8Exile

Priscilla Harden Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair, Sr.

Upton Sinclair at the age of eight

Upton Sinclair at twenty-seven, when he was writingThe Jungle

Winston Churchill reviewsThe Jungle

George Bernard Shawat Ayot-St. Lawrence, about 1913

Mary Craig Sinclair and Upton Sinclair in Bermuda, 1913

George Sterling, his wife, Carrie, and Jack London

Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz

Sergei Eisenstein, about 1933

Upton Sinclair during the EPIC campaign, 1934

Upton Sinclair and Harry Hopkins, 1934

Flivver Kingin Detroit, 1937

Upton Sinclair, about 1960, with autographed picture of Albert Einstein

Upton Sinclair standing before his home in Monrovia, California

May Hard Sinclair and Upton Sinclair, 1962

Upton Sinclair with seventy-nine of the books he has written

lament the fact that the servant did not always remember to draw the water for his bath; I was tempted to narrate how I bathed every morning of that winter in Arden with water in a tin washbasin and a newspaper spread upon a tent floor. I remember our Christmas turkey, which we hung up outside in the cold; we cooked it joint by joint, hung by a wire inside the little round wood stove. Nobody’s turkey ever tasted better.

When Mitchell Kennerley acceptedLove’s Pilgrimage, and paid me an advance of twelve hundred and fifty dollars, I decided to build a house on my single-tax lot at the edge of the Forest of Arden. Frank Stephens was the builder, and I didn’t hold it against him that, like all other builders, he underestimated the cost. It came to twenty-six hundred dollars and kept me scratching for quite a while. I was contributing articles toPhysical Cultureat a hundred and fifty dollars a month, which provided my living.

The little two-story cottage was completed early in the spring of 1911. It was painted brown on the outside, and stained on the inside. There was a living room in front with an open fireplace and a chimney that smoked. High on the wall, a shelf ran all the way round and held most of my books. In the rear was one small bedroom, and a still smaller kitchen, plus a bathroom without plumbing. Upstairs was an attic that I planned some day to make into two rooms. We moved in, feeling most luxurious after the tents. Next door was a one-room cabin belonging to Scott Nearing; I rented it for a study, and so had everything of a material nature that a man of letters could desire.

The Forest of Arden turned green again, and put flower carpets on its floor, and the tennis court was rolled and marked, and everything was jolly. The young people were preparingThe Merchant of Venice, and the Esperantists of America held a convention in the big barn; I studied that language for three weeks, and when I went to supper at the inn I would say,“Mi desiras lo puddingo”—at least that is the way I recall it after fifty years. I was writing a sequel toLove’s Pilgrimage, which I completed but have never published.

Unknown to me, the fates had been weaving a net about my life; and now they were ready to draw it tight. Corydon wrote that Mary Craig Kimbrough was coming to New York to talkwith a publisher who had read her life of Winnie Davis, and that she, Corydon, was coming with her. Also there came a letter from Harry Kemp, saying that he was finishing at the university, and was then going to “beat” his way east and visit Arden. George Sterling was on his way from California to New York—he too was to be tied up in that net!

There was an odd development, which served as a sort of curtain raiser to the main tragedy. A little discussion club got into a dispute with George Brown, the anarchist shoemaker. The club members were accustomed to hold meetings in the outdoor theater, and Brown would come and air his opinions on the physiology of sex. The women and girls didn’t like it. They asked him to shut up, but he stood on the elemental right of an anarchist to say anything anywhere at any time. He broke up several meetings—until finally the executives of the club went to Wilmington and swore out a warrant for his arrest for disturbing the peace.

That, of course, brought the newspaper reporters, and put my picture in the papers again. I had had nothing to do with the discussion club or with the arrest of Brown, but I lived in Arden and was part of the scenery. The anarchist was sentenced to five days on the rockpile at the state prison; he came back boiling with rage and plotting a dire revenge: he would have all the members of the baseball team arrested for playing on Sunday, andtheywould have a turn on the rockpile! He would add Upton Sinclair, who had been playing tennis on Sunday, and thus would punish Arden by putting it on the front page of every newspaper in America. He carried out this scheme, and eleven of us were summoned to court, and under a long-forgotten statute, dating from 1793, were sentenced to eighteen hours on the rockpile. This made one of the funniest newspaper stories ever telegraphed over the world—you may find the details inThe Brass Checkif you are curious. What the anarchist shoemaker did not realize, and what nobody else realized, was that he was setting the stage and assembling the audience for the notorious Sinclair-Kemp divorce scandal. The fates were against me.

The story of Corydon and Thyrsis comes now to its painful climax. They had been married for eleven years, and for the last seven or eight had realized that they were mismated. They talked much of divorce, and according to accepted conventions, Corydon was the one to get it. But the world made divorce difficult and placed handicaps upon a divorced woman; so Corydon kept hesitating, taking one step forward and two steps back.

If this story belonged to Thyrsis alone, he would tell it all, on the theory that the past is past and never returns, and the only use we can make of blunders is to help others in avoiding them. But the story is Corydon’s also, and Corydon found herself a new husband and a new life, and has long since retired from the limelight.

Thyrsis, an unhappily married man, bore among his friends the reputation of being “puritanical”; a onetime virtue that now ranks as a dangerous disease. About the bedside of the patient gather the psychoanalysts and up-to-the-minute “intellectuals”; they take his temperature, or lack of it, and shake their heads anxiously over his subnormal condition. Jack London was much worried about Thyrsis and wrote warning letters; but in the course of time, Jack’s own theories brought him to a situation where he could not have his wife and another woman at the same time, and so he voluntarily removed himself from the world. Then Frank Harris took over the case of Thyrsis and prescribed for the patient a tempestuous love affair. No man can become a great novelist without one, it seems, nor can a modern autobiography be worthy of suppression by the police unless it contains several adulteries per volume.

Let the fact be recorded that Thyrsis was capable of falling in love, and if he did not do it frequently, it was because he had so many other matters on his mind. There is a story having to do with this period, which ought to be told because of the satisfaction it will bring to the lovers of love, and to those who dislike the puritanical Thyrsis and will be pleased to see him “get his.”

It was the winter of 1910-11, when Corydon had gone south, having once more decided upon a divorce. Thyrsis was a free man, so he thought—and, incidentally, a lonely and restless one. He was thirty-two at this time, and went up to New York to attend a gathering in Carnegie Hall, where the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was acting as host to Victor Berger, socialist Congressman-elect. Thyrsis came early, and in one of the aisles came face to face with a lovely young woman of twenty-one or two, wearing the red badge of an usher. In those observant eyes and that frank open countenance was revealed something he had been seeking for a long time; there was a mental flash, and the two moved automatically toward each other. Said she, without hesitation: “You are Thyrsis?” Said he: “You are Inez Milholland?”

