled such devices. I 
 was on my way to New York — bound on one of my 
 literary adventures; so I offered to act as his agent. 
 
The Quest of Truth 227 
 
 Which I did, with this sad result — that the manufac- 
 turers declared his invention was indeed a great im- 
 provement, but that they did not care to put it on the 
 market. 
 
 I do not know when I have written a letter that 
 gave me such difficulty to write, and such pain, as the 
 letter in which I had to tell my friend of this failure 
 of the object which I supposed had been the central 
 part of his life for so long. 
 
 But there was a centre in that man's life deeper and 
 higher than any I knew about. Never shall I forget 
 the wonderful letter which he sent to me, condoling 
 me for my disappointment; saying, most simply, that 
 as God had given him back his health through his 
 work, he had from the very start resolved that success 
 or failure, in a material way, with his device, should 
 not be allowed to perturb his spirit. 
 
 Here was another great discovery, over which I 
 brooded in my hut among the pines, namely, that he 
 who forgot himself found himself; he who put others 
 before himself, found what was greater than what is 
 usually termed success: he found peace, happiness, 
 life. 
 
 — But this vision was blurred, even as the sun- 
 lighted vistas of my Carmel woods and hills would 
 often be blurred by the invading fogs. I admired, 
 I wondered ; but . . . but what about my upright and 
 invincible ego? What about the creative power of 
 my own will? 
 
 I evaded the issue; I shunned these obtrusive and 
 disconcerting thoughts. 
 
228 The High Romance 
 
 2. The Book Of The Quest 
 
 Also, there was my Book; this Book which was 
 the chronicle of my life. The time had come when 
 I must revalue my own values concerning this central 
 point of my artistic and spiritual life. The time had 
 come to search out the truth about my work as well as 
 about myself. 
 
 There was, for example, the verdict passed upon 
 the manuscript by one of the chief readers for an 
 important firm of publishers whom Witter Bynner 
 had fairly pestered to publish the thing. He did not 
 succeed, and he sent me the report which caused 
 the publishers to reject the manuscript. It came to 
 me while I was working in my Carmel hut, and I read 
 it with blank amazement that anybody could so regard 
 my work. 
 
 Its essential portion ran as follows: — 
 
 "In character, though not in quality, the MS be- 
 longs with Rousseau's Confessions, Marie Bashkirt- 
 seff's Journal, any one of those self revelations that 
 the Celtic and Latin races excel in, but the package of 
 sheets contains much else. Part of it is in the form 
 of letters, the interludes interrupt the main narrative 
 to present nature pictures, sketches of chance com- 
 panions, a medley of aspirations, reflections, expe- 
 riences, friendships, reveries, rhapsodies, prose 
 poems, and physical detail, fact and fancy — resem- 
 bling a flood of rather muddy water, sometimes bear- 
 ing precious things upon its bosom, sometimes, flot- 
 sam and jetsam, sometimes, the objects of daily life. 
 
 "Technically speaking, the MS has nearly every 
 
The Quest of Truth 229 
 
 possible fault, — extreme verbosity, no order, wild 
 confusion, no sense of proportion, errors in taste, 
 trash and gems of thought and expression mixed to- 
 gether with no appreciation of values, different sorts 
 of literary forms, no unity, no harmony, wild outpour- 
 ings, imaginative flights, autobiographical detail, — a 
 heterogeneous compound of dissimilar elements — as 
 the old phrase goes. 
 
 "Yet the merits embedded in this mass are undeni- 
 able, evident, and could some one, other than the au- 
 thor, attempt the task of selection, of revision, of 
 pruning, the MS might be made over into a contribu- 
 tion of some value to the literature of psychology, of 
 self revelation, of human documents. The author, 
 himself, is entitled to be heard and he describes his 
 purpose as that of trying to write 'as truthful a state- 
 ment of myself in relation to life, and of life in rela- 
 tion to myself as I can compass,' 'a book of the open 
 air,' 'a chant of the morning sun,' 'to give enough 
 facts of his life to serve as foundation stones,' 'My 
 wish is to trace in firm lines the course of my physical 
 career, sounding therein the motive phrases of my 
 spiritual career. Art, Death, Intoxications, Women, 
 the Infinite, taking them up one by one, like parts of 
 a symphony, developing them fully, pursuing them to 
 the limits of their flight in any direction, solos for the 
 various voices of my many selves, with variations on 
 certain themes for some of the instruments in my 
 orchestra; blending, fusing, harmonizing, all voices, 
 all instruments, all parts; the word-music of my Ego 
 in its relations to life.' This last quotation may serve 
 a two-fold purpose, show the aim of the MS, and the 
 
230 The High Romance 
 
 author's fanciful, redundant style. Again he says 
 that this MS is simply a big magazine, himself the 
 sole editor, and well nigh its sole contributor. 
 
 "The author complains not once but many times, 
 and bitterly, of rejected contributions, of editors who 
 acknowledge that his work has power, originality, 
 literary merit, but allege that it is morbid, unhappy, 
 unpleasant. Judging from this present MS, the fault 
 may be also placed upon lack of mental training, of 
 mental control, of order, of unity. There is beauty, 
 as for example, in that cry of the artist in the throes 
 of creation, or in many of the thumb-nail nature 
 pictures, or in scattered phrases and expressions, in 
 poetical feeling, and yet — the moods often are akin 
 to the sensations experienced through opium or 
 alcohol. 
 
 "On the side of actual facts, the MS is a narra- 
 tive of a fatherless boyhood, of uncongenial work 
 from the age of twelve, of literary tastes and long- 
 ings, of the horrors of existence in the basement of a 
 Boston five cent store, of the inspiration of Philip 
 Hale's articles, of cutting loose from business, and 
 relying on his pen, of repeated hemorrhages, journeys 
 for health, in Texas, California, Bermuda, etc.; of 
 the destruction of all his MSS in the fires of the 
 San Francisco earthquake and at Helicon Hall, of the 
 unrelenting pressure of impecuniosity, of the make- 
 shifts of the machine fiction produced as pot boilers, 
 of the indestructible yearning to write after his own 
 way, of the final settlement in California, and of the 
 farewell that sounds as if the shadow of the Face- 
 less Stranger, Death, that has haunted the writer all 
 his life, were near at hand. It is a pitiful, squalid 
 
The Quest of Truth 231 
 
 record on the material side, a losing fight with dis- 
 ease, poverty, untoward circumstances, dissipation, — 
 and yet there blooms the flower of the ideal, of hope, 
 of work, to redeem, to uplift, to ennoble, to make 
 worth while, this story of a life. 
 
 "Valuable portions, fine descriptions, poetical 
 sketches, beautiful phrases, much prose poetry, could 
 be disentangled from the mass in which they are 
 embedded, and a story of great human interest, of 
 literary quality, of psychological importance pro- 
 duced, but the work would amount to a thorough re- 
 writing of the MS. It would be a task to which few 
 editors would wish to apply themselves. The appeal 
 to the sympathy is so great, the beauty of much of 
 the MS is so plain, that it is with real regret that the 
 reader condemns the MS, and with a real hope that 
 some way may be found to utilize the MS. In its 
 present shape, it seems impossible." 
 
 This criticism — which today I can see to have been 
 most fair, most thorough, erring where it did err only 
 on the side of kindness and of eagerness to recognize 
 what was worth while in the amazing manuscript 
 through which that poor lady (whose name I do not 
 know) was obliged to wade — this criticism, I say, 
 appeared to me simply as one more of the obtuse re- 
 fusals of the conventional publisher, and I threw it 
 aside disdainfully. 
 
 The fact is, I was not arrived at the point where 
 I could see the truth regarding my work, and I re- 
 jected even such helpful criticisms as the one quoted 
 above with the same impatience with which I bolted 
 from publishers and editors who did, in fact, attempt 
 to influence me toward commercial compromises. 
 
232 The High Romance 
 
 Many indeed were these efforts of men who quite 
 frankly regarded writing as a part of the almost uni- 
 versal proj&t-making system of the age, to have me 
 take what they regarded as a sensible attitude. 
 
 I was at this time writing occasional contributions 
 for a London weekly journal, The New Age, which 
 that brilliant champion of the rights of the poor, that 
 leader of the Guild revival in England, A. R. Orage, 
 was editor — an editor who possessed much of the in- 
 tuitive genius of W. E. Henley in divining and en- 
 couraging literary talent. Hilaire Belloc, H. G. 
 Wells, Bernard Shaw, Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton; 
 that great exponent of beautiful style, Francis Grier- 
 son (one of the true masters of modem literature), 
 and other makers and shakers of world-thought were 
 among Orage's band of writers. So too was Arnold 
 Bennett, writing under the name of Jacob Tonson. 
 His weekly column was stimulating to a degree, and 
 I wrote to him, and we exchanged several communi- 
 cations. I had recently tried a novel, which was 
 largely autobiographical in its matter; another ver- 
 sion, in fact, of the theme I was struggling with in 
 my book of books; and I had received a letter from 
 a New York publisher which was so frank an example 
 of the commercial attitude toward literature that I 
 sent it to Bennett, knowing he would make some 
 characteristic use of it in his inimitable column. He 
 did so, and I take the following passage from his 
 department in the New Age: 
 
 "Authentic documents are always precious to the 
 student, and here is one which strikes me as precious 
 beyond ordinary. It is a letter received from a well 
 
The Quest of Truth 233 
 
 known publisher by a correspondent of mine who is 
 a journalist: 
 
 " 'I am awfully sorry that we cannot take your 
 novel, which is immensely clever and which interested 
 my partner more than anything he has read in a good 
 while. He agrees with me, however, that it has not 
 got the qualities that make for a sale, and you know 
 that this is the great desideratum with the publisher. 
 Now, don't get peevish and send us nothing else. 
 I know you have a lot of talent, and your difficulty is 
 in applying this talent to really practical problems 
 rather than to the more attractive products of the 
 imagination. Get down to facts, my son, and study 
 your market. Find out what the people like to read 
 and then write a story along those lines. This will 
 bring you success, for you have a talent for 
 success. Above all things, don't follow the lead 
 of our headstrong friend who insists upon do- 
 ing exactly what you have done in this novel — 
 namely, neglecting the practical market and working 
 out the fanciful dictates of imagination. Remember 
 that novel writing is as much of a business as making 
 calico. If you write the novels that people want you 
 are going to sell them in bales. When you have made 
 your name and your market, then you can afford 
 to let your imagination run riot, and then people will 
 look at you admiringly and say: 'I don't understand 
 this genius at all, but isn't he great?' Do you see 
 the point? You must do this AFTER you have won 
 your market, in the first place, by writing what folks 
 want to buy. Sincerely yours .' 
 
 "The writer is American. But the attitude of the 
 average English publisher could not have been more 
 
234 The High Romance 
 
 accurately expressed than in this letter sent by one 
 New Yorker to another. The only thing that puzzles 
 me is why the man originally chose books instead of 
 calico. He would have understood calico better. 
 In my opinion, many publishers would have under- 
 stood calico better than books. There are two things 
 which a publisher ought to know about novel produc- 
 ers—things which do not, curiously enough, apply to 
 calico producers and which few publishers have ever 
 grasped. I have known publishers to go into the 
 bankruptcy court and come out again safely and yet 
 never grasp the significance of those two things. The 
 first is that it is intensely stupid to ask a novelist to 
 study the market with a view to obtaining large circu- 
 lations. If he does not write to please himself — if 
 his own taste does not naturally coincide with the 
 taste of the million — he will never reach the million 
 by taking thought. The Hall Gaines, the Miss 
 Corellis and the Mrs. Humphrey Wards are bom, not 
 made. It may seem odd, even to a publisher, that 
 they write as they do write — by sheer glad instinct. 
 But it is so. The second thing is that when a novelist 
 has made 'his name and his market' by doing one 
 kind of thing he can't successfully go off at a tangent 
 and do another kind of thing. To make the largest 
 possible amount of money out of an artist the only 
 way is to leave him alone. When will publishers 
 grasp this? To make the largest possible amount of 
 money out of an imitative hack, the only way is to 
 leave him alone. When will publishers grasp that an 
 imitative hack knows by the grace of God forty times 
 more about the public taste than a publishers knows?" 
 
The Quest of Truth 235 
 
 Yet, I could at last begin to see that although I was 
 right in not complaisantly adopting the commercial 
 point of view, I was not right in my reckless insistence 
 upon an absolutely egotistical attitude. More dis- 
 concerting still, was the gathering suspicion, and 
 more than suspicion, the growing certainty, that my 
 work itself was not all that I cracked it up to myself 
 as being. 
 
 William Aspenwall Bradley, who, like Bynner, in 
 the friendly spirit of one writer trying to help another, 
 had read my book in the interest of a publisher, gave 
 me a leg up over this wall of blind egotism. 
 
 "The conviction has grown upon me," he wrote, 
 "that your book contains some of the best writing 
 you have yet done. But for that very reason it seems 
 to me that to centre so much that is beautiful around 
 an appeal for the particular form of social philosophy 
 which you have adopted, while it may have personal 
 justification, is bad art. Now, I am not descrying 
 this or other forms of social experimentation, as you 
 know; nor am I quarrelling with the way in which 
 you have written the book, for I am aware that it has 
 a very deep p^sonal meaning for you. I am simply 
 forced to consider the matter as an outsider, and try 
 to ascertain through my own feeling, just how the 
 matter would present itself to the public. I can see 
 how, if you gave a more profound philosophical basis 
 for the change that occurred in you, making your 
 adhesion to your special theory merely incidental, 
 the book would be greatly improved, without losing 
 any of the force you wish to give it. Indeed, I re- 
 member you making a particular point of the fact 
 that there was something deeper than this theory of 
 
236 The High Romance 
 
 yours about the power of optimistic new thought in 
 your experiences — that you have already tried to 
 apply its influence to your life without success — and 
 that it was only because you had approached it in a 
 new light that you finally found it helpful." 
 
 3. Seven Years Later 
 
 Never was there more discerning criticism and ad- 
 vice given to a young and unformed writer; yet he 
 was totally unable to avail himself of the words of 
 truth, for he could not see the truth, therefore, it 
 could not set him free from the talons of his chimera 
 — of indeed, a flock of chimeras, which bore him 
 away upon wild and whirling and vertiginous courses, 
 dashing to and fro among all the isms and illusions, 
 all the fads and follies of the fantastic age, now draw- 
 ing nigher and nigher to the abyss of the Catastrophe 
 the ominous shadow of which was even then, though 
 we knew it not, darkling upon the world. 
 
 But though I disregarded good advice, and ignored 
 the truthful criticism of my book, as well as the 
 merely commercial advice, I knew that for the time, 
 at least, the game was up; the book was no go; and 
 I put it away, and did not look at it again for seven 
 years. 
 
 Seven years, you know, is a mystic period! 
 
 For now, my dear Bradley, seven years after I 
 threw down my book, and nearly ten after you sent 
 me your kindly letter, I not only confess that you 
 were quite right, and that you told me the truth — 
 which I could not recognize (the seed falling upon 
 
The Quest of Truth 237 
 
 stony ground indeed) — ^but, what is more to the pur- 
 pose, so does my book confess it. That really fun- 
 damental basis for my book, the lack of which you 
 discerned, and which I could not supply, for I did not 
 know what it could be, is now at last mine to build 
 upon. At the time you read my screamingly egotis- 
 tical olla podrida of autobiography, auto-psychology, 
 literary essay, book of adventure, book of kicking 
 against the pricks, I was, as you were just enough to 
 recognize, trying in my nakedly personal fashion to 
 contribute something to the great task of social re- 
 construction which is so absolutely necessary. But 
 what I could contribute of any real value, was not 
 so apparent. I waved so many banners, I shouted 
 so confused a medley of war cries — Socialism, 
 Vegetarianism, Anarchism, Fletcherism, New 
 Thought, Psychic Research, Mysticism! — that no 
 wonder you couldn't make head or tail of it all; 
 any more than the poor world could make head or 
 tail of the babble of contentious systems and formulas 
 of the rest of the literary world-makers and world- 
 shakers so busy among us — the Tolstois, the Nietz- 
 sches, the Shaws, the Ibsens, the Metchnikoffs, the 
 Kropotkins, the Strindbergs, the Gorkis, the Maeter- 
 lincks, the Gorkis, down to the Bertie Russells, and 
 the Norman Angells, and the Walter Lippmanns, etc., 
 etc. — the would-be social saviours, the Prophets, the 
 Voices, the Visionaries. 
 
 And my book was the mirror of this confusion and 
 fantasy of mind and of life. 
 
 There was only one thing which justified its baffled 
 efforts — namely, the fact that it was after all bound 
 upon an adventure in search of truth. 
 
238 The High Romance 
 
 So, too, the same thing is true of those greater and 
 more adequately equipped minds and souls, whose 
 personal testaments so bizarrely bear witness to the 
 frightful confusion of our world as the Catastrophe 
 approached; they too were seeking the Light. 
 
 But I was blind, utterly blind, during all those 
 years of reckless roving as 1 adventured in my search 
 after the high romance among books and among men, 
 among ideas, and personalities, here, there and every- 
 where in our country, from Canada to Mexico, from 
 Boston to San Francisco, from Whitman to Neitzsche, 
 from Yeats and Wells to William James, from Fred- 
 erick Myers and his ghosts to Wincenty Lutoslawski, 
 and his Christian Yoga! 
 
 Yes, I was blind, utterly blind, to the fact that all 
 Seekers, the great as well as the little, the proud and 
 the humble, seek but one thing, and sooner or later 
 must make a choice. . . . 
 
 The thing that we seek is God. 
 
 The choice we must make is. Shall I follow Him? 
 
 — In my little hut at the foot of Mount Carmel, 
 as in my hut on the Massachusetts island, and as 
 everywhere else, I was struggling with a myriad of 
 questions, which at root resolved themselves into one 
 or two, namely: 
 
 Is there a God? 
 
 If there is, what are my relations to Him? 
 
 Around these fundamental questions, all others 
 gather. I can see now that from the beginning, I 
 was committed to this deepest of all concerns, but 
 
The Quest of Truth 239 
 
 I did not realize that fact — my eyes were holden so 
 I could not see; my soul was urging me onward, but 
 my mind was not in communion with my soul, save 
 brokenly and confusedly; wherefore, like millions of 
 others, before my time, and in my time, and never 
 more than in these days of War, I followed wander- 
 ing, betraying lights, and fascinating shadows, 
 through highways and byways, and over the hills of 
 life and time, far, far away. I roamed toward vague 
 vistas of adventure, ever opening in new directions. 
 There was no fixed star known to me by which I 
 might safely guide my quest. 
 
 Nevertheless, it was after all, a Quest; it was the 
 Great Quest. It was the supreme adventure. It was 
 the real, the only worth-while romance and high 
 adventure of the soul. And the time for its crisis 
 was now at hand. 
 
M 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE NEW PAGANISM 
 
 1. The Artist as Hierophant 
 
 ANY things, however, were to happen upon my 
 adventurous road, before the great thing of all 
 came to pass. . . . 
 
 And as I look back upon that time of confusion, 
 and clearly see that what I had to give the world 
 was of no particular value, nevertheless it would be 
 an affectation if I did not also recognize that in my 
 persistent attempts to achieve literary self-expression 
 I was, in my humble fashion, in rapport with the 
 spirit of my age. I unconsciously sought to become 
 one of its mediums of expression, one of the channels 
 for its communications; a Voice of its desire; and a 
 part, therefore, of the most powerful and predominat- 
 ing movement in modem art. 
 
 For, without raising the question of the relative 
 merits or demerits of modern art (especially literary 
 art) as compared with that of past days, surely no- 
 body will dispute the statement that never in the 
 history of the world have writers, purely as writers 
 — quite apart from their positions as proponents or 
 expounders of religious creeds, or scientific knowl- 
 edge, or systems of government — ever claimed or 
 attained such influence and power as they exercise 
 today. 
 
 Artists have assumed, and been freely accorded by 
 
 240 
 
The New Paganism 241 
 
 public opinion, positions of almost dogmatical, pon- 
 tifical authority in human society. They claim and 
 are granted a right hardly short of divine to criticize 
 all values, all institutions and all laws, and to over- 
 throw those they condemn, and set up new ones of 
 their own creation. 
 
 At the centre, as the animating principle, of all 
 social and religious movements and revolutions — ^both 
 those which renovate and reform and those which 
 wreck and destroy — you will find the writer. That 
 large and constantly growing portion of humanity 
 which, as W. B. Yeats puts the case, "makes its soul" 
 out of books, and music, and painting, and dancing, 
 and drama, instead of the religions which it has cast 
 into the dust-bin of Time, fully accepts free and in- 
 dividualistic Art as the revelation of the innermost 
 truth and power of Life. 
 
 A new dynamic religion is thus being created: a 
 religion of the mystical recognition of the power, 
 beauty, and right-to-be-free, of human life. It claims 
 for the artist full liberty to utter, in any form, what- 
 ever he and none other deems best to say. The creeds 
 and regulations and organizations of society must 
 follow and be moulded after his visions and revisions. 
 He is at once the prophet and the only permissible 
 priest of the high service of human progress. There- 
 fore it greatly behooves all who are concerned in 
 any way with bettering the race-soul (upon the better- 
 ment of which depends the improvement of all the 
 institutions of government, law, and social service) 
 to be keenly attentive to the voices of all authentic 
 artists. 
 
242 The High Romance 
 
 This, I am confident is not an over-statement of 
 the belief in advanced and radical intellectual circles 
 today. 
 
 2. The Chief Issue 
 
 It is, of course, obvious that humanity is stand- 
 ing at the gateway of some tremendous new epoch, 
 one in which all the past struggles of all those ideas 
 which debase or uplift mankind will be eclipsed by 
 the gigantic scope and relentless nature of the coming 
 conflict of opposing wills and antagonistic spiritual 
 forces. 
 
 America will unquestionably be the greatest of all 
 the psychic battlefields of the future, and the voices 
 of our artists today are uttering the omens and the 
 prophecies of the impending crisis. They formulate 
 the watchwords and phrase the battle cries. ... If 
 you would know what is to be tomorrow, study the 
 artists of today. . . . 
 
