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Love's Pilgrimage: A Novel

by Upton Sinclair · English · Gutenberg #5964 · 1,035,836 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Love's Pilgrimage: A Novel

Author: Upton Sinclair


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #5964]
                Most recently updated: October 13, 2016

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Charles Franks, Charles Aldarondo, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team








LOVE’S PILGRIMAGE

A NOVEL

By Upton Sinclair

New York And London






CONTENTS





     PART I

     Love’s Entaglement

     BOOK I    THE VICTIM
     BOOK II   THE SNARE
     BOOK III  THE VICTIM HESITATES
     BOOK IV   THE VICTIM APPROACHES
     BOOK V    THE BAIT IS SEIZED
     BOOK VI   THE CORDS ARE TIGHTENED
     BOOK VII  THE CAPTURE IS COMPLETED

     PART II

     Love’s Captivity

     BOOK VIII THE CAPTIVE BOUND
     BOOK IX   THE CAPTIVE IN LEASH
     BOOK X    THE END OF THE TETHER
     BOOK XI   THE TORTURE-HOUSE
     BOOK XII  THE TREADMILL
     BOOK XIII THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE
     BOOK XIV  THE PRICE OF RANSOM
     BOOK XV   THE CAPTIVE FAINTS
     BOOK XVI  THE BREAK FOR FREEDOM






LOVE’S PILGRIMAGE

PART I

Loves Entanglement

BOOK I

THE VICTIM





It was in a little woodland glen, with a streamlet tumbling through it.
She sat with her back to a snowy birch-tree, gazing into the eddies of a
pool below; and he lay beside her, upon the soft, mossy ground, reading
out of a book of poems. Images of joy were passing before them; and
there came four lines with a picture--

   “Hard by, a cottage-chimney smokes,
    From betwixt two aged oaks,
    Where Corydon and Thyrsis, met,
    Are at their savory dinner set.”

“Ah!” said she. “I always loved that. Let us be Corydon and Thyrsis!”

He smiled. “They were both of them men,” he said.

“Let us change it,” she responded--“just between ourselves!”

“Very well--Corydon!” said he.

Then, after a moment’s thought, she added, “But we didn’t have the
cottage.”

“No,” said he--“nor even the dinner!”

Section 1. It was the Highway of Lost Men. They shivered, and drew their
shoulders together as they walked, for it was night, and a cold, sleety
rain was falling. The lights from saloons and pawn-shops fell upon their
faces--faces haggard and gaunt with misery, or bloated with disease and
sin. Some stared before them fixedly; some gazed about with furtive and
hungry eyes as they shuffled on. Here and there a policeman stood in
the shelter, swinging his club and watching them as they passed.
Music called to them from dives and dance-halls, and lighted signs and
flaring-colored pictures tempted them in the entrances of cheap museums
and theatres; they lingered before these, glad of even a moment’s
shelter. Overhead the elevated trains pounded by; and from the
windows one could see men crowded about the stoves in the rooms of
lodging-houses, where the steam from their garments made a blur in the
air.

Down this highway walked a lad, about fifteen years of age, pale
of face, and with delicate and sensitive features. His overcoat was
buttoned tightly about his neck, and his hands thrust into his pockets;
he gazed around him swiftly as he walked. He came to this place every
now and then, but he never grew used to what he saw.

He eyed the men who passed him; and when he came to a saloon he would
push open the door and gaze about. Sometimes he would enter, and hurry
through, to peer into the compartments in the back; and then go out
again, giving a wide berth to the drinkers, and shrinking from their
glances. Once a girl appeared in a doorway, and smiled and nodded to
him; he started and hurried out, shuddering. Her wanton black eyes
haunted him, hinting unimaginable things.

Then, on a corner, he stopped and spoke to a policeman. “Hello!” said
the man, and shook his head--“No, not this time.” So the boy went on;
there were several miles of this Highway, and each block of it the same.

At last, in a dingy bar-room, with saw-dust strewn upon the floor, and
the odor of stale beer and tobacco-smoke in the air--here suddenly the
boy sprang forward, with a cry: “Father!” And a man who sat with bowed
head in a corner gave a start, and lifted a white face and stared at
him. He rose unsteadily to his feet, and staggered to the other, and
fell upon his shoulder, sobbing, “My son! My son!”

How many times had Thyrsis heard those words--in how many hours of
anguish! They sank into the deeps of him, waking echoes like the clang
of a bell: they voiced all the terror and grief of defeated life--“My
son! My son!”

The man clung to him, weeping, and pouring out the flood of his shame.
“I have fallen again--I am lost--I am lost!”

The occupants of the place were watching the scene with dull curiosity;
and the boy was trembling like a wild deer trapped.

“Yes, father, yes! Let us go home.”

“Home--home, my son? Will you take me home? Oh, I couldn’t bear to go!”

“But you must come home.”

“Do you mean that you still love me, son?”

“Yes, father, I still love you. I want to try to help you. Come with
me.”

Then the boy would gaze about and ask, “Where is your hat?”

“Hat, my son? I don’t know. I have lost it.” The boy would see his torn
and mud-stained clothing, and the poor old pitiful face, with the eyes
blood-shot and swollen, and the skin, that had been rosy, and was now
a ghastly, ashen gray. He would choke back his feelings, and grip his
hands to keep himself together.

“Come, father, take my hat, and let us go.”

“No, my son. I don’t need any hat. Nothing can hurt me--I am lost!
Lost!”

So they would go out, arm in arm; and while they made their progress up
the Highway, the man would pour out his remorse, and tell the story of
his weeks of horror.

Then, after a mile or so, he would halt.

“My son!”

“What is it, father?”

“I must stop here, son.”

“Why, father?”

“I must have something to drink.”

“_No_, father!”

“But, my boy, I can’t go on! I can’t walk! You don’t know what I’m
suffering!”

“No, father!”

“I’ve got the money left--I’m not asking you. I’ll come right with
you--on my word of honor I will!”

And so they would fight it out--all the way back to the lodging-house
where they lived, and where the mother sat and wept. And here they would
put him to bed, and lock up his clothing to keep him in; and here,
with drugs and mineral-waters, and perhaps a doctor to help, they would
struggle with him, and tend him until he was on his feet again. Then,
with clothing newly-brushed and face newly-shaven he would go back to
the world of men; and the boy would go back to his dreams.

Section 2. Such was the life of Thyrsis, from earliest childhood to
maturity. His father’s was a heritage of gentle breeding and high
traditions--his forefathers were cavaliers, and had served the State.
And now it had come to this--to hall bedrooms in lodging-houses, and a
life-and-death grapple with destruction! And when Thyrsis came to study
the problem, he found that it was a struggle without hope; his father
was a man in a trap.

He was what people called a “drummer”. He was dependent for his living
upon the favor of certain merchants--men for the most part of low
ideals, who came to the city in search of their low pleasures. One met
them by waiting about in the lobbies of hotels, and in the bar-rooms
which they frequented; and always the first sign of fellowship with them
was to have a drink. And this was the field on which the battle had to
be fought!

He would hold out for months--half a year, perhaps--drinking lemonade
and putting up with their raillery. And then he would begin with
ginger-ale; and then it would come to beer; and then to whiskey. He was
always devising new plans to control himself; always persuading himself
that he had solved the problem. He would not drink in the morning; he
would not drink until after dinner; he would not drink alone--and so
on without end. His whole life was drink, and all his thoughts were of
drink--the odor of it always in his nostrils, the image of it always
before his eyes.

And the grimness of his fate lay here--that it was by his best qualities
that he was betrayed. If he had been hard and mercenary, like some
of those who preyed upon him, there might have been hope. But he was
generous and free-hearted, a slave to his impulses of friendship. And
this was what made the struggle such a cruel one to Thyrsis; it was like
the sight of some noble animal basely snared.

From his earliest days the boy had watched these forces working
themselves out. The gentleman and the “drummer” fought for supremacy,
and step by step the soul of the man was fashioned to the work he
did. To succeed with his customers he must share their ideas and their
tastes; and so he was bitter against reformers, who interfered with the
gaieties of the city, with no consideration for the tastes of “buyers.”
 But then, on the other hand, would come a time of renunciation, when he
would be all enthusiasm for temperance.

He was full of old-fashioned ideas, which would take the quaintest turns
of reactionism; his politics were summed up in the phrase that he “would
rather vote for a nigger than a Republican”; but then, in the same
breath, he would announce some fine and noble sentiment, out of the
traditions of a forgotten past. He was the soul of courtesy to women,
and of loyalty to friends. He worshipped General Lee and the old time
“Virginia gentleman”; and those with whom he lived, and for whose
unclean profits he sold himself, never guessed the depths of his
contempt for all they stood for. They had the dollars, they were on top;
but some day the nemesis of Good-breeding would smite them--the army of
the ghosts of Gentility would rise, and with “Marse Robert” and “Jeb”
 Stuart at their head, would sweep away the hordes of commercialdom.

Thyrsis saw a great deal of this forgotten chivalry. His nursery had
been haunted by such musty phantoms; and when he first came to the
Northern city, he stayed at a hotel which was frequented by people
who lived in this past--old ladies who were proud and prim, and
old gentlemen who were quixotic and humorous, young ladies who were
“belles,” and young gentlemen who aspired to be “blades”. It was a world
that would have made happy the soul of any writer of romances; but to
Thyrsis in earliest childhood the fates had given the gift of seeing
beneath the shams of things, and to him this dead Aristocracy cried out
loudly for burial. There was an incredible amount of drunkenness, and of
debauchery scarcely hidden; there was pretense strutting like a peacock,
and avarice skulking like a hound; there were jealousy, and base
snobbery, and raging spite, and a breath of suspicion and scandal
hanging like a poisonous cloud over everything. These people came
and went, an endless procession of them; they laughed and danced and
gossiped and drank their way through the boy’s life, and unconsciously
he judged them, and hated them and feared them. It was not by such that
his destiny was to be shaped.