A Vassar girl, with a wealthy father, Inez had joined the Socialist Party and had become an active suffragette—all of which, of course, made a sensation in the newspapers. That evening, after the meeting, Thyrsis went with her to her hotel, and they sat in the lobby conversing until three o’clock in the morning, when the place was deserted by all but the night watchman. What did they not talk about, in the vast range of the socialist and suffrage movements in America, and in England, where Inez had been to school; the people they knew, the books they had read, the events that the future held behind its veil!

“I never met anyone I could talk to so easily,” said Thyrsis; and Inez returned the compliment. “But don’t fall in love with me,” she added. When he asked, “Why not?” she answered, “I am already in love, and you would only make yourself unhappy.” Later, she told him that she too was unhappy; it was a married man, and she would not break up another woman’s home butwould only eat her heart out. Again that old, old story that Heine sings, and for which neither socialists nor suffragists have any remedy!

Es ist eine alte GeschichteDoch klingt sie immer neu.

Inez desired to meet Berger, and he came next morning. The three of us went for a drive and had lunch at the Claremont. We spent the afternoon walking in the park, then had dinner at the hotel, and spent the evening together, solving all the problems of human society. It was another intellectual explosion, this timeà trois. Said the socialist Congressman: “Thyrsis, if it wouldn’t be that I am a family man, I would run away with that girl so quick you would never see her once again.” Thyrsis repeated that to Inez, who smiled and said, “He is mistaken; it is not like that.”

Thyrsis disregarded the sisterly advice that had been given to him. He fell in love—with such desperate and terrifying violence as he had never conceived possible in his hard-working, sober life. He understood for the first time the meaning of that ancient symbol of the little archer with the bow and arrow. Commonplace as the metaphor seemed, there was no other to be used; it was like being shot—a convulsive pain, a sense of complete collapse, an anguish repeated, day after day, without any respite or hope of it.

He could not give up. It seemed to him that here was the woman who had been made for him, and the thought that he had to lose her was not to be borne. He would go back to Arden and write letters—such mad, wild, pain-distracted letters as would satisfy the most exacting intellectual, the most implacable hater of Puritans! Inez afterward assured him that she had destroyed these letters, which was kind of her. She was always kind, and straightforward, saying what she meant, as men and women will do in utopia.

The storm passed, as storms do, and new life came to Thyrsis. Four years afterward he met Inez Milholland again. She was now married, and it seemed to Thyrsis that the world had laid its paralyzing hand upon her; she was no longer simple, in the manner of the early gods. Was it that the spell was broken? Orwas it that Thyrsis had an abnormal dislike for fashionable costumes, large picture hats, and long jade earrings? Another two years, and Inez, a suffrage politician, came out to California and broke her heart trying to carry the state for Hughes, on the theory that he would be more generous to the cause than Woodrow Wilson. This was supposed to be strategy, but to Thyrsis it seemed insanity. In any case, what a melancholy descent from the young ardors of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society! She died of exhaustion.

The story of Corydon and Thyrsis comes to an end in the year 1911. George Sterling was coming from California, Harry Kemp from Kansas; Mary Craig Kimbrough was in New York to consult with a publisher, and Corydon had come with her.

George Sterling, the day of his arrival, came to call upon Corydon in her father’s home. There he met the young lady from Mississippi and promptly fell upon his knees before her, after the fashion of romantic poets, even after they are forty. She was pale from a winter’s labor over manuscript, and George called her a “star in alabaster” and other extravagant things that moved her to merry laughter. Later on, Thyrsis met the couple walking on the street and stopped to greet them. Said Thyrsis matter-of-factly: “You don’t look well, Craig. Really, you look like a skull!” George raged, “I am going to kill that man some day!” But Craig replied, “There is the first man in the world who ever told me the truth.”

George Sterling, an unhappily married man, wanted to marry Craig. She told him, “I can never love any man.” When he demanded to know the reason, she told him that her heart had been broken by an early love affair at home; she knew she would never love again. But the poet could not accept that statement; he began writing sonnets to her—more than a hundred in the course of the next year. Eighteen years later it was my sad duty to edit theseSonnets to Craigfor publication, and they were received by the high-brow literary world with some uncertainty. They have a fatal defect—it is possible to understand what they mean. Literary tastes move in cycles, and just now poetry loversare impressed by eccentricities of language and punctuation. But the day will come when they care about real feelings, expressed in musical language, and then they will thrill to such lines as these:

All gracious things, and delicate and sweet,Within the spaces of thy beauty meet

And again:

Sweet in this love are terrors that beguileAnd joys that make a hazard of my breath.

And again:

Stand back from me! Have mercy for a space,Lest madness break thine image in my mind!

In connection with this unhappy love affair, there was another curious tangle of circumstances. The girlhood sweetheart of Craig in the Far South had brought to her a poem so sad that it had moved her to tears, and she had carried it ever since in her memory. “The Man I Might Have Been” was its title—the grief-stricken cry of those who fall into the trap of John Barleycorn. Now here was the author of that poem, in love with the same woman; and both the unhappy suitors—the Southern boy and the crowned poet of California—were fated to end their lives by their own hands, and those of John Barleycorn.

Thyrsis was invited up to New York to give advice about the life of Winnie Davis. It was April and happened to be warm, so he wore tennis shoes because they were comfortable; to make up for this informality he added kid gloves—which seemed to Mary Craig Kimbrough of Mississippi the funniest combination ever heard of. She said nothing, being the soul of politeness; but her lively red-brown eyes took in everything. She was learning about these strange new creatures called radicals, and their ideas, some of which appeared sensible and others crazy. Watching Thyrsis, she thought, “The funny, funny man!” She watched him, thinking the same thought for a matter of half a century; but she did not always have to be polite about it.

Corydon, Thyrsis, and Craig settled themselves in the little cottage on the edge of the Forest of Arden. Springtime had come,and the Arden folk were givingMidsummer Night’s Dream; Corydon was Titania, in yellow tights and a golden crown. At this juncture came Harry Kemp, having completed another year at the University of Kansas; he was lugging two suitcases full of books and manuscripts, plus an extra blue shirt and a pair of socks. There was a girl at Arden who was a lover of poetry, and Thyrsis, fond matchmaker, had the idea that the poet might become interested in this girl. But the fates had other plans, and were not slow to reveal them. Corydon was interested in the poet.

It was during this time that Harry Kemp wrote a sonnet to Thyrsis and handed it to him with the words, “You may publish this some day.” It will not be ranked as a great sonnet, but it is curious as a part of the story; so, after Harry’s death, his permission is accepted.

Child, wandering down the great world for a dayAnd with a child’s soul seeing thru and thruThe passing prejudice to Truth’s own view.Immortal spirit robed in mortal day,Striving to find and follow the one wayThat is your way, none other’s—to be trueTo that which makes a sincere man of you!Still be yourself, and let tongues say their say!Still fling the seed with daring hand abroad,And, then, mayhap, the Race to come will beGladdened, with ripened fruit and bursting podOf Love, and Brotherhood, and Liberty—Open to Nature and Her Laws from GodAs spreading gulfs lie open to the Sea!

Still fling the seed with daring hand abroad,And, then, mayhap, the Race to come will beGladdened, with ripened fruit and bursting podOf Love, and Brotherhood, and Liberty—Open to Nature and Her Laws from GodAs spreading gulfs lie open to the Sea!

Corydon went to New York, to the apartment of her mother and father, which was vacant in the summer. Harry followed her; and then came Thyrsis, and the great divorce scandal burst upon the world. It was made by the newspapers, so the story had to be told inThe Brass Check. There seems no good reason to repeat it here; suffice it to say that Thyrsis found himself presented in the capitalist press as having taught his wife free love and then repudiated her when she took him at his word. The newspapers invented statements, they set traps, and betrayed confidences—and when they got through with their victim, they had turned his hair gray.

Corydon and Harry fled from the storm. But after a few days they came back; and then there were interviews of many columns, and Sunday-supplement pages with many pictures, in the course of which the great American public learned all about Thyrsis’ dietetic eccentricities and his objections to coffee and cigarettes. Corydon caused vast glee to the New York smart set by describing her life partner as “an essential monogamist”; those who read and laughed did not remember that only last week they had read that he was a “free lover.” As a matter of fact, neither the writers nor the readers knew what was meant by either term, so the incongruity did not trouble them.

Thyrsis filed suit for divorce in New York state, which is ruled by Catholic laws, administered by Catholic judges. If in his writings you find a certain acerbity toward the Catholic political machine, bear in mind these experiences, which seared into a writer’s soul scars never to be effaced. The Catholic judge appointed a “referee” to hear testimony in the case, and this referee, moved by stupidity plus idle curiosity, asked Thyrsis questions concerning his wife’s actions that under the New York law the husband was not permitted to answer. But the referee demanded that they be answered, and what was Thyrsis to do? He answered; so the Catholic judge had a pretext upon which to reject the recommendation of his referee.

The court and the referee had between them several hundred dollars of Thyrsis’ hard-earned money, which, under the law, they were permitted to keep—even though Thyrsis got no divorce. He filed another suit and paid more money, and waited another three or four months, in the midst of journalistic excursions and alarms. Another referee took testimony, and this time was careful to ask only the exactly prescribed questions; in due course another decision was handed down by another Catholic judge, who had also been “seen” by parties interested. This time the decision was that Thyrsis had failed to beat up his wife, or to choke or stab or poison her, or otherwise manifest masculineresentment at her unfaithfulness; therefore he was suspected of “collusion,” and the application was again denied. Of course the judge did not literally say that Thyrsis should have behaved in those violent ways; but that was the only possible implication of his decision. When a husband was fair and decent, desiring his dissatisfied wife to find happiness if she could—that was a dangerous and unorthodox kind of behavior, suggestive of “radical” ideas. Men and women suspected of harboring such ideas should be punished by being tied together in the holy bonds of matrimony and left to tear each other to pieces like the Kilkenny cats.

In February 1912 Thyrsis took his son and departed for Europe, traveling second-class in a third-class Italian steamer; sick in body and soul, and not sure whether he was going to live or die, nor caring very much. He had managed to borrow a little money for the trip, and he had a job, writing monthly articles forPhysical Culture Magazinefor a hundred and fifty dollars each. As a writer of books he was destroyed, and nobody thought he would ever have a public again. Mitchell Kennerley, publisher ofLove’s Pilgrimage, remarked, “If people can read about you for two cents, they are not going to pay a dollar and a half to do it.”Love’s Pilgrimagehad been published a month or two before the divorce scandal broke and had started as a whirlwind success—selling a thousand copies a week. The week after the scandal broke, it dropped dead, and the publisher did not sell a hundred copies in a year.

Springtime in Florence! “Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehn?” Could any man walk under Tuscan skies in March and fail to be happy? George D. Herron had a villa on the slopes towards Fiesole, where he lived in what peace he could find; Thyrsis spent a couple of weeks with him, and talked over old times and the state of the world, with the great cataclysm of World War I only two years and a half in the future. Carrie Rand Herron played Schumann’sWidmungin the twilight—and for her a death by cancer was even nearer than the war.

Was Thyrsis happy? In truth, he hardly knew where he wasor what he was doing. Places and events went by as if in a dream, and nothing had meaning unless it spoke of pain and enslavement, in America as in Italy. The grim castle of Strozzi was an incarnation in stone of the Beef Trust or the Steel Trust. Crowds of olive-skinned starving children with sore eyes, peering out of doorways of tenements in the back streets of Florence, were simply Mulberry Row in New York. Galleries full of multiplied madonnas and crucified martyrs spoke of Tammany Hall and its Catholic machine, with Catholic cops twisting the arms of socialist working girls on the picket line; Catholic archbishops striding down the aisle of a hall commanding the police to arrest women lecturers on birth control; Catholic judges sitting on the bench in black silk robes, punishing socialist muckrakers for being too decent to their erring wives.

Milan: a great city, with many sights, but for Thyrsis only one attraction—a socialist paper in an obscure working-class quarter, with an editor who was translating Thyrsis’ books. And then Switzerland, with towering snow-clad mountains and clear blue lakes—and another socialist editor. Then Germany, and one of the Lietz schools, a new experiment in education, where Thyrsis had arranged to leave his son: a lovely spot on the edge of the Harz Mountains, with a troop of merry youngsters living the outdoor life. Nearby were miles of potatoes and sugar beets, with Polish women working in gangs like Negro slaves. There was another school in Schloss Bieberstein, for the older boys, fine strapping fellows, bare-legged and bare-armed, hardened to the cold, and ready for the slaughter pits; in three years most of them would be turned into manure for potatoes and sugar beets.

Then Holland, where Frederik van Eeden had undertaken to help Thyrsis get the freedom that was not to be had in New York. A lawyer was consulted and put the matter up to the startled judges of the Amsterdam courts. Under the Dutch law, the husband was not required to prove that he had beaten or choked or poisoned his wife; he might receive a divorce on the basis of a signed statement by the wife, admitting infidelity. But what about granting this privilege to a wandering author from America? How long would he have to remain a resident of Holland in order to be entitled to the benefit of civilized and enlightened law? The judges finally agreed that they would admit this one American to their clemency—but never again! Amsterdam was not going to be turned into another Reno!

A visit to England. Gaylord Wilshire was living in Hampstead, endeavoring to finance his gold mine in London. The great coal strike was on, and Tom Mann, editor of a syndicalist newspaper, was sent to jail for six months. Wilshire, who by now had come to despair of political action for the workers, leaped into the breach, and he and Thyrsis got out several issues of the paper—the contribution of the latter consisting of a debate in which he opposed the leading idea of the editor. Apparently that satisfied the London police, for the eccentric Americans were allowed to argue without molestation. The newspaper reporters came swarming, and it was a novel experience for Thyrsis to give interviews and read next morning what he said, instead of how he looked and what he ate and how his wife had run away with a “box-car poet.”

Some things he liked in England, and some not. A ghastly thing to see the effect upon the human race of slow starvation continued through many centuries! Here were creatures distorted out of human semblance; swarms of them turning out on a bank holiday to play, having forgotten how to run, almost how to walk; shambling like apes, drooping like baboons, guffawing with loud noises, speaking a jabber hardly to be understood. They lay around on Hampstead Heath, men and women in each others’ arms, a sight new to an American. Whether they were drunk or sober was difficult for a stranger to tell.

The miners’ strike committee held its meetings in the Westminster Hotel; and just across the way were the Parliament buildings, and labor members to welcome a socialist author. John Burns took Thyrsis onto the floor of the House to hear the debate on the settlement of the coal strike, a full-dress affair reported all over the world; Asquith versus Balfour, or rather both of them versus the working masses of Britain. This was what capitalism considered statesmanship—this hodgepodge of cant and cruelty, bundled in a gray fog of dullness. Thyrsis sat in a sacredseat, where no visitor was supposed to be, and gazed upon rows of savages in silk hats, roaring for what little blood was left in the veins of half-starved miners’ families. He clenched his hands until his nails made holes in his skin.

When the great lawyer Asquith was in the midst of his sophistries, the young American could stand no more; he half rose from his seat, with his mouth open to say what he thought of these starvers of British labor. Half a dozen times he rose, with words starting from his throat, and half a dozen times he sank back again. They would have arrested him, no doubt, and his protest would have been heard. But it would also have gone to Amsterdam, where the polite judges had still to decide the problem of the custody of Thyrsis’ son!

Thyrsis went out and visited Westminster Abbey, where he was swept by a storm of horror and loathing; wandering among marble tombs and statues of ruling-class killers and the poets and men of genius who had betrayed the muse to Mammon. High-vaulting arches, lost in dimness; priests in jeweled robes, and white-clad choirs chanting incessant subjection; a blaze of candles, a haze of altar smoke, and mental slaves with heads bowed in their arms—the very living presence of that giant Fear, in the name of which the organized crimes of the ages have been committed. Here was the explanation of those swarms on Hampstead Heath, deprived of human semblance; here was the meaning of pettifogging lawyers and noble earls and silk-hatted savages shouting for the lifeblood of starving miners; here was the very body and blood of that Godhead of Capitalism—

Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feetChristian and Jew and Atheist meet!

Miss Mary Craig Kimbrough came traveling. It was natural that a young lady from Mississippi should desire to see art galleries and meet celebrities in England; and if she came as the guest of an earl and a countess, that would surely be respectable according to Mississippi standards. It so happened that the noble earl was a bit of a radical and had had his own maritalscandal. He had gone to Reno, Nevada, and got himself divorced from an unsatisfactory marriage; then, upon his remarriage in England, his peers had haled him before them, convicted him of bigamy, and sentenced him to six months in jail.

A tremendous uproar in its day, but it had been many days ago; the English nobility are a numerous family, which Mississippi could hardly be expected to keep straight. Craig’s father had the general impression, held by every old-fashioned Southern gentleman, that the English nobility are a depraved lot; but on the other hand, Craig’s mother knew that they are socially irresistible. She proved it whenever, at a gathering of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, she was asked for news about her daughter who was visiting the Countess Russell in London.

“Aunt Molly” was a plump little Irish lady, the warmest hearted soul that ever carried a heavy title. She had had her own divorce tragedy, and her warm Irish heart was with Thyrsis. She had published two or three novels, and for writing purposes had a retreat, an ancient cottage on the edge of a village not far from Eton. It was so low that you had to stoop to get through the doorway, and its chimney had smoked for at least three hundred years; but it was newly plastered inside, and furnished with antiques and bright chintzes. Here Aunt Molly brought her protegée, and Thyrsis came from Holland to collect local color for the new novel,Sylvia, which he was making out of Craig’s tales of her girlhood in the Far South. In after years the heroine would stop in the middle of an anecdote, look puzzled, and say, “Did that really happen to me? Or is it one of the things we made up forSylvia?”

One glimpse of the British aristocracy at home. The novel Thyrsis was writing dealt with a splendid young Harvard millionaire, one of whose friends remarks that he deliberately cultivated the brutal manners of the British upper classes toward their social inferiors. Craig was distressed by this, insisting that it couldn’t be true; finally it was agreed that Aunt Molly should be the arbitrator. The problem was submitted, and this high authority laughed and said, “Well, look at Frank!” She went on to tell anecdotes portraying the bad manners of his lordship, her husband; also of his uncles and his cousins, Lord This and theMarquis of That and the Duke of Other. Craig subsided, and the sentence stands as it was written.

Thyrsis, himself, walking along the road in his everyday clothes, saw a fancy equipage drive up and halt, while the occupants asked him the way to a certain place; having been politely answered, the lady and gentleman drove on without so much as a nod of thanks. On another occasion, while walking, he attempted to ask the way of a gentleman out for a constitutional, and this person stalked by without a sound or a glance. Mentioning this experience to a conventional Englishman, Thyrsis received the following explanation: “But if one entered into talk with any stranger who hailed him on the road, one might meet all sorts of undesirable persons!”

To Aunt Molly’s home in London came H. G. Wells, and with the countess’ half-dozen tiny white dogs dancing in their laps, the two social philosophers compared their views on the state of the world. Wells had now come to the conclusion it would take about three hundred years to get socialism, which to Thyrsis seemed the same as being a die-hard tory. Wells took him to lunch at the New Reform Club, and as they were leaving the dining room, he stopped and whispered that Thyrsis now had an opportunity to observe the Grand Khan of Anglo-American literature, Henry James, eating a muttonchop. On the landing halfway down the stairs they ran into Hilaire Belloc, who held them with half an hour of brilliance. He exhibited an amazing familiarity with the medieval world and its manifold futilities. It was like an exhibition of a million dollars’ worth of skyrockets and pyrotechnical set pieces; when it was over, you went away with nothing.

Also Thyrsis met Frank Harris, possessor of a golden tongue. Harris would talk about Jesus and Shakespeare in words so beautiful that only those masters could have matched it; but in the midst of his eloquence something would turn his thoughts to a person he disliked, and there would pour from the same throat such a stream of abuse as might have shocked a fallen archangel. Harris invited the young author to lunch at an expensive hotel and spent four or five pounds on the occasion; politeness forbade Thyrsis to hint his feelings of distress at such a demonstration. He would not partake of the costly wines, and could have lived for a couple of weeks on such an expenditure. Not long after this, Harris published in a magazine his solution of all the problems of health—which was to use a stomach pump, get rid of all you had eaten, and start over again.

Then Bernard Shaw. For eight or nine years Thyrsis had followed our modern Voltaire with admiration, but also with some fear of his sharp tongue. When he met him, he discovered the kindest and sweetest-tempered of humans, the cleanest, also; he had bright blue eyes, a red-gold beard turning gray, and the face of a mature angel. The modern Voltaire motored Thyrsis out to his country place and gave him a muttonchop or something for lunch, while he himself ate ascetic beans and salad, and admitted sadly that his periodic headaches might possibly be due to excess of starch, as Thyrsis suggested. To listen to G. B. S. at lunch was exactly like hearing him at Albert Hall or reading one of his prefaces; he would talk an endless stream of wit and laughter, with never a pause or a dull moment.

After lunch they walked to see the old church. Not even a modern Voltaire could imagine a visitor from America failing to be interested in looking at the ruins of an old church! On the way they came to a sign warning motorists that they were passing a school. Thyrsis asked, “Where is the school?” His host laughed and explained, “This is England. The school was moved some years ago, but we haven’t got round to moving the sign yet. The motorists slow up, and then, just after they have got up speed again, they come to the school.”

Years back, Thyrsis had met May Sinclair, then visiting in New York. Those were the days ofThe Divine Fire—does anyone remember that novel? Thyrsis had sent it to Jack London, who wrote that if he could write one such story, he would be willing to die. Now in London, Thyrsis went to see May Sinclair at her studio, and listened while she received another visitor to tea and asked him questions. It was a shy youth, a shop assistant in London, who had been invited because May Sinclair was writing a book about such a person and wished to know what hours he worked, what his duties were, and so on. One could guessthat the poor youth had never been in such company before, and never would be again.

The class lines are tightly drawn in that tight little island. May Sinclair told me a little story about H. G. Wells, who had begun life as a shop assistant; talking to Wells about the novel she was writing, she asked him some question about the dialect of a shop assistant. Wells flushed with annoyance and said: “How shouldIknow?” Thyrsis thought that was a dreadful story, so dreadful that he covered his face with his hands when he heard it. May Sinclair was distressed, because she hadn’t meant to gossip—she hadn’t realized how this anecdote would sound to an American socialist.

Thyrsis went back to Holland, which was supposed to be his residence. He was not deceiving the honorable judges of the Amsterdam courts—he really did mean to live in Holland, where everybody was so polite and where, alone of all places in Europe, they did not give you short change, or coins made of lead. It was an unusually cold and rainy summer—the peasants of France were reported to be gathering their hay from boats. Thyrsis sat in a little room, doing his writing by a wood stove, and waiting in vain for the sun to appear. His friend Van Eeden took him walking and pointed out the beautiful effects of the tumbled clouds on the horizon. “These are the clouds that our Dutch painters have made so famous!” But Thyrsis did not want to paint clouds, he wanted to get warm.

Craig came to Holland, and Dr. Van Eeden and his wife introduced her to staid burgomasters’ wives, who were as much thrilled to meet the granddaughter of American slave owners as she was to meet Dutch dignitaries. Because Van Eeden had been through a divorce scandal in his own life, he could sympathize with the troubled pair. An odd fact, that all the friends who helped him through these days of trial—the Herrons in Italy, the Wilshires and Russells in England, the Van Eedens in Holland—had been through the divorce mill.

Frederick van Eeden was at this time in his fifties, the best-known novelist and poet of his country. But the country wastoo small, he said—it was discouraging to write for only seven million people! He had had a varied career—physician, pioneer psychotherapist, then labor leader and founder of a colony like Thyrsis; he lived on the remains of this colony, a small estate called Walden. His beard was turning gray, but his mind was still omnivorous, and he and his young American friend ranged the world in their arguments.

Van Eeden s wife was a quiet woman, young in years but old in fashion, the heroine of Van Eeden’sBride of Dreams; she sat by and did her sewing and seemed a trifle shocked when the young lady from Mississippi ventured to poke fun at the ideas of her lord and master. Her two little children were lacking altogether in American boisterousness; their utmost limit of self-assertion was to stand by Thyrsis’ chair at suppertime, and watch him with big round eyes while he ate a fig, and whisper “Ik ok!”—that is, “Me, too!” Thyrsis found the Dutch language a source of great amusement, and he evolved a rule for getting along; first say it in German, and if that is not understood, say it in English, and if that is not understood, say it halfway between.

Van Eeden took Thyrsis to Berlin, where they visited a young German poet, Erich Gutkind, who under the pen name of Volker had published an ecstatic book that Van Eeden expected to outmode Nietzsche. A charming young Jewish couple—Thyrsis called them theGute Kinder, and sometimes theSternengucker, because of the big telescope they had on the roof of their home. Van Eeden and Gutkind were on fire with a plan to form a band of chosen spirits to lead mankind out of the wilderness of materialism; Thyrsis brought tears into the young rhapsodist’s eyes by the brutality of his insistence that the sacred band would have to decide the problem of social revolution first.

All three of these men saw the war coming, and the problem of what to do about it occupied their thoughts. Thyrsis had written a manifesto against war, calling on the socialist parties of the world to pledge themselves to mass insurrection against it. He had found sympathy among socialists in England and France, but very little in Germany. Karl Kautsky had written that the agitation of such a program would be illegal in Germany—which apparently settled it with him and his party. Thyrsis now spent a day with Kautsky and his wife and son—die heilige Familie, as their enemies dubbed them. He debated the problem with Suedekum, with Fischer, with Ledebour and Liebknecht; the latter two escorted him about the Reichstag and took him to lunch—in a separate dining room where Social Democratic members were herded, apart from the rest! Ledebour and Liebknecht were sympathetic to his program, but could not promise any effective action, and what they told him had much to do with Thyrsis’ decision to support the Allies in 1917.

Yes, the war was not far away. Military men with bristling mustaches were strutting about, jostling ordinary folk out of the way, staring over the heads of the men, and into the faces of women. “Papa, why do they twist their mustaches into points?” inquired David, eleven years old, and the answer was, “It is to frighten you.” “But it doesn’t frighten me,” said the little boy. However, it frightened his father, so that he removed his son from the German school to one in England.

TheGute Kindertook their guests driving to see the sights of Berlin, including the monstrous statues of the Sieges Allee. Thyrsis thought he had never seen anything so funny since the beginning of his life. He found something funnier to say about each one—until his host leaned over and signaled him to be quiet, pointing to the cab driver up in front. More than once it had happened that a ribald foreigner, daring to commitlèse-majestéin the hearing of a Prussian ex-soldier, had been driven to the police station and placed under arrest.

Thyrsis was invited to meet Walter Rathenau. He had never heard the name, but his friends explained that this was the young heir of the great German electrical trust; he went in for social reform and wrote bold books. They were driven to the Kaiserlicher Automobil Klub, a gorgeous establishment, with footmen in short pants and silk stockings. There was a private dining room and an elaborate repast, including plovers’ eggs, a dish of which Thyrsis had never heard and which proved to be dangerous in practice, since you never knew what you were going to find when you cracked a shell. Thereafter the irreverent strangers always referred to Rathenau asKiebitzei.

They united in finding him genial but a trifle overconfident—an attitude that accompanies the possession of vast sums of money and the necessity of making final decisions upon great issues. Van Eeden was a much older man who had made himself a reputation in many different fields—yet he did not feel so certain about anything as he found this young master of electricity and finance. However, there is this to be added: it is the men who know what they think who are capable of action. Walter Rathenau would no doubt have made over German industry along more social and human lines if the reactionaries had not murdered him.

The Dutch divorce was granted, in pleasant fashion, without Thyrsis having to appear in court. Craig, who was back in England under the wing of her earl and countess, now wished to return to Mississippi to persuade her parents to let her marry a divorced man; Thyrsis also wished to go, having a new novel to market. These were the happy days before the passport curse, so it was possible to travel incognito and land in New York without newspaper excitement. In the interest of propriety, the pair traveled on separate steamers. Craig came on theLusitania, ship of ill fate for her as for others; in a stormy December passage she was thrown and broke the bones at the base of the spine, which caused her suffering for many years, and made a hard task yet harder for her.

The siege of the family began. The father was a judge and knew the law—at least he knew his own kind, and took no stock in a piece of engraved stationery from Amsterdam that he could not read. “Daughter, you cannot marry a married man!” That was all he would say; and the answer, “Papa, I have made up my mind to marry him!” meant nothing. She would spend her nights weeping—an old story in her life. She was his first child, and her portrait, a beautiful oil painting, hung in the drawing room; when she went away to New York again, he put this portrait up in the attic.

Thyrsis, meantime, was interviewing publishers—an old story inhislife. Mitchell Kennerley had no use forSylvia—itwas notin the modern manner. Thyrsis’ fate was to wander from one publisher to another—since he would not obey the rules of their game. Literary works were turned out according to pattern, stamped with a trademark, and sold to customers who wanted another exactly like the last. A new publisher came forward, an old-fashioned one; but apparently the buyers of old-fashioned novels distrusted the Thyrsis label.Sylviasold only moderately, and the sequel,Sylvia’s Marriage, hardly sold at all. Two thousand copies in America and a hundred thousand in Great Britain—that was a record for a prophet in his own country!

It was a time of stirring among the foreign-born workers in America, and Thyrsis and other young enthusiasts thought it was the beginning of the change for which they prayed. There was a strike of silkworkers in Paterson, New Jersey, and the intelligentsia of Greenwich Village made weekend pilgrimages for strike relief and oratory. Leading the strike were Bill Haywood, grim old one-eyed miners’ chief from the Rockies; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who had begun her rebel career as a high-school girl in New York; Carlo Tresca, his face and body scarred by the bullets of his masters’ gunmen; Joe Ettor and Arthur Giovannitti, fresh from a frame-up for murder in Massachusetts. Helping them, and at the same time studying them for copy, were budding young novelists such as Leroy Scott and Ernest Poole; a dramatist, Thompson Buchanan, who was later to employ his knowledge in the concoction of anti-Bolshevik nightmares; and John Reed, war correspondent, whose bones were destined to lie in the Kremlin in less than ten years.

They besought Thyrsis to join them; he yielded to the temptation, and once more saw the busy pencils of the newspaper reporters flying. Did they make up the false quotations themselves, or was their copy doctored in the office? Impossible to say; but Thyrsis saw himself quoted as advising violence, which he had never done in his life. He filed the clippings away, and filed the rage in his heart. It was still six years to the writing ofThe Brass Check.

A terrible thing to see tens of thousands of human beings starved into slavery, held down by policemen’s clubs and newspaper slanders. The young sympathizers were desperate, and in the hope of moving the heart of New York, they planned the“Paterson Pageant”—to bring two thousand silkworkers to the stage of Madison Square Garden and give a mass performance of the events of the strike, with special emphasis on speeches and singing. Over this scheme a group of twenty or thirty men and women slaved day and night for several weeks, and bled their pocketbooks empty—and then saw the New York papers hinting that they had stolen the money of the strikers! Two things out of that adventure will never pass from memory: first, the old warehouse in which rehearsals were held, and John Reed with his shirt sleeves rolled up, shouting through a megaphone, drilling those who were to serve as captains of the mass; and second, the arrival of that mass, two thousand half-starved strikers in Madison Square Garden rushing for the sandwiches and coffee!

The elderly Judge in Mississippi would not change his decision once given; but the ladies of the family were more pliable, and by springtime it had become plain to them that they could not break the bonds that held their daughter to the dreaded socialist muckraker. Two of them came to New York on a pilgrimage to see what sort of man it might be that had woven this evil spell. The mother was a lady who refrained from boasting of being the seventh lineal descendant of that Lady Southworth who had come to Massachusetts to marry the second colonial governor; but who allowed herself a modest pride as founder of the Christian (Disciples) church of her home town and sponsor of no one knew how many monuments to Confederate heroes throughout the South. With her came a greataunt, one of the few “strong-minded women” the state of Mississippi had produced; she had gone to California, and become a schoolteacher, and married a pioneer, General Green, who was known as the “father of irrigation” and had left her a newspaper, the ColusaSun, to manage.

These two reached New York in a state of trepidation hardly to be comprehended by irreverent intellectuals. Oh, fortunate chance that the socialist muckraker had been born close to Mason and Dixon’s line, and had so many Virginia ancestorshe could talk about! Actually, there were cousins who were cousins of cousins! His mother had taught him exactly how to use a knife and fork; his bride-to-be had taught him that gloves do not go with tennis shoes! For these reasons, plus a lawyer’s assurance that the divorce was valid in the United States, it was decided that there should be a wedding.

But surely not in New York, swarming place of reporters! Let it be in some decent part of the world, where family and good breeding count! Mississippi was impossible, because the Judge forbade it; but in Virginia there were cousins who would lend the shelter of their name and homestead. So the party took a night train—one amused but attentive muckraker and three Southern ladies on the verge of a nervous crisis, seeing a newspaper reporter in every sleeping-car berth. “Oh, the reporters! What will the reporters say!” Thyrsis heard this for a week, until he could stand it no more and suddenly exploded in a masculine cry: “Oh,damnthe reporters!” There followed an awe-stricken silence—but in their secret hearts the two elderly ladies were relieved. It was a real man, after all!

Fredericksburg, scene of the slaughter of some fifteen thousand Yankees. The old-maid cousins knew Craig, because she had been sent to them to recuperate after dancing seasons; they now welcomed this romantic expedition with open arms. There was a tremendous scurrying about, and the respectable mother set out to persuade the pastor of her respectable kind of church to officiate. But, alas, that dread stigma of a divorce! Thyrsis had to seek out an Episcopal clergyman and persuade him. Having been brought up in that church, he knew how to talk to such a clergyman; having been the innocent party in the divorce, he had under the church law the right to be remarried.

But the clergyman required evidence that Thyrsis had been the innocent party; so the would-be bridegroom came back to the hotel to get the divorce certificate. As it happened, in the hurry of packing, the proper document had been overlooked; instead, there was another and subsequent document, giving Thyrsis the custody of his son. It was in the Dutch language, and the author, who was no Dutchman, took it and translated it, with the elderly clergyman looking over his shoulder. Somehow the legal formulas became confused, and a certificate ofcustody underwent a mysterious transmogrification—it became a certificate of divorce based on the wife’s admitted infidelity.

The Episcopal proprieties having thus been satisfied, the clergyman put on his glad robes, and there was a ceremony in an ancient family garden by the banks of the swiftly flowing Rappahannock, with the odor of violets and crocuses in the air, and a mother and a greataunt and several old-maid cousins standing by in a state of uncertain romance. As for the bride and groom—the world had battered them too much, and they could hardly squeeze out a tear or a smile. Thyrsis had even forgotten the ring, and with sudden tears his mother-in-law slipped her own wedding ring from her finger into his hand. Apart from this lapse, and the single “damn,” he played his part perfectly. He promised to love, honor, and obey—and did so for a total of forty-eight years thereafter.

At home in Mississippi sat the elderly Judge, having been forewarned of the event and waiting for the storm to break. The telephone rang: the MemphisCommercial Appeal—or perhaps it was the New OrleansTimes-Picayune. “Judge Kimbrough, we have a dispatch from Fredericksburg, Virginia, saying that your daughter has married Upton Sinclair.” “Yes, so I understand.” “The dispatch says that the husband is an advocate of socialism, feminism, and birth control. Does your daughter share her husband’s ideas on these matters?” Said the Judge: “My daughter does not shareanyof her husband’s ideas!” And so the interview went out to the world.

The fates who deal out marriages seldom chose two more different human personalities for yoking together. Craig was all caution and I was all venture. She was all reticence, and I wanted to tell of my mistakes so that others could learn to avoid them. Craig would have died before she let anyone know hers. When she got some money she wanted to hide it like a squirrel; when I got some I wanted to start another crusade, to change a world that seemed to me in such sad shape. Craig agreed about the shape, but what she wanted to do was to hide us from it. This duel was destined to last for forty-eight years.

My mother and hers had proudly produced their family trees, and behold, we were both descended from the same English king. We had traveled by different routes: Craig’s ancestor, Lady Southworth, had come to Massachusetts to be married to the colonial governor, William Bradford; mine had come to Virginia and entered the Navy. One of my ancestors had been a commander in the Battle of Lake Huron in the War of 1812, and his son, Captain Arthur Sinclair, my grandfather, had commanded one of the vessels with which Admiral Perry opened up Japan. That grandfather, three uncles, and several cousins had fought in the Confederate States Navy. Craig’s great-grandfather had been appointed by President Jefferson the first surveyor general of the Territory of Mississippi. So those two mothers had got along conversationally, and Mama Kimbrough had good news to take back to Leflore County.

The youngest Kimbrough daughter, Dolly, was at a school in Tarrytown, on the Hudson, and I escorted Mama Kimbrough there. On the way she set out to make a Christian out of me, and I was so attentive that we went an hour past our station; we had to get out and wait for a train to take us back. We found Dolly in bed, blooming in spite of an appendix operation. By the time we returned to New York I had been able to persuade Mama that my socialism was just Christian brotherhood brought up to date; also Mama had decided that a trip to Europe with Craig and me would be educational for Dolly.

The first place we visited was Hellerau, in Germany, where the Dalcroze School was holding its annual spring festival. Hellerau means “bright meadow.” Rising from that meadow was a temple of art, and we witnessed a performance of Gluck’sOrpheus, represented in dance as well as in music. It was one of the loveliest things I had ever seen, and a quarter of a century later I used it for the opening scene ofWorlds End—the world’s beginning of Lanny Budd. The young Lanny met on the bright meadow—as we ourselves had met—Bernard Shaw with his golden beard outshining any landscape. I had already had lunch at his home in London and at his country home; he welcomed us, and our joy in the Dalcroze festival was confirmed by Britain’s greatest stage critic. He was always so kind, and the letters he wrote me about the Lanny Budd books helped them to win translation into a score of foreign languages.

We traveled to David’s school and collected him. We had lunch in a restaurant in Dresden. I ordered an omelet in my most polished German, and very carefully specified that I did not want pancakes. “Kein Mehl,” I said several times, but they brought us pancakes; when we refused to accept them and tried to leave the restaurant, they would not let us out. Our train was due so we had to pay, and I bade an unloving farewell to Germany—just a year before World War I.

We went to Paris, and there rented an apartment for a couple of weeks. When we were ready to pay our bill, the proprietresspulled a rug from under the bed and accused us of having spilled grease on it. We had had no grease, and hadn’t even seen the rug; but when we refused to pay for the damage, the woman called in a policeman—I think he was the tallest man I ever saw in uniform. He told us we would have to pay or we could not leave. It was a “racket,” of course, but there was nothing we could do; so to France also we bade an unloving farewell. When World War I came, we weren’t quite sure which person we wanted most to have punished—the German restaurant proprietor or the French virago and tall policeman.

We went to England, where nobody ever robbed us. We settled in the model village of Letchworth, built by co-operatives. I had acquired from Mrs. Bernard Shaw the right to make a novel out of a drama by the French playwright Eugène Brieux, calledDamaged Goods, dealing with venereal disease. I wrote that novel and got an advance from the publisher, and so we had a pleasant summer. I played tennis at the club, and in a middle-aged bachelor girl found the first female antagonist who could keep me busy. I have forgotten her name, but I remember that whenever I got in a good shot she would exclaim, “Oh,haught!”

Also I remember an outdoor socialist meeting at which I addressed an audience of co-operators, speaking from the tail of a cart along with dear, kind George Lansbury, member of Parliament and leader of the left-wing socialists.

We moved into London for a while, and there the lady from the Mississippi Delta met more strange kinds of people—among them Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Sylvia Pankhurst, and other suffrage combatants. Craig’s sister Dolly had met them too, and we learned, somewhat to our dismay, that Dolly had carried into the National Art Gallery a hatchet concealed under her skirt. Known suffragettes, when they tried to go in, were searched; but the guards didn’t know Dolly, and it was a simple matter for her to retire to the ladies’ room and pass the hatchet. What would Chancellor Kimbrough, president of two banks in Mississippi, have said if a newspaper reporter had called him up and told him that his youngest daughter had been arrested for passing a hatchet!

While I renewed my acquaintance with my socialist friends, it was Craig’s pleasure to go out on the streets and watch the people. At home the servants had been black; here they had white skins but even so were like another race. The educated classes were gracious and keen-minded; but the poor seemed to be speaking a strange language. What did “Kew” mean? Every shop assistant said it when you handed her money; and once when Craig and I were going down into “the Tube,” two male creatures rushed past us in the midst of a hot argument. We caught one shouted sentence, “Ow, gow an’ be a Sowshalist!”

I had a curious experience in London with Jessica Finch, who was the owner and director of a fashionable American school for young ladies, just off Fifth Avenue in New York. Her prices were staggering, and admission had to be arranged years in advance. She was an ardent suffragist and a socialist as determined as myself; she taught these two doctrines to her pupils, and when they went home for Christmas vacation, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society moved into her school to hold its annual convention.

When Craig had first met me in New York, I had taken her to one of these conventions, and she had met a youth named Walter Lippmann, founder and president of the Harvard chapter of that organization. Walter was interested now to meet a young lady from the Far South, and began at once to further his education. “What is the economic status of the Negro in Mississippi?” Craig, with her red-brown eyes twinkling, replied, “I didn’t know he had any.”

Jessica was in the habit of taking a bevy of her pupils abroad at the end of each school year, and they were all snugly ensconced in the palatial home of London’s great department-store proprietor, Harry Gordon Selfridge. Jessica laughingly assured me that she had a Rembrandt in her bedroom and that every one of the girls had a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of pictures on her walls. Jessica loved to talk, and there was plenty to talk about; the suffragettes and the British socialist movement and the prospect of a world war. It must have been two or threeo’clock in the morning when we parted. Craig and I saw her several years later in New York. She was married to J. O’Hara Cosgrave, onetime editor ofEverybody’s Magazineand later editor of the New YorkSunday World.

The happy summer passed.Damaged Goodswas coming out, and I had to be in New York. Craig’s blessed mother, much against the judgment of the Judge, allowed Dolly to stay in London to become a paying guest at the Wilshires’ and attend the Dalcroze School of Eurythmics. My David was placed in one of the progressive schools near the city.

As I have already said, Craig had written some tales of her Southern girlhood; and I had stolen them from her for a novel to be calledSylvia.Damaged Goods, both the play and novel, had filled my mind with the subject of venereal disease, something considered unmentionable in those days. I now decided to use the material fromSylviafor a novel on that theme, and we settled down in a little apartment to finish it. We had long arguments of course. Craig was herself Sylvia, and she thought she knew what Sylvia would do and say. I had to agree; but I thought I knew what the public would want to read. If anybody had been in the next room while we were arguing they would surely have thought that World War I had already broken out.

We decided to transfer the battleground to Bermuda for the winter. We found one of those little white cottages built of blocks carved out from coral. Craig had had enough of social life to last all her days, she said; all she wanted was to sit in the shade of a palm tree and decide what she believed about life. In the afternoon I would mount a bicycle and ride down to the Princess Hotel and play tennis with a captain of the British Army, stationed nearby.

A former young woman secretary of mine had married a Bermuda planter, and they would come for us in a carriage—no autos permitted in those days—and take us to a home completely surrounded by onions and potatoes. At night the planter took me out on Harrington Sound in a flat-bottomed boat; holding a torch we would look into the clear water, and there would be abig green lobster waiting to be stabbed with a two-pronged spear.

It was in Bermuda that we had an experience Craig delighted to tell about. Walking along the lovely white coral road, we stopped at a little store to buy something to eat. Looking up, my eyes were caught by familiar objects on shelves near the ceiling—flat cans covered with dust but with the labels still visible: “Armour’s Roast Beef.” “What are those cans doing up there?” I asked, and the proprietor replied, “Oh, some years ago a fellow wrote a book about that stuff, and I haven’t been able to sell a can since.”

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