CHAPTER XI
THE GREAT ADVENTURE
Mr. Wickson did not send for father. They met by chance on the
ferry-boat to San Francisco, so that the warning he gave father was
not premeditated. Had they not met accidentally, there would not
have been any warning. Not that the outcome would have been
different, however. Father came of stout old Mayflower* stock, and
the blood was imperative in him.
* One of the first ships that carried colonies to America, after
the discovery of the New World. Descendants of these original
colonists were for a while inordinately proud of their genealogy;
but in time the blood became so widely diffused that it ran in the
veins practically of all Americans.
"Ernest was right," he told me, as soon as he had returned home.
"Ernest is a very remarkable young man, and I'd rather see you his
wife than the wife of Rockefeller himself or the King of England."
"What's the matter?" I asked in alarm.
"The Oligarchy is about to tread upon our faces--yours and mine.
Wickson as much as told me so. He was very kind--for an oligarch.
He offered to reinstate me in the university. What do you think of
that? He, Wickson, a sordid money-grabber, has the power to
determine whether I shall or shall not teach in the university of
the state. But he offered me even better than that--offered to
make me president of some great college of physical sciences that
is being planned--the Oligarchy must get rid of its surplus
somehow, you see.
"'Do you remember what I told that socialist lover of your
daughter's?' he said. 'I told him that we would walk upon the
faces of the working class. And so we shall. As for you, I have
for you a deep respect as a scientist; but if you throw your
fortunes in with the working class--well, watch out for your face,
that is all.' And then he turned and left me."
"It means we'll have to marry earlier than you planned," was
Ernest's comment when we told him.
I could not follow his reasoning, but I was soon to learn it. It
was at this time that the quarterly dividend of the Sierra Mills
was paid--or, rather, should have been paid, for father did not
receive his. After waiting several days, father wrote to the
secretary. Promptly came the reply that there was no record on the
books of father's owning any stock, and a polite request for more
explicit information.
"I'll make it explicit enough, confound him," father declared, and
departed for the bank to get the stock in question from his safe-
deposit box.
"Ernest is a very remarkable man," he said when he got back and
while I was helping him off with his overcoat. "I repeat, my
daughter, that young man of yours is a very remarkable young man."
I had learned, whenever he praised Ernest in such fashion, to
expect disaster.
"They have already walked upon my face," father explained. "There
was no stock. The box was empty. You and Ernest will have to get
married pretty quickly."
Father insisted on laboratory methods. He brought the Sierra Mills
into court, but he could not bring the books of the Sierra Mills
into court. He did not control the courts, and the Sierra Mills
did. That explained it all. He was thoroughly beaten by the law,
and the bare-faced robbery held good.
It is almost laughable now, when I look back on it, the way father
was beaten. He met Wickson accidentally on the street in San
Francisco, and he told Wickson that he was a damned scoundrel. And
then father was arrested for attempted assault, fined in the police
court, and bound over to keep the peace. It was all so ridiculous
that when he got home he had to laugh himself. But what a furor
was raised in the local papers! There was grave talk about the
bacillus of violence that infected all men who embraced socialism;
and father, with his long and peaceful life, was instanced as a
shining example of how the bacillus of violence worked. Also, it
was asserted by more than one paper that father's mind had weakened
under the strain of scientific study, and confinement in a state
asylum for the insane was suggested. Nor was this merely talk. It
was an imminent peril. But father was wise enough to see it. He
had the Bishop's experience to lesson from, and he lessoned well.
He kept quiet no matter what injustice was perpetrated on him, and
really, I think, surprised his enemies.
There was the matter of the house--our home. A mortgage was
foreclosed on it, and we had to give up possession. Of course
there wasn't any mortgage, and never had been any mortgage. The
ground had been bought outright, and the house had been paid for
when it was built. And house and lot had always been free and
unencumbered. Nevertheless there was the mortgage, properly and
legally drawn up and signed, with a record of the payments of
interest through a number of years. Father made no outcry. As he
had been robbed of his money, so was he now robbed of his home.