Most of them were poor; not an honest poverty, but a sham and artificial
poverty--the inability to dress as others did, and to lose money at
“bridge” and “poker”, and to pay the costs of their self-indulgences. As
for Thyrsis and his parents, they always paid what they owed; but they
were not always able to pay it when they owed it, and they suffered all
the agonies and humiliations of those who did not pay at all. There
was scarcely ever a week when this canker of want did not gnaw at them;
their life was one endless and sordid struggle to make last year’s
clothing look like new, and to find some boarding-house that was cheaper
and yet respectable. There was endless wrangling and strife and worry
over money; and every year the task was harder, the standards lower, the
case more hopeless.

There were rich relatives, a world of real luxury up above--the thing
that called itself “Society”. And Thyrsis was a student and a bright
lad, and he was welcome there; he might have spread his wings and flown
away from this sordidness. But duty held him, and love and memory held
him still tighter. For his father worshipped him, and craved his help;
to the last hour of his dreadful battle, he fought to keep his son’s
regard--he prayed for it, with tears in his eyes and anguish in his
voice. And so the boy had to stand by. And that meant that he grew up in
a torture-house, he drank a cup of poison to its bitter dregs. To others
his father was merely a gross little man, with sordid ideas and low
tastes; but to Thyrsis he was a man with the terror of the hunted
creatures in his soul, and the furies of madness cracking their whips
about his ears.

There was only one ending possible--it worked itself out with the
remorseless precision of a machine. The soul that fought was smothered
and stifled, its voice grew fainter and feebler; the agony and the shame
grew hotter, the suffering more cruel, the despair more black. Until at
last they found him in a delirium, and took him to a private hospital;
and thither went Thyrsis, now grown to be a man, and sat in a dingy
reception-room, and a dingy doctor came to him and said, “Do you wish to
see the body?” And Thyrsis answered, in a low voice, “No.”

Section 3. So it was that the soul of this lad had grown sombre, and
taken to brooding upon the mysteries of fate. Life was no jest and no
holiday, it was no place for shams and self-deceptions. It was a place
where cruel enemies set traps for the unwary; a field where blind and
merciless forces ranged, unhindered by man or God.

Thyrsis could not have told how soon in life this sense had come to him.
In his earliest childhood he had known that his father was preyed upon,
just as certainly as any wild thing in the forest. At first the enemies
had been saloon-keepers, and wicked men who tempted him to drink with
them. The names of these men were household words to him, portents of
terror; they peopled his imagination as epic figures, such as Black
Douglas must have been to the children of the Northern Border.

But then, with widening intelligence, it became certain social forces,
at first dimly apprehended. It was the god of “business”--before which
all things fair and noble went down. It was “business” that kept vice
triumphant in the city; it was because of “business” that the saloons
could not be closed even on Sunday, so that the father might be at home
one day in seven. And was it not in search of “business” that he was
driven forth to loaf in hotel-lobbies and bar-rooms?

Who was to blame for this, Thyrsis did not know; but certain men made
profit of it--and these, too, were ignoble men. He knew this; for now
and then his father’s employers would honor the little family with some
kind of an invitation, and they would have to swallow their pride and
go. So Thyrsis grew up, with the sense of a great evil loose in the
world; a wrong, of which the world did not know. And within him grew a
passionate longing to cry aloud to others, to open their eyes to this
truth!

Outwardly he was like other boys, eager and cheerful, even boisterous;
but within was this hidden thing, which brooded and questioned. Life
had made him into an ascetic. He must be stern, even merciless, with
himself--because of the fear that was in him, and in his mother as well.
The fear that self-indulgence might lay its grisly paws upon him! The
fear that he, too, might fall into the trap!

It was not merely that he never touched stimulants; he had an instinct
against all things that were softening and enervating, all things that
tempted and enslaved. For him was the morning-air, and the shock of cold
water, and the hardness of the wild things of the open. Other people
did not feel this way; other people pampered themselves and defiled
themselves--and so Thyrsis went apart. He lived quite alone with his
thoughts, he had never a chum, scarcely even any friends. Where in the
long procession of lodging and boarding-houses and summer-resorts should
he meet people who knew what he knew about life? Where in all the world
should he meet them, save in the books of great men in times past?

There was not much of what is called “culture” in his family; no music
at all, and no poetry. But there were novels, and there were libraries
where one could get more of these, so Thyrsis became a devourer of
stories; he would disappear, and they would find him at meal-times,
hidden in a clump of bushes, or in a corner behind a sofa--anywhere
out of the world. He read whole libraries of adventure: Mayne-Reid
and Henty, and then Cooper and Stevenson and Scott. And then came more
serious novels--“Don Quixote” and “Les Misérables,” George Eliot, whom
he loved, and Dickens, whose social protest thrilled him; and chiefest
of all Thackeray, who moulded his thought. Thackeray knew the world that
he knew, Thackeray saw to the heart of it; and no high-souled lad who
had read him and worshipped him was ever after to be lured by the glamor
of the “great” world--a world whose greatness was based upon selfishness
and greed.

Thyrsis knew no foreign language, and fate or instinct kept him from
those writers who jested with uncleanness; so he was virginal, and pure
in all his imaginings. Other lads exchanged confidences in forbidden
things, they broke down the barriers and tore away the veils; but
Thyrsis had never breathed a word about matters of sex to any living
creature. He pondered and guessed, but no one knew his thoughts; and
this was a crucial thing, the secret of much of his aloofness.

Section 4. In one of the early boarding-houses there had been a little
girl, and the families had become intimate. But the two children
disliked each other, and kept apart all they could. Thyrsis was
domineering and imperious, and things must always be his way. He was
given to rebellion, whereas Corydon was gentle and meek, and submitted
to confinements and prohibitions in a quite disgraceful manner. She was
a pretty little girl, with great black eyes; and because she was silent
and shy, he set her down as “stupid”, and went his way.

They spent a summer in the country together, where Thyrsis possessed
himself of a sling-shot, and took to collecting the skins of squirrels
and chipmunks. Corydon was horrified at this; and by way of helping her
to overcome her squeamishness he would make her carry home the bleeding
corpses. He took to raising, young birds, also, and soon had quite
an aviary--two robins, and a crow, and a survivor from a brood of
“cherry-birds.” The feeding of these nestlings was no small task, but
Thyrsis went fishing when the spirit moved him, secure in the certainty
that the calls of the hungry creatures would keep Corydon at home.

This was the way of it, until Corydon began to blossom into a young
lady, beautiful and tenderly-fashioned. Thyrsis still saw her now and
then, and he made attempts to share his higher joys with her. He had
become a lover of poetry; once they walked by the seashore, and he
read her “Alexander’s Feast”, thrilling with delight in its resounding
phrases:

   “Break his bands of sleep asunder,
    And rouse him like a rattling peal of thunder!”

But Corydon had never heard of Timotheus, and she had not been taught to
exploit her emotions. She could only say that she did not understand it
very well.

And then, on another occasion, Thyrsis endeavored to tell her about
Berkeley, whom he had been reading. But Corydon did not take to the
sensational philosophy either; she would come back again and again to
the evasion of old Dr. Johnson--“When I kick a stone, I know the stone
is there!”

This girl was like a beautiful flower, Thyrsis told himself--like all
the flowers that had gone before her, and all those that would come
after, from generation to generation. She fitted so perfectly into her
environment, she grew so calmly and serenely; she wore pretty dresses,
and helped to serve tea, and was graceful and sweet--and with never an
idea that there was anything in life beyond these things. So Thyrsis
pondered as he went his way, complacent over his own perspicacity; and
got not even a whiff of smoke from the volcano of rebellion and misery
that was seething deep down in her soul!

The choosers of the unborn souls had played a strange fantasy here; they
had stolen one of the daughters of ancient Greece, and set her down in
this metropolis of commercialdom. For Corydon might have been Nausikaa
herself; she might have marched in the Panathenaic procession, with
one of the sacred vessels in her hands; she might have run in the Attic
games, bare-limbed and fearless. Hers was a soul that leaped to the call
of joy, that thrilled at the faintest touch of beauty. Above all else,
she was born for music--she could have sung so that the world would have
remembered it. And she was pent in a dingy boarding-house, with no point
of contact with anything about her--with no human soul to whom she could
whisper her despair!

They sent her to a public-school, where the sad-eyed drudges of the
traders came to be drilled for their tasks. They harrowed her with
arithmetic and grammar, which she abhorred; they taught her patriotic
songs, about a country to which she did not belong. And also, they
sent her to Sunday-school, which was worse yet. She had the strangest,
instinctive hatred of their religion, with all that it stood for. The
sight of a clergyman with his vestments and his benedictions would make
her fairly bristle with hostility. They talked to her about her sins,
and she did not know what they meant; they pried into the state of her
soul, and she shrunk from them as if they had been hairy spiders. Here,
too, they taught her to sing--droning hymns that were a mockery of all
the joys of life.

So Corydon devoured her own heart in secret; and in time a dreadful
thing came to happen--the stagnant soul beginning to fester. One day the
girl, whose heart was the quintessence of all innocence, happened to
see a low word scribbled upon a fence. And now--they had urged her to
discover sins, and she discovered them. Suppose that word were to stay
in her mind and haunt her--suppose that she were not able to forget it,
try as she would! And of course she tried; and the more she tried, the
less she succeeded; and so came the discovery that she was a lost soul
and a creature of depravity! The thought occurred to her, that she might
go on to think of other words, and to think of images and actions as
well; she might be unable to forget any of them--her mind might become
a storehouse of such horrors! And so the maiden out of ancient Greece
would lie awake all night and wrestle with fiends, until she was bathed
in a perspiration.

Section 5. About this time Thyrsis was making his _début_ as an author.
He had discovered a curious knack in himself, a turn for making verses
of a sort which were pleasing to children. They came from some little
corner of his consciousness, he scarcely knew how; but there was a paper
that was willing to buy them, and to pay him the princely sum of five
dollars a week! This would pay for his food and his hall bedroom, or for
board at some farm in the summer; and so for several years Thyrsis was
free.

He told a falsehood about his age, and entered college, and buried
himself up to the eyes in work. This was a college in a city, and a poor
college, where the students all lived at home, and had nothing to do but
study; and so Thyrsis missed all that beneficent illumination known
as “student-life.” He never hurrahed at foot-ball contests, nor did he
dress himself in honorific garments, nor stupify himself at “smokers.”
 Being democratic, and without thought of setting himself up over others,
he was unaware of his greatest opportunities, and when they invited him
into a fraternity, he declined. Once or twice he found himself roaming
the streets at night with a crowd of students, emitting barbaric
screechings; but this made him feel silly, and so he lagged behind and
went home.

The college served its purpose, in introducing him to the world of
knowledge; but that did not take long, and afterwards it was all in his
way. The mathematics were a discipline, and in them he rejoiced as a
strong man to run a race; and this was true also of the sciences, and of
history--the only trouble was that he would finish the text-books in the
first few weeks, and after that there was nothing to do save to compose
verses in class, and to make sketches of the professors. But as for the
“languages” and the “literatures” they taught him--in the end Thyrsis
came to forgive them, because he saw that they did not know what
languages and literatures were. On this account he took to begging leave
of absence on grounds of his poverty; and then he would go home and
spend his days and nights in learning.

One could get so much for so little, in this wonderful world of mind!
For eight cents he picked up a paper volume of Emerson’s “Essays”; and
in this shrewd and practical nobility was so much that he was seeking
in life! And then he stumbled upon a fifteen-cent edition of “Sartor
Resartus”, and took that home and read it. It was like the clash of
trumpets and cymbals to him; it made his whole being leap. Hour after
hour he read, breathless, like a man bewitched, the whole night through.
He would cry aloud with delight, or drop the book and pound his knee and
laugh over the demoniac power of it. The next day he began the “French
Revolution”; and after that, alas, he found there was no more--for
Carlyle had turned his back upon democracy, and so Thyrsis turned his
back upon Carlyle.

For this was one of the forces which had had to do with the shaping of
his thought. Beginning in the public-schools he had learned about his
country--the country which was his, if not Corydon’s. He had read in
its history--Irving’s “Life of Washington,” and ten great volumes about
Lincoln; so he had come to understand that salvation is of the people,
and that those things which the people do not do--those things have not
yet been done. So no one could deceive him, or lead him astray; he might
laugh with the Tories, and even love them for their foibles--quaint old
Samuel Johnson, for instance, because he was poor and sturdy, and had
stood by his trade of bookman; but at bottom Thyrsis knew that all
these men were gilding a corpse. Wordsworth and Tennyson, Browning and
Swinburne--he followed each one as far as their revolutionary impulse
lasted; and after that there was no more in them for him. Even Ruskin,
who taught him the possibilities of English prose, and opened his eyes
to the form and color of the world of nature--even Ruskin he gave up,
because he was a philanthropist and not a democrat.

Thyrsis had been brought up as a devout Episcopalian. They had
dressed him in scarlet and white to carry the train of the bishop
at confirmation, and had sent him to an afternoon service every day
throughout Lent. Early in life he had stumbled on a paper copy of
Paine’s “Age of Reason,” and he read it with horror, and then conducted
a private _auto da fé_. But the questions of the book stayed with him,
and as years passed they clamored more loudly. What would have happened,
astronomically, if the sun had stood still? And how many different
species would have had to go into the ark? And what was the size of a
whale’s gullet, and the probable digestive powers of a whale’s stomach?

And then came more fundamental difficulties. Could there, after all,
be such a duty as faith in any intellectual matter? Could there be any
revelation superior to reason--must not reason have once decided that it
was a revelation, or was not? And what of all the other “revelations”,
which all the other peoples of the world accepted? And then again, if
Jesus had been God, could he really have been tempted? To be God and man
at the same time--did that not mean both to know and not to know?
And was there any way conceivable for anything to be God, in which
everything else was not God?

These perplexities and many others the boy took to his clerical adviser,
a man who loved him dearly, and who gave him some volumes of the
“Bampton lectures” to read. Here was the defense of Christianity,
conducted by authorities, and with scholarship and dignity; and Thyrsis
found to his dismay that the only convincing parts of their books were
where they gave a _résumé_ of the arguments of their opponents. He
learned in this way many difficulties that had not yet occurred to him;
and when he had got through with the reading his mind was made up. If
any man were to be damned for not believing such things, then it was
his duty as a thinker to be damned; and so he bade farewell to the
Church--something which was sad, in a way, for his mother had been
planning him for a bishop!

Section 6. But Thyrsis was throwing away many chances these days.
He went into the higher regions to spend his Christmas holidays; and
instead of being tactful and agreeable, he buried himself in a corner
of the library all day long. For Thyrsis had made the greatest discovery
yet--he had found out Shakespeare! At school they had taught him
“English” by means of “to be or not to be”, and they had sought to
trap him at examinations by means of “man’s first disobedience and
the fruit”; and so for years they had held him back from the two great
glories of our literature. But now, by accident, he stumbled into “The
Tempest”; and after that he read every line of the plays in two weeks.

He lost his soul in that wonderland; he walked and thought no more like
the men of earth--he dwelt with those lords and princes of the soul,
and learned to speak their language. He would dodge among cable-cars and
trucks with their heavenly melodies in his ears; and while he sung them
his eyes flashed and his heart beat fast:

   “Good night, sweet prince,
    And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

There were a few days left in those wondrous holidays; and these went
to Milton. There was a set of his works, enormously expensive, which
had been made and purchased with no idea that any human being would ever
read them. But Thyrsis read them, and so all the beauty of the binding
was justified. For hours, and hours upon hours, he drank in that
thunderous music, crying it aloud with his hands clenched tightly, and
stopping to laugh like a child with excitement:

   “Th’imperial ensign, which full high advanced,
    Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind,
    With gems and golden lustre rich emblazed,
    Seraphic arms and trophies; all the while
    Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds!”

And afterwards, when he came to the palace that “rose like an
exhalation”, all of Thyrsis’ soul rose with it. One summer’s day he
stood on a high mountain with a railroad in the valley, and saw a great
freight-engine stop still and pour out its masses of dense black smoke.
It rose in the breathless air, straight as a column, high and majestic;
and Thyrsis thought of that line. It carried him out into the heavens,
and he knew that a flash of poetry such as that is the meeting of man’s
groping hand with God’s.

It was about here that a strange adventure came to him. It was
midwinter, and he went out, long after midnight, to walk in a beautiful
garden. A dry powdery snow crunched beneath his feet, and overhead the
stars gleamed and quivered, so bright that he felt like stretching out
his hands to them. The world lay still, and awful in its beauty; and
here suddenly, unsuspected--unheralded, and quite unsought--there
came to Thyrsis a strange and portentous experience, the first of his
ecstasies.

He could not have told whether he walked or sat down, whether he spoke
or was silent; he lost all sense of his own existence--his consciousness
was given up to the people of his dreams, the companions and lovers of
his fancy. The cold and snow were gone, and there was a moonlit glade in
a forest; and thither they came, one by one, friendly and human, yet
in the full panoply of their splendor and grace. There were Shelley and
Milton, and the gentle and troubled Hamlet, and the sorrowful knight
of la Mancha, with the irrepressible Falstaff to hearten them all;
a strangely-assorted company, yet royal spirits all of them, and no
strangers to each other in their own world. And here they gathered and
conversed, each in his own vein and from his own impulse, with gracious
fancy and lofty vision and heart-easing mirth. And ah, how many miles
would one have travelled to be with them!

That was the burden which this gift laid upon Thyrsis. He soon
discovered that these visions of wonder came but once, and that when
they were gone, they were gone forever. And he must learn to grapple
with them as they fled, to labor with them and to hold them fast, at the
cost of whatever heartbreaking strain. Thus alone could men have even
the feeblest reflexion of their beauty--upon which to feed their souls
forever after.

Section 7. These things came at the same time as another development in
Thyrsis’ life, likewise portentous and unexpected. Boyhood was gone,
and manhood had come. There was a bodily change taking place in him--he
became aware of it with a start, and with the strangest and most
uncomfortable thrills. He did not know what to make of it, or what to do
about it; nor did he know where to turn for advice.

He tried to put it aside, as a thing of no importance. But it would not
be put aside--it was of vast importance. He discovered new desires in
himself, impulses that dominated him in a most disturbing way. He found
that he took a new interest in women and young girls; he wanted to
linger near them, and their glances caused him strange emotions. He
resented this, as an invasion of his privacy; it was inconsistent with
his hermit-instinct. Thyrsis wished no women in his life save the muses
with their star-sewn garments. He had been fond of a line from a sonnet
to Milton:

   “Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart.”

But instead of this, what awful humiliations! In a summer-resort where
he found himself, there was a girl of not very gentle breeding, somewhat
pudgy and with a languishing air. She liked to have boys snuggle down
by her; and so Thyrsis spent the whole of one evening, sitting in
a summer-house with an arm about her waist, dissolved in a sort of
moon-calf sentimentalism. And then he passed the rest of the night
wandering about in the forest cursing himself, with tears of shame and
vexation in his eyes.

He was so ignorant about these matters that he did not even know if the
changes that had taken place in him were normal, or whether they were
doing him harm. He made up his mind that he must have advice; as it was
unthinkable that he should speak about such shameful things with any
grown person, he bethought himself of a classmate in college who was an
earnest and sober man. This friend, much older than Thyrsis, was the son
of an evangelical clergyman, and was headed for the ministry himself.
His name was Warner, and Thyrsis had helped him in arranging for some
religious meetings at the college. Warner had been shocked by his
theological irregularities; but they were still friends, and now Thyrsis
sought a chance to exchange confidences with him.

The opportunity came while they were strolling down an avenue near the
college, and a woman passed them, a woman with bold and hard features,
and obviously-painted cheeks. She smiled at a group of students just
ahead, and one of them turned and walked off arm in arm with her.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Warner. “Did you see that?”

“Yes,” said Thyrsis. “Who is she?”

“She comes from a house just around the corner.”

“But who is she?”

“Why--she’s a street-walker.”

“A street-walker!”

This brought to Thyrsis’ mind a problem that had been haunting him for a
year or two. Always when he walked about the streets at night there were
women who smiled at him and whispered. And he knew that these were bad
women, and shrunk from them. But just what did they mean?

“What does she do?” he asked again.

“Why, don’t you know what a street-walker is?”

“Not very well,” said Thyrsis.

It took some time for him to get the desired information, because
the other could not realize the depths of his ignorance. “They sell
themselves to men,” he said.

“But what for?” asked Thyrsis. “You don’t mean that they--they let
them---”

“They have intercourse together. Of course.”

Thyrsis was almost dumb with dismay. “But I should think they would have
children!” he exclaimed.

“Good Lord, man!” laughed the other. “Where do you keep yourself,
anyway?”

But Thyrsis was too much shaken to think of being ashamed. This was a
most appalling revelation to him--it opened quite a new vista of life’s
possibilities.

“But why should they do such things?” he cried.

“They earn their living that way,” said the other.

“But why _that_ way?”

“I don’t know. They are that kind of women, I suppose.”

And so Warner went on to expound to him the facts of prostitution,
and all the abysses of human depravity that lie thereabouts. And
incidentally the boy got a chance to ask his questions, and to get a
common-sense view of his perplexities. Also he got some understanding of
human nature, and of the world in which he lived.

Here was Warner, a man of twenty-four, and of a devout, if somewhat dull
and plodding conscientiousness; and the last eight or nine years of his’
life had been one torment because of the cravings of lust. He had never
committed an act of unchastity--or at least he told Thyrsis that he had
not. But he was never free from the impulse, and he had no conception
of the possibility of being free. His desire was a purely brute
one--untouched by any intellectual or spiritual, or even any sentimental
color. He desired woman, as woman--it mattered not what woman. How low
his impulses took him Thyrsis realized with a shudder from one remark
that he made--that his poverty did not help him to live virtuously, for
about the docks and in the workingmen’s quarters there were women who
would sell themselves for fifty cents a night.

This man’s whole life was determined by that craving; in fact it seemed
to Thyrsis that his God had made the universe with relation to it--a
heaven to reward him if he abstained, and a hell to punish him if he
yielded. It was because of this that he clung to the church, and shrunk
from any dallying with “rationalism”. He disapproved of the theatre,
because it appealed to these cravings; he disapproved of all pictures
and statues of the nude human form, because the sight of them
overmastered him. For the same reason he shrunk from all impassioned
poetry, and from dancing, and even from non-religious music. He was
rigid in his conformance to all the social conventions, because they
served the purpose of saving him and his young women-friends from
temptation; and he looked forward to the completion of a divinity-course
as his goal, because then he would be able to settle down and marry, and
so at last to gratify his desires. He stated this quite baldly, quoting
the authority of St. Paul, that it was “better to marry than to burn.”

This conversation brought Thyrsis to a realization that there was a
great deal in the world that was not found in the poetry of Tennyson
and Longfellow; and so he began to pry into the souls of others of his
fellow-students.

Section 8. Warner had given him the religious attitude; and now he
went after the scientific. There was a tall, eager-faced young man, who
proclaimed himself a disciple of Haeckel and Herbert Spencer, and even
went so far as to quote Schopenhauer in class. Walking home together one
day, these two fell to arguing the freedom of the will, and the nature
of motives and desires, and what power one has over them; and so Thyrsis
made the startling discovery that this young man, having accepted the
doctrine of “determinism,” had drawn therefrom the corollary that he
had to do what he wanted to do, and so was powerless to resist his
sex-impulses. For the past year this youth, a fine, intellectual and
honest student, had gone at regular intervals to visit a prostitute;
and with entirely scientific and cold-blooded precision he outlined
to Thyrsis the means he took to avoid contracting disease. Thyrsis
listened, feeling as he might have felt in a slaughter-house; and when,
returning to the deterministic hypothesis, he asked how it was that
he had managed to escape this “necessity”, he was told that it must be
because he was of a weaker and less manly constitution.

And there was yet another type: a man with whom there was no difficulty
in bringing up the subject, for the reason that he was always bringing
it up himself. Thyrsis sat next to him in a class in Latin, and noticed
that whenever the text contained any hint at matters of sex--which was
not infrequent in Juvenal and Horace--this man would look at him with a
grin and a sly wink. And sometimes Thyrsis would make a casual remark in
conversation, and the man would twist it out of its meaning, or make
a pun out of it--to find some excuse for his satyr’s leer. So at last
Thyrsis was moved to say to him--“Don’t you ever realize what a state
you’ve got your mind into?”

“How do you mean?” asked the man.

“Why, everything in the world seems to suggest obscenity to you. You’re
always looking for it and always finding it--you don’t seem to care
about anything else.”

The other was interested in that view of it, and he acknowledged with
mild amusement that it was true; apparently it was a novelty to him
to discuss such matters seriously. He told Thyrsis that he could not
remember having ever restrained a sexual impulse in his life. He thought
of lust in connection with every woman he met, and his mind was a
storehouse of smut. And yet he was not a bad fellow, in other ways;
he handsome, and a good deal of an athlete, and was planning to be a
physician. “You’ll find most all the fellows are the same,” he said.

Not long after this, Thyrsis was selected to represent his college on
a debating-team, and he went away to another city and was invited to
a fraternity-house; and here, suddenly, he discovered how much of
“college-life” he had been missing. This was a fashionable university,
and he met the sons of wealthy parents. About a score of them lived in
this fraternity-house, without any sort of supervision or restraint.
They ate in a beautiful oak-panelled dining-room adorned with
drinking-steins; and throughout the meal they treated their visitor to
such an orgy of obscenity as he had never dreamed of in his life before.
Thyrsis was trapped and could not get away; and it seemed to him when
he rose from the table that there was nothing left clean in all God’s
universe. These boys appeared to vie with each other in blasphemous
abandonment; and it was not simply wantonness--it was sprawling and
disgusting filthiness.

One of this group took Thyrsis driving, and was led to talk.
Here was a youth whose father was the president of a great
manufacturing-enterprise, and supplied him with unlimited funds; which
money the boy used to divert himself in the pursuit of young women.
Sometimes he had stooped so low as manicure-girls and shop-clerks
and stenographers; but for the most part he sought actresses and
chorus-girls--they had more intelligence and spirit, he explained, they
were harder to win. He had his way with them, partly because he was
handsome and clever, but mainly because he was the keeper of the keys
of opportunity. It was his to dispense auto-rides and champagne-suppers,
and flowers and jewels, and all things else that were desirable in life.

Thyrsis was appalled at the hardness and the utter ruthlessness of this
man--he saw him as a young savage turned loose to prey in a civilized
community. He had the most supreme contempt for his victims--that was
what they were made for, and he paid them their price. Nor was this just
because they were women, it was a matter of class; the young man had
a mother and sisters, to whom he applied quite other standards. But
Thyrsis found himself wondering how long, with this contagion raging
among the fathers and the sons, it would be possible to keep the mothers
and the daughters sterilized.

Section 9. These discoveries came one by one; but Thyrsis saw enough at
the outset to make it clear that the time had come for him to gird up
his loins. The choice of Hercules was before him; and he did not intend
that the course of his life was to be decided by these cravings of the
animal within him.

From the grosser sorts of temptation he was always saved by the
fastidiousness of his temperament; the thought of a woman who sold
herself for money could never bring him anything but shuddering. But all
about his lodging-house lived the daughters of the poor, and these were
a snare for his feet. It seemed to him as if this craving came to a
man in regular pulses; he could go for weeks, serene and happy in his
work--and then suddenly would come the restlessness, and he would go
out into the night and wander about the streets for hours, impelled by a
futile yearning for he knew not what--the hope of something clean in
the midst of uncleanliness, of some adventure that would be not quite
shameful to a poet’s fancy. And then, after midnight, he would steal
home, baffled and sick at heart, and wet his pillow with hot and bitter
tears!

So unbearable to him was the thought of such perils that he was impelled
to seek his old friend the clergyman, who had lost him over the ancient
Hebrew mythologies, and now won him back by his living moral force. With
much embarrassment and stammering Thyrsis managed to give a hint of
what troubled him; and the man, whose life was made wholly of love for
others, opened his great heart and took Thyrsis in.

He told him of his own youthful struggle--a struggle which had resulted
in victory, for he had never known a woman. And he put all the facts
before the boy, made clear to him the all-determining importance of the
issue:

   “Choose well, your choice is
    Brief and yet endless!”

On the one hand was slavery and degradation and disease; and on the
other were all the heights of the human spirit. For if one saved and
stored this mighty sex-energy, it became transmuted to the gold of
intellectual and emotional power. Such was the universal testimony of
the masters of the higher life--

   “My strength is as the strength of ten
    Because my heart is pure.”

And this was no blind asceticism; it was simply a choosing of the best.
It was not a denial of love, but on the contrary a consecration of love.
Some day Thyrsis would meet the woman he was to cleave to, and he would
expect her to come to him a virgin; and he must honor her as much--he
must save the fire and fervor of his young desire for his life’s great
consummation.

Such was the ideal; and these two men made a compact between them, that
once every month Thyrsis would write and tell of his success or failure.
And this amateur confessional was a mighty motive to the lad--he knew
that he could never tell a lie, and the thought of telling the truth was
like a sword hanging over him. There were hours of trial, when he stood
so close to the edge of the precipice that this alone was what kept him
clear.

Section 10. The summer had come, and Thyrsis had gone away to live in
a country village, and was reading Keats and Shelley, and the narrative
poems of Scott. There came a soft warm evening, when all the world
seemed a-dream; and he had been working hard, and there came to him
a yearning for the stars. He went out, and was strolling through the
streets of the village, when he saw a girl come out of one of the
houses. She was younger than he, graceful of form, and pretty. The
lamp-light flashed on her bright cheeks, and she smiled at him as she
passed. And Thyrsis’ heart gave a great leap, and the blood surged to
his face; he turned and looked, and saw that she was gazing over her
shoulder at him.

He stopped, and turned to follow, his meditations all gone, and gone his
resolutions. A trembling seized him, and every nerve of him tingled. He
could feel his heart as if it were underneath his throat.

In a moment more he was beside the girl. “May I join you?” he asked, and
she replied with a nod.

Thyrsis moved beside her and took her arm in his. A moment later they
came to a place where the road was dark, and he put his arm about her
waist; she made no resistance.

“I--I’ve seen you often before,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied, “I have seen you.” And he suddenly remembered a
remark that he had heard about her. There was a large summer-hotel in
this neighborhood, which as usual had brought all the corruptions of the
city in its train; and a youth whom Thyrsis had met there had pointed
out the girl with the remark, “She’s a little beast.”

And this idea, as it came to him, swept him away in a fierce tide of
madness; he bent suddenly down and whispered into her ear. They were
words that never in Thyrsis’ life had passed his lips before.

The girl pushed him away; but she laughed.

“You don’t mind, do you?” exclaimed Thyrsis, his heart thumping like a
hammer.

“Listen,” he whispered, bending towards her. “Let us go and take a walk.
Let us go where no one will see us.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Out into the country,” he said.

“Not now,” she replied. “Some other time.”

“No, now!” exclaimed Thyrsis, desperately. “Now!”

They had been moving slowly; they came to a place where a great tree
hung over the road, shadowing it; and there they stopped, as by one
impulse.

“Listen to me,” he whispered, swiftly. “Listen. You don’t know how
anxious I have been to meet you. It’s true--indeed it’s true!”

He paused. “Yes,” said the girl, “and I have been wanting to meet you.
Didn’t you ever see me nod to you?”

And suddenly Thyrsis put his arms about her, and pressed her to him. The
touch of her bosom sent the blood driving through his veins in torrents
of fire; he no longer knew or cared what he said, or what he did.

“Listen to me,” he raced on. “Listen to me! Nobody will know! And you
are so beautiful, so beautiful! I love you!” The words burned his lips,
but he forced himself to say them, again and again--“I love you!”

The girl was gazing around her nervously. “Not now,” she exclaimed. “Not
to-night. To-morrow I will meet you, to-morrow night, and go with you.”

“No,” cried Thyrsis, “not to-morrow night, but now!” And he clasped her
yet more tightly, with all his strength. “Listen,” he panted, his breath
on her cheek. “I love you! I cannot wait till to-morrow--I could not
bear it. I am all on fire! I should not know what to do!”

The girl gazed about her again in uncertainty, and Thyrsis swept on in
his swift, half-incoherent exclamations. He would take no refusal;
for half his madness was terror of himself, and he knew it. And then
suddenly, as he cried out to her, the girl whispered, faintly, “All
right!” And his heart gave a throb that hurt him.

“I’ll tell you,” she went on, hastily, “I was going to the store for
something, and they expect me home. But wait here till I get back, and
then I’ll go with you.”

“You mean it?” whispered Thyrsis. “You mean it?”

“Yes, yes,” she answered.

“And it will be soon?”

“Yes, soon.”

“All right,” said he. “But first give me a kiss.” As she held up her
face, Thyrsis pressed her to him, and kissed her again and again, until
her cheeks were aflame. At last he released her, and she turned swiftly
and darted up the street.

Section 11. And after she was gone the boy stood there motionless, not
stirring even a hand. A full minute passed, and the color went out of
his cheeks, and the fire out of his veins, and he could hardly stand
erect. His head sunk lower and lower, until suddenly he whispered
hoarsely, under his breath, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

He looked up at the sky, his face ghastly white; and there came from his
throat a low moan, like that of a wounded animal. Suddenly he turned,
and fled away down the street.

He went on and on, block after block; but then, all at once, he stopped
again and faced about. He gripped his hands until the nails cut him,
and shut his teeth together like a steel-trap. “No, no!” he muttered.
“No--you coward!”

He turned and began to march, grimly, as a soldier might; he went back,
and stopped on the spot from which he had come; and there he stood, like
a statue. So one minute passed, then another; and at last a shadow moved
in the distance, and a step came near. It was the girl.

“Here I am,” she whispered, laughing.

“Yes,” said Thyrsis. “I have something I must say to you, please.”

She noticed the change in a flash, and she stopped. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know just how to tell you,” said Thyrsis, in a low, quivering
voice. “I’ve been a hound, and now I don’t want to be a cad. But I’m
sorry for what we were talking about.”

“You mean what _you_ were talking about, don’t you?” demanded the girl,
her eyes flashing.

Thyrsis dropped his glance. “Yes,” he said. “I am a cur. I beg your
pardon. I am so ashamed of myself that I don’t know what to do. But, oh,
I was crazy. I couldn’t help it! and I--I’m so sorry!” There were tears
in his voice.

“Humph,” said the girl, “it’s all right.”

“No,” said Thyrsis, “it’s all wrong. It’s dreadful--it’s horrible. I
don’t know what I should have done---”

“Well, you better not do it any more, that’s all,” said she. “I’m sure
you needn’t worry about me--I’ll take care of myself.”

Thyrsis looked at her again; she was no longer beautiful. Her face was
coarse, and her anger did not make it any better. His humility made no
impression.

“It is so wrong---” he began; but she interrupted him.

“Preaching won’t help it any,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it.
Good-bye.”

So she turned and walked away; and Thyrsis stood there, white, and
shuddering, until at last he started and strode off. Clear through the
town he went, and out into the black country beyond, seeing nothing,
caring about nothing. He flung himself down by the roadside, and lay
there moaning for hours: “My God, my God, what shall I do?”

Section 12. It was nearly morning when he came back and crept upstairs
to his room; and here he sat by the bedside, gazing at the haggard face
in the glass. At such times as this he discovered a something in his
features that filled him with shuddering; he discovered it in his words,
and in the very tone of his voice--the sins of the fathers were being
visited upon the children! What an old, old story it was to him--this
anguish and remorse! These ecstasies of resolution that vanished like a
cloud-wrack--these protestations and noble sentiments that counted for
naught in conduct! And his was to be the whole heritage of impotence and
futility; he, too, was to struggle and agonize--and to finish with his
foot in the trap!

This idea was like a white-hot goad to him. After such an experience
there would be several months of toil and penance, and of savage
self-immolation. It was hard to punish a man who had so little; but
Thyrsis managed to find ways. For several months at a time he would go
without those kinds of food that he liked; and instead of going to bed
at one o’clock he would read the New Testament in Greek for an hour. He
would leap out of bed in the morning and plunge into cold water; and
at night, when he felt a longing upon him, he would go out and run for
hours.

He took to keeping diaries and writing exhortations to himself. Because
he could no longer use the theological prayers he had been taught, he
fashioned new invocations for himself: prayers to the unknown sources of
his vision, to the new powers of his own soul--“the undiscovered gods,”
 as he called them. Above all he prayed to his vision of the maiden who
waited the issue of this battle, and held the crown of victory in her
keeping--

   “Somewhere beneath the sun,
      Those quivering heart-strings prove it,
    Somewhere there must be one
      Made for this soul to love it--

    Some one whom I could court
      With no great change of manner,
    Still holding reason’s fort,
      While waving fancy’s banner!”

All of which things made a subtle change in his attitude to Corydon,
whom he still met occasionally. Corydon was now a young lady, beautiful,
even stately, with an indescribable atmosphere of gentleness and purity
about her. All things unclean shrunk from her presence; and so in times
of distress he liked to be with her. He would drop vague hints as
to sufferings and temptations, and told her that she seemed like a
“goddess” to him.

Corydon received this with some awe, but with more perplexity. She could
not understand why anyone should struggle so much, or why a youth should
take such a sombre view of things. But she was perfectly willing to seem
like a “goddess” to anyone, and she was glad if that helped him. She was
touched when he read her a poem of his own, a poem which he held very
precious. He called it

   “A song of the young-eyed Cherubim
    In the days of the making of man.”

And in it he had set forth the view of life that had come to him--

   “The quest of the spirit’s gain--
      Lured by the graces of pleasure,
    And lashed by the furies of pain.
      Thy weakness shall sigh for an Eden,
    But the sword shall flame at the gate;
      For far is the home of thy vision
    And strong is the hand of thy fate!”

Section 13. Though Thyrsis had no time to realize it, it was in this
long and bitter struggle that he won whatever power he had in his future
life. It was here that he learned “to hold his will above him as his
law”, and to defy the world for the sake of his ideal. And then, too,
this toil was the key that opened to him the treasure-house of a new
art--which was music.

Until he was nearly out of college Thyrsis had scarcely heard any music
at all. Church-hymns he had learned, and a few songs in school. But now
in poetry and other books he met with references to composers, and to
the meaning of great music; and the things that were described there
were the things he loved, and he began to feel a great eagerness to get
at them. As a first step he bought a mandolin, and set to work to teach
himself to play, a task at which he wrought with great diligence. At the
same time a friend had bought a guitar, and the two set to work to play
duets. The first preliminary was the getting of the instruments in tune;
and not knowing that the mandolin is an octave higher than the guitar,
they spent a great deal of time and broke a great many guitar-strings.

As the next step, Thyrsis went to hear a great pianist, and sat
perplexed and wondering. There was a girl next to him who sobbed, and
Thyrsis watched her as he might have watched a house on fire. Only once
the pianist pleased _him_--when he played a pretty little piece called
somebody’s “impromptu”, in which he got a gleam of a “tune.” Poor
Thyrsis went and got that piece, and took it home to study it, with the
help of the mandolin; but, alas, in the maze of notes he could not even
find the “tune.”

But if he could not understand the music, he could read books about
it; he read a whole library--criticism of music, analysis of music,
histories of music, composers of music; and so gradually he learned the
difference between a sarabande and a symphony, and began to get some
idea of what he went out for to hear. At first, at the concerts, all
he could think of was to crane his neck and recognize the different
instruments; he heard whole symphonies, while doing nothing but
watching for the “movements,” and making sure he hadn’t skipped any. One
heartless composer ran two movements into one, and so Thyrsis’ concert
came out one piece short at the end, and he sat gazing about him in
consternation when the audience rose to go. Afterwards he read long
dissertations about each symphony before he went, and he would note down
the important points and watch for them. The critic would expatiate
upon “the long-drawn dissonance _forte_, that marks the close of the
working-out portion”; and Thyrsis would watch for that long-drawn
dissonance, and be wondering if it was never coming--when suddenly the
whole symphony would come to an end! Or he would read about a “quaint
capering measure led off by the bassoons,” or a “frantic sweep of the
violins over a trombone melody,” and he would watch for these events
with eyes and ears alert, and if he found them--_eureka_!

But such things could not last forever; for Thyrsis had a heart full of
eagerness and love, and of such is the soul of music. And just then was
a time when he was sick and worn--when it seemed to him that the burden
of his life was more than he could bear. He was haunted by the thought
that he would lose his long battle, that he would go under and go down;
and then it was that chance took him to a concert which closed with the
great “C-Minor Symphony.”

Thyrsis had read a life of Beethoven, and he knew that here was one
of the hero-souls--a man who had grappled with the fiends, and passed
through the valley of death. And now he read accounts of this titan
symphony, and learned that it was a battle of the human spirit with
despair. He read Beethoven’s words about the opening theme--“So knocks
fate upon the door!” And a fierce and overwhelming longing possessed him
to get at the soul of that symphony.

He went to the concert, and heard nothing of the rest of the music, but
sat like a man in a dream; and when the time came for the symphony,
he was trembling with excitement. There was a long silence; and then
suddenly came the first theme--those fearful hammer-strokes that
cannot be thought without a shudder. They beat upon Thyrsis’ very
heart-strings, and he sat appalled; and straight out he went upon the
tide of that mighty music-passion--without knowing it, without knowing
how. He forgot that he was trying to understand a symphony; he forgot
where he was, and what he was; he only knew that gigantic phantoms
surged within him, that his soul was a hundred times itself. He never
guessed that an orchestra was playing a second theme; he only knew that
he saw a light gleam out of the storm, that he heard a voice, pitiful,
fearful, beautiful beyond utterance, crying out to the furies for mercy;
and that then the storm closed over it with a roar. Again and again it
rose; Thyrsis did not know that this was the “working-out portion” that
had forever been his bane. He only knew that it struggled and fought his
fight, that it pleaded and sobbed, and rose higher and higher, and began
to rejoice--and that then came the great black phantom-shape sweeping
over it; and the iron hammer-strokes of Fate beat down upon it, crushed
it and trampled it into annihilation. Again and again this happened,
while Thyrsis sat clutching the seat, and shaking with wonder and
excitement. Never in his experience had there been anything so vast, so
awful; it was more than he could bear, and when the first movement came
to an end--when the soul’s last hope was dead--he got up and rushed
out. People who passed him on the streets must have thought that he was
crazy; and afterwards, that day and forever, he lived all his soul’s
life in music.

As a result of this Thyrsis paid all his bank-account for a violin, and
went to see a teacher.

“You are too old,” the teacher said.

But Thyrsis answered, “I will work as no one ever worked before.”

“We all do that,” replied the other, with a smile. And so they began.

And so all day long, with fingers raw, and arms and back shuddering with
exhaustion, Thyrsis sat and practiced, the spirit of Music beckoning him
on. It was in a boarding-house, and there was a nervous old man in the
next room, and in the end Thyrsis had to move. By the time he went away
to the country, he was able to play a melody in tune; and then he would
take some one that had fascinated him, and practice it and practice
it night and day. He would take his fiddle every morning at eight and
stride out into the forest, and there he would stay all day with the
squirrels. They told him once how a new arrival, driving over in the
hotel ‘bus at early dawn, had passed an old Italian woman toiling up a
hill and singing for dear life the “Tannhauser March.” It chanced that
the new arrival was a musician, and he leaned out and asked the old
woman where she had learned it. And this was her explanation;

“Dey ees a crazy feller in de woods--he play it all day for tree weeks!”

Section 14. By this time Thyrsis had finished at college, passing
comfortably near the bottom of his class, and had betaken himself to a
university as a graduate student. He was duly registered for a lot of
courses, and spent his time when he should have been at the lectures,
sitting in a vacant class-room reading the book that had fascinated him
last. His note-book began at that time to show two volumes a day on
an average, and once or twice he stopped at night to wonder how it had
actually been possible for him to read poetry fourteen hours a day for a
whole week and not be tired.

He taught himself German, and that led to another great discovery--he
made the acquaintance of Goethe. The power of that mighty spirit took
hold of him, so that he prayed to him when he was lonely, and kept the
photograph of the young poet in his pocket, to gaze at it as at a lover.
The great eyes came to haunt him so that one night he awoke crying out,
because he had dreamed he was going to meet Goethe.

In the catalog of the university there were listed a number of courses
in “rhetoric and English composition”. They were for the purpose of
teaching one how to write, and the catalog set forth convincingly the
methods whereby this was done. Thyrsis wished to know all there was to
know about writing, and so ne enrolled himself for an advanced course,
and went for an hour every day and listened to expositions of the
elements of sentence-structure by Prof. Osborne, author of “American
Prose Writers” and “The Science of Rhetoric”. The professor would give
him a theme, and bid him bring in a five-hundred word composition.
Perhaps it was that Thyrsis was lacking in the play-spirit; at any
rate he could not write convincingly on the subject of “The Duty of the
College Man to Support Athletics.” He struggled for a month against his
own impotence, and then went to see his instructor.

“I think,” he said, “I shall have to drop Course A.”

The professor gazed over his spectacles at him.

“Why?”

“I don’t think I am getting any good out of it.”

“But how can you tell what good you are getting?”

“I don’t seem to feel that I am,” said Thyrsis, deprecatingly.

“It is not to be supposed that you would feel it,” said the other--“not
at this early stage. You must wait.”

“But I don’t like the method, sir.”

“What’s wrong with the method?”

Thyrsis was embarrassed. He was not sure, he said; but he did not think
that writing could be taught. Anyway, one had first to have something
worth saying--

“Are you laboring under the delusion that you know anything about
writing?” demanded the professor. (He had written across Thyrsis’ last
composition the words, “Feeble and trivial”.)

“Why, no,” began the boy.

“Because if you are, let me disabuse your mind at once. There is no one
in the class who knows less about writing than yourself.”

“I think,” said Thyrsis, “it’s because I can’t bring myself to write in
cold blood. I have to be interested. I’m sure that is the trouble.”

“I’m sure,” said the other, “that the trouble is that you think you know
too much.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” said Thyrsis, humbly. “I’ve tried my best---”

“It is my business to teach students to write. I’ve given my life to
that, and I think I know something about it. But you think you know more
than I do. That’s all.”

And so they parted. Thyrsis kept a vivid recollection of this interview,
for the reason that at a later stage of his career he came into contact
with Prof. Osborne again, and got another glimpse of the authoritarian
attitude towards the art of letters.

Section 15. Thyrsis had not many friends at college, and none at all
at the university. He had no time to make any; and besides, there was
a certain facetious senior who had caught him hurrying through the
corridors one day, declaring in excitement that--

   “Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
    On its roof did float and flow!”

But he had long ago ceased to hope for a friend, or to care what anybody
thought about him; it was clear to him by this time that he had made
himself into a poet, and was doomed to be unhappy. His mother had given
up all hope of seeing him a bishop, and they had compromised upon a
judgeship; but here at the university there was a law-school, and he met
the students, and saw that this, too, could not be. These “lawyers” were
not seeking knowledge for the love of it--they were studying a trade, by
which they could rise in the world. They were not going out to do battle
for truth and justice--they were perfecting themselves in cunning, so
that they might be of help in money-disputes; they were sharpening their
wits, to make them useful tools for the opening of treasure-chests. And
this attitude to life was written all over their personalities; they
seemed to Thyrsis a coarse and roistering crew, and he shrunk from them
in repugnance.

He went his own impetuous way. He stayed at the university until he had
taught himself French and Italian, as well as German, and had read all
the best literature in those languages. And likewise he heard all the
best music, and went about full of it day and night. By this time he had
definitely beaten his devils, and had come to be master of himself; and
though nobody guessed anything about it, there was a new marvel going on
within him--he had, in a spiritual sense, become pregnant.

There were many signs by which this state might have been known. He went
quite alone, and spoke to no man; he was self-absorbed, and walked
about with his eyes fixed on vacancy; he was savage when disturbed, and
guarded his time unscrupulously. He had given up the very last of the
formalities of life--he no longer attended any lectures, or wore cuffs,
and he would not talk at meal-times. He took long walks at impossible
hours, and he was fond of a certain high hill where the storms blew.
These things had been going on for a year; and now the book that had
been coming to ripeness in his mind was ready to be born.

It had its origin in the reading of history, and the fronting of old
tyranny in its cruel forms. Thyrsis had come to hate Christianity for
many things by that time, but most of all he hated it because it taught
the bastard virtue of Obedience. Thyrsis obeyed no man--he lived his
life; and the fiery ardor with which he lived it was taking form in his
mind as a personality. He was dreaming a hero who should be _Resistance_
incarnate; the passionate assertion of man’s right and of man’s
defiance.

It was in the days of ferocity in Italy, the days of the despot and the
bravo; and Thyrsis’ hero was a minstrel, a mighty musician whose soul
was free. And he sung in the despot’s hall, and wooed the despot’s
daughter. This was the minstrel of “Zulieka”---

   “His ladder of song was slight,
    But it reached to her window’s height;
    Each verse so frail was the silken rail,
    From which her soul took flight.”

Thyrsis went about quite drunk with the burning words with which
the minstrel won the lady, and tore her free from the mockeries of
convention, and that divinity that doth hedge about a princess. He bore
her away, locked tightly in his arms, and all his own--into the great
lonely mountains; and there lived the minstrel and the princess, the
lord and the lady of an outlaw band. But the outlaws were cruel, and the
minstrel sought goodness; and so there was a struggle, and he and the
lady went yet deeper into the black forest, where they dwelt alone in a
hut, he a prince of hunters and she a princess of love. But the outlaws
led the despot to the place, and there was a battle; the princess was
slain, and the minstrel escaped in the darkness. All night he roamed
the forest, and in the morning he lay by the roadside with a bow in his
hand, and when the despot rode by he rose and drove the shaft through
his heart. Then they captured him, and tortured him, and he died with a
song of mockery and defiance upon his lips.

Section 16. Now, when these things first came to Thyrsis, he whispered
in awe that it would be a life-time before he could write them. And a
year passed thus, while every emotion of his life poured itself into
some part of that story, and every note of music that he heard came out
of the minstrel’s heart. At last the time came when he was so full of it
that he could no longer find peace; when the wonder of it was such that
he walked along the street laughing, and with tears in his eyes. Then he
said to himself, “It must be done! Now! Now!” And he looked about him as
a woman might, seeking some place for her labor.

That was in the late winter, when the professors at the university,
and all his relatives and acquaintances, had given him up as a hopeless
case. He had stopped all his writing for money--he had a hundred
dollars laid by, and that would suffice him; and he was wandering about
whispering to himself: “The spring-time! The spring-time! For it must
be in the country!” When April had come he could stand it no longer--he
must go! So he left all behind him, and set out for a place in the
wilderness.

When he reached it, he found a lake that was all ice, and mountains that
were all snow; the country people, who had never seen a poet, and knew
not the subtle difference between inspiration and insanity, heard with
wonder that he was going out into the woods. But he set out alone,
through the snowy forest and along the lake-shore, to find some place
far away, where he could build a hut, or even put up a tent; and when he
was miles from the village, he came suddenly on a little wonderland
that made his heart leap like the wild deer in the brake. Here was a
dreamland palace, a vision beyond all thinking--a little shanty built
of logs! It stood in a pretty dell, with a mountain streamlet dashing
through it, and the mighty forest hiding it, and the lake spread out
in front of it. It was all wet snow, and freezing rain, and mud and
desolation; but Thyrsis saw the summer that was to be, and he sat down
upon a stone and gazed at it, and laughed and sang for wonder and joy.

Then he fled back to the village, and found the owner of the earthly
rights to this paradise, and hired it for a little gold; and then he
moved out, in spite of the snow. At last his soul was free!

Twice a week they brought him provisions, and there he stayed. At first
he nearly froze at night, and he had to write with his gloves on; but
he did not feel the cold, because of the fire within. He climbed the
mountains and yelled with the mad wind, and tramped through the bare,
rocking forest, singing his minstrel songs. And all these days he
walked with God, and there was no world at all save the world of nature.
Millions of young-hearted things sprang up out of the ground to welcome
him; the forests shook out their dazzling sheen, and the wild birds
went mad in the mornings. All the time Thyrsis was writing,
writing--thrilling with his ecstasy, and pouring out all his soul.
He kept a little diary these days, and for weeks there was but one
entry--“The book! The book!”

And then one day came a letter from his mother, saying that she was
coming to the village nearby to spend the summer; also that Corydon’s
mother was coming, and that Corydon would be with her!






BOOK II

THE SNARE





_The streamlet tinkled on. She sat, gazing about her at each familiar
tree and rock. And meanwhile he was reading again from the book--

   “Here, too, our shepherd-pipes we first assay’d!”

“Is that from ‘Thyrsis’?” she asked. “Read me those lines that we used,
to love so much.”

And so he turned the page, and read again--

   “A fugitive and gracious light he seeks,
      Shy to illumine; and I seek it, too.
        This does not come with houses or with gold,
      With place, with honor, and a flattering crew:
       ‘Tis not in the world’s market bought and sold--
            But the smooth-slipping weeks
    Drop by, and leave its seeker still untired;
      Out of the heed of mortals he is gone,
      He wends unfollow’d, he must house alone;
    Yet on he fares, by his own heart inspired.”_

Section 1. On the train Corydon was writing a letter to a friend, to say
where she was going, and that Thyrsis was there. “I don’t expect to
see anything of him,” she wrote. “He grows more egotistical and more
contemptuous every day, and I cordially dislike him.”

But when a man has spent three or four weeks with no company save the
squirrels and the owls, there comes over him a mood of sociability,
when the sight of a friendly face is an event. Thyrsis had now written
several chapters of his book, and the first fury of his creative impulse
had spent itself. So when Corydon stepped from the train, she found
him waiting there to greet her; and he told her that he was laying in
supplies for a feast, and that on the morrow she and her mother were to
come out and see his fairy-palace and have a picnic dinner.

They came; and the May put on her finest raiment for their greeting. The
sun shone warm and bright, and there was a humming and stirring in grass
and thicket; one could feel the surge of the spring-time growth as a
living flood. There was a glory of young green over the hill-sides, and
a quivering sheen of white in the aspens and birches. Corydon clasped
her hands and cried out in rapture when she saw it.

And Thyrsis, picturesque in his old corduroy trousers and his
grey flannel shirt, played the host. He showed them his domestic
establishment--wherein things were set in order for the first time since
he had come. He told all his adventures: how the cold had crept in at
night, and he had to fiddle to keep his courage up; how he had slept in
a canvas-cot for the first time, and piled all the bedding on top,
and wondered that he was cold; how he had left the pail with the
freshly-roasted beef on the piazza, and a wild cat had carried off
pail and all. He made fun of his amateur house-keeping--he would forget
things and let them burn, or let the fire go out; and he had tried
living altogether on cold food, to the great perplexity of his stomach.

Then he gave a demonstration of his hard-won culinary skill. He boiled
rice and raisins, and fried bacon and eggs; and they had fresh bread
and butter, and jam and pickles, and a festive cake. And after they had
feasted, Thyrsis stretched himself and leaned back against the trunk of
a tree, and gazed up at the sky, quoting the words of a certain one-eyed
Kalandar, son of a king, “Verily, this indeed is life! ‘Tis pity ‘tis
fleeting!”

Afterwards he took Corydon for a walk. They climbed the hill where he
came to battle with the stormwinds, and to watch the sunsets and the
moon rising over the lake. And then they went down into the glen, where
the mountain streamlet tumbled. Here had been wood-sorrel, and a carpet
of the white trillium; and now there was adder’s tongue, quaint and
saucy, and columbine, and the pale dusty corydalis. There was soft new
moss underfoot, and one walked as if in a temple.

Thyrsis pointed out a seat beside a deep bubbling pool. “Here’s where I
sit and write,” he said.

“And how comes the book?” asked Corydon.

“Oh, I’m hammering at it--that’s the best I can say.”

“What is it?”

“Why--it’s a story. I suppose it’ll be called a romance, though I don’t
like the word.”

Corydon pondered for a moment. “I wouldn’t expect you to be writing
anything romantic,” she said.

Thyrsis, occupied with his own thoughts, observed, “I might call it a
revolutionary romance.”

“What is it about?”

He hesitated. “It happens in the middle ages,” he said. “There’s a
minstrel and a princess.”

“That sounds interesting,” said Corydon.

Now in the period of pregnancy the artist’s mood is one of
secretiveness. But afterwards there comes a time for promulgation and
rejoicing; and already there had been hints of this in the mind of
Thyrsis. The great secret that he was cherishing--what would be the
world’s reception of it? And now suddenly a wild idea came to him. He
had heard somewhere that it is the women who read fiction. And was not
Corydon a perfect specimen of the average middle-class young lady, and
therefore of that mysterious potentiality, “the public”, to which he
must appeal? Why not see what she would think of it?

He took the plunge. “Would you like me to read it to you?” he asked.

“Why, certainly,” she replied, and then added, gently, “If it wouldn’t
be a desecration.”

“Oh, no,” said Thyrsis. “You see, when it’s been printed, all sorts of
people will read it.”

So he went back to the house and brought the precious manuscript; and he
placed Corydon in the seat of inspiration, and sat beside her and read.

In many ways this was a revolutionary romance. Thyrsis had not spent any
of his time delving into other people’s books for “local color”; he
was not relying for his effects upon gabardines and hauberks, and a
sprinkling of “Yea, sires,” and “prithees.” His castle was but the
vaguely outlined background of a stage upon which living hearts wrought
out their passions. One saw the banquet-hall, with its tapestries and
splendor, and the master of it, the man of force; there were swift
scenes that gave one a glimpse of the age-long state of things--

   “Right forever on the scaffold,
    Wrong forever on the throne.”

There was a quarrel, and a cruel sentence about to be executed; and then
the minstrel came. His fame had come before him, and so the despot, in
half-drunken playfulness, left the deciding of the quarrel to him. He
was brought to the head of the table, and the princess was led in; and
so these two met face to face.

Here Thyrsis paused, and asked, “Are you interested?”

“Go on, go on,” said Corydon.

So he read about his princess, who was the embodiment of all the virtues
of the unknown goddess of his fancy. She was proud yet humble, aloof
yet compassionate, and above all ineffably beautiful. And as for the
minstrel--

   “The minstrel was fair and young.
    His heart was of love and fire.”

He took his harp, and first he pacified the quarrel, and then he sang to
the lady. He sang of love, and the poet’s vision of beauty; but most of
all he sang of the free life of the open. He sang of the dreams and the
spirit-companions of the minstrel, and of the wondrous magic that he
wields--

   “Secrets of all future ages
      Hover in mine ecstasy;
    Treasures never known to mortals
      Hath my fancy hid for thee!”

He sang the spells that he would weave for her, the far journeys she
should take--

   “For thy soul a river flowing
      Swiftly, over golden sands,
    With the singing of the steersman
      Stealing into wonderlands!”

Section 2. This song was as far as Thyrsis had written, and he paused.
Corydon was sitting with her hands clasped, and a look of enthrallment
upon her face. “Oh, beautiful! beautiful!” she cried.

A thrill of pleasure went through the poet. “You like it, then?” he
said.

“Oh, I like it!” she answered. And then she gazed at him, with wide-open
eyes of amazement. “But you! You!” she exclaimed.

“Why not I?” he asked.

“How in the world did you do it? Where did you get it from?”

“It is mine,” said Thyrsis, quickly.

“But I can’t imagine it! I had no idea you were interested in such
things!”

“But how could you know what I am interested in?”

“I see how you live--apart from everybody. And you spend all your time
in books!”

Thyrsis suddenly recollected something which had amused him very much.
Corydon had been reading “Middlemarch,” and had told him that Dr.
Casaubon reminded her of him. “And so I’m still just a bookworm to you!”
 he laughed.

“But isn’t your interest in things always intellectual?” she asked.

“Then you suppose I’m doing this just as an exercise in technique?” he
countered.

“It’s taken me quite by surprise,” said Corydon.

“We have three faculties in us,” Thyrsis propounded--“intellect,
feeling, and will; and to be a complete human being, we have to develop
all of them.”

“But you spend so much time piling up learning!”

“I need to know a great many things,” he said. “I’m not conscious of
studying anything I don’t need for my purpose.”

“What is the purpose?” she asked.

He touched the precious manuscript. “This,” he said.

There was a pause.

“But you lose so much when you cut yourself off from the world,” said
Corydon. “And there are other people, whom you might help.”

“People don’t need my help; or at least, they don’t want it.”

“But how can you know that--if you never go among them?”

“I can judge by the lives they live.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Corydon, quickly, “but people aren’t to blame for the
lives they live!”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because--they can’t help them. They are bound fast.”

“They should break loose.”

“That is easy for you to say,” said Corydon. “You have no ties.”

“I did have them--I might have them still. But I broke them.”

“Ah, but you are a man!”

“What difference does that make?”

“It makes all the difference in the world. You can earn money, you can
go away by yourself. But suppose you were a girl--shut up in a home, and
told that that was your ‘sphere’?”

“I’d fight,” said Thyrsis--“I’d break my way out somehow, never fear.
If one doesn’t break out, it simply means that his desire is not strong
enough.”

Thyrsis had been surprised at the depth of Corydon’s interest in his
manuscript; he had not supposed that she would be so susceptible to
anything of the imagination. And now he was surprised to see that her
hands were clenched tightly, and that she sat staring ahead of her
intently.

“Are you dissatisfied with your life?” he asked.

“Is there anything in it that I could be satisfied with?” she cried.

“I had no idea of that,” he said.

“No,” she replied; “that only shows how stupid you can be!”

“But--you never showed any signs--”

“Didn’t you know that I was trying to prepare for college last year?”

“Yes; but you gave it up.”

“What could I do? I had no help--no encouragement. I was groping like a
blind person. And I told you about it.”

“But I told you what to study,” objected Thyrsis.

“Yes,” said the girl; “but how could I do it? You know how to
study--you’ve been taught. But I don’t know anything, and I don’t know
how to find anything out. I began on the Latin, but I didn’t even know
how the words should be pronounced.”

“Nobody else knows that,” observed Thyrsis, somewhat inconsequently.

“It was all so dull and dreary,” she went on--“everything they would
have had me learn. I wanted things that had life in them, things that
were beautiful and worth while--like this book of yours, for instance.”

“I am really delighted that you like it,” said Thyrsis, touched by that.

“Tell me the rest of it,” she said.

Section 3. Thyrsis told his story at some length; in the ardor of
her sympathy his imagination took fire, and he told it eloquently, he
discovered new beauties in it that he had not seen before. And Corydon
listened with growing delight and amazement.

“So that is the way you spend your time!” she exclaimed.

“That is the way,” he said.

“And that is why you live like a hermit!”

“Yes, that is why.”

“And you think that you would lose your vision if you went among
people?”

“I know that I should.”

“But how do you know?”

“I know because I have tried. You don’t realize how hard I have to work
over a thing like this. I have carried it in my mind for a year; I have
lived for nothing else--I have literally had no other interest in the
world. Every sentence I have read to you has been the product of work
added to work--of one impulse piled upon another--of thinking and
criticizing and revising. Just the little bit I have done has taken me
a whole month, and I have hardly stopped to eat; it’s been my first
thought in the morning and my last at night. And when the mood of it
comes to me, then I work in a kind of frenzy that lasts for hours and
even days; and if I give up in the middle and fall back, then I have to
do it all over again. It’s like toiling up a mountain-side.”

“I see,” whispered Corydon. “And then, do you expect to have no human
relationships as long as you live?”

Thyrsis pondered for a moment. “Did you ever read Mrs. Browning’s poem,
‘A Musical Instrument’?” he asked.

“No,” she answered.

“It’s a most beautiful poem,” he said; “and it’s hardly ever quoted or
read, that I can find. It tells how the great god Pan came down by the
river-bank, and cut one of the reeds to make himself a pipe. He sat
there and played his music upon it--

   ‘Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
      Piercing sweet by the river!
    Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
    The sun on the hill forgot to die,
    And the lilies reviv’d, and the dragon-fly
      Came back to dream on the river.

   ‘Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
      To laugh as he sits by the river,
    Making a poet out of a man.
    The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,--
    For the reed which grows nevermore again
      As a reed with the reeds in the river.’”

Thyrsis paused. “Do you see what it means?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Corydon, “I see.”

“‘Making a poet out of a man!’ That is one of the finest lines I know.
And that’s the way I feel about it--I have given up all other duties in
the world. If I can write one book, or even one poem, that will be an
inspiration to men in the future--why, then I have done far more than I
could do by a lifetime given to helping people around me.”

“I never understood before,” said Corydon.

“That is the idea the minstrel tries to voice to the princess. At first
he pours out his soul to her; but then, when he finds that she loves
him, he is afraid, and tries to persuade her not to come with him. He
tells her how lonely and stern his life is; and she has been born to a
gentle life--she has her station and her duty in the world. But the more
he pleads the hardness of his life, the more she sees she must go with
him. Even if the end be death to her, still she will be an inspiration
to him, and give wings to his music. ‘Be silent,’ she tells him--‘let me
fling myself away for a song! To do one deed that the world remembers,
to utter one word that lives forever--that is worth all the failure and
the agony that can come to one woman in her lifetime!’”

Corydon sat with her hands clasped. “Yes,” she said, “that is the way
she would feel!”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” remarked the other. “I must make it
real; and I’ve been afraid about it. Would she really go with him?”

“She would go if she loved him,” said Corydon.

“If she loved him. But she must love his art still more.”

“She must love _him,”_ said Corydon.

Thyrsis shook his head. “It would not do for her to go with him for
that,” he said.

“Why not? Doesn’t he love her?”

“Yes; but he is afraid to tell her so. They dare not let that sway
them.”

“I don’t understand. Why not?”

“Because personal love is a limited thing, and comparatively an ignoble
thing.”

“I don’t see how there can be anything more noble than true love between
a man and a woman,” declared Corydon.

“It depends on what you mean by ‘true’ love,” replied Thyrsis. “If two
people love each other for their own sakes, and go together, they soon
come to know each other, and then they are satisfied--and their growth
is at an end. What I conceive is that two people must lose themselves,
and all thought of themselves, in their common love for something
higher--for some great ideal, some purpose, some vision of perfection.
And they seek this together, and they rejoice in finding it, each for
the other; and so they have always progress and growth--they stand for
something new to each other every day of their lives. To such love there
is no end, and no chance of weariness or satiety.”

“I had never thought of it just so,” said the girl. “But surely there
must be a personal love in the beginning.”

“I don’t know,” he responded. “I hadn’t thought about that. I’m afraid
I’m impersonal by nature.”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s what has puzzled me. Don’t you love human
beings?”

“Not as a rule,” he confessed.

“But then--what is it you are interested in? Yourself?”

“People tell me that’s the case. And there’s a sense in which it’s
true--I’m wrapped up in the thought of myself as an art-work. I’ve a
certain vision of the possibilities of my own being, and I’m trying to
realize it. And if I do, then I can write books and communicate it to
other people, so that they can judge it, and see if it’s any better than
the vision they have. It is a higher kind of unselfishness, I think.”

“I see,” said Corydon. “It’s not easy to understand.”

“No one understands it,” he replied. “People are taught that they must
sacrifice themselves for others; and they do it, blindly and stupidly,
and never ask if the other person is worthy of the sacrifice--and still
less if they themselves have anything worth sacrificing.”

Corydon had clenched her hands suddenly. “How I hate the religion of
self-sacrifice!” she cried.

“Mine is a religion of self-development,” said Thyrsis. “I am
sacrificing myself for what other people ought to be.”

Section 4. They came back after a time, to the subject of love; and to
the ideal of it which Thyrsis meant to set forth in the book. It was
the duty of every soul to seek the highest potentiality of which it had
vision; and as one did that for himself, so he did it for the person
he loved. There could be no higher love than this--to treat the thing
beloved as one’s self, to be perpetually dissatisfied with it, to
scourge it to new endeavor, to hold it in immortal discontent.

This was a point about which they argued with eager excitement. To
Thyrsis, love itself was a prize to be held before the loved one;
whereas Corydon argued that love must exist before such a union could be
thought of. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes shone as she maintained the
thesis that the princess could not go with the minstrel unless his love
was given to her irrevocably.

“If you mean by love a sense of oneness in the pursuit of an ideal, then
I agree with you,” said Thyrsis. “But if you mean what love generally
means--a mutual admiration, the worshipping of another personality--then
I don’t.”

“And are lovers not even to be interesting to each other?” cried
Corydon.

But the poet did not shrink even from that. “I don’t think a woman could
be interesting to me--except in so far as she was growing. And she
must always know that if she stopped growing, she would cease to be
interesting. That is not a matter of anybody’s will, it seems to me--it
is a fact of soul-chemistry.”

“I don’t think you will find many women to love you on that basis,” said
Corydon.

“I never expected to find but one,” was Thyrsis’ reply; “and I may not
find even one.”

She sat watching him for a moment. “I had never realized the sublimity
of your egotism,” she said. “It would never occur to you to judge anyone
else by your own standards, would it?”

“That is very well put,” laughed Thyrsis. “As a matter of fact, I have a
maxim that I count all things lost in the world but my own soul.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I can depend on my own soul; and I have not yet met anything
else in life of which I can say that.”

Again there was a pause. “You are as hard as iron!” exclaