Jack bought the cottage, but he was never able to live there. As a staff correspondent of the _Metropolitan Magazine_ he was dashing from the Colorado Fuel and Iron strike to the European War and back again to New York. In 1917, knowing I, too, had looked at it with longing eyes, he asked whether I would like to buy it; he was starting for Russia the next day and had to have ready money. By a lucky chance I had just received a check for a thousand dollars in payment for some Chicago lectures. We exchanged check and deed. He left the next day for the land of promise whither Bill Haywood, his friend, had already gone and whence neither was to return.
Big Bill, who had steadily advocated resistance to conscription, had been arrested and freed on bail furnished by Jessie Ashley. She had forfeited it gladly to have him safely out of the country. I had had a long talk with him before he had made up his mind definitely to leave. The conversation brought back to me the picture of the times he and I had walked up and down the Cape Cod sands and he had given me such good counsel about not jeopardizing the happiness of the children.
Those who had opposed Bill for his “hands in the pocket” advice at the Paterson strike were the same who were opposing his jumping his bail. Since the day we had together visited the C.G.T. meetings in Paris, Bill had come to see the virtues of expediency; that, rather than languish in jail where he could accomplish no useful purpose, a revolutionary should, if he could, exile himself. “He who fights and runs away, will live to fight another day.” This, according to the American idea, was cowardice—you should stay and be a martyr. But to Bill it was now merely shortsighted. He had concluded that the average worker when he went in for rioting and hand-to-hand combat was beaten before he had begun. He realized the workers had been split by the War; they had not united and stood up against conscription with any backbone. They could not as yet be depended upon as a force, but some day he hoped to return and reorganize them.
Truro provided the children with three carefree months every summer in what still seems to me one of the most beautiful spots in the world. For several years I hung on to this dream of being with them constantly, but it was only a dream. I used to go down to open the house and perhaps snatch a week or so there before being obliged to hurry back, but father and my sister Nan were good foster-parents. This house was eventually to burn as had the one in Hastings; fate seemed to decree I should not be tempted to slip back into peaceful domesticity.