And he had no recourse. The machinery of society was in the hands
of those who were bent on breaking him. He was a philosopher at
heart, and he was no longer even angry.
"I am doomed to be broken," he said to me; "but that is no reason
that I should not try to be shattered as little as possible. These
old bones of mine are fragile, and I've learned my lesson. God
knows I don't want to spend my last days in an insane asylum."
Which reminds me of Bishop Morehouse, whom I have neglected for
many pages. But first let me tell of my marriage. In the play of
events, my marriage sinks into insignificance, I know, so I shall
barely mention it.
"Now we shall become real proletarians," father said, when we were
driven from our home. "I have often envied that young man of yours
for his actual knowledge of the proletariat. Now I shall see and
learn for myself."
Father must have had strong in him the blood of adventure. He
looked upon our catastrophe in the light of an adventure. No anger
nor bitterness possessed him. He was too philosophic and simple to
be vindictive, and he lived too much in the world of mind to miss
the creature comforts we were giving up. So it was, when we moved
to San Francisco into four wretched rooms in the slum south of
Market Street, that he embarked upon the adventure with the joy and
enthusiasm of a child--combined with the clear sight and mental
grasp of an extraordinary intellect. He really never crystallized
mentally. He had no false sense of values. Conventional or
habitual values meant nothing to him. The only values he
recognized were mathematical and scientific facts. My father was a
great man. He had the mind and the soul that only great men have.
In ways he was even greater than Ernest, than whom I have known
none greater.
Even I found some relief in our change of living. If nothing else,
I was escaping from the organized ostracism that had been our
increasing portion in the university town ever since the enmity of
the nascent Oligarchy had been incurred. And the change was to me
likewise adventure, and the greatest of all, for it was love-
adventure. The change in our fortunes had hastened my marriage,
and it was as a wife that I came to live in the four rooms on Pell
Street, in the San Francisco slum.
And this out of all remains: I made Ernest happy. I came into his
stormy life, not as a new perturbing force, but as one that made
toward peace and repose. I gave him rest. It was the guerdon of
my love for him. It was the one infallible token that I had not
failed. To bring forgetfulness, or the light of gladness, into
those poor tired eyes of his--what greater joy could have blessed
me than that?
Those dear tired eyes. He toiled as few men ever toiled, and all
his lifetime he toiled for others. That was the measure of his
manhood. He was a humanist and a lover. And he, with his
incarnate spirit of battle, his gladiator body and his eagle
spirit--he was as gentle and tender to me as a poet. He was a
poet. A singer in deeds. And all his life he sang the song of
man. And he did it out of sheer love of man, and for man he gave
his life and was crucified.
And all this he did with no hope of future reward. In his
conception of things there was no future life. He, who fairly
burnt with immortality, denied himself immortality--such was the
paradox of him. He, so warm in spirit, was dominated by that cold
and forbidding philosophy, materialistic monism. I used to refute
him by telling him that I measured his immortality by the wings of
his soul, and that I should have to live endless aeons in order to
achieve the full measurement. Whereat he would laugh, and his arms
would leap out to me, and he would call me his sweet metaphysician;
and the tiredness would pass out of his eyes, and into them would
flood the happy love-light that was in itself a new and sufficient
advertisement of his immortality.
Also, he used to call me his dualist, and he would explain how
Kant, by means of pure reason, had abolished reason, in order to
worship God. And he drew the parallel and included me guilty of a
similar act. And when I pleaded guilty, but defended the act as
highly rational, he but pressed me closer and laughed as only one
of God's own lovers could laugh. I was wont to deny that heredity
and environment could explain his own originality and genius, any
more than could the cold groping finger of science catch and
analyze and classify that elusive essence that lurked in the
constitution of life itself.
I held that space was an apparition of God, and that soul was a
projection of the character of God; and when he called me his sweet
metaphysician, I called him my immortal materialist. And so we
loved and were happy; and I forgave him his materialism because of
his tremendous work in the world, performed without thought of
soul-gain thereby, and because of his so exceeding modesty of
spirit that prevented him from having pride and regal consciousness
of himself and his soul.
But he had pride. How could he have been an eagle and not have
pride? His contention was that it was finer for a finite mortal
speck of life to feel Godlike, than for a god to feel godlike; and
so it was that he exalted what he deemed his mortality. He was
fond of quoting a fragment from a certain poem. He had never seen
the whole poem, and he had tried vainly to learn its authorship. I
here give the fragment, not alone because he loved it, but because
it epitomized the paradox that he was in the spirit of him, and his
conception of his spirit. For how can a man, with thrilling, and
burning, and exaltation, recite the following and still be mere
mortal earth, a bit of fugitive force, an evanescent form? Here it
is:
"Joy upon joy and gain upon gain
Are the destined rights of my birth,
And I shout the praise of my endless days
To the echoing edge of the earth.
Though I suffer all deaths that a man can die
To the uttermost end of time,
I have deep-drained this, my cup of bliss,
In every age and clime--
"The froth of Pride, the tang of Power,
The sweet of Womanhood!
I drain the lees upon my knees,
For oh, the draught is good;
I drink to Life, I drink to Death,
And smack my lips with song,
For when I die, another 'I' shall pass the cup along.
"The man you drove from Eden's grove
Was I, my Lord, was I,
And I shall be there when the earth and the air
Are rent from sea to sky;
For it is my world, my gorgeous world,
The world of my dearest woes,
From the first faint cry of the newborn
To the rack of the woman's throes.
"Packed with the pulse of an unborn race,
Torn with a world's desire,
The surging flood of my wild young blood
Would quench the judgment fire.
I am Man, Man, Man, from the tingling flesh
To the dust of my earthly goal,
From the nestling gloom of the pregnant womb
To the sheen of my naked soul.
Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh
The whole world leaps to my will,
And the unslaked thirst of an Eden cursed
Shall harrow the earth for its fill.
Almighty God, when I drain life's glass
Of all its rainbow gleams,
The hapless plight of eternal night
Shall be none too long for my dreams.
"The man you drove from Eden's grove
Was I, my Lord, was I,
And I shall be there when the earth and the air
Are rent from sea to sky;
For it is my world, my gorgeous world,
The world of my dear delight,
From the brightest gleam of the Arctic stream
To the dusk of my own love-night."
Ernest always overworked. His wonderful constitution kept him up;
but even that constitution could not keep the tired look out of his
eyes. His dear, tired eyes! He never slept more than four and
one-half hours a night; yet he never found time to do all the work
he wanted to do. He never ceased from his activities as a
propagandist, and was always scheduled long in advance for lectures
to workingmen's organizations. Then there was the campaign. He
did a man's full work in that alone. With the suppression of the
socialist publishing houses, his meagre royalties ceased, and he
was hard-put to make a living; for he had to make a living in
addition to all his other labor. He did a great deal of
translating for the magazines on scientific and philosophic
subjects; and, coming home late at night, worn out from the strain
of the campaign, he would plunge into his translating and toil on
well into the morning hours. And in addition to everything, there
was his studying. To the day of his death he kept up his studies,
and he studied prodigiously.
And yet he found time in which to love me and make me happy. But
this was accomplished only through my merging my life completely
into his. I learned shorthand and typewriting, and became his
secretary. He insisted that I succeeded in cutting his work in
half; and so it was that I schooled myself to understand his work.
Our interests became mutual, and we worked together and played
together.
And then there were our sweet stolen moments in the midst of our
work--just a word, or caress, or flash of love-light; and our
moments were sweeter for being stolen. For we lived on the
heights, where the air was keen and sparkling, where the toil was
for humanity, and where sordidness and selfishness never entered.
We loved love, and our love was never smirched by anything less
than the best. And this out of all remains: I did not fail. I
gave him rest--he who worked so hard for others, my dear, tired-
eyed mortalist.