 Already, I think, it is quite clear that minor issues 
 are being brushed aside, and that the basic principle 
 of the warfare being waged by most modern writers 
 who count for anything, intellectually and artistically, 
 can be plainly discerned as a demand for absolute 
 liberty of expression, and the overthrow of all at- 
 tempts to maintain traditional and institutional forms 
 of moral and spiritual Authority. 
 
 Ultimately, all forms of moral and spiritual 
 authority are based upon the dogma of a personal 
 God; who has revealed His dictates to His creatures, 
 who are bound to follow these or meet with inevitable 
 disaster. 
 
 Christianity is the expression, and the Catholic 
 
The New Paganism 243 
 
 Church is the organism, for the working-out of this 
 idea, and all forms of society which claim "legitimate 
 authority," save one (a new-comer to the hierarchy 
 of modem ideas), derive directly or indirectly their 
 spiritual or moral sanction from this source. 
 
 The one exception among modem forms of social 
 organism claiming "legitimate authority" which does 
 not derive sanction from Christianity, is Socialism, 
 which would set up the authority not of "God," but 
 of the "State." 
 
 This idea of the innate and sovereign power of 
 "the State" ceases more and more to remain the 
 mere abstraction it was for long, and tends more and 
 more to become positively deific in the minds of ever 
 increasing multitudes. 
 
 This deifying process is largely the work of modem 
 artists, poets and prose prophets especially, who have 
 breathed an energetic life into what would be only 
 a cold mental abstraction without the fire and passion 
 and power they have given to it. 
 
 Now, with this particular source of authority, 
 modem non-Christian thought (with the exception of 
 pure anarchy: but that grows constantly less active) 
 has no quarrel, but rather a deep affinity; because 
 both at bottom are in opposition to dogmatic religion, 
 to Christianity. 
 
 Hence, it is day by day becoming clearer that the 
 great task which modem art has set all its forces to 
 accomplish, is to get rid of the power of Christianity, 
 and to permit all that which Christian morality would 
 prohibit or shackle — all the forces of free sensual life 
 — to seek and find expression untrammeled save by 
 considerations of expediency, or of a purely social. 
 
244 The High Romance 
 
 and non-Christian, decorum. For, since Christianity 
 claims the power and the sanction of an Almighty 
 God to guide and mould human life, and asserts that 
 disaster follows any least slackening of its control, 
 modem art must of necessity wage war against 
 Christianity — save, of course, when modem art is 
 itself Christian, explicitly, or in nature, and purpose. 
 
 But modem American art has shown little Christian 
 character or direction. France has its Huysman, its 
 Brunetiere, its Paul Claudel, its Francis Jammes, its 
 Maurice Barres, its Paul Bourget, and many other 
 Christian forces; England its Newman, its Francis 
 Thompson, its Hilaire Belloc, its Benson, its Chester- 
 tons, its Martindale, its Alice Meynell, its Shane 
 Leslie, its Francis Grierson; but only a few and, 
 as yet, quite local and minor Christian artists are to- 
 day ranged against the powerful brigade of English, 
 French, German, Jewish, Russian, and native artists 
 who in America wage war against the Christian ethic 
 — avowedly, or implicitly. 
 
 It is impossible, however, to doubt that a reaction 
 is near at hand, and that soon the champions of 
 Christ in art will step forth to face Apollo. . . . For 
 the inevitability of reaction, in all movements, is a 
 phenomenon that must be granted by all students and 
 champions of humanitarianism, and as the New 
 Paganism, which is creating the mystical religion of 
 the state, continues its career it is bound to face at 
 last the one power which dares to say to Man: "You 
 have a Master — a Supematural Creator Who demands 
 Obedience, and Who has given to me His Authority 
 over you!" For such is the voice of the Catholic 
 Church; and, strange to say, it has ever been able 
 
The New Paganism 245 
 
 to gain poets, and other artists, to express its ancient 
 and unchanging mind. A few of the keener-minded 
 and far-sighted leaders of modem humanitarianism 
 are aware of this singular recrudescence of Christian 
 supematuralism in American art and thought; and 
 are calling attention to the fact that the one thing, 
 and the only thing, which can prevent the overthrow 
 of all forms of dogmatical, auflioritative, moral con- 
 ventions, habits, customs, and beliefs, — ^namely, the 
 influence of the Catholic Church, is now exerting 
 itself in a great new movement of artistic and cultural 
 forces. In this age, the fourth centenary of 
 Luther, it is plain to demonstration that Protestantism 
 has failed. Only the religion of Rome has retained 
 power. Rome alone opposes the free development 
 and ultimate triumph of the New Paganism. Rome 
 is the true enemy of that ascendant force in modem 
 art which would lead humanity away from Christian 
 ideas of good and evil in search not of a Heaven in 
 the sky, but of the Earthly Paradise: Utopia: in other 
 words, the fully accomplished Brotherhood of Man 
 in the Socialist State of the World. For nothing 
 short of that consummation of the dreams of the 
 literary rebels of all the ages can be accepted as the 
 ideal of the New Paganism. 
 
 — No more definite and noteworthy utterance of 
 this ideal has been made than the confession of 
 faith which one of the most influential and typical 
 artist-prophets of the new dispensation, H. G. Wells, 
 makes in the most recent of his books, as follows : — 
 
 "/ conceive myself to be thinking as the world 
 thinks, and if I find no great facts, I find a hundred 
 little indications to reassure me that God comes. 
 
246 The High Romance 
 
 Even those who have neither the imagination nor the 
 faith to apprehend God as a reality will, I think, real- 
 ize presently that the Kingdom of God over a world- 
 wide system «/ republican States is the only possible 
 formula under which we may hope to unify and save 
 mankind," 
 
 He comes to this conclusion after studying "the 
 sub-surface religious movement" which he believes is 
 going on, a "movement entirely outside any existing 
 church or religious form," a movement he deems to 
 be a turning of the minds and hearts of ordinary men 
 toward God, a yearning after righteousness that prom- 
 ises much for the good of the world. Mr. Wells, 
 after many books, and years of search and experiment 
 in life and art and thought, has come at last to 
 Religion: to the Religion of the State. 
 
 In this, he is a true prophet, a true pioneer. His 
 new religion is definitely here, and the great task 
 which it attempts is the final overthrow of Christianity, 
 which it declares to have failed in the work which 
 it, the New Religion, will surely accomplish, namely, 
 the "unifying" and the "saving" of mankind. This 
 is the result, says Wells, and the only possible 
 result, of the modem movement of revolt; of man- 
 kind's great and never-ceasing quest for life — for 
 more life; the life more abundant — for liberty: true 
 liberty, unshackled, unquestioned, and permanent — 
 and for happiness, real and lasting happiness — after 
 which all human hearts are ever searching. 
 
 And this is the great quest in which nearly all 
 modem writers unite, however else they may disagree. 
 Of course, I refer now to "serious" writers, writers 
 conscious of responsibility and of definite social pur- 
 
The New Paganism 247 
 
 pose. Thousands of writers work merely to supply 
 the huge modem demand for entertainment, and for 
 something to "pass away the time." Apart from 
 these, there is that constantly increasing number of 
 writers who definitely and consciously are "artists," 
 and who consider their work to be socially important. 
 And these writers, I repeat, nearly all concur in that 
 dogma which Wells has so forcibly phrased, and I 
 have quoted above. 
 
 Again, I say, it is obvious that Mr. Wells, in 
 common with most of the more forcible and influential 
 writers of today, has come at last, after many years 
 of restless wandering among the systems and the 
 formulae invented by men, to Religion; he has re- 
 turned to God, as the only possible solution of the 
 mystery of human suff'ering and subjection and deg- 
 radation in the world as it is today. 
 
 — And I, too, at last made that discovery, I, too, 
 found my Religion, and it is how I did so, and with 
 what result, that now remains to be told. 
 
 3. A Man in Search of his Soul 
 
 I have often been struck by the fact that you may 
 (or you might until quite recently) read most modem 
 American and English literature — novels, poetry, es- 
 says, biographies, etc., without ever being made aware 
 that men are concerned in other matters than material, 
 or sensual, things and interests. There is much vague 
 talk of "spirituality," it is tme, especially of late, 
 but very little serious examination of fundamental 
 questions dealing in a concrete way with the mystery 
 
248 The High Romance 
 
 of man. Few modem writers, until quite lately, 
 squarely and honestly faced the queries which nearly 
 every individual some time or other must examine, 
 namely, — 
 
 Did I or did I not come into existence accidentally? 
 
 Am I a product of mechanical forces? 
 
 Am I mortal or immortal? 
 
 Is there conscious life for me after the happening 
 we call death? 
 
 What is the meaning of my life? 
 
 What is the answer to the riddle of existence? 
 
 But this silence on fundamental subjects is broken. 
 The books begin to multiply in which these questions 
 are treated. Indeed we are now in the dawn of an 
 epoch when these questions will give us no rest. 
 Willy-nilly, we must face them. The soul-hunger and 
 the soul-thirst of humanity will no longer be denied. 
 Strange foods are offered it, and are eagerly de- 
 voured; for if the soul is cut away from its true 
 nourishment it will turn to anything to satisfy its in- 
 eluctable cravings. 
 
 And, as I go through the records of my own blun- 
 dering and febrile existence, I see that from first to 
 last what I have been trying to tell is the story of a 
 man wandering in search of his soul: looking every- 
 where for God. 
 
 But when I was writing of my earlier adventures, 
 I did not know this palmary face, and therefore I 
 omitted mention of many vital things which now I 
 can see were essential to the understanding of my 
 story, and necessary for me to consider, if I were 
 to bring my quest to a happy ending. . . . 
 
 These facts I now propose briefly to muster to- 
 
The New Paganism 249 
 
 gether, passing rapidly through them to the conclu- 
 sion of all. . . . 
 
 Among these facts, for example, were these, 
 namely, that as a child I was baptized, and partook 
 of the sacraments of penance, communion, and con- 
 firmation, in the Catholic Church. 
 
 Yet these facts are barely mentioned in my record ; 
 because for most of my life they seemed to me to be 
 only most negligible, accidental facts; of which I had 
 ceased even to think. Before I was thirteen years 
 old, all religious interest had completely left me. 
 My mother had been a Church of England woman, 
 joining the Roman communion when she married my 
 father, but never really consenting to its claims, and 
 giving them up after her husband's death. There- 
 fore, I was brought up at a public school instead of 
 the parochial school, in spite of the objections of my 
 father and the Catholic friends of the family. For 
 a little while after my father died I went to mass and 
 the Catechism class on Sundays, but they made only 
 an evanescent impression upon me. 
 
 For a brief period, a month or two at most, while 
 I was at the Catholic school, in the infirmary, nursing 
 my broken leg, the personal influence of a kindly old 
 priest who used to visit me every day brought about 
 a brief phase of piety. It was, however, merely of 
 an emotional and "literary" type. All my dreams 
 were of living a hermit's life in the woods and putting 
 up crosses over springs of water so that those who 
 drank should think of the God who died for man. 
 On my return to Halifax this streak of religious emo- 
 tionalism faded away. 
 
 I liked the rites and ceremonies of the church, but 
 
250 The High Romance 
 
 merely for artistic reasons; yet even this slight hold 
 upon me was soon broken after I went a few times to 
 hear an American Universalist minister who was then 
 the sensation in "liberal" circles in Halifax. 
 
 From him, and from a very self-conscious Catholic 
 apostate who took me to these meetings, I received the 
 infection of the spirit of "science." 
 
 4. A Pageant of Mystagogues 
 
 It was in the air, this spirit, twenty-five years ago, 
 almost as powerfully as it had been some years be- 
 fore, in the period following the work of Darwin, 
 and Huxley, when God was dethroned. 
 
 This spirit did not really lead its victims to a 
 serious personal study of real science, or of religion; 
 save in a few exceptional cases. It simply communi- 
 cated itself from soul to soul; all souls that were not 
 awake and obedient to God being at once occupied 
 by the spirit of materialistic natural "science." So 
 far as I was concerned, I simply accepted all the easy 
 denials of religion which were the effects of the new 
 dispensation upon ignorant and un-educated egotists; 
 and soon the subject of religion completely dropped 
 out of my mind. 
 
 From my fourteenth to my thirtieth year I cannot 
 recall feeling any, even the slightest interest or con- 
 cern in the Christian religion, or in any other. Art 
 was the only thing that mattered: art and my self. 
 
 The only bond by which I was spiritually attached 
 to others was formed when in my first years in Boston 
 I fell into a loose and sentimental, not a reasoned- 
 out or firm, connection with Socialism. 
 
The New Paganism 251 
 
 But it was not until the days of Helicon Hall, when 
 I came to share the same conviction that was animat- 
 ing so many modem writers, namely, that the Spirit 
 of Life was striving to express itself through us, 
 through the medium of art, that I consciously ex- 
 perienced any psychic life. 
 
 Art and self were really my gods; but still I was 
 not satisfied; I was not at rest, and from the time of 
 that going forth into the wilderness, led by that 
 strange, inward drawing, which I have described, I 
 began to take an ever-growing interest in the mani- 
 festations of the strangely powerful and singularly 
 varied spirit of modem mysticism as it was display- 
 ing itself in America in the forms of Spiritism, 
 New Thought, Christian Science, Mental Healing, 
 Theosophy, Occult Science, etc., etc. 
 
 I became an omnivorous reader of the vast, fungoid 
 literature of the subject. I attended seances and 
 meetings. I sought out and interviewed all sorts and 
 conditions of men and women who were leaders or 
 followers of these movements, in New York, Massa- 
 chusetts, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, 
 Boston, and elsewhere — from men like William 
 James to roughneck fakers like Schlatter, the "Divine 
 Healer." 
 
 5. Ghosts in Helicon Hall 
 
 It was my sojourn at Helicon Hall that led me into 
 the path I followed among the new cults and religious 
 movements. That typical colony of the uneasy spirits 
 of the place would be assembled to watch a table 
 arisen to such heights of fantasy and wide- 
 spread influence in this spiritually distracted country. 
 
252 The High Romance 
 
 Spiritualism, which as I have said, was repre- 
 sented at Helicon Hall by several devotees, suddenly 
 broke out there in a spasm of fantastic activity. 
 Seances began in the rooms of the woman who lived 
 in the next room to mine, and word was passed about, 
 supposedly on the quiet, to "the right people," that 
 there was a chance to see and hear strange things. 
 After a while, however, there was no pretence at 
 secrecy, and sometimes nearly the whole population 
 of the place would be assembled to watch a table 
 frantically galloping about, with Upton Sinclair 
 clinging to its top, his justly famous legs waving in 
 the air. 
 
 And there was one highly exciting night when we 
 thought that we were about to improve upon all 
 previously discovered or invented systems of com- 
 municating with the other world. One of our sitters 
 was a young man who understood the Morse telegraph 
 code, and the raps on the table all at once began 
 to come in groups which were readable as code 
 messages; a vast improvement over the cumbrous, 
 ordinary methods of asking questions, and getting 
 three raps for yes and one for no, and so forth, and 
 so on. But the invisible telegrapher failed to come 
 any more after two or three seances; nor did his im- 
 proved method give us anything of importance from 
 the invisible world. He was probably too progressive 
 for the conservative forces, the reactionaries, over 
 there, and they squelched him, or something. 
 
 It was at these seances that I first met William 
 James. He heard about the phenomena at Helicon 
 Hall, and came to investigate. Patiently, like a true 
 philosopher, he sat at the table one night when we 
 
The New Paganism 253 
 
 hoped to get communications befitting such a famous 
 man; but, alas, there were plumbers in the cellar, at 
 work on the boiler, and no spook had the ghost of 
 a show to make itself heard through the brazen 
 clangour of the iron pipes leading to the furnace. 
 
 6. The Polish Yogi 
 
 It was after Helicon Hall had been wiped out that 
 I next met the Harvard philosopher. He had pub- 
 lished in the American Magazine a brief version of 
 his celebrated address before the American Philo- 
 sophical Association concerning the hidden energies 
 of man, and the article had attracted national atten- 
 tion. He told a number of exceedingly interesting 
 stories of men who had accomplished extraordinary 
 feats of self-suggestion, or performed mighty labours, 
 under the influence of optimistic ideas which inspired 
 them with mental and spiritual and even physical 
 "second wind," or third and fourth wind, after break- 
 downs or exhaustion had apparently destroyed or im- 
 paired their forces. And he affirmed his belief that 
 in each one of us there was "a reservoir of energy," 
 which each one of us might "tap," if we only willed it 
 so. 
 
 I asked the editor of The American to follow up this 
 article by a series of articles dealing with men and 
 women who had accomplished this self-energizing 
 process, and I was sent to Boston to talk with William 
 James about the matter, and collect material for 
 articles along that line. 
 
 William James received me most graciously. I 
 told him bow young men throughout the country were 
 
254 The High Romance 
 
 looking toward him for spiritual light and leading, 
 and I shall never forget the sweet, kindly, self- 
 deprecating manner in which he received my some- 
 what enthusiastic compliments. And he talked with 
 me a long time in the simplest and heartiest fashion, 
 walking up and down from his tall desk, at which he 
 stood to do much of his writing, to the fireplace, and 
 back again; interested, vigorous, kindly. 
 
 His chief "case," in the hidden energy article, he 
 told me, was an European philosopher, an authority 
 on Plato, who had cured himself of an extremely 
 bad case of nervous prostration by Hindoo "yogi" 
 methods of self-suggestion. This man happened to 
 be in Boston at the time of my visit, and Professor 
 James gave me a letter to him, suggesting that perhaps 
 the full account of his remarkable experiences would 
 give me material such as I sought. 
 
 He was lecturing, before the Lowell Institute, on 
 Poland and its literature. His name was Wincenty 
 Lutoslawski, a Pole, who had been a professor at the 
 University of Cracow until the Austrian Government 
 expelled him because of his patriotic utterances. I 
 heard him lecture that night. Dressed in the conven- 
 tional evening uniform, Lutoslawski, even so, was an 
 extraordinary personage; a blazing temperament. 
 Professor James, who saw me sitting by myself, and 
 joined me for a while, told me that never in all his 
 experience had he known Boston audiences so stirred, 
 and so willing to betray the fact, as they had been 
 since Lutoslawski had come to lecture them. 
 
 Next day I presented my letter, Lutoslawski re- 
 ceived me in his room in a Cambridge boarding house. 
 He was now dressed in some collarless, grey flannel 
 
The New Paganism 255 
 
 "hygienic" garb, and his room was littered with the 
 various kinds of nuts and "breakfast foods" on which, 
 so he informed me, he existed; flesh foods being too 
 gross and material for a modem mystic! He told me 
 about his Yogi researches in India, and how he meant 
 to form a colony of American mystics; composed of 
 men who were willing to work with him in the in- 
 vestigation of occultism, somewhere in California, or 
 Florida, where the colony would receive the benefit 
 of the psychic force of sunshine, and the open air. 
 And, on the spot, he invited me to join him. 
 
 But, genuinely as I was interested, I was not ready 
 to follow this Polish Yogi into the wilderness, and 
 Lutoslawski passed on, along his own strange trails, 
 seeking, as I sought, the high romance. I continued 
 to hear from him, now and then; from California, 
 and then from Austria, and Algiers. In the last place 
 he hoped to found a colony to study the conditions 
 requisite for securing the birth of men and women 
 of genius. . . . 
 
 His mission in America failed, so far as the colony 
 was concerned. He afterwards sent me a volume 
 written in French — ^he wrote his books in Polish, or 
 English, or German, or French, with equal facility 
 — on the Human Will; based upon his study of the 
 American new thought movements. 
 
 7. A Chicago Occultist 
 
 Then there was the "T. K." 
 
 In a ranch house in Arizona I discovered a book 
 called the "Great Work," written by "T. K." It was 
 a strangely interesting and powerfully written thing, 
 
256 The High Romance 
 
 purporting to be by a man sent to this country by a 
 secret centre of mystical "adepts" in India for the 
 purpose of instructing Americans in the methods for 
 developing spiritual consciousness and power ac- 
 cording to the teachings handed down from the ancient 
 mystery religions of India, and perpetuated in the 
 "great school." 
 
 I wrote to the "T. K." He said in reply that my 
 letter interested him, but that if I meant to be his 
 pupil, the next step would need to be a personal inter- 
 view. So when next I passed through Chicago, I 
 sought him out, and spent an evening in his com- 
 pany, and he told me his story — or, anyhow, part 
 of it. 
 
 Many years before he had been an editor in San 
 Francisco. He gave up journalism for the bar. In 
 his youth he had abandoned all religious associatons. 
 In manhood, his interest in religion re-awakened. He 
 began (as so many of these queer mystics do) with 
 spiritualism. Becoming convinced of its extreme 
 danger to those who dabbled in its necromantic 
 practices, he gave this up and studied other forms of 
 modem mysticism. One day, as he was crossing 
 Market Street, in San Francisco (all the singular 
 things that can happen take place in this romantic 
 city), he was tapped on the shoulder by a stranger. 
 
 "You are Mr. So and So?" this stranger asked. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "I have an important message for you. May I 
 speak to you in private?" 
 
 "Certainly. Come to my office." 
 
 He led the way to his law office. There the 
 man unfolded his extraordinary message. He spoke 
 
The New Paganism 257 
 
 correct English, his attire was the ordinary garb of 
 the Occident. But, he continued, he was, neverthe- 
 less, a Hindu; and he was also the emissary, or the 
 ambassador, of the secret college of mystical adepts 
 which in India for untold centuries had kept the 
 light of the ancient mystery religion burning. The 
 time had now come, however, when the Orient was 
 to send its message of spiritual power to the Occident, 
 which was threatened with utter destruction because 
 of its rank materialism. The "great school" meant 
 to form centres in the United States. Several Ameri- 
 cans had been under observation. My informant was 
 one of them. It now rested with himself to say if he 
 would proceed any further. If he desired to take up 
 the work, he was immediately to go with his Hindu 
 guide to a place in the Colorado mountains, where he 
 would be given his preliminary training. Then he 
 must go to India to complete his education in the great 
 school itself. 
 
 This fantastic proposal was immediately accepted. 
 My informant went to Colorado with the Hindu. He 
 stayed alone with him in the high mountains for 
 eighteen months. Then he went to India and for 
 several years studied in the secret school of Hindu 
 adepts. His special work was to learn how to ex- 
 press Hindu occultism in terms understandable by 
 American readers. When it was judged that he was 
 adequately trained, he was sent back to the United 
 States. He was not to accept any money from any- 
 body. He must earn his living by his own work; 
 work quite outside the "great work." And he must 
 attack two things, and uphold one thing. The two 
 things he was to attack were hypnotism and the 
 
258 The High Romance 
 
 Catholic Church, which, he declared, were the two 
 chief expressions, and instruments, of the evil force 
 in the universe; and which were continually in oppo- 
 sition to the progress of the truth, which he was to 
 uphold; this truth being the occultism taught by the 
 Hindu school of "adepts." 
 
 He became a druggist in Oak Park, Chicago, and 
 thus made his living. But his real work was to 
 teach American men and women how to develop in 
 themselves a sort of divine relation to the occult force 
 of the universe, so that they could travel, as he did, 
 even to India, on "the astral plane," while their bodies 
 quietly rested. Mystic masonry, he said, was really 
 a part of the "great work" as taught by the Indian 
 school, and the innermost circles of Masonry were 
 devoted to occult researches such as the Rosicrucians 
 of the Middle Ages, the hermetic philosophers, and 
 other organizations of past ages, had passed on to 
 modern times. He carried on his particular branch 
 of the work for the most part by correspondence, and 
 his pupils were scattered in nearly every state of the 
 union. 
 
 — But I was still unconvinced (though to this day 
 I feel assured that the "T. K." was starkly honest, 
 according to his lights), and I remained undetached. 
 All this was interesting — ^but for me it was not the 
 path of attainment. 
 
 8. The Living Dead Man 
 
 Also there was "Paul Karishka," the Christian 
 Hermetic. 
 
 I met him in Los Angeles, where the cults and oc- 
 
The New Paganism 259 
 
 cult systems fairly jostle each other in competition 
 for public favour. 
 
 Here was a man who had been a United States Cir- 
 cuit Court Judge, and who at the time I met him, 
 and for many years before, was a highly respected 
 and successful lawyer, and a wealthy man. He was, 
 he told me, for we had many long conversations, 
 a native of Maine who had come west when young 
 and grown up with the country. He, too, had been 
 without religion, and had begun to long for religion. 
 He, too, like the "T. K." had met a mysterious 
 stranger from the Orient, a man, this time, from 
 Damascus, representing a secret lodge of "Christian 
 Hermetics." He had gone with this man to Alaska, 
 and been instructed, amid the lonely mountains, in 
 the mystic lore of the ancient East. Then under the 
 pen-name of "Paul Karishka" he had written many 
 books, novels and essays, designed to spread the 
 doctrine of self-development of occult powers, and 
 had taught many pupils the way to the secret of the 
 initiates. 
 
 — This man died a few years ago. After his 
 death the poet Elsa Barker, published books purport- 
 ing to be automatic writings received by her from a 
 "living dead man"; who was no other than my old 
 Los Angeles acquaintance, Paul Karishka. 
 
 9. The Truth That Makes You Rich 
 
 And Bumell, who with splendid simplicity termed 
 himself the "Truth"! 
 
 Attired in a magnificent leopard skin dressing 
 gown, with a huge mastiff crouching at his feet, this 
 
260 The High Romance 
 
 man, also a Los Angeles product, told me he would 
 not take a million dollars for his business. At his 
 door there would often be a line of limousines, as his 
 pupils, mostly women, waited their turn to learn the 
 "truth" at rates averaging about twenty dollars a 
 lesson. On Sunday nights the large room in his 
 house where he received the public, at one dollar each 
 person, would be crowded; while Bumell lectured, 
 and a stenographer took down his words. Carbon 
 copies of the lecture would sell for as high as twenty 
 dollars each. The following paragraph will give, I 
 think, a fair idea of at least the construction of these 
 lectures. 
 
 ^'Fishes would nothing fresh but fire salt refuses 
 condoles the frenzy sky adventures Dionysus forces 
 inner revolting from but abysses roaring far visions 
 depths,^' — and so forth, on and on, for an hour. 
 
 His language, in other terms, was absolutely un- 
 intelligible; but by a species of incantation, as he 
 talked, and by means of some inner key of which only 
 his disciples have the secret, this mystical gibberish 
 apparently thrilled his devotees with profound and 
 consoling messages. 
 
 I knew a college professor who was an advanced 
 pupil, and who believed that he gained tremendous 
 personal power and mastery from his instructor. I 
 know of another man, a celebrated author, who be- 
 came one of the best known exponents of the extreme 
 forms of modem art and philosophy, after being 
 "developed" by Bumell's "truth." 
 
 And all these were only a few of the singular 
 persons and cults with whom and with which I came 
 
The New Paganism 261 
 
 into contact. Since that time they have increased 
 more and more — to say nothing about the Theoso- 
 phists, and the Vedantists, with their "temples" in San 
 Francisco and elsewhere, and the Bahaists, and the 
 other Oriental importations; and leaving out of ac- 
 count the swarming and ever-multiplying forms of 
 New Thought, and Christian Science. 
 
 10. The Temple of Vulgarity 
 
 From most of these movements of the modem 
 spirit as expressed in the mystical cults, however, I 
 gained nothing but disappointment. 
 
 Christian Science, for instance, had no power to 
 move me save to disgust. As a reporter, I was 
 present in the famous Mother Church in Boston when 
 it was opened. As one of the pilgrims to the room 
 where the writing table of Mrs. Eddy is kept I stood 
 in line for an hour or so while the bell rang at in- 
 tervals and the room was emptied of visitors and 
 filled again with others. At last I reached it: the 
 sanctum sanctorum. One glance at that plush and 
 crimson interior: that bourgeois dream of heavenly 
 luxury and beauty, was enough for me. It revealed 
 the soul of that stupid and hopelessly commonplace 
 delusion which has gained such a strong hold upon 
 the American public simply because soul-hunger and 
 soul-thirst are universal, and affect even the most 
 commonplace and ordinary and negative lives. 
 There is not a spark of real art struck forth from the 
 stupid, otiose cults of Christian Science and the "New 
 Thought" movements in this country. They are ap- 
 pallingly banal. And that fact for me was condem- 
 
262 The High Romance 
 
 nation enough. Unless a religion can call forth those 
 great reactions of the soul which manifest in true 
 poetry and painting and sculpture and architecture 
 and drama, it surely is not a real religion. 
 
 Still, I could see and freely grant that though these 
 multiplying mystical cults for the greater part lacked 
 all reality and true power, they nevertheless were 
 proofs of the breaking down of the materialistic 
 systems, and of those so-called Christian sects which 
 denied the supernatural elements of religion and only 
 accepted moral and ethical elements. 1 saw that the 
 human soul could not rest content with such sapless 
 creeds. And I could understand though I could not 
 share the feelings of those who turned to Christian 
 Science or to other forms of the multifarious mys- 
 tical cults, for in them they found some satisfaction 
 for the imperious desire of the human soul to escape 
 from the limitations of the visible world, and the 
 world of mere intellectualism, and the world of time, 
 and to enter the realms of the invisible, of the spir- 
 itual, the inynortal and eternal. 
 
 11. The Creed of Pantheism 
 
 My investigations were two-fold in character; first 
 of all, they were incited by a personal and insatiable 
 interest in the subject of the occult; secondly, I con- 
 sidered it would supply me with material for my 
 work. After my studies had been under way for 
 some time, I received a commission to write a series 
 of articles, dealing with modem mysticism, to be en- 
 titled "New America," for a monthly review now ex- 
 tinct, Van Vordens Magazine, This task caused me 
 
The New Paganism 263 
 
 to attempt the co-ordination of my desultory re- 
 searches, and to reach some definite point of view in 
 regard to them. 
 
 This point of view I came to consider something 
 very important indeed, for it seemed to me that noth- 
 ing other than a new dispensation of the fundamental 
 Spirit of Life was opening its beneficent reign on 
 earth. 
 
 To me it seemed, as I wrote at the time, that we 
 were living amid the joyous throes of a revolution of 
 peace; a revolution of love. The age of materialism, 
 together with all the creaking and fantastic survivals 
 of old ignorances and out-worn habits of thought 
 known as orthodox Christianity — were passing away, 
 and with them would pass the miseries and the slaver- 
 ies of man. "You put the case, if I may say so, in a 
 megaphone manner," William James wrote to me; 
 "but on the whole I think you are right." 
 
 I saw — as I put the matter — that "Love is the true 
 God of humanity's ever-spreading religious sense; 
 and the world is turning gladly to its radiant altar, 
 in the light of which the ideals of the Brotherhood of 
 Man in the Fatherhood of God are purged clean of 
 cant and formalism, and Fear is known as the only 
 devil — a devil that man is learning to treat as such 
 a weak-spined demon deserves to be treated, simply 
 by ignoring it. Love creates — Fear destroys; Love 
 is health, happiness, light; fear is disease and the only 
 death. From man's rapidly-developing sense of his 
 own creative and curative power — from his sense of 
 his own divinity as a part of divine and everlasting 
 life — there is up-springing and flowing in all direc- 
 tions movements which are profoundly affecting the 
 
264 The High Romance 
 
 human race. Some of these movements are fantastic 
 distortions of truth; some are the masks of mercenary 
 charlatans ; but the world should purge the false from 
 the true and partake of the great good underlying 
 all. And there comes to those who communicate with 
 this new spirit a sense of their own progress from a 
 vague beginning in darkness, on through merely neb- 
 ulous consciousness, down to the vivid self-conscious- 
 ness of the present. From being merely specks of 
 insentient life, men and women have developed into 
 life-consciousness; little by little, and now and then 
 by leaps and bounds; and then they passed into self- 
 consciousness ; and now we are rapidly entering into 
 the inheritance of the next great step forward in 
 evolution, namely, the entrance into cosmic con- 
 sciousness. Man, at last, is acquiring positive knowl- 
 edge of his spiritual existence. This knowledge is 
 coming to him not only through the use of his reason- 
 ing powers, but also through the gradual unfolding 
 of new and supra-normal faculties. Phenomena such 
 as are evidenced in hypnotism, clairvoyance, thought- 
 transference, spiritism, and the like, are the out- 
 ward signs of this growing inner faculty. On all sides 
 these signs of the new times, these tidings and tokens 
 of the unfolding and developing of the new world of 
 sunshine, hope, strength, health, and love, are appear- 
 ing and multiplying." 
 
 And — as I also wrote at that time — I hoped to be 
 "a Voice of this new world, and a Voice of the people, 
 telling the new tales of hope, and singing the new 
 songs of joy, and so be one of many builders, helping 
 to build for the people the crystal house of beauty. 
 
 "For at last (I dared to affirm) I knew what I had 
 
The New Paganism 265 
 
 long sought to know; I knew — myself; I had found 
 myself. And in finding myself I had found the clue 
 to all other souls, and to all the secrets of life. They 
 merge into one secret, and this secret is that which is 
 at the core of the new religious movements; it is joy, 
 endless joy; strong, sure joy that mounts ever on- 
 wards and upwards, to higher regions of life. All 
 is life; death is but the shadow of a gesture of life; 
 a shadow seen only in the minds of men who are not 
 yet awakened; of men still wandering in the darkness 
 of sense illusion and of self -illusion; the illusion of 
 the narrow, personal self which men must transcend 
 as they rise into the consciousness of the great self 
 that is behind, and above, and below, and before, and 
 permeating all things. 
 
 "For those who understand the New Spirit, know 
 that the universe is not dead matter, but a living and 
 eternal force of which man is part; and that man's 
 soul is immortal; that the cosmos is so ordered that 
 all things and all events work together for the good 
 that is to be the consummation of all things. And 
 always the search for the higher good will proceed, 
 onwards and ever upwards." 
 
 And, obviously enough, the search required a 
 leader — or, rather, many leaders. Should modesty 
 restrain me from claiming a post among them? 
 
 Nay, modesty forbid! Get thee behind me, mod- 
 esty! 
 
 12. Antimonies 
 
 And at last I boiled it all down — all my adventures 
 and researches in modem mysticism — and extracted 
 the quintessential facts, as follows: — 
 
266 The High Romance 
 
 First, that the force behind all the phenomena of 
 life was a spiritual force, and not merely a material, 
 or chemical, force. 
 
 Second, that it was a force that could be controlled 
 and used by man. 
 
 Third, that the human will was the instrument by 
 means of which the spiritual force of the universe 
 could be utilized. 
 
 Fourth, that the paramount duty of those aWake 
 to these facts was to make them known to the world, 
 for these were the truths which when known would 
 make men free indeed. 
 
 • •••••• 
 
 Irrefragible, it seemed to me, were these shining 
 and energetic truths. 
 
 But . . . but, unfortunately, there was another 
 fact; a fact which knocked all the others, so far at 
 least as I was concerned, into a cocked hat. This fact 
 was the highly embarrassing circumstance that having 
 reached the point where I had discovered that the 
 power of my own will was the greatest of all human 
 powers, and the key to all good, to all my desires — 
 the key which, as William James had long ago said 
 to me in Boston, was the master-key that unlocked the 
 bottomless reservoir of hidden energy — I had com- 
 pletely lost control of my will. 
 
 I was like a man who had locked up the pearl of 
 great price in a safe, and who had forgotten the com- 
 bination. 
 
 I stood at the door of the earthly paradise, but I 
 couldn't get in, for nobody could let me in but myself, 
 and I had lost, or broken, or gambled away, the golden 
 key. 
 
The New Paganism 267 
 
 I could make resolutions, but I could not keep 
 them. I had grown quite undependable, untrust- 
 worthy; to myself, and all others. For example, 
 there was the matter of drink. All my life from 
 boyhood I had been in the habit of going on wild 
 sprees; seeking and finding mad adventures in 
 Alcoholia. To me drink was an escape ; a flight from 
 the sordid and the commonplace aspects of life. It 
 opened a door to excitement, to drama, to romance. 
 And I had always assumed that I could do as I pleased 
 in this respect; that I could leave ofl" drinking when- 
 ever I desired. But I did not so desire. And, by 
 and by, though I did desire to stop, I could not. My 
 pose of being the captain of my fate, the master of 
 my soul, in this respect, as in so many others, simply 
 could not be sustained. I was not a master; I was a 
 slave. 
 
 As I gradually realized my situation, I made more 
 earnest attempts than in past days to leave off; but I 
 grew worse and worse. My orgies grew ever more 
 ill-timed and desperate. The only concession which 
 I would make to my new-found spiritual interests was 
 to adopt yellow chartreuse for my favourite brew of 
 illusion; because I had somewhere read that the 
 formula of this wine was a monkish secret which 
 science could not penetrate. . . . 
 
 And this sardonic antimony extended its impassable 
 gulf between all my ideals and my actual life; be- 
 tween what I wished to do and be, and what I really 
 was, and what I did. 
 
 More and more, the humiliating weight of this 
 knowledge of real failure weighed down upon me and 
 crushed my spirit. I was forced to see myself as one 
 
268 The High Romance 
 
 who taught, but who could not do what he taught; a 
 living lie. And I was but one of many artists 
 whom I knew to be like me in this respect — writers 
 who called upon others to follow them where they 
 themselves could not go; writers who set themselves 
 up, as I was fain to do, to be prophetic and creative, 
 destroying old creeds and formulating new ones, but 
 who only substituted vain words for reality. All — 
 all without exception — after passing through phases 
 of ebullient exaltation and excitement, became sad 
 or mad or bad — never, never really or permanently 
 glad. There was nothing stable in their volatile and 
 fantastic forms of religion and government and art. 
 Their theories were only meant for other people to 
 carry out. Only here and there could you find 
 one of these modem prophets willing himself to do 
 what he preached, save only when he preached 
 sensual indulgence, under the title of "the larger free- 
 dom," or "the higher morality," or "liberty of 
 life." But only now and then did a Tolstoi or a 
 Thoreau, or a Whitman or Whitman's disciple, Ed- 
 ward Carpenter, attempt to carry out any theory of 
 social or religious "reform" which would entail hard- 
 ship or moral effort. As one typical modem ex- 
 pounder of "advanced ideas" recently stated the case 
 in a letter to the New York Times: "/ put forward 
 the claim that a man must not he judged upon what 
 he is but upon what he writes!" That is the true creed 
 of the modem artist, the modem literary "uplifter." 
 Never mind what I do or what I am, but only what I 
 write! 
 
 It is the utter prostitution of the sacred Word! 
 
The New Paganism 269 
 
 Well, here it was that I broke away from the art 
 that would be religion without obeying the very first 
 law of religion, which is sacrifice — primarily self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 The deification of self, in these modem times, came 
 to its frightful climax in Nietzsche, on the day when 
 he telegraphed to Georg Brandes: "Write for me 
 the music of my new song! For I have found the 
 new heaven and the new earth!" And then he was 
 led away — poor, shattered soul! — ^with an asylum 
 nurse wiping the drooling lips that had attempted to 
 sing the psalm of the Apocalypse of Self. 
 
 Yet one may admire Nietzsche much more than his 
 swarm of flabby disciples. He in all honesty at least 
 attempted to achieve his own ideal. But most of the 
 swarm of would be saviours of society and liberators 
 of the human soul stick by the fallacious creed ex- 
 pressed so well in the letter I have quoted above. 
 "Never mind what I do or what I say but only what I 
 write." 
 
 From this creed I recanted, disgusted by the anti- 
 mony so visible in myself between my ideals and my 
 practice, and discernible also in nearly all the rest 
 of the writers of the day. 
 
 Art was a great power; but the exaltation of Art 
 into religion was idolatry. 
 
 Will was a tremendous force; but self-will was 
 essentially suicidal. 
 
 What was the power beyond and above the power 
 of art and of self-will; the final power? 
 
 What could it be, but God? 
 
 And I set my face at last towards Him, Who Is, 
 
270 The High Romance 
 
 and Was, and Is to Be, and the supreme adventure of 
 the high romance led me forth from my hut among 
 the pines, and up the trail that led away from it — 
 the old trail worn by the feet of the Spanish padres 
 long ago — along the slope of Mount Carmel. , , . 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 SISTER TERESA 
 
 1. On the Road to Monterey 
 
 IT is only in looking backward that the omens and 
 portents of the great adventure, which now was 
 dawning, fall into any semblance of order and con- 
 nection. At the time, things happened, that was all. 
 Not until the most palpably extraordinary occur- 
 rences arrived did I give what was happening any 
 special attention, and even then I did not see their 
 relation to each other. But now I can discern the 
 connecting links of cause and effect which led me to 
 the supreme event. 
 
 It was at Carmel-by-the-Sea that Junipero Serra 
 founded the central one of all his missions, and there 
 he died and was buried. Though the mission still 
 stands, Carmel is now more celebrated for the fact 
 that it is a colony of artists, poets, fictionists, painters, 
 and their followers, than because it was the cradle of 
 religion in the west. . . . Rather typical, is it not? 
 of an age when Art has endeavoured to assume more 
 and more a consciously religious function in life. . . . 
 
 Nowadays it is only once a week that the old 
 mission is anything more than something which tour- 
 ists motor over from Del Monte to snap-shot or 
 glance at, or which painters sketch because its historic 
 interest appeals to them, or else because its adobe 
 
 walls against the sapphire sea or the turquoise sky 
 
 271 
 
 ^ Ji 
 
272 The High Romance 
 
 — or the sky of pearly-grey if the ubiquitous sea-fog 
 is about — assumes a heavenly beauty of colour that 
 evokes from them a creative impulse. Once a week 
 the parish priest, — very appropriately, a Spaniard, — 
 drives from Monterey and says Mass. A handful 
 of Catholics worship; tourists come drawn by curios- 
 ity. Then the church is locked up again for another 
 week, except when curious visitors or pious pilgrims 
 come. 
 
 But in the village hidden among the pines north 
 and west, the writers are at work, and the painters 
 are busy, and the influences of Art go forth con- 
 stantly in colour, and line, and words. ... An age, 
 this of ours, as W. B. Yeats has written — "when 
 we are agreed that we 'make our souls' out of 
 some one of the great poets, of ancient times, or 
 out of Shelley or Wordsworth, or Goethe or Balzac 
 or Flaubert or Count Tolstoy, in the books he wrote 
 before he became a prophet and fell into a lesser 
 order, or out of Mr. Whistler's pictures, while we 
 amuse ourselves, or at best make a poorer sort of 
 soul, by listening to sermons or by doing or by not 
 doing certain things. We write of great writers, 
 even of writers whose beauty would once have seemed 
 an unholy beauty, with rapt sentences like those our 
 fathers kept for the beatitudes and mysteries of the 
 Church; and no matter what we believe with our lips, 
 we believe with our hearts that beautiful things, as 
 Browning said, . . . 'Have lain bumingly on the 
 Divine Hand.' "... 
 
 Yes; so, for the most part, we of Carmel believed, 
 as did we of Helicon Hall, and of those radical circles 
 in New York where aforetime I mingled with the 
 
Sister Teresa 273 
 
 spirits of my time. We would make a few changes 
 in the creed as proposed by Yeats; among the "soul- 
 makers" named by him we would admit the experts 
 in socialism, and "social service," and also, maybe, 
 nowadays, the leaders of "intellectual anarchy," and 
 the LW.W. 
 
 I was in company that day, with a new acquaint- 
 ance, an English music critic, a prose stylist named 
 Redfern Mason, who had been converted to Cathol- 
 icism, he told me, by reading Dante, and by the 
 sight of Cardinal Newman lying in his coffin. My 
 friend was on his way to Monterey, to assist at Mass, 
 and I was accompanying him . . . Why? . . . Well, 
 at that time I would have been hard put to it to 
 answer definitely; all I can say is that I was at- 
 tracted. 
 
 At Mass, I wondered at my friend, at his great de- 
 votion; yet I knew, though vaguely, that Something 
 was Happening; that the Mass was no empty form; 
 and it was an Action. But I had so long forgotten all 
 the little knowledge of my childhood, that I could 
 not understand what the Mass really meant, and really 
 was. 
 
 As we followed the trail through the odorous pine 
 woods, the day I have in mind, we talked of 
 "mysticism" and its relation to life and religion; 
 he maintaining that when it was true, it was simply 
 a portion of Catholic religion, and I maintaining that 
 it stood apart from and above all known creeds and 
 formal faiths. But on one thing we fully agreed, 
 namely, that all the signs of the times pointed to a 
 great revival of interest in the supernatural. The 
 soul of the world was weary; materialism was futile 
 
274 The High Romance 
 
 to console or guide it; the world invisible was opening 
 many vistas of adventure and affording glimpses to 
 those privileged or courageous souls who boldly and 
 persistently explored its purlieus. To my compan- 
 ion, many of these vistas opened perilously near the 
 Pit, or into regions where the False Light rosily shone 
 upon a region of illusions which hid, as a golden 
 curtain over the mouth of a chamel house, the do- 
 mains of diabolism; and I, after all, despite my con- 
 trary opinion, was forced to remember back to several 
 episodes in my own experience which went to show 
 that there unquestionably were grave dangers in the 
 so-called mystical planes of thought and life. I 
 spoke of some modem mystics of my personal ac- 
 quaintance. He said: "They are false. They are 
 merely mystagogues. But have you read the life of 
 Sister Teresa?" 
 
 "George Moore's novel?" I asked. 
 "Oh, that!" he said. "No; I don't mean that." 
 Then he told me of a book by a young French Car- 
 melite nun, who had died a few years before. The 
 book had been translated into all the languages. 
 Thousands of apparently miraculous events had fol- 
 lowed prayers addressed to her. She had begged 
 when dying to be allowed to return from the super- 
 natural world to this world after death and do what 
 good she might for us who lived here. In her own 
 words, she had said she would "let fall a shower of 
 roses" after her death, each rose a spiritual favour. 
 And she had more than fulfilled her pledge; for the 
 shower had become a torrent. It now required a 
 monthly magazine of many pages to record the world- 
 wide evidences of Sister Teresa's power. In prosaic 
 
Sister Teresa 275 
 
 St. Louis, a Catholic newspaper each week printed 
 several columns of acknowledgments from peo|)le 
 who believed that Sister Teresa had helped them. 
 Some of these favours were as extraordinary as any 
 of the miracles recorded at Lourdes, and were as well 
 supported by scientific testimony. Others, of course, 
 were unprovable, and many were slight and possibly 
 negligible things; but they all afforded abundant tes- 
 timony to the tremendous extent to which tens of 
 thousands of people believed that their invisible 
 friend was helping them from the unseen, supernatu- 
 ral world — from a "heaven" of happiness which she 
 had gained by following the teachings and the counsels 
 of Jesus Christ in His Church on earth. 
 
 I was very much interested in all this, but as my 
 friend had not read the book himself, only heard 
 about it, he could not tell me some of the things I 
 was most anxious to know; yet I very clearly remem- 
 ber the unique sort of impression which the episode 
 made upon me . . . Sister Teresa! . . . the very 
 name held something ineffably attractive. It was like 
 the sort of presage which you feel at times when you 
 pick up a new book, a glance at which assures you of a 
 new devotion in your literary life, but which at the 
 time you cannot, or do not, read at once . . . but 
 which you come to later on with a gusto of apprecia- 
 tion. 
 
 2. The Bishop 
 
 It was months later, when all remembrance of Sis- 
 ter Teresa had passed from conscious thought, that I 
 heard the name again. Once more I was in company 
 with Redfem Mason; but now it was in the city, in 
 
276 The High Romance 
 
 San Francisco. He had taken me to call upon a 
 friend who hailed from the same city in the East 
 where he had lived before coming to California. 
 This friend was a Bishop of the Catholic Church, and 
 I felt very interested, curious, rather, in the prospect 
 of coming into contact, unofl&cially, away from a 
 church, with a Catholic prelate. 
 
 The occasion was quite exciting. I do not know 
 just what I expected ; but my thoughts pictured vested 
 figures, and pomp and ceremony. 
 
 I entered, as a matter of fact, the office of a man 
 who impressed me as many a first-rank captain of 
 industry or leader in one of the professions had im- 
 pressed me in my reportorial days, when I interviewed 
 them by the hundred. In short, he was an efficient, 
 practical, wide-awake personage, with obvious power, 
 a strong personality. He sat at a roll-top desk, in 
 an office, working at the business of his diocese. He 
 wore no robes ... no lace . . . nothing ecclesi- 
 astical, save, of course, the Roman collar and the 
 pectoral cross — though that was tucked out of the 
 way as he worked — and the ring which my friend 
 kissed as he entered the room. I think I was disap- 
 pointed . . . yes, I am sure I was. I think that 
 the plain evidences before me that a Catholic Bishop 
 could be a practical, keen, administrator of business 
 affairs, up-to-date, and just like any other big Amer- 
 ican leader of men, blew rather coldly upon my in- 
 nate romanticism. I would have preferred a Bishop 
 more in keeping with a dramatic idea of a Bishop, 
 conceived by a mind still densely ignorant of Cathol- 
 icism. 
 
 As for the talk that followed, I won't go into it 
 
Sister Teresa 277 
 
 deeply. The Bishop, it struck me, did not seem in- 
 clined for abstract or theoretical discussion; he was 
 warmly and humanly interested in meeting his friend, 
 the Englishman, and in talking about mutual acquaint- 
 ances, and discussing books, and writers. But my 
 friend was bound to get me into the talk; I could see 
 that, and with an Englishman's stubborn persistence 
 he succeeded. 
 
 And with that ready command of the powers of 
 attention which is a mark of men who know how 
 to lead other men and who possess great executive 
 ability, the Bishop gave up chatting about friends, 
 and books, and spoke with me about my studies in 
 mysticism. But anything less "mystical," in the 
 usual sense in which people mistakingly confuse the 
 mystical with the mysterious and with the "super- 
 stitional" — if I may coin a word — than this occasion, 
 could hardly be supposed. And yet, it was truly 
 mystical. Indeed, the moment had come when some- 
 thing was to happen, something of great importance. 
 
 The Bishop looked at me more attentively, and 
 asked a few questions. He is not one of those men 
 who take a long time to understand a situation; his 
 apprehensions are swift and sure. He is also 
 most frank and simple; and makes others simple also 
 in their response to him. He soon was in possession 
 of the essential facts of my case, that is, its spiritual 
 facts. And then when we came to the subject of 
 mystical literature he broke in with precisely what 
 my friend had said in Monterey. 
 
 "Why don't you read some of the modem cases of 
 the real mystical life?" he asked. "The modem 
 fads and cults do not have a monopoly of the subject. 
 
278 The High Romance 
 
 you know. I'll tell you what I will do for you, some 
 day; I'll take you to see the Prioress of our Carmelite 
 monastery, where the mystical life is cultivated by 
 experts, as it has been from time immemorial. She 
 will take an interest in you because of your interest 
 in this subject, I am sure." 
 
 "There is a Carmelite monastery in San Fran- 
 cisco?" I said, surprised. Two of the mystical au- 
 thors whom I had read (very partially, and mostly at 
 second-hand, through quotations and in articles about 
 them rather than in their own works) were Saint 
 Teresa and Saint John of the Cross. I knew that the 
 Carmelite Order had been one of the great centres 
 for the mystical experiment; but to hear that it was 
 at work in San Francisco, in my own city (for I 
 have come to consider San Francisco my own), this 
 indeed strangely surprised me. That there were peo- 
 ple who even today, even in the United States of 
 America, locked themselves up for life in a monas- 
 tery in order to follow the life of prayer and mystic 
 self-immolation, somehow or other gave all my ideas 
 an unsettling shock. Mysticism as an individual 
 experiment, unshackled by "dogmas" and ecclesias- 
 tical restrictions and authority — mysticism as a 
 modem "movement," as part of the revolt of hu- 
 manity against all the restrictions of "dogmatic" 
 and "mediaeval superstitions," as part of the new 
 "spiritual science," oh, yes! that of course was all 
 right; but "orthodox" mysticism, a mysticism con- 
 sidered simply as one part of a positive, final, author- 
 itative religious system, no, that view was decidedly 
 unacceptable. 
 
 All the same, however, I was very curious and in- 
 
Sister Teresa 279 
 
 terested. I very much wanted to see the Carmelite 
 Prioress. I most emphatically accepted the invita- 
 tion. 
 
 And the Bishop continued, after I had so expressed 
 myself: 
 
 "I think you would be interested in two recent 
 books which illustrate the practical results in our own 
 day of Carmelite mysticism. They will show you 
 that we don't regard our Saints of the Middle Ages 
 — ^which you heretics so mistakenly slander — as the 
 end of the chapter of the supernatural in the Church." 
 
 "I would be very glad to read those books," I re- 
 plied. "Please tell me." 
 
 "They are the autobiographies of Sister Teresa, the 
 Little Flower, and of Sister Elizabeth, of the Trinity, 
 two young Carmelite nuns who recently died in 
 France." 
 
 I stared at the Bishop, who smiled; the light of his 
 kindly interest in his glowing eyes. 
 
 Sister Teresa; again this Sister Teresa, the Car- 
 melite! And again the leap of a strange interior in- 
 terest. 
 
 "Come back when you read them and tell me what 
 you think about them," added the Bishop, and we 
 arose to go. 
 
 I went that very day and bought the two books, 
 and read them, one after the other . . . how avidly, 
 how thirstily, it is hard indeed to describe. 
 
 Once upon a time, when I was a boy, I went to 
 sea with my father in a sailing ship on a voyage 
 among the West Indian isles. We were caught in a 
 
280 The High Romance 
 
 long calm, and our water ran low, so low that at 
 last we were reduced to a very small amount, and by 
 the Captain's order were forbidden to drink more than 
 a very small quantity daily, not nearly enough to 
 satisfy our thirst in that tropical place. Then one 
 day ihe rain came, ah, such a cool and sweet and 
 copious rain. We loosened the ropes of the poop- 
 deck awning, and in the awning and in the bags 
 formed by lowering the sails, we caught enough water 
 to fill all our casks and buckets. And we drank and 
 drank and drank our fill. 
 
 Well! I could not indeed as yet drink my fill, but 
 my spiritual drought was broken by those two books, 
 and I drank and drank and drank out of my reading 
 and re-reading a refreshment and a satisfaction never 
 known before. 
 
 It was the book of Sister Teresa which especially 
 moved me. Over its pages I did what no other book 
 ever caused me to do in all my life before, nor any 
 play, nor any work of even the highest or profoundest 
 art — except, one, "The Hound of Heaven" — I wept. 
 Again and again a blinding rush of hot and stinging 
 tears blurred my sight and stopped my reading. . . . 
 
 The other book, the Sister Elizabeth, stirred me 
 not so strongly, but perhaps even more deeply. 
 
 The two books are before me now. The first con- 
 sists, first of a prologue giving an account of a French 
 family, the head of which was a jeweller named 
 Martin, the son of an army officer. Failing in his 
 efforts as a young man to become a monk of St. Ber- 
 nard, he married a young woman, Zelie Guerin, who 
 
Sister Teresa 281 
 
 had also failed in efforts to become a nun. She 
 prayed that she might become the mother of many 
 children all of whom might enter religious life. 
 Nine children were bom. Four died in infancy. 
 The other five, daughters all, became nuns. 
 
 The youngest of these was Therese, or Teresa, as 
 she is perhaps more commonly known in English- 
 speaking countries. She became a nun at the age 
 of fifteen, in 1888, at Liseux, and nine years later 
 she died, September 30, 1897. Shortly before her 
 death, at the command of her Prioress, she wrote her 
 autobiography. This was published two years later. 
 Edition after edition was exhausted. Translations 
 appeared in most of the modem languages. 
 
 After the prologue, there is the autobiography 
 itself, eleven short chapters in all; followed by re- 
 ports of her sayings and counsels and a sheaf of her 
 letters, poems, and prayers. Then comes' the account 
 of the proceedings set on foot to "beatify" this young 
 nun, that is, to secure the official pronouncement of 
 the authorities at Rome that Sister Teresa is entitled 
 to the honours of sainthood in the minor degree 
 known as "Beatification," which, if accorded, may 
 or may not be eventually increased to the full honour 
 of being pronounced a "Saint." 
 
 There are further sections which from our 
 modem point of view are stranger than all the 
 others, containing many accounts well documented in 
 most instances, of "miracles" which have taken place 
 since the death of Sister Teresa. There are cures of 
 diseases (many of which had been pronounced incur- 
 able by medical science), like malignant cancer, liver 
 complaint of thirty-five years' standing, tuberculosis, 
 
282 The High Romance 
 
 cataract on the eyes, cerebral uremia, elephantiasis, 
 hip disease, and many other things. There are 
 startling instances of sudden or most unexpected "con- 
 versions," sometimes accompanied by apparitions of 
 the dead nun; or by manifestations of her presence 
 in the form of inexplicable perfumes. There are 
 marvellous stories of the relief of desperate cases of 
 want. Many thousands of letters have been received 
 at the Carmelite monastery in Liseux relating and 
 gratefully acknowledging all manner of "favours" 
 granted by the Heavenly power through the inter- 
 cession of Sister Teresa. 
 
 The other book, the autobiography of Sister Eliz- 
 abeth, was much less "sensational," but told a some- 
 what similar story. Its writer, Marie-Elizabeth 
 Catez, bom at Bourges in 1880, the daughter of an 
 army officer, and moving in good society, entered the 
 Carmelite monastery at Dijon in 1901, dying five 
 years later. Her "life" was written and published 
 in 1909, rapidly went through many editions, and was 
 spread abroad in translations. Fewer and less re- 
 markable "miracles" or favours are attributed to her 
 power. Her book and her life invite those who 
 understand their message and their mission to follow 
 this great soul in her progress upward through still, 
 internal regions of spiritual life where remarkable 
 "happenings" have little effect one way or the other 
 upon the soul which knows that these things do not 
 matter when only one thing matters, which is, for the 
 soul to find God and be transformed in Him. 
 
 Now, while I was still under the strange influence 
 of these books, I called again to see the Bishop, and 
 
Sister Teresa 283 
 
 talked them over with him. And all at once, looking 
 at me with eyes full of laughter: kindly, sweet-tem- 
 pered, loving laughter — he said to me: "Do you know 
 what's the matter with you? It's only one thing. 
 The Holy Ghost can't get into a soul when it is full 
 of that which is not holy. You need to go to confes- 
 sion. That's all. You need to go to confession. 
 We can talk about 'difficulties,' intellectual enigmas, 
 and all the rest of it, and we won't ever get very 
 far; though surely I'll talk with you about such things 
 as much as you please. But if you clean the win- 
 dows of your soul, there won't be any difficulties. 
 The Holy Ghost will answer everything." 
 
 —Well! 
 
 I think even then that I knew he was right. But 
 I got away from the subject and from the Bishop — 
 as soon as I could. I was stricken in the most vulner- 
 able point of my armour of egoism. 
 
 — Confession! To plunge my memory into the 
 darkness and the foulness of my life, and expose all 
 that to somebody else? . . . No. No. NO. . . . 
 Impossible. . . . 
 
 Yet, as I turned to the two books again the thought 
 would not let me go: the thought of what the Bishop 
 had said. The Holy Spirit would not, could not enter 
 my soul, because it was not fit for Him. 
 
 How different in the case of the two Carmelite nuns. 
 They, like me, were writers, that is, they both pos- 
 sessed a certain measure of ability to express them- 
 selves in literature. They, too, believed as I believed 
 that something could be done through written words to 
 effect what they held to be good. 
 
284 The High Romance 
 
 Yes, but they first of all lived the words they 
 wrote. 
 
 They were not to be judged merely by what they 
 said or wrote, but by what they were, and what they 
 had become, by willing it so. And, therefore, these 
 two simple, young, innocent, worldly-ignorant girls 
 had taken a course the exact opposite to that which 
 I and most of the other modem writers and seekers 
 after happiness pursue. We seek multiplicity and 
 variety of sensuous experiences. They withdrew 
 from them as completely as they could. We seek 
 after the widest and most complete publicity for our 
 opinions and our actions (save those things which 
 in the present "bourgeois" and "conventional" state 
 of society we do not as yet dare to make public). 
 They withdrew from the already limited and re- 
 stricted sphere of the young French woman and went 
 into monasteries for ever. None save their own 
 families or their associates ever even saw them again. 
 There, in quiet and silence, they prayed and wrought 
 without ceasing to become conscious and ever more 
 conscious of God, to make themselves ever less and 
 less that God might be more and more; and, after 
 a few short years, they died and were buried in 
 their obscure, monastery burial grounds. 
 
 And now the whole world feels their power. 
 From their quiet graves they move great men and 
 shape the destinies of millions of souls. For now, 
 men and women who teach, who preach, who write 
 books, who study science, who lead armies, who 
 paint pictures, who make dramas, who give them- 
 selves up to be missionaries, or who labour in thou- 
 sands of humbler yet none the less necessary and 
 
Sister Teresa 285 
 
 essential tasks, feel and acknowledge the power 
 gained by the two young nuns who lived and died 
 a few brief years ago in France. Whether that 
 power is communicated simply through their own 
 writings or the multiplying mass of things written 
 around or because of their books or lives, or whether 
 in all verity that power manifests more directly and 
 immediately in spiritual communications, in prayer 
 and miracle, one thing is indeed most obviously true, 
 namely, that no mere "artist" or "intellectual liber- 
 ator" of our day wields such tremendous practical 
 power as that exerted by Sister Teresa or Sister 
 Elizabeth. 
 
 Now, I asked myself, what is this power? 
 
 — As the fantastic end of all the fantasies of 
 my life, am I come to the point where I think that to 
 shut one's self up in a monastery and pray from dawn 
 to midnight is the answer to the riddle of existence? 
 
 No. I did not think that. But what I did think 
 concerning the nature of the power wielded by those 
 who live such a life (and live it successfully, for 
 there can be failure and disaster in that life as in all 
 other forms of this adventurous and most perilous 
 existence), was made plain to me when, shortly after 
 my last talk with the Bishop, I went to the Carmelite 
 monastery to see the Prioress, as the Bishop had 
 advised. 
 
 But I did not go with the Bishop. I rather avoided 
 him, I'm afraid, after his probing lance of a re- 
 mark concerning confession. That remark had in- 
 deed proven a veritable surgical stroke. It plunged 
 into a secret yet obtrusive tumour in my soul. I 
 knew it was there, as many a cowardly person knows 
 
286 The High Romance 
 
 they have some obscure and alarming physical afflic- 
 tion but will not face the fact, diagnose the condition, 
 and submit to a dreadful yet absolutely essential 
 operation. Yes, the Bishop's remark plunged into 
 that tumour, and cut it open, but did not eliminate 
 it, simply caused it to bleed and to drain forth the 
 evil emanations of its corruption and its deadly 
 nature. 
 
 3. Sin 
 
 This aching tumour was my newly awakened and 
 ever-growing consciousness of the pressure of moral 
 guilt upon my soul. Yet I had long ago decided that 
 morality was a purely relative thing. Why, then, 
 was I suffering so? 
 
 I tried to get to the bottom of my confused and 
 wavering mental condition, and, so far as I can ex- 
 press the result of my effort, it might be summarized 
 as follows: 
 
 First, I am positive in my belief that I exist, a 
 separate, self-conscious, unique individual. 
 
 I did not create myself. That is beyond all ques- 
 tion true. 
 
 Moreover, it is for me unthinkable that I am the 
 fortuitous result of accidental material forces, 
 chemical or mechanical. 
 
 Therefore, I must accept the belief that I was 
 created. A force not in any way dependent upon 
 myself or the world of matter in which I am living, 
 created me, and created the world of matter and all 
 other things. 
 
 Words like "Life-Force" or "Nature" or "Creative 
 
Sister Teresa 287 
 
 Principle" do not fully express the nature of this 
 Creator. 
 
 Pre-eminently am I persuaded of the Creator's 
 Eternal Personality. 
 
 And the name of God opens up for me marvellous 
 and unending vistas of meaning. 
 
 Hence, I must believe in and acknowledge a God, 
 and that I am His creature. 
 
 Now, if God gave me life, He and no other force 
 it is which sustains me in life, and He of course can 
 do what He will with His own. At any moment, then, 
 He may take my life away from me. 
 
 But this applies only to my life in this world: 
 the life of my body; not the life of my soul; for 
 concerning this I have the same positive belief that 
 I have in the existence and the supreme power of 
 Almighty God. My soul cannot die. I — the true 
 I — am immortal. 
 
 Now, there must be a reason for everything. If 
 there is a God, and if He made me, and made me 
 in essence immortal, and if I find myself despite 
 these facts living as a mortal human being who must 
 inevitably die, there must be some good reason, some 
 truly sufficing explanation. Also there must be some 
 good reason for the fact that I, like most other human 
 beings (in a greater measure than some, and in a 
 lesser measure than the greater number), live a life 
 of sickness and suffering and pain and trouble and 
 disappointment. There must be some good reason 
 for the frightful misery and degradation of the 
 world of men today. And there must be some good 
 reason for the fact that in me was implanted an 
 
268 The High Romance 
 
 irresistible urge toward artistic creation and expres- 
 sion, even as in so many other men and women. 
 
 What then, was the reason for all these perplexing 
 things? 
 
 Of this, at least, I was certain, namely, that in- 
 deed the reason was and only could be, Good. 
 
 If there was a God — and there is a God — it fol- 
 lowed that He must be Good. 
 
 Only in a state of madness or of self-willed Evil 
 could any one seriously believe that the ultimate 
 nature of the ultimate Reality could be anything else 
 than perfect Good. 
 
 God, therefore, could not contradict Himself. He 
 could not cause that which was evil. All that was 
 truly good must necessarily be due to His power 
 or permission. Impossible for a sane soul even to 
 dream that God could cause evil or will that which 
 was bad or injurious to His creatures! Hence, if 
 we suffered — and if all the world suffered — and if 
 our lives were maimed and crippled and repressed- — 
 and if indeed the best possible human life was a 
 poor and limited thing compared to what the life 
 of the soul could be — ^then there were only two pos- 
 sible solutions of such a mystery. 
 
 The first was that something had happened some- 
 how, somewhere, to man: something for which man 
 was absolutely responsible, and the consequences of 
 which were disease and pain and death — conse- 
 quences in which all human beings shared, even as 
 they shared the responsibility for that something in 
 which man had failed or transgressed. 
 
 The second, more partial answer was, that if God 
 was good — and He is — and we nevertheless were 
 
Sister Teresa 289 
 
 troubled by sorrow and pain and death, then it must 
 be that much of all this woe and darkness was not 
 evil at all but in reality good. 
 
 In short, it was clear that there could be no evil 
 whatsoever save one thing only, which evil thing was 
 to repeat in any form or degree the thing which had 
 first caused all our woe and loss, which thing, no 
 matter what form it may have assumed, could in its 
 essential nature have been one thing only, namely, 
 Disobedience to God. . . . 
 
 In a word, it must be Sin. 
 
 Thus, without theological training, reading, or in- 
 struction, I arrived at the full, free acceptance of the 
 dogma of Original Sin. 
 
 And by its light, I could see what a poor, blunder- 
 ing, blinded, mistaken fool I had been, and what 
 millions of words I had wasted or misused in com- 
 plaining about my bad luck, and the wretched con- 
 ditions of the world which so hampered my mission 
 to lead and mould my fellow men! 
 
 What stupidity! What vain arrogance! 
 
 For that which was really bad, truly evil, in my 
 life, I alone was responsible, through my disobedience 
 to God. 
 
 Sin explained all that was evil in my life. 
 
 And all other matters: trouble, pain, hardships, 
 which could not be traced back to wilful trans- 
 gressions against what I knew to be good, were, of 
 course, not essentially evil but in themselves op- 
 portunities for good . . . they were disciplinary; 
 they were purgative; they were illuminative; they 
 could indeed, if I but truly willed it so, and God 
 consented, be the means that finally would unite me 
 
290 The High Romance 
 
 to the will of God. . . . My will freely and joyfully 
 saying: Thy will be done! 
 
 4. The Coming of the Comforter 
 
 So do my thoughts now arrange the sequence of 
 the progress of my soul. . . . 
 
 But (I thank God again and again) He did not 
 permit me to rest content with mental searchings and 
 mental conviction and statement. 
 
 I tried indeed to have it so. I tried to fill up the 
 void in my soul with reading and with dreams. I 
 devoured "mystical" books without cessation — but 
 nothing could keep back the flood that was coming; 
 nothing could avert the necessity of looking into the 
 depths of my own soul, and of then turning to 
 God. . . . Who is the Judge: but Who is also the 
 Good Physician; the eternal Comforter. . . . 
 • * • • • • • 
 
 And now I entered a most dark valley, through 
 which I journeyed in strange pain and desolation, 
 before I came at last to find footing upon the lower- 
 most slope of Mount Carmel, and saw far above and 
 beyond me the white lightnings of the eternal sun- 
 shine gleam for a moment upon the far invitation of 
 glorious upland vineyards, and the peaks that 
 touched the shimmering garments of the adoring 
 stars. . . . 
 
 — But how may I describe the valley of pain 
 through which I journeyed? 
 
 How may I lift the veil upon the days and nights 
 of anguish so piercing yet so welcome, so singularly 
 bitter-sweet, in which I came to see myself not as 
 
Sister Teresa 291 
 
 the proud master of life, or the unfortunate victim 
 of society — but as the stained and wounded wanderer 
 from my Father's House? ... 
 
 • •••••• 
 
 — Suffice it to say that as in all its revealing 
 light and purgative power, this conviction came, pain 
 and sorrow swept over me, and grew; and, though 
 at first I knew it not, the Comforter also drew near, 
 and nearer. 
 
 For there came a day when I became conscious 
 that there was a Presence in the world; a Personality 
 vast enough to fill all the world, and yet also dwelling 
 in my heart; and little by little, gently and per- 
 suasively, yet irresistibly, the Name of the Presence 
 was made known to me; the Name above all other 
 names; the Name of Christ. 
 
 Yes, it was Christ who sought me out, — mystery 
 of ineffable condescension! — 
 
 Nor would He let me alone; this Christ Who be- 
 came Man so that men might become partakers of 
 God ; and, once I had recognized Who it was Who had 
 come, the rest of my journey was not long. 
 
 So silent and still and secret was His approach 
 to my soul that it is impossible for me now to say 
 when and where He just appeared. 
 
 I became aware of Him as One Who could not be 
 left out of the accounting by any (at least) of those 
 who studied mysticism even superficially. 
 
 The true mysticism exalted Him as God. 
 
 The false or mistaken or groping forms of 
 mysticism all claimed Him either as supreme example 
 of man's ability to unite with the divine, or as chief 
 
292 The High Romance 
 
 among mystical "masters" or "adepts" or "prophets." 
 
 To be sure, 1 did not in those days distinguish 
 between that which was the true mysticism and that 
 which was false or partial or mistaken or merely 
 groping in a mist. 
 
 How could I, lacking the true criterion? 
 
 But there was something, I think, in my artistic 
 sense, which helped me to find my way through the 
 dubious places in which so often I wandered. There 
 was so much sheer nonsense in so much of this stuff; 
 there was so much bad taste, and shoddy and pinch- 
 beck craftsmanship in the literary handling of the 
 material! 
 
 On the other hand, the more the writer approached 
 the true Centre of his subject, the better his handling 
 of it became; not necessarily in the mere technical 
 part, but in his ability (or perhaps it is better to say, 
 in the gift granted him) to let the Light and Life shine 
 through, making his matter to glow and grow warm 
 and pulsatory with the presence of Love. 
 
 I do not refer to the poets or artists who attempt 
 mystical subjects; whose intuitions, or sympathies 
 with mystical truths, incline them to express such 
 high matters as Francis Thompson (for example) 
 touches upon in his Hound of Heaven. No; for 
 even at its highest and greatest, all literary or other 
 artistic expression of mystical matters lacks force, 
 the effective, real force, which is possessed by the 
 much less beautiful or exalted expressions of those 
 who have gained the doctrine by living the life, 
 
 — For the secret of power, I recognized, consisted 
 in personal action. 
 
Sister Teresa 293 
 
 The most beautiful artistic expression of a truth 
 had no such energy as the doing or living of the 
 truth. 
 
 Therefore, the words of Christ have transcendent 
 and unapproachable power because He was His 
 words; He lived them; His life was in them, and 
 remains in them for ever. ... "I am the Way; 
 the Truth; the Life," He says, not, "I write a book 
 about the way." And the words of those who do 
 not live, because they do not Will, what they say, are 
 without real power. 
 
 Now, those who actively and consciously will that 
 which is evil are few indeed — although such per- 
 verted souls there have been and there are today, 
 especially in the region of the false mysticism — 
 but the harm they do is frightful. They are priests 
 of the Anti-Church, ministers of the Spirit of Denial. 
 And they are served in turn by a host of followers, 
 mystagogues, charlatans and deceivers, many of 
 whom are great artists, and the leaders of in- 
 tellectual modernity and of Godless science. 
 
 They are those who would identify themselves with 
 divinity and throw down all final distinctions between 
 good and evil. 
 
 They are the evangels of the New Paganism. 
 
 The soul-hunger of humanity must find food; and 
 if the true food, the Living Bread, is kept from 
 humanity it will turn perforce to the strange foods 
 of idolatry. 
 
 — But the Grace of God — ^there is no other 
 explanation — preserved me from the dangers amid 
 which I adventured. More and more in my reading 
 
294 The High Romance 
 
 I turned from the false lights of fantasy toward the 
 fixed stars and the everlasting Sun. That is, I turned 
 more and more from Blake, and Swedenborg, and 
 Maeterlinck and Yeats, and Whitman, and Nietzsche, 
 and Wells, and William James, and Vedanta, and 
 New Thought, and Spiritualism, and Mystic 
 Masonry, and Mental Science, and the swarming con- 
 fusion of egotistical and idolatrous voices and cults 
 and movements of the day, and more and more I 
 turned toward poets like Grashaw and Traheme and 
 Herbert and Thompson, and writers — especially these 
 latter — who had lived the life of devotion, the 
 Christian Catholic mystics: Saint Teresa, and John 
 of the Cross, and many, many others. 
 
 — Too many others, in fact. Also too many 
 writers who were not mystics but who wrote about 
 mysticism. I read too much, and prayed too little; 
 though I had indeed at last began consciously to pray, 
 petitioning (vaguely at first) the Power above all 
 other powers, the One Supreme and Central Light, 
 for help and light and strength. And by and by 
 my prayers became more definite, and (thanks be to 
 Him) at last I turned to Christ in my prayers. . . , 
 
 — But, just the same, my life was almost as 
 confused, nearly as whirling and as unfixed in prin- 
 ciple, as before. My soul was glutted with reading; 
 gorged and stuffed with mystical books; but it had 
 assimilated little or nothing; it was in the throes of 
 a spiritual dyspepsia. 
 
 Only the fact that I had formed a habit of prayer, 
 and that my will was turned in part toward its 
 Object, saved me, I feel sure, from succumbing 
 
Sister Teresa 295 
 
 to a fixed fantasy of the spirit, a kind of mad 
 pantheism in which Christ and His Holy Church 
 would have been merely part and parcel of a system 
 including all the gods and idols, all the masquerading 
 spirits of the abyss, all the welter of modem fads 
 and follies, vanities and insanities, the ecstasies of 
 evil, and the vertigoes of vice. 
 
 And ever more and ever more the pressure of the in- 
 ward conviction of sin increased. There grew upon 
 me a never-lifting distress. I could not turn away 
 from my as yet undeclared yet positive knowledge 
 that all my life I had been doing wrong, and that to 
 commit wrong wilfully was in very truth the only 
 absolutely evil thing in all the world. 
 
 Confess it, then! Confess the fact, my soul tried, 
 and tried again and again, to tell me. I stifled the 
 voice. But the voice would not let me be. I plunged 
 into work, into reading, into dissipation; but I could 
 not forget; I could not escape. 
 
 Well, I said to myself, at least it can do no harm 
 to see this Prioress. Probably I will find that she 
 does not share the rather old-fashioned and "supersti- 
 tional" views of the Bishop. 
 
 As for me, of course, I cannot accept the formal 
 authority and creeds and dogmas of any church; 
 least of all this outworn Catholic Church, with its 
 notorious tyranny over the mind and the soul. It 
 locks up individual liberty with that boasted key of 
 Peter; it is a huge machine that may be suitable 
 for the multitude, but not for thinkers or for 
 artists. 
 
296 The High Romance 
 
 — For I was now ready to acknowledge the neces- 
 sity for a religion that will teach morality and 
 keep the people in touch with supernatural life. 
 Poetry and literature and all the arts, and life it- 
 self, lose colour, vitality, and beauty when people 
 cease to believe in the Supernatural. A purely natu- 
 ral scheme of things is bound inevitably to issue in 
 miserable mediocrity in art and literature and social 
 systems. And, no doubt, popular religious govern- 
 ment requires a mechanism for its operation, just as 
 popular political government does. As we progress 
 more and more toward the future stature of the race, 
 the necessity for the mechanisms will cease; the per- 
 fected individual will require no other authority than 
 his own will in all his works and ways; his will no 
 evil working because it will be good. . . . But that 
 time is far distant from us now; that at least is a fact 
 there can be no disputing save by utterly impracticable 
 idealists, or, rather, impossibilists. Government is 
 necessary, man being as he is; and authoritative re- 
 ligion as well. But, of course, there are circles within 
 circles, and the restraints and the rules requisite for 
 the great crowd do not apply to the superior souls of 
 today who are examples of what all will be in the 
 future and where, if not among the artists, will these 
 emancipated spirits be found? Yes, I concluded, 
 although religious systems are useless so far as I am 
 concerned, still, it will be interesting to study this 
 quaint survival of mediaevalism, and some day I will 
 go to this Carmelite monastery. . . . 
 
 But, at last, when indeed I did go, it was not be- 
 cause of the reasoning given above. It was because 
 of my hunger and my thirst, because of my in- 
 
Sister Teresa 297 
 
 cessant craving for spiritual food and drink. The 
 debates and the enquiries of my mind settled nothing, 
 and discovered nothing. It was my secret soul that 
 was urging me forward. It was my soul that could 
 not rest content, that could not be satisfied until it 
 had set its face away from the shadows and the shams, 
 the false gleams and all the illusions, toward 
 Reality. 
 
CHAPTER Xni 
 
 AT THE GATE OF MOUNT CARMEL 
 
 AND SO there came a day when I set out for Mount 
 Carmel. 
 
 It was a sombre day. It was a day of misery. 
 Things had happened — things too private for me to 
 reveal — things which had most bitterly humiliated 
 me, and shamed me, and cast me down. 
 
 Not only so, but in upon my storm-tossed mind and 
 soul there had swept a flood of pain and deepest 
 despondency, a flood of confused introspection, which 
 like some powerful solvent extracted bitter, poisonous 
 juice out of a mass of memories writhing and seeth- 
 ing in the alembic of my heart, and forced it upon 
 my shuddering soul to drink. 
 
 All my misfortunes, failures, miserable mistakes; 
 my frustrated purposes; my mad adventures and 
 excesses; my ruined plans; my lost work; my sickness 
 and disappointments and defeats — all, all were there, 
 commingling their acrid emotions and sickening 
 toxins in that frightful chalice of recollection. 
 
 Such was the quintessence of my past. 
 
 What of the future? The future; ah, that I could 
 not face. . . . 
 
 I walked slowly through the streets, dragging my 
 nauseated and crippled soul, like a half-repentant 
 suicide dragging himself to a hospital after swallow- 
 ing his dose of poison, forced by his still existing 
 
 298 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 299 
 
 will-to-live, but wavering in spirit on the verge of 
 that abyss where the will dies and the soul seeks 
 destruction as a falling stone seeks the earth. . . . 
 
 The monastery was situated in the house where 
 Robert Louis Stevenson's widow had lived after 
 Stevenson's death in Samoa, a house in which the 
 great romancer, I am sure, would have delighted to 
 dwell. It was perched on the steep side of Russian 
 Hill, overlooking San Francisco Bay toward Mount 
 Tamalpais, with Alcatraz Island lying at the foot of 
 the hill, reminding you of a sympathetic picture for 
 one of Stevenson's own stories — a picture drawn by 
 Maxfield Parrish, let us say. And this fact of the 
 monastery being in a house so closely associated with 
 literature possessed for me I know not what half- 
 serious, half -fanciful meaning. I had failed to find 
 that which I was searching after in literature — or in 
 the roving and adventurous life I had led in even 
 more pronounced a fashion, perhaps, than R. L. S. 
 himself. Was my house of art, my quest for adven- 
 ture, to become a house of religion, a quest after 
 greater adventures than those of the open road, and 
 the ways of the sea, and the deserts and cities of this 
 passing world? 
 
 But on the afternoon when at last I dragged myself 
 to this house, these thoughts were not in my mind; 
 literary parallels and associations did not interest me. 
 Nor did the unusual beauty and artistic quality of the 
 house impress me, then, as later it most strongly did. 
 I was far too bruised and sore and heavily laden to 
 notice the superficial aspects of my adventure. 
 
 Passing up a short flight of stairs protected by an 
 iron railing of peculiar beauty, I entered the door 
 
300 The High Romance 
 
 where a sign said: "Enter without knocking," and 
 found myself in a small room with one or two book- 
 cases, and a bell-pull hanging against the wall. I 
 was about to ring the bell when I saw a slip of paper 
 pinned under it saying: "Community in retreat: do 
 not ring the bell. Leave messages and petitions at the 
 turn." 
 
 Retreat? What was that? And "turn," what 
 could that be? I did not know; but what I did know 
 was that my usual bad luck had followed me to the 
 door of Mount Carmel. I had at last dragged my- 
 self there, ready to knock — and now I was forbidden 
 to knock. I must go away. Would I ever try 
 again? It was most unlikely. A mood, a day, had 
 come in which I had experimented; but the experiment 
 had failed; I would go away; probably not to try 
 again. . . . 
 
 But there was a large picture of Sister Teresa on 
 the dusky wall of the little room. And in the book- 
 cases were a number of booklets concerning her. 
 There was a copy of a periodical devoted to chron- 
 icling the "favours" attributed to her intercessory 
 power. I stopped to look these over, and wished 
 that I could buy some of them. Then I thought: 
 "I have come, and I am turned away; but why not 
 leave a message?" And I drew a sheaf of news- 
 paper "copy" paper from my pockets, and a pencil 
 and scribbled a few words. 
 
 "To the Mother Prioress: 
 
 "I have just finished reading, at the recommenda- 
 tion of Bishop Hanna, the books concerning 'Sister 
 Teresa; The Little Flower of Jesus,' and 'Sister 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 301 
 
 Elizabeth: The Praise of Glory.' I am a writer, 
 36 years old, married with two children. I am try- 
 ing to reach Jesus Christ. I am a great sinner. I 
 was bom into the Church but have fallen away during 
 twenty years. 
 
 "Will you pray for my conversion to Christ, dear 
 mother, asking Sisters Elizabeth and Teresa also to 
 pray for me? Sister Teresa has brought about many 
 conversions. Please pray that she may intercede for 
 me. Surely God will grant her prayer." 
 
 As I folded the scrap of paper, all at once in the 
 dark doorway that led to the interior, a nun appeared, 
 and advanced into the room saying: "Is there any- 
 thing I can do for you?" She was an out-sister, as 
 I learned afterward. I said, I had come to see the 
 Prioress, if it were possible. "No; the community is 
 in retreat," the sister said ; "no visitors are received." 
 But it was permissible to buy books and these were 
 selected. I gave a coin in payment. The nun said 
 she must go inside for change. I gave her the note, 
 then, asking her if she would deliver it to the Prioress. 
 She bowed, and withdrew. 
 
 She was gone for quite some time, and when she re- 
 turned, she said to me: "Reverend Mother says if 
 you will come to the speak room, she will see you. 
 Please come this way." 
 
 I followed her down a little dark passageway into 
 a little dark room. She immediately left me and* 
 shut the door. In the wall, high up, a barred window 
 admitted a dim light. There was a crucifix on the 
 wall, a picture or two, a holy water font. Two chairs 
 stood on the bare floor in front of a grating that 
 reached from the ceiling to within two or three feet 
 
302 The High Romance 
 
 from the floor. Behind this grating, some two feet 
 distant, was another grating, covered on the inside 
 with a black curtain. And save for the passing of a 
 cable car outside, now and then, there was no sound 
 to break a silence that seemed not merely to be brood- 
 ing in the room, like a presence, but which also 
 seemed to emanate from the depths of the atmosphere, 
 like a power. 
 
 Then I heard a voice: a clear-toned, energetic 
 woman's voice out of the silence, that said : 
 
 "Praised be Jesus Christ!" 
 
 Astonished, I said nothing in reply. What could 
 I say? This Jesus whom I had denied . . . how 
 could I praise Him? 
 
 Then the voice went on: "Is there somebody in 
 the room?" 
 
 I divined that the speaker was behind the black 
 curtain, within the second screen. 
 
 "Yes," I answered, "yes, Reverend Mother." 
 
 "Oh, yes! I am so glad. I read your note. We 
 are in retreat, you know. We don't receive visitors 
 while we are in retreat; but I felt I must make an 
 exception. So you have read Sister Teresa?" 
 
 I replied — I know not what — but soon my lips were 
 unsealed, and my heart and soul, as well. 
 
 Now it is not for nothing, on the contrary there are 
 very good reasons, why there are veils drawn between 
 those who live in Carmel and those who live in the 
 world. And veils of reticence are no less essential, 
 when it is a question of discussing certain matters 
 concerning the soul. I must draw such a veil be- 
 tween my readers and the remainder of the interview. 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 303 
 
 What I said and what was said to me must remain 
 unwritten. 
 
 Only this I feel I should say, namely, that I was 
 frank. I did not hang back. I told the invisible 
 listener how unhappy I was, and why, and how I had 
 been searching after God in strange places, and how 
 Sister Teresa had led me to this place, where out of 
 the surrounding darkness and out of the brooding 
 depths of silence and mystery, the voice had spoken, 
 which said: "Praised be Jesus Christ!" 
 
 By and by, I rose to go. 
 
 "You will please wait for a minute, while 1 give 
 Sister Gertrude a relic of Sister Teresa for you," 
 said the voice. "And the prayers will begin at once. 
 We will storm Heaven for you. And you will come 
 again?" 
 
 "I will." 
 
 And presently I was out in the street, walking 
 homewards, the little packet of books in my hand. 
 The out-sister had said she had placed the relic of 
 Sister Teresa in the packet. 
 
 The sun was shining as I went along, a golden, 
 reddish sunshine of the late afternoon. I passed a 
 little open space of greenery, a hill-side park, walk- 
 ing like a man in a dream for whom, as the dream 
 slowly fades, the distant horizon shines like silver, 
 and secret stars drop down the sky, slowly, one by 
 one, like big drops of violet rain. 
 
 And, just then, as I walked past the little green 
 hill, feeling as if the golden-reddish sunshine were in- 
 side me as well as shining all about me, and upon me, 
 there fell about me a breath from Heaven. ... I 
 
304 The High Romance 
 
 inhaled a potent, penetrating perfume, stronger and 
 stranger by far than rich and subtle incense, simpler 
 by far than the odour of yerba buena or of mint 
 or violets; sweet, most rare, and wonderful. 
 
 I remember how I lifted the bundle of books to my 
 face, thinking, with an inward smile: "The good 
 nuns are women still. These books have been lying 
 too near the scent bottle or the powder box." But 
 soon, in fact almost instantly, the perfume was gone. 
 There was no odour, none at all, emanating from the 
 bundle of books. 
 
 "Perhaps it was a whiff from some flower or herb 
 in the grass of the little park," and then I thought 
 no more about it; but walked on, trying to retain my 
 strange new sense of the other-world, striving not to 
 lose it, and not to find myself back again in the grey 
 and chilly world outside that world of warmth and 
 light and gladness. I was like a little child sent away 
 from its first Christmas or birthday party, shutting 
 its eyes to see again the shining things, and to hear 
 the music. 
 
 Then I reached the door of my apartment house, 
 down in the heart of the city, and, as I entered it, 
 all at once, instantaneously tbe breath from Heaven 
 breathed once more upon me. ... I was in the 
 midst of a pulsation of perfume, more exotic than 
 the richest incense, yet simpler and more familiar 
 than the homeliest scents that are distilled by all 
 sweet flowers, and rare and wonderful. 
 
 Whereupon, I remembered, and I knew. I re- 
 membered that tlie account of Sister Teresa's mani- 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 305 
 
 festations are full of such instances of psychic 
 odours. She is the Little Flower. She said just be- 
 fore her death: "I will let fall a shower of roses." 
 After her death she came back to earth in vision, and 
 said: "I will make the shower of roses a torrent." 
 She asked God, before she died, to let her soul stay 
 till time is over near the earth in order to do good 
 for poor souls in this world. 
 
 And at my feet, even at mine, at the feet of the 
 stained, broken, wandering writer, she had thrown a 
 secret rose: a mystical rose, the rose of my desire. 
 
 — That night I wrote to the Prioress, and related 
 the incident, saying, as I have said above, that per- 
 haps it was only a fancy, or an illusion, the curious 
 product of mental and spiritual excitement; but that 
 I could not credit any such explanation, although I 
 knew that to believe such a wonderful thing could 
 have happened to me was perhaps the worst form of 
 illusion How could I dare to believe that the Lit- 
 tle Flower would give to one exiled so far from her 
 purity even a single inhalation of her fragrance in 
 Heaven? 
 
 But I begged the Prioress not to cease praying for 
 me. I implored her r\ot to forget her promise to 
 beg Sister Teresa to pray for me. I begged the 
 prayers of the community. Frankly, and with no 
 reservation of pride, I stood in the dust at the door 
 of Carmel, a poor, a wretched, a suffering beggar. I 
 wrote the letter with tears streaming; such tears as I 
 had begun to know; tears that burned and tore me, 
 yet which in their passing left me lighter and stronger, 
 and more determined to beg harder and harder. 
 
306 The High Romance 
 
 And even in the midst of all this disturbance, of this 
 storm in my soul, my poor soul tried to sing, tried, 
 as ever it tries, to find living words to express its 
 desires. Poor were those words, and awkward and 
 harsh the sound of them; but I remembered that on 
 Mount Carmel there have always been poets. Saint 
 Teresa and John of the Cross were great writers, 
 marvellous poets, as well as seekers after sanctity. 
 So I felt that my beggar's song at the gate of Mount 
 Carmel would he understood, despite its wounded 
 rhythm. They who were on the mountain would 
 understand that, in all forms possible, I was begging 
 my way along the road of my quest — that the fol- 
 lower of the high romance had put aside some of his 
 more cumbrous garments of egotism, of spiritual 
 pride, and was humbly asking for help. So I put this 
 in my letter: — 
 
 TO THE CARMELITE NUNS OF SAN 
 FRANCISCO 
 
 By the deep wells of Love they stand 
 
 In God's most mystic garden close. 
 A crystal cup is in each hand, 
 
 Sealed with the Cross that bears the Rose. 
 And when my thirsting soul did pray 
 For waters pure of life, 't was they 
 
 Who gave one little drop — 
 One little drop of love and light. 
 Yet sweet widi life, and charged with might. 
 
 Mother, Sisters, pray with me 
 That never may my thirsting stop 
 Until my soul and Christ unite! 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 307 
 
 Carmel understood. From Carmel, the next day, 
 this came to me: 
 
 AN ANSWER 
 
 A breath from Heaven hath thrilled my soul, 
 
 And earth is fading fast away. 
 How faint the floods of anguish roll 
 
 Upon the strand of yesterday! 
 The far horizon holds for me 
 A silver line of life to be. 
 
 A breath from Heaven! turn not in scorn. 
 
 Nor say such gift I may not claim; 
 A Saint was in one moment bom 
 
 On Calvary's darkened hill of shame. 
 He turned to Christ, nor turned in vain. 
 To Him who for his sake was slain. 
 
 There, soul to Soul upon the Cross, 
 There, eye to Eye in tears, in love — 
 
 Blessed gain! Earth knows no loss 
 Save losing Thee, God above! 
 
 Thou art not lost, save to the heart. 
 
 That will not in Thy love have part. 
 
 A breath from Heaven! I ask no more; 
 
 One breath is deathless life divine. 
 The fragrance of the farther shore 
 
 Floats o'er this seeking soul of mine, 
 To bear Thy love, Christ to me. 
 Today is Paradise with Thee! 
 
308 The High Romance 
 
 It was my own inward conviction expressed for me. 
 Why should I for an instant let my doubts obscure 
 what had shone for me in such clear light? 
 
 I doubted no longer; in fact, I knew I had not 
 doubted at all; I had only tried to doubt. Sister 
 Teresa had cast at the feet of the poor beggar at the 
 gate of Carmel, a rose of Paradise. 
 
 Now, most freely, I admit that there are natural 
 explanations of this occurrence. 
 
 It is obvious from all that I have told you that 
 there is much of the fanciful in my temperament. I 
 had read Sister Teresa's book and been keenly im- 
 pressed by it. I had read of a dozen instances of 
 this supposedly supernatural phenomenon of the per- 
 fume. Then I had gone through a strenuous 
 psychological experience. I was in the midst of it, 
 indeed, when the perfumes came. What wonder if 
 the suggestions implanted by my brooding, at such a 
 favourable time for suggestions, had resulted in my 
 jangled nerves and excited imagination conspiring to 
 cheat my senses? 
 
 I do not say no. Perhaps this is the explana- 
 tion. . . Only, you see, it is not the true explana- 
 tion. 
 
 The very springs and sources of all good things, 
 that delight us here upon earth: music and colour, 
 and harmonious form, and fragrance, and all beau- 
 tiful things whatsoever, are fixed, not in time, but in 
 the region of the eternal. In this world, all such 
 things are "real" enough, "objective" enough, most 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 309 
 
 surely, but at the same time only evanescent symbols 
 of the realities at which they hint. In that sphere to 
 which the perfected soul attains, the deep wells of 
 beauty pour forth delights and ravishments which 
 the keenest of sense-muffled, sense-stained, sense- 
 dulled joys are poor indeed. 
 
 Free souls, the intimates of the House of God, the 
 undaunted sons and daughters of desire, children 
 of the liberty of God, live among these joys, and they 
 control the forces thereof, and, by God's consent- 
 ing will, the miracles of His Saints are the operations 
 of these forces by or through the souls of the just, 
 for the purpose of furthering the work of God. 
 
 The "Saint": the man or woman who is granted 
 or who attains on earth the "sanctilication" of his or 
 her soul: that is, who turns from all perversions of 
 the powers and the proper uses of the soul — which 
 has only one end: one permanent purpose, namely, 
 to serve and glorify the Creator and be in fine united 
 to Him — such a one compared to ordinary "good 
 people," is like the great genius among commonplace, 
 average people. 
 
 He has access to powers which are impossible to 
 others. He does at a stroke what others could not 
 do in centuries of labour. And, surely, his mission 
 is also comparable to that of the artist: it is to re- 
 veal the hidden joy and beauty and power and liberty 
 to which the soul may attain, as the artist reveals 
 the wonder and beauty and power of controlled and 
 harmonized sound, colour, form and thought. And 
 these things when they are worthy and true, all the 
 achievements and aspirations of art, are shadows and 
 
310 The High Romance 
 
 signs, evanescent and partial at their very best, of 
 the higher and permanent things; they are forecasts 
 of the joy of the soul when it is united to God. 
 
 Even those great poets and artists who draw the 
 closest to the truth fall far below the plane of the 
 saint. 
 
 The saint is the most necessary and the most practi- 
 cal person in the world. To fall short of the highest 
 accomplishment, namely, the attainment of immortal 
 life and liberty and joy, is to fail absolutely, no 
 matter what measure of "success" one may win in 
 any temporal and impermanent thing. 
 
 Saints are the masters and the exemplars at once 
 of the art, the science, the rule, the way, the truth, 
 of eternal life. 
 
 The mystics among them are the very flowers of 
 the flock, and are of all the most necessary and 
 practical. 
 
 God is a spirit. 
 
 He moves all things by spiritual forces. 
 
 The mystics, the saints, are the communicating 
 mediums whereby His power. His truth, and His love 
 are spread among men. They supplement and co- 
 operate with the more immediate and direct agencies 
 of grace: which are the sacraments instituted by 
 Christ, and besides these, His free grace,^ given where, 
 and when, and why, and how. He alone knows, as He 
 alone should know. 
 
 But the saints, and mystics, being after all, 
 eminently human, and knowing as none others know 
 what human beings suffer and how they aspire and 
 act and fail, accomplish, under God, work which they 
 alone may do. 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 311 
 
 They are the power-houses of the Church. They 
 generate spiritual force which diffuses itself 
 throughout the world. They are closer to the hidden 
 power of the Most High than all other souls. 
 
 Which of course is why they are so practically use- 
 ful. 
 
 For God is Love, and the mystics are the lovers of 
 God, through whom His love is spread upon earth. 
 
 It is the function of love to give itself, to communi- 
 cate itself, to unite itself to all things not contrary 
 to its nature. Therefore, God, being love, seeks 
 without cessation to enter all souls and unite them 
 with each other in Him, for souls are the units of the 
 organism of love. When they are dispersed and torn 
 asunder, there can be no complete happiness and 
 satisfaction. They yearn toward each other always 
 — unless they turn from love to hate and reach that 
 awful, that unwordable point where of their own 
 will they seek separation instead of unity, and, of 
 their own, volition, plunge into the abyss of denial 
 and of everlasting death, the abyss of endless ego- 
 tism. 
 
 God being love, it is love that flows from His daily 
 coming in the Sacrifice of the Mass. It is by love, 
 and through love, and because of love, that His saints 
 are given the largest measure of the love that flows 
 out from His sacraments. And this overflowing love, 
 they, imitating God, dispense to others. That is their 
 work. They are specialists in the Science of Love. 
 They are experts in Prayer. They are the real re- 
 formers. They are the poets who live poetry, being 
 saturated with beauty and grace. They put pleasures 
 aside for the sake of happiness. 
 
312 The High Romance 
 
 It is known now that just before the war there was 
 a great flight of souls out of the ways of the world 
 into the ways of God, not only into the cloisters, 
 but also to live the personal effort at sanctification in 
 the world. 
 
 There was a new outpouring of mystical literature 
 from the presses all over the earth. There was con- 
 currently a new quickening of religious life. 
 
 The powers of good were mounting and multiply- 
 ing for the struggle with the powers of evil. Do you 
 say, the latter, then, must be the stronger, for look 
 at what has happened : see the desolated and shattered 
 world, stricken by the horrors of the worst of all great 
 wars? But in answer I say that the spiritual warfare 
 of good against evil is a greater and more awful 
 struggle than the one that has ravaged this world : the 
 latter, at its worst, is but a grim and frightful panto- 
 mime, a gruesome shadow, cast from the world of 
 spirit in which the warfare of the forces of evil against 
 the everlasting God goes on: a warfare of which the 
 end is certain, though not the duration. For the re- 
 sults of the warfare of time are impermanent, save as 
 they conjoin with the spiritual struggle whose results 
 are for all eternity. 
 
 And when the war is over, it will be seen by many 
 who now do not see that religion must be recognized 
 as the only force that can keep the world sane and 
 endurable. Its power will be bitterly contested. Let 
 none of us fail to remember that fact. The anti- 
 religion of the new paganism will appeal not without 
 tremendous glamour and apparent power to hungering 
 and thirsting souls. But Christ must and will prevail. 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 313 
 
 ... Of course! For, even if this world should pass 
 utterly into the hands of that most evil one who denies 
 God, his prize would be temporary, his victory a 
 chimera. For to Christ belongs eternity, and nothing 
 short of eternal success comports with the power and 
 majesty of Jesus Christ. 
 
 As mediums for the communication of love from 
 God to man, the ever-growing number of those who 
 seek personal sanctification, whether in the world 
 or the cloister or in the direct service of the church 
 in priestly offices, or as teachers, arid in all the 
 branches of social service — in which the Church from 
 the beginning has led the way, and will continue 
 to lead — will inevitably increase. Such souls are the 
 hidden centres of energy in all Christian works and 
 movements which amount to anything. 
 
 They keep alive and active the supernatural mo- 
 tives without which all good works grow sapless and 
 rigid and decadent. They invisibly join hands with 
 the heavenly spirits who are appointed to assist 
 humanity. And, as the Catholic Church is the centre 
 of all true progress, the signs of the coming advance 
 of spiritual concerns (the only concerns that are of 
 permanent value) may be discerned in the growing up 
 of many centres of the contemplative life throughout 
 this country, and in the lives of many individuals who 
 are living in the world, married or unmarried, doing 
 this thing or that thing, whatever they are called to 
 do, but making all things subserve the progress of the 
 one only thing that matters, namely, the love and the 
 service of God. 
 
314 The High Romance 
 
 But how reluctantly self-love and pride surrender, 
 even when they know they have been conquered! 
 How stubbornly they hold back the soul when the door 
 has opened to its knocking. 
 
 My pride and self-will said to me: — "Well, yes, 
 of course, this is a perfectly charming adventure; 
 make the most of it. You have known that 
 mysticism was a road of romance and wonder. All 
 your life you have sought to escape from the hum- 
 drum and the tedious and commonplace ways of 
 ordinary life. You have discovered that the soul is 
 not happy in a materialistic world. You know that 
 materialistic science is a stupid blunder. There is, 
 in all verity, a God who will reward those who seek 
 Him out. He is the Creator of souls, and souls are 
 immortally self-conscious and personal beings. 
 
 "And, no doubt, your soul, searching so passion- 
 ately for the life and light of God, has communicated 
 with the soul of one who has found and who possesses 
 what you are looking for, and a gleam of the pearl 
 of great price has shone for an instant from an inter- 
 stice between the visible and the invisible worlds. 
 But, granting all this, there really is no valid reason 
 for you to suppose that because this particular soul 
 happens to belong to one of the innumerable house- 
 holds of faith that you are necessitated to rush into 
 that household, where you may simply chafe and 
 rebel against all its formalism, its narrow tryanny 
 over free and independent souls. No, no, no; read 
 and profit and communicate with Sister Teresa, or 
 any other Catholic mystic, living or dead; but pre- 
 serve your own independence; be content as a mem- 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 315 
 
 ber of the great church not made with hands in which 
 not only Catholic Saints, but the poets and the artists 
 and the intellectual revolutionaries are the ministers 
 of that limitless Truth which no dogmas or creeds 
 can ever confine." 
 
 Which argument I really for some time could not 
 answer. Vacillating and distressed after the first 
 glowing rush of conviction had ebbed, as all things 
 ebb, I beat about the open door as I have seen birds 
 beat about a window, the light of which had blinded 
 them; only I was not blinded by the light, I was still 
 blinded by the darkness of my own conceit. 
 
 I called on the Bishop. 
 
 He lifted his eyebrows in surprise when I told him 
 I had visited the Carmelite Prioress. 
 
 "A very able woman," he remarked ; "a member of 
 an old and distinguished Boston family. I daresay 
 you think it a very queer thing for a woman of culti- 
 vation and great gifts to shut herself away from soci- 
 ety like this." 
 
 "No; I think I partly understand it," I replied. 
 
 "They are experts in prayer," he said, "They 
 call down power for us who work." 
 
 He looked at me, smiling; his eyes full of vigorous 
 life; sparks of colour touching the amethyst ring, 
 the golden cross peeping from between the buttons 
 of his black coat, the purple below his collar. 
 
 "You seem, strangely enough, to understand the 
 work they are called to do," he said; "but you do 
 not understand the Church of which that work is but 
 a part." 
 
316 The High Romance 
 
 "That is the case," I answered, "there are so many 
 things that the Church tells me I must believe, which 
 I can't believe." 
 
 The Bishop busily turned to his desk. 
 
 "Well, come around again some day, and tell 
 me what your difficulties are, and we'll talk them 
 over," said he. "Telephone, or drop in, just as you 
 like." 
 
 This wise, enlightened Bishop! This Bishop who 
 is a great theologian, but who knew it was not 
 theology that troubled me; but only the sickness of 
 sin! 
 
 A few weeks later, I called on him again. 
 
 "Sit down, sit down!" he cried. "And what's the 
 news?" 
 
 At that time, I was connected with a daily news- 
 paper, and the Bishop's keen interest in all that con- 
 cerned the welfare of his city or nation led him to 
 have many a talk with one who knew something of 
 the inner workings of public affairs from viewing 
 them as a journalist. Indeed, nothing human is 
 without interest to him; interest and keen concern — 
 even as is the case with the ancient Church, ancient 
 and ever new, of which he is such a distinguished 
 servant. For the Church knows how all things human 
 may be made good where they are not good by one 
 power only — not vast philosophical schemes of re- 
 form, or legislation, or by word, but by the power of 
 goodness; and the Church is the channel for that 
 goodness, ever flowing from God toward man, and 
 only diverted or wasted or perverted by man's own 
 fault. . . . 
 
 But I think the Bishop knew as soon as he glanced 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 317 
 
 at my face, that day, that I had come to talk bus- 
 iness; for his own face grew alert and serious. 
 
 "I have come," I said, "to give in." 
 
 "But your doubts," he said. "There are things 
 you desire to see more clearly — " 
 
 Then, in his quick impulsive manner the Bishop 
 jumped to his feet, and made a little gesture which 
 I'll never forget; a gesture which brushed all minor 
 matters aside. He knew that all further talk and 
 beating about the bush were useless, purely a waste 
 of energy. For I no longer had any doubts. They 
 had all gone away. Faith had come. And faith 
 told me all and more than any theologian could do; 
 for theology is merely the intellectual and verbal ex- 
 pression of faith, and therefore at best only a partial 
 expression; because Faith holds that which is too 
 deep and transcendent for the unaided mind to under- 
 stand, or for words to say. Faith can only be fully 
 expressed in action, in terms of life, in sanctity above 
 all. . . . 
 
 So the Bishop brushed all idle talk aside, and he 
 said: "My son!" And the love which his Church 
 exists to communicate from God to man, shone from 
 him, and was in the touch of his hand. 
 
 Next morning, I confessed. It was not, this sac- 
 rament, at all what I feared; it was not a surgical 
 operation, but a bath of balm for my bruised and 
 aching heart. The following morning, in the little 
 chapel of the Carmelites, on the Feast of the Assump- 
 tion of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Carmel, 
 I communicated, and God returned to my soul. . . . 
 Truly He is, and He rewards those who will seek 
 Him out. . . . 
 
318 The High Romance 
 
 1. How Faith Returned 
 
 It was long afterward, that I asked myself, How, 
 and Why, did my doubts disappear and my Faith re- 
 turn? 
 
 All I can answer is, that the Carmelites, the Bishop, 
 and other friends had been praying for me. There 
 was, in especial, dear Katie Lynch, who for years, 
 I know, had prayed for me, as she did — and still, 
 God bless her, she does — for all the men, "Her boys," 
 of the newspaper where she sits at the telephone ex- 
 change. Shall I ever forget the joy in Katie's face 
 when I stopped at her switch-board, one day, and 
 whispered that I was being received into the Church? 
 And Katie was in the little Carmelite church, next 
 morning, to be sure, and said a prayer for me. It 
 was Katie, and the likes of her, who taught me where 
 true religion is mostly to be found, and true mysti- 
 cism, — among the poor of God, the faithful souls, 
 who live lives of goodness; the priests, and the nuns, 
 and the men and women you may see in the grey wan 
 light of early morning, going to early Mass. . . . Ah, 
 when I think of this vast net of prayer and self-sacri- 
 fice which is woven from Atlantic to Pacific, from 
 north to south, in every town and city in our great 
 country, this tidal ebb and flow of sacramental spirit- 
 ual power, then I know what a force for good this 
 Catholic Church is in our land of over-much material- 
 ism, of too much fret and worry about the things that 
 do not matter. . . . 
 
 Secondly, I, too, had been praying for light. More 
 to the purpose, I am sure that Sister Teresa and Sister 
 Elizabeth, prayed also, on the other side of the veil. 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 319 
 
 And now that my will — which I had falsely thought 
 to be so powerful, but which in fact had become so 
 weak that I could keep no pledge, could maintain no 
 determination, but on the contrary had become a 
 prey of every mood and impulse that swept over me 
 — now, I say, that at last my will was even feebly 
 trying to will the will of God, it was assisted. Its 
 impeded power (impeded because of its wounded, 
 crippled, poisoned condition) was being supported 
 by the purified wills of my friends on earth, and my 
 friends in heaven. . . . 
 
 And, therefore, faith returned; first dimly, and 
 uncertainly, then stronger and stronger, and steadier, 
 and steadier, like the sure sun rising. And, like sun 
 shining on ice, faith melted the frosty egotism that 
 had congealed the inmost springs of good action in 
 my soul; and the tides of faith now burst forth, ihey 
 streamed through my being; they broke down all 
 obstacles; they swept away the worst of the rubbish 
 and waste and filth, and carried my soul, as on a 
 raft of hope, over the flood and the wreck of my old 
 life, to the shore of certitude. 
 
 Now, I am aware, that there is what would seem 
 to many minds a very plausible explanation of this 
 return of faith, its smouldering approach and then, 
 as it were, its spontaneous combustion, in my soul. 
 This explanation has been made by many of my 
 friends, who say: "It's all quite simple. The Church 
 had him under its influence in his childhood, and the 
 power which moulds the child will usually prevail 
 with the man, even if for a time he throws off the 
 influence." 
 
320 The High Romance 
 
 But, as a matter of fact, the only hold which the 
 Church had upon me when I was a child was pre- 
 cisely of that sort which critics of the rational kind 
 will not recognize — it was almost solely supernatural. 
 That is to say, I did not go to a Catholic school, but 
 received what little education I did receive in a non- 
 religious public school. My home atmosphere was 
 far removed from being strongly Catholic; it was 
 only superficially Catholic. And from the age of 
 fourteen even this slight connection with the Church 
 was broken off. On the other hand, I did receive the 
 sacramental seals of the Faith; I was baptized; I was 
 confirmed; I became a communicant. So, for my 
 part, I am satisfied, that deeper than the evanescent 
 impressions which my mind took from the few cat- 
 echism lessons and instructions given me, were the 
 spiritual marks of the sacraments; and that the sac- 
 raments left channels, as it were, in my soul, which 
 channels became lost beneath debris and rot, yet were 
 nevertheless indestructible, and when the flood of faith 
 again entered my being the debris was swept away, 
 and the sacramental channels of grace resumed their 
 functions. . . . 
 
 But, even as I examine and search into the mys- 
 teries of this re-birth, I know that to the mind without 
 faith, I talk Chinese or gibberish. For without the 
 illumination of faith (which is not credulity, though 
 many critics of Christianity confound the two things), 
 the mind is unable to understand and act upon the 
 truths of religion. Faith is a mystical power which 
 enables the mind to recognize religious truth. I do 
 not mean that faith brings the vision of truth; for the 
 vision of truth belongs to eternity, though certain 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 321 
 
 highly privileged souls gain glimpses even in time; 
 but faith supplies a certitude of truth, a conviction, 
 which is a power in itself to the soul as it struggles 
 forward upon its mission: its mission of proving 
 itself, in this evanescent life, worthy of the life more 
 abundant of eternity. 
 
 So, faith itself it was that taught me the truth, and 
 showed me that Christ in all verity was God; that 
 He had become man that we might follow Him to 
 God; and that Christ was still with us, here upon 
 earth, in His mystical body, the Church; into which 
 He would have all souls incorporated, in the union 
 of will and of faith, in the life of love — brothers 
 all, in the Fatherhood of God. Therefore, no longer 
 was there any question, for me, of would I or should 
 I enter the Church. I now found myself in the 
 Church; and that was the end of my bitter strug- 
 gles. . . • 
 
 And week by week, and month by month, and year 
 by year, thereafter, God let His light shine clear and 
 still more clear, and I knew that faith illuminates the 
 mind, and that only in the light of faith can truth 
 be known. With faith, one may truly see; not all, 
 not everything; still as in a glass darkly; yet, it is 
 seeing, it is assuredly seeing that part by which the 
 whole is fully believed in; and so, my mind, at- 
 tempting to deal with its changed relations, and feel- 
 ing it necessary to do so, though well aware that to 
 those without faith its processes are perhaps even 
 more unconvincing than the lyric cry of pure, in- 
 stinctive faith, arranged its attitude toward the 
 Church, as follows: 
 
322 The High Romance 
 
 Since there is a God (I said) Who is Good; the 
 creator of all men and of all things, and their sus- 
 taining principle, it is inconceivable for me to sup- 
 pose that He would not communicate this truth to His 
 children. 
 
 Nor would He entrust such a work of love to any 
 other than Himself. 
 
 God alone could be the Authority for the communi- 
 cation of Eternal Truth. 
 
 But mortal man could never understand the divin- 
 ity of God. 
 
 Humanity could not face on equal terms the abso- 
 lute Spirit. If it could do so it would be equal to 
 God; which is impossible: which to believe is to sin 
 the sin of absolute pride: for God is the Creator of 
 man. 
 
 Hence, God in His goodness must will to accommo- 
 date Himself to man. 
 
 How else would He do so than by becoming man 
 Himself? 
 
 This was the turning point. 
 
 I saw, and fully acknowledged, the necessity of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 He was a man; and He was also the Eternal and 
 Omnipotent, Absolute Divine. 
 
 And, this being so, how unquestionable the fact 
 that Christ would create and perpetuate an infallible 
 Guide and Authority to spread His teaching and main- 
 tain it pure and permanently immutable! For He 
 knew the nature of Man; He better than any knew 
 the injury which had been caused by man's Fall from 
 uprightness and truth — a fall due to Pride and Diso- 
 bedience: a fall which all men go on repeating in 
 
At the Gate of Mount Carmel 323 
 
 greater or lesser degree. Left to themselves, cut 
 loose from the restraint of obedience to lawful Au- 
 thority, was it not the ineluctable tendency of human 
 beings to set up and worship each for himself an idol 
 made in his own likeness, or in the likeness of that 
 Evil Spirit who became Evil by the first act of self- 
 will and disobedience? Hence, would Christ not set 
 up a Church: infallible, perdurable, speaking and 
 acting with absolute and immutable Authority? 
 
 Every fibre of my being answered, Yes. 
 
 There must be a Church established and maintained 
 by Jesus Christ, acting with His authority, and that 
 Church I must find. 
 
 And find it I did — the Church of my childhood: 
 the Church of the Holy Child; the Body of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
I 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 HOW SISTER TERESA CONFIRMED HER FAVOUR 
 
 1. I Sail Away to War 
 
 TOLD the Bishop about Sister Teresa's gift of a 
 rose, or rather the perfume of a rose; a mystical 
 rose of Paradise. 
 
 "Of course," I acknowledged; "there is a perfectly 
 reasonable case to be made out for the view that 
 there was nothing at all supernatural in the episode, 
 and that it was merely an instance of auto-sugges- 
 tion. . . ." 
 
 The Bishop shrugged his shoulders. "Yes, of 
 course," he said. "But supernatural things happen, 
 you know; yes, they happen." 
 
 He was right. For such a things not only hap- 
 pened to me, but it happened again, in confirmation 
 of the first visitation. 
 
 Just one year from the day when the little breath 
 from Heaven blew across my dreary path, and made 
 it break out in blossoming beauty, the true road of the 
 High Romance, found at last, once again Sister Te- 
 resa manifested her interest in her brother who was 
 wandering amid the illusions and the mists of time. 
 
 It happened in Mexico. 
 
 I had persuaded my managing editor to let me 
 alleviate the drudgery of a reporter's task by writing 
 
 324 
 
Sister Teresa Confirmed Her Favour 325 
 
 art criticism. One day I came in from my rounds 
 of the picture galleries, and was told to pack up and 
 go aboard a warship in the harbour that was to sail 
 in the morning for Mexico. Huerta had insulted the 
 American flag. The United States marines were 
 ashore at Vera Cruz. The Mexican crisis had ar- 
 rived at last. It was War! Or, so we thought. . . . 
 
 I did not know any good reason why I should be 
 going, but I soon was on my way. It was an assign- 
 ment; handed out in that amazingly haphazard fash- 
 ion in which so many of our big newspapers transact 
 their affairs. I knew no Spanish. I had given 
 no more than the most cursory attention to the messy 
 situation in Mexico. I had no experience in naval 
 or military matters, and knew next to nothing about 
 international politics; but, as usual, such consider- 
 ations did not get themselves reckoned with ; what my 
 paper wanted was lively reading matter; I was sup- 
 posed to be a pretty good reporter — and a pretty good 
 reporter is expected to be competent to handle any 
 subject in the entire encyclopedia of human events. 
 
 Such a view, which is the working policy of many 
 an influential paper, is part and parcel of the fright- 
 ful fallacy which gives to private, personal judgment 
 such devastating power in human aff'airs. It explains 
 a great deal of the trouble of our reckless, ignorant, 
 superficial modem world. It is the fallacy which 
 permits irresponsible, ignorant, reckless, egotistical 
 scribblers to hypnotize whole populations with their 
 editorials, and sway them this way and that way to 
 suit their own views or the views of their financial 
 and political masters. It is the same philosophy 
 which underlies the preaching and the prophetizing 
 
326 The High Romance 
 
 of modem artists and revolutionary intellectualists, 
 only it is seen at its crude and vulgar worst in the 
 yellow newspaper. 
 
 However, I did not indulge myself in such reflec- 
 tions. This, after all, was an adventure! So I 
 bought a pair of binoculars, a fountain pen, (a leaky 
 nuisance which I heaved overboard a few days later) , 
 khaki clothes and such like contraptions, and duly 
 became a War Correspondent. 
 
 The thrill of it lasted for quite a time. We 
 steamed forth from San Francisco Bay, convoyed by 
 tugs full of motion picture operators and newspaper 
 photographers (I did my best not to look self-con- 
 scious when the cameras clicked), outward bound to 
 War! 
 
 The ferry boats went past, careening by the battle- 
 ship on which I was stationed, tip-tilting with the 
 weight of wildly cheering commuters, and from a 
 press tugboat one of my fellow reporters howled at 
 me through a megaphone: "Put a punch in your stuff, 
 remember! Don't forget, now, put a punch in your 
 stuff!" He was giving me a friendly yet warning 
 tip; for I was rather suspiciously tainted with high- 
 browism, I am afraid, in the opinion of my local 
 room. 
 
 The Golden Gate opened before us; the tugs fell 
 back; the cheering died away; the city became a vague 
 strip of mottled colour on the shore, the land itself 
 grew faint, and the sea received us into its silence 
 and its peace. 
 
 But we did not heed the message of the sea. It 
 was only a sort of street or passageway down which 
 we steamed on the grim business of war. Southward 
 
Sister Teresa Confirmed Her Favour 327 
 
 we thrust steadily on through the sun-drenched, slowly 
 rolling waters. The great ship was like a moving 
 city of steel, rigid and trim as an office building. 
 Sweet pure winds blew their bland breath upon us, 
 full of mystical whispers that came across thousands 
 of leagues of sea, from far islands of romance and 
 the yellow countries of Khans, Sultans and Mikados. 
 At night, in a soft, hazy, purple sky the stars were 
 incredibly multitudinous. I had forgotten that there 
 were so many stars. 
 
 Once, late at night, the officer on the bridge con- 
 senting, I climbed the forward mast, high up, to the 
 armoured machine gun platform. 
 
 Seen from there, the ship that I had considered 
 immense, like a great city of steel (we carried more 
 than a thousand souls), and rigid like an office build- 
 ing, was a slender, frail, tenuous thing, and the foam- 
 streaked black abyss of the ocean was no longer 
 merely a street; it had become mysterious and mighty. 
 Looking upward, the starry sky seemed close; it 
 seemed all about us, yet also remote beyond conjec- 
 ture. . . . 
 
 When I reached the deck again I avoided every- 
 body, wishful to go to sleep with the impression of 
 the sky fresh in my heart. But a friendly marine, 
 doing sentry duty, stopped me with a question: 
 
 "Do you reckon we'll sure enough fight the Spig- 
 goties this time, Mr. Reporter?" 
 
 "It looks that way," I answered. 
 
 "Gee! It's kind of queer, ain't it?" 
 
 "Why?" I asked. 
 
 "Oh, I dunno — ^but it's queer. I was goin' to take 
 a job with the Forest Rangers in my home state, Idaho, 
 
328 The High Romance 
 
 and then a guy who's a friend of mine, says, *0h, 
 come on — let's join the marines, and get a trip to 
 the Philippines, or somewhere.' So we did, and now 
 here we are, off to light the Spiggoties. Gee, I never 
 reckoned we'd sure enough get into any scrapping on 
 our trip, no sirree." 
 
 "Well, how do you like it?" 
 
 "Doggone if I know yet — I ain't got nothin' against 
 them Spiggoties, except I guess they are a mean gang, 
 by what I hear — but if they got to be whipped, why 
 I reckon we got to do it — but it's queer, that's what 
 I think — it's queer." 
 
 I agreed with him. Queer it was. The whole 
 business. Especially at night, when one had just de- 
 scended from the silence above the deck, up under 
 the quiet stars that were so irrefragibly remote, so 
 mystically strange. 
 
 But it was not strange by day, when we could 
 plainly see the long black torpedo boats hanging 
 about us like some new breed of porpoise, and the 
 huge electrical collier wallowing behind us, and the 
 band played, and the marines were drilling, and the 
 jackies were stowing away the supplies hurried 
 aboard so profusely in San Francisco. Then every- 
 thing was a stirring and fascinating piece of business. 
 The busy wireless brought us scraps of ominous news 
 from Vera Cruz, and bulletins from the flaming press 
 of our excited land. And I studied maps of Mexico, 
 and talked by the hour with various marine and 
 naval officers, and sent home wireless stuff in which 
 I hoped there was the "punch" that the reporter im- 
 plored, so that my fellow citizens should not fail 
 to be ihriljed in the space between coffee 9,nd work, 
 
Sister Teresa Confirmed Her Favour 329 
 
 as they crowded into trolley cars, railroad trains and 
 ferries, from New York to San Francisco, from Port- 
 land to Galveston. 
 
 Presently, the long, dim line of jagged coast be- 
 came Mexico instead of California, with no change 
 of appearance, except that it grew more barren. 
 Then we sped across the hot, hazy Gulf of California 
 and reached the mainland, and the fleet scattered its 
 units up and down a thousand miles of torrid, steam- 
 ing, sweltering coast line, with queer, little coloured 
 towns stuck upon the edges of palm groves and blaz- 
 ing desert, every five hundred miles or so, and 
 swarms of alligators crawling on the bars of the few 
 marshy rivers, and buzzards sailing enigmatically 
 overhead. 
 
 There for the next five months or so — each month 
 hotter than the one before — we swashed to and fro 
 upon the never-ceasing, liver-churning swell, from 
 Guaymas to Acapulco, and watchfully waited, and 
 waited watchfully, while nothing happened, nothing 
 happened, nothing at all. 
 
 Then it grew hotter. After that it grew hotter. 
 Presently it grew hotter. Then hotter. The men 
 could not go ashore. They could only look at the 
 shore and long. The staff officers, however, daily 
 visited the town before which my ship was stationed, 
 and I could do as I pleased — it being understood, oh, 
 distinctly understood, that No Responsibility was in- 
 curred for me. The Admiral pointed this out. So 
 did the Captain. The Executive Officer — as became 
 that zealous man — renewed the compact daily. 
 
 And the sailormeli grew soft, and dull, and pasty 
 of face, and in the hot dank nights the mean, feverish 
 
330 The High Romance 
 
 Mexican devils crawled aboard from the festering 
 city and the hot, sickly swell, and things happened 
 that made the Chaplain look white-lipped and drawn, 
 and made the surgeons swear at whoever was respon- 
 sible for keeping the fleet in this putrescent pickle. 
 We buried a suicide or two, in the sea, and we shipped 
 home by the colliers many muttering melancholiacs, 
 and at night we languidly looked at stale motion pic- 
 tures and made the band play till the men were ready 
 to bite their mouthpieces in two. 
 
 So I went ashore a good deal, not only to escape 
 from the stuffy, irritable atmosphere of the battleship, 
 but also because I grew fond of that sad, wounded, 
 beautiful, desolated little city of Mazatlan. For 
 nearly two years the revolutionaries had been en- 
 camped about it. All its wealthier citizens had long 
 ago gone away, leaving only those whose financial 
 interest compelled their staying on, and, of course, 
 the poor folk — ^the eternal sufferers, the dumb, the 
 driven poor, that we have always with us. A hand- 
 ful of foreigners, German, British, American, French, 
 Spanish, still lingered. Day by day the revolution- 
 aries attacked the outposts and advanced trenches of 
 the garrison. Anywhere from three to twenty men, 
 women, and children were wounded Or slain each day 
 by snipers firing into town from the jungles and hills. 
 The place was quite too strong for the revolutionaries 
 to carry by storm, with their inadequate artillery, but 
 they were slowly, very slowly, yet surely, starving it 
 into surrender. The garrison, of course, maintained 
 a grip on the bulk of the food supply, so, necessarily, 
 the poor folk suffered the brunt of this slow torture. 
 The death rate was frightful. Weakened by mal- 
 
Sister Teresa Confirmed Her Favour 331 
 
 nutrition, the people, especially the children, lan- 
 guidly yielded to whatever sickness cared to take the 
 trouble of attacking such tame and tired victims. 
 They simply lay down, rather willingly, I believe, 
 and drowsed away into the dusky end of all. 
 
 In the shade of the dusty trees in the plazas, or in 
 doorways and shops, amid streets scarred with rifle 
 shots and torn by shell explosions, and dirty and mal- 
 odorous as only a neglected tropical town can be, the 
 dull-eyed, listless, emaciated men stood about in little 
 groups, talking in low voices, or else they prowled 
 about looking for shell-fish on the shore. One day 
 some of them discovered the carcass of a cow, which 
 after starving a long time, had died and been cast 
 forth on the shore for the next tide to carry out to 
 the fish (for the buzzards disdained it). They cut 
 that shrunken, tough piece of skin and bones to pieces 
 so bloodless that they left no stain where the cutting 
 was done, and went off to their poor families, thank- 
 ing God, saying earnestly: ''Dios gracias.'' Now and 
 then some of them mustered enough energy to raid 
 a Chinese shop, looting the com and canned goods. 
 The frail children begged from door to door, or 
 hunted for cactus fruit in the rocks near the beau- 
 tiful carriage drive along the shore, and for the rest 
 of my life I shall be haunted by their pleading, 
 mournful eyes. The women also begged, also, being 
 devout, they gathered in the churches. I used to step 
 in to watch and wonder as they knelt before the gaudy 
 altars, or the grotesque stations of the cross, some of 
 them with their skinny arms stretched out in the 
 terrific cruciform symbol; others beating upon their 
 lean breasts, accusing themselves, no doubt — as the 
 
332 The High Romance 
 
 good, the best souls do, — of the sins which had drawn 
 down such woe upon the land. 
 
 "They are wonderful, these people," said the 
 Englishman who had lived in Mexico for a quarter 
 of a century, one day when we were dining together 
 on the curious scraps served in the hotel which catered 
 to foreigners. "Preyed upon by adventurers and 
 demagogues who possess not a scrap of real patriot- 
 ism, but who simply tear the country apart to feast 
 on the fragments, the greater number of the Mexican 
 people still retain a wonderful goodness. I have 
 watched them for twenty-five years and my admira- 
 tion grows deeper. They have never been given a 
 fair chance by their various governments; never edu- 
 cated properly, never really helped; yet they help 
 each other. The poorest are marvellously charitable 
 to each other. They are miraculously patient. In 
 the midst of all the frightful disorders and troubles, 
 they say, 'Well, it is the will of God.' And they wait 
 for better days. When I read the American papers 
 which glibly talk about the great popular revolutions 
 in Mexico, I'm utterly disgusted. Why don't they 
 try to get at the facts? Why don't they show that the 
 facts are that the Mexican people are victimized by 
 a handful of professional politicians and professional 
 revolutionaries, more than they were by the most 
 despotic of their former governments. Why do the 
 people stand it? Well, all the arms are owned by 
 the paid revolutionary fighters; and the people them- 
 selves are not united. Those of one state are more 
 isolated from those of another state than nation is 
 from nation, in Europe." 
 
 So, believe me, all notions which first I might 
 
Sister Teresa Confirmed Her Favour 333 
 
 have entertained concerning the purple pomp of War, 
 and the romantic interest of writing War news, 
 quickly faded away. This was not a War, but a 
 mournful misfortune, and I hoped that if our arms 
 did go ashore they would go there not to back up the 
 dirty game of the revolutionists, but to police the land 
 for a time, and give the stable elements — if such there 
 were — a chance to set up a decent government, and 
 then withdraw. 
 
 2. The Bomb 
 
 There was little news for me to send to my paper, 
 even though I risked my neck landing through the 
 surf to the south of the city, and joined the head- 
 quarters of General Obregon, staying with him for 
 some days, looking for good stuff. And I went with 
 an agent of the United States State Department, on 
 a hand-car on the dismantled railroad, forty miles 
 farther south, to Rosario, and remained there a fort- 
 night. I gathered heaps of gorgeous local colour; 
 but mighty little news. 
 
 Yet I did witness an event which was, in its way, 
 historical; an event which cast a queer shadow before 
 the vast Catastrophe which was even then, though 
 we knew it not at Mazatlan, darkling over Europe. 
 
 Attached to Obregon's forces was an aviator with 
 an American aeroplane who almost daily made flights 
 above the city and dropped down proclamations, call- 
 ing upon the people to join the revolution. So accus- 
 tomed did they become to him that they would run 
 into the streets when he appeared and shout: " Buenas 
 dias, sefior!" The Federal forces possessed no anti- 
 air-craft guns, so the aviator was never disturbed. 
 
334 The High Romance 
 
 One morning, just after breakfast, I came upon 
 the quarter deck, and Admiral Howard, pacing up 
 and down his sacrosanct side of the deck, courte- 
 ously called me over, and we paced up and down, 
 chatting together. As we made a turn, we both saw 
 the bursting black cloud of a bomb explosion arising 
 from near the church in the main plaza of the city. 
 
 This had never happened before, and Admiral 
 Howard, and the other naval officers who came run- 
 ning up to the spotting glasses, were frankly aston- 
 ished; because they thought they knew the location 
 and range of all the few guns possessed by Obregon, 
 and they knew of none so situated that it could throw 
 a shell to this particular spot. 
 
 None of us even thought about the aeroplane. 
 
 Yet, far over our heads, in the stainless blue sky, 
 where a flock of buzzards soared, was the aeroplane, 
 and from the aeroplane the bomb had been hurled, 
 in an effort to hit a fort which we called Round Top, 
 a hill fortress, on the seaward edge of the city. The 
 bomb had missed the hill by half a mile, and struck 
 in a street called the Street of the Carnival, dashing 
 to pieces, or badly smashing up, sixteen or eighteen 
 of the poor people of Mazatlan, mostly women and 
 children. 
 
 This, I believe, was the first occasion a bomb was 
 ever hurled from an airship into a city killing or 
 maiming non-combatants. 
 
 Later in the day, we discovered what had caused 
 this explosion, and there was an immediate council 
 of the commanders of the various ships in Mazatlan; 
 an Englishman, commanding a little gun-boat, a Ger- 
 man, commanding an armoured cruiser, the Leipzig, 
 
Sister Teresa Confirmed Her Favour 335 
 
 afterwards sent to the bottom in the battle off the 
 Falklands, and a Japanese captain, besides Admiral 
 Howard. 
 
 It then came out that Mexico had not signed The 
 Hague agreement which prevented such outrages. 
 Nevertheless, all agreed, German, English, Japanese, 
 American, that treaty or no treaty, such outrages must 
 be prevented, and notice to that effect was served upon 
 Obregon. He explained that the bomb had been 
 meant for the fort, but promised that for the future 
 no attempts would be made to hit a fort on the very 
 edge of a populous city from an aeroplane a mile or 
 so up in the air. 
 
 3. The Carmelite Church 
 
 I got to know Mazatlan rather well, and its exotic 
 beauty is impressed upon my memory with a seal 
 of sorrowful and tragic charm. 
 
 I discovered, in a small plaza, remote from the 
 more prosperous quarter of the city, a little Carmelite 
 church, a gem of simple architectural beauty, and 
 with a really first-class statue of Saint Teresa. In 
 this little chapel, among the humble people, I spent 
 long hours, trying to make myself understand with 
 practical force that if a man has friends in the other 
 world — as I knew I had — he could only maintain 
 that friendship on condition that he was a friend to 
 people in this world; also, that unless the wells of 
 mystical beauty gave the one that found them strength 
 and courage for practical work in this material world, 
 and for the doing of his duty, he had wandered from 
 the true road and in a desert of shifting mirages had 
 
336 The High Romance 
 
 come to the fountains of illusion, and the oasis of 
 vain dreams. 
 
 And I would repeat over and over again, in various 
 words and forms, the cry my spirit had so often 
 uttered in the wandering, passionate days of other 
 years : 
 
 "If ever I forget my brothers and sisters who are 
 in the dark places, and in want, and ignorance, and 
 misery, God punish me!" 
 
 4. Antonio's Baby 
 
 But I did not spend all my time in the golden 
 silence and serene beauty of that Carmelite church. 
 I made acquaintances among the Mexican people, and 
 tried to understand them. Also, I would often go 
 to the chief hotel, and sit down in the huge, still patio 
 (still except when the guns of Round-Top thundered, 
 and the shells went hurtling overhead), and talk with 
 Louis, the German-Jew from Chicago, who managed 
 its sadly diminished business for some absent pro- 
 prietor. 
 
 Louis was very fat, and exceedingly pimpled, and 
 suffered much from prickly heat, and the loss of 
 business. Nevertheless, he was a philosopher who 
 had managed to construct a system of thought, by 
 which he maintained his mental peace even in melan- 
 choly Mexico. He explained his system to me sev- 
 eral times in the long, desultory talks we had in the 
 dusky patio, amid the potted palms, with the stone 
 floor moistened to keep things cool, and from time 
 to time the whole place shaking violently as a shrap- 
 nel shell crashed over our heads from the fort. 
 
Sister Teresa Confirmed Her Favour 337 
 
 "Each morning, when I wake up," said Louis, in 
 his husky, fat voice, "I say to myself, I say, 'You 
 can stick it out till bedtime.' Und at bedtime I 
 say, 'Veil, I haf passed anoder day. Now I vill haf 
 mine sleep again.' So der time goes by, und I should 
 worry? My pay, it keeps on — und nod in Mexican 
 money, either, no siree! A check goes each month 
 to mine bank in Los Angeles, Cal. Ven I can't stick 
 it out no longer, I vill go back — unless things get 
 quiet here." 
 
 One day when I was talking with Louis a poor 
 woman, young and hollow-eyed and wanly pretty, en- 
 tered the patio, carrying the most emaciated little 
 bundle of bones and rag that ever was called a baby. 
 Antonio, the bartender, came out from behind the 
 little bar where he concocted American mixed drinks 
 when a rare customer would come, and joined the 
 woman. 
 
 "Antonio's wife and baby boy," said Louis* 
 
 "What's the matter with the baby?" I asked. 
 
 "What's the matter with all der liddle children in 
 Mazatlan?" Louis replied. "They are starving, and 
 der weak women cannot nurse them, und der sickness 
 comes — so they die like — like flies." 
 
 I could not stand the sight, and rose to go. 
 
 Then the impulse came. 
 
 I drew from my pocket a picture of the Little 
 Flower. 
 
 "Translate for me, Louis," I said. "Please tell 
 the woman that this is the picture of a Saint, who is 
 doing much to help poor people. Tell her to put the 
 picture under the baby's pillow — and maybe the baby 
 will get better." 
 
338 The High Romance 
 
 So the kindly German- Jew told the woman what 
 I said. She grabbed the picture eagerly. She 
 kissed it. "Ah, Santa, Santa!" she cried. She 
 touched the bundle of bones and rag with the picture. 
 Antonio, the husband, grinned sheepishly. 
 
 And I went away — and soon forgot it all. For I 
 was concerned with an affair of my own which was 
 deeply troubling me. 
 
 5. My Anniversary 
 
 It was drawing near the first anniversary of my 
 visit to the Carmelite monastery, and there had come 
 into my mind a haunting, irresistible persuasion that 
 on that day, once more, something was going to hap- 
 pen — something supernatural — something of the kind 
 that had marked the day when I first reached the foot 
 of Mount Carmel. 
 
 I could not shake off this feeling. Yet I tried hard 
 to do so. For I knew very well that it is wrong and 
 dangerous to seek for or to invite or to welcome 
 signs, omens, or wonders from the world behind the 
 veil. 
 
 If these happen spontaneously — ^that is different: 
 yet even then we must be cautious, we must refuse 
 to be credulous and eager. For unless such things 
 lead to good works, and improvement of moral life, 
 and increase of faith, they lead to evil and not to 
 good. Faith in God is the only safe guide for the 
 questing soul. No true mystic looks for signs and 
 wonders or strives to open the door of the soul to 
 psychic manifestations. 
 
 There are such things as spiritual vanity and glut- 
 
Sister Teresa Confirmed Her Favour 339 
 
 tony and selfishness, and these are most actively at 
 work in the cases of those who go seeking after super- 
 natural wonders for the sake of spiritual thrills, ex- 
 citements, and adventures. 
 
 Here is where Catholic mysticism differs pro- 
 foundly from the various so-called mystical cults of 
 the age. No saint may be canonized by the Church 
 if the evidence in the case does not prove that the 
 miracles and wonders of his life produced good re- 
 sults, led to increased faith, and hope, and charity: 
 and humility, and temperance, justice, and fortitude. 
 
 By their fruits ye shall know them! The saints 
 of God are good: they don't just talk about good. 
 They are not magicians, soothsayers, necromancers, 
 or sorcerers; they are seekers after God who in their 
 journey through this life are sometimes granted ex- 
 traordinary gifts or powers or experiences in order 
 to confirm the power of God and of the laws of God: 
 laws which are not the laws of men. God is Law, 
 and all that He does is lawful, and never more so 
 than in those manifestations of His will which 
 transcend the processes of nature, and are termed 
 miraculous. 
 
 This I knew as soon as Faith came to me; and 
 with all my will I essayed to put away from my mind 
 this thought, this presentiment, that on the anniversary 
 of my visit to Carmel I should once more know that 
 Sister Teresa was near me. But I could not do 
 so. . . . 
 
 On the evening before the day I went ashore, and 
 found a Spanish priest at the little Carmelite church 
 who confessed me. I stayed that night at the home 
 of an American acquaintance. At dawn I went to 
 
340 The High Romance 
 
 the little church, and communicated in honour of 
 the day and all it meant to me. 
 
 After Mass I returned to the house of my acquaint- 
 ance, my mind still full of the presentiment. Break- 
 fast over, my acquaintance and I sat on the veranda 
 of his house, chatting idly, when all at once a couple 
 of bullets went snapping by us, followed almost in- 
 stantaneously by the crack! crack! of the rifle shots. 
 
 Somebody had opened fire upon us from the direc- 
 tion of the fort. We ran behind the house as three 
 more shots spat viciously at us. 
 
 However, that was all. There was no attack. 
 Some soldiers, apparently, had opened fire from the 
 distance, but did not mean to follow up the bullets. 
 Yet it was obvious that the exposed position of the 
 house would keep us in a dangerous state if we re- 
 mained; so, by and by, we cautiously evacuated the 
 premises, and made our way into the city. For sev- 
 eral hours after that we were busy going about warn- 
 ing the members of the foreign colony of the episode, 
 which might, we feared, be the prelude to a general 
 attack upon Americans. 
 
 6. Another Rose From Heaven 
 
 Naturally, the bullets, and the excitement, and the 
 menace, had driven all memory of my thoughts about 
 Sister Teresa out of my mind. 
 
 But Sister Teresa did not forget. The bullets did 
 not upset her plans one bit. In fact, they helped her, 
 inasmuch as they drove my consciousness quite away 
 from all brooding over my presentiment, and made 
 what happened all the more objective. 
 
Sister Teresa Confirmed Her Favour 341 
 
 For when I entered the patio of the hotel that after- 
 noon about four o'clock, all recollection of my 
 psychic warning, and of the meaning of the day, had 
 vanished. 
 
 I had also forgotten all about Antonio's baby; for 
 when the bartender rushed out into the patio as I 
 entered, and jumped at me and grabbed my hands, 
 wringing them violently, and pouring forth a babble 
 of Spanish-Mexican jargon, I was utterly bewildered. 
 
 "What's the matter with him, Louis?" I asked. 
 
 The German-Jew said: "Why he's thanking you 
 for the picture of that little Saint. His baby got 
 veil and strong, all at once, when the picture was put 
 under its pillow. Dot iss so. I haf seen the baby 
 mineself. It voss going to die, and now it iss all 
 quite veil again." 
 
 Which was exactly true. I afterward looked into 
 the matter more closely. Sister Teresa remembered 
 my anniversary. She did not throw me a rose from 
 her mystical garden. There was no odour as of in- 
 cense ; there was no touch of the poetry of spiritual ro- 
 mance ; there was no delectation of my personal sense 
 of delight in the high adventures of the soul. 
 
 No. 
 
 But, through my little sister in heaven, I learned 
 one of the primary lessons of life and love, namely, 
 the fact that if God gives us roses, or gives us faith, 
 or gives us gifts or powers, little or great. He does not 
 mean us to keep them for ourselves; we must com- 
 municate them all to others. 
 
 Thus the Little Flower remembered and marked 
 the first anniversary of my coming to Carmel. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 NEARLY five years have gone by since I found 
 my way to Garmel. After returning from Mex- 
 ico, when the Great War had cast Mexico into the 
 shadow of newspaper oblivion, my paths of quest 
 ran through less obviously romantic places and cir- 
 cumstances. The prosaic toil of daily duty claimed 
 me more and more — ^that toil which in other 
 years of the pilgrimage I had either evaded or 
 ignored. 
 
 But, now, all life has become a romance. 
 
 Never shall I forget the exhilarating, marvellous 
 sense of an expansion of interest, of a deepening of 
 zest, of a lifting up, as it were, of the horizon line, 
 which more and more was mine as I went on farther 
 and farther in my new life. This, too, despite the 
 fact that these latter years held keener and more 
 afflicting misfortunes, graver and more difficult prob- 
 lems, harder and more bitter troubles, than any I 
 had known before — though I had thought myself 
 so singularly the buffet of fate, the plaything of ap- 
 parently malicious circumstances. But over these 
 matters, I drop the curtain. In the deeper sense of 
 the word, they do not matter — yet in even a greater 
 sense, they matter profoundly: for by them I tested 
 this new life, this sword and armour of Faith, and I 
 found them invulnerable. 
 
 The path of the high romance led me beyond the 
 342 
 
Conclusion 343 
 
 valleys of illusion, and the roadside inns of the en- 
 chanters could no longer tempt me with drugged 
 wines. 
 
 I set my face toward the real adventure, the true 
 romance. 
 
 The coloured mists and make-believe of my 
 previous essays in the "mystical" sufficed me not 
 when the real thing began. Now I know that it is not 
 what I write but what I am that matters. God forbid 
 that I should claim that what I am is of any particular 
 value, save to God, who loves all human souls, 
 great and small, alike; but God Himself implants 
 the hope that even I may so live as to merit life: that 
 I may use my art not for art's sake, but for God's 
 sake; and thus play a part, even if a most minor one, 
 in the war of wills which is destined to follow the 
 war of shot and shell. For I believe that this coun- 
 try, under God, will know a new birth of freedom, and 
 that in the almost universal overthrowing of the pil- 
 lars of government and society which must follow the 
 war, government of the people, by the people, for the 
 people, will indeed not perish from the earth but will 
 rather kindle a new fire on the altar of the new nation 
 of the West; a fire which so long, and so long only, as 
 it bums first of all as an offering to God, will light 
 and warm the hearts and homes of untold millions of 
 human beings. 
 
 But there is a great and growing peril to be over- 
 come, else not liberty but slavery will be our portion 
 — a slavery more abject and degrading than any that 
 has ever come upon us. 
 
 In our country we are face to face with the menace 
 of paganism; a new paganism which sets up the worst 
 
344 The High Romance 
 
 of all idols — that monstrous thing, the godless "State" 
 which in Prussia became incarnate in Kaiserism, but 
 which in America threatens to become a bureaucracy, 
 dominated by a plutocracy, served by a priesthood 
 of false mystics, and glorified by an art that idolizes 
 the senses, and drugs the soul with visions of an im- 
 possible earthly Paradise. . . . 
 
 Against this, only Christianity can hope to prevail. 
 
 Christian Democracy is the only perfect democ- 
 racy, and nothing but perfect democracy will be 
 finally accepted by men, whose kings have failed 
 them, and whose tyrants are being overthrown, 
 whether these tyrants wear imperial purple, or come 
 disguised in the demagoguery of the godless press, or 
 as an oligarchy of materialistic interests, or as self- 
 chosen champions of mob-rule. 
 
 The spirit of Christ is the dissolvent of all tyrannies 
 and the very life of liberty, and of the happiness 
 which men have the right, nay, the command of God, 
 to possess. "Follow Me, for I am the Way, the 
 Truth, and the Life." So said Christ, the God-man, 
 the Divine Artist, the living Poem of the Purpose of 
 God, the Liberator of the soul, the Guide to Beauty 
 and to Joy. And in the Prayer of Prayers He gave 
 us the permanent platform of the only political party 
 that can truly succeed : that great party which is made 
 up of all those who consciously follow the standard 
 of Christ, or who, led by His Spirit, belong to the 
 soul if not always to the body of His Church. 
 
 Our Father: 
 
 {Oh, words which bind all men together in a com- 
 
Conclusion 345 
 
 mon bond of dependence, of brotherhood, under one 
 Creator.) 
 
 Who art— 
 
 {Oh, everlasting affirmation of the One Reality, 
 Thou art indeed!) 
 
 In Heaven — 
 
 (As St. Francis said: ^'In heaven, that is, in the 
 angels and in the Saints, illuminating them with 
 Light, for Thou art Truth, inflaming them with Love, 
 for Thou art Love Itself." And from Heaven, 
 through Thy Angels and Saints, Thou givest light and 
 life and love to thy servants of all ranks and station: 
 to poets, artists, teachers, statesmen, rulers, workmen, 
 craftsmen, and men of business; men of the law, men 
 of trade; tillers of the soil; fishers in the sea — but 
 most of all to those who, like Mary, the sister of busy 
 Martha, are content to love Thee and to look upon 
 Thee.) 
 
 Hallowed be Thy Name — 
 
 {Here is the Object and the Purpose of all life and 
 labour and art — the glory of God: for He, being God, 
 therefore Good, hence our Lover, knows that in glori- 
 fying God man finds his true life, his real liberty, his 
 only lasting happiness.) 
 
 Thy Kingdom come — 
 
 {Oh, quickly come!) 
 
 Thy Will be done — 
 
 {Which are the words that in all finality express 
 the central and fundamental essential of human life, 
 art, government, science and religion. God is. His 
 will be done. How could it be possible for aught 
 but good to come of that Will, which is the Will-to- 
 Love?) 
 
346 The High Romance 
 
 Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who 
 trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, 
 and deliver us from evil. Amen. 
 
 The Colophon 
 
 I have many good friends, I know, to whom I 
 appear a turn-coat to great causes: the causes of 
 "progress," "enlightenment," "humanity," to which 
 I was once so passionately devoted. They cannot un- 
 derstand my "reactionary step." But they believe 
 the reasons for my action to be rooted in what they 
 feel to be an excess of emotionalism in my tempera- 
 ment, combined with a strain of atavistic romanticism. 
 . . . The odour and the misty coils of incense fuming 
 before the candle-lighted altar, the ritualistic beauty 
 of sacerdotal ceremonies, the glamorous enchantment 
 of occult interests, these, together with music, and, 
 no doubt, the relief which adhesion to fixed points 
 of conduct and belief gave to a nature unfitted for the 
 cold, hard, steady labour of intellectual and moral 
 pursuits, explain to their minds my surprising and 
 saddening act. . . . Well, possibly, nay, probably, 
 my own explanation will leave these friends uncon- 
 vinced; nevertheless I take the chance. I owe it to 
 myself as well as to these friends to give my own ac- 
 count of the matter. 
 
 I fear I am indeed almost fanatical in my devotion 
 to art, and that my cravings for its manifestations are 
 almost too intense — but as for finding Catholicism a 
 luxurious revel of aestheticism and romanticism — 
 Ah, but no! It is true that there is great art in the 
 Church; but it does not show itself in any marked 
 
Conclusion 347 
 
 degree at present in these modem times, certainly not 
 in tlie United States. It will come by and by, yes, 
 but now there is little or none. Our church music 
 generally is atrocious; no condemnation can be too 
 strong. Our architecture is not much better. Our 
 statues and our pictures, and our books and our peri- 
 odical press (save for a few and now happily increas- 
 ing number of writers and journals) are frightfully 
 banal. The level of culture and art, at present, is 
 deplorably low. If I had joined the Catholic Church 
 for the sake of satisfying my aesthetic desires, no mis- 
 take of my life would have been greater. . . . 
 
 But I joined it to satisfy the hunger of my soul 
 for God. For I would rather, a hundred million 
 times over, be the crudest, most ignorant, humblest 
 man who ever came out of Catholic France or Ireland, 
 or Poland, or Silesia; I would rather be an African 
 jungle dweller, or a Digger Indian, and have true 
 Catholic faith than to be the greatest and most cul- 
 tured artist in the world, and devoid of faith. 
 
 For it is by faith that we live the only life worth 
 while, the life of the true romance. 
 
 And God who is no niggard with His bounty added 
 to His gift of faith two minor yet great favours, by 
 means of which it was more practicable for me to 
 make my faith work, in the pragmatic sense of the 
 word — that is, to render it in terms of art, and terms 
 of life. Faith's deeper and truest work has lit- 
 tle direct relation, oftentimes, to outward and visi- 
 ble results; but for me the exterior results were per- 
 mitted. 
 
348 The High Romance 
 
 For on the day when I kneh before His altar, on 
 the feast day of Mary, Queen of Garmel, God took 
 away from me, instantly, and fully, all temptation to 
 fall into that degrading and crippling vice to which I 
 have been obliged to refer too often for my own com- 
 fort — I mean, the evil habit of drinking to excess. It 
 was banished; it never returned. What my own will 
 could not do, God's will accomplished. 
 
 Also, He restored me to health; He gave me back 
 my energy and bodily strength. 
 
 Therefore, when there came another day upon 
 which I once more knelt before God's altar, and was 
 admitted to membership in the Third Order of Most 
 Holy Mary of Mount Garmel, I assumed — in accord- 
 ance with the ancient custom — a title, and became 
 Michael of the Will of God. For now I knew that 
 indeed the will of man is a greater and vaster and 
 more awful force than I had ever dreamed of it being 
 in the days of my most exalted self -deification. I 
 also realized that there is only one employment 
 worthy of such a power, namely, to work the will of 
 God. Far be it from me to dare to affirm that I have 
 succeeded — or that I may ever wholly succeed — in 
 this great work; but I know that this work is the only 
 thing which is commensurate with man's dignity, and 
 his imperial destiny, and I know that it is the high se- 
 cret of the Holy Grail, the Cup of Quest — ^that Grail 
 which I sought all my life, and which all men seek in 
 their hearts, and which so long baffled my search, but 
 which in a million places throughout the world, every 
 minute of the day and night, is held up, shining and 
 marvellous, in the plain sight of all men, while the 
 appointed Servant of the Sacrifice says above it: 
 
Conclusion 349 
 
 "0 God, who in creating human nature, didst won- 
 derfully dignify it, and hast still more wonderfully 
 renewed it; grant that, by the mystery of this water 
 and wine, we may be made partakers of his divinity 
 who vouchsafed to become partaker of our hu- 
 manity," 
 
 So I came back from far places to my poor, shat- 
 tered Book. Returning to the hut in the pine wood 
 of Garmel, for a space, I put together the fragments 
 of all I had written — such a huge mass! — during 
 some twenty years. I left out a great deal. There 
 were certain chapters and episodes which made liter- 
 ary capital of what, later on, I dealt with in the only 
 right way: in the confessional — and all such morbidi- 
 ties I threw into the fire, where they belonged. Into 
 the same clean purging flame, also, went heaps of 
 similar stuff; all the tortuous efforts to express my 
 baffled questing; the huge, crazy novel written during 
 that frenetic period in New York when I shut myself 
 up in my garret; the self-willed rules of life which 
 I could not follow; the creeds and confessions. So 
 I burned my bridges, my dangerous and fantastic 
 bridges. And because I had learned that not shout- 
 ing from the housetops, but silence, and reticence, 
 were the true friends of the soul, I considered whether 
 I should not let this book also perish; but be- 
 cause my story has such a happy ending, I kept it 
 from the fire, and I send it forth as an act of 
 faith. 
 
 And now, as the colophon to my story, I wish and 
 pray for all who may be good and patient enough to 
 
350 The High Romance 
 
 read my words, success in their own adventures, the 
 gaining of the quest of their high romance, and joy 
 and peace at the end of all, the joy of Jesus Christ. 
 
 THE END 
 
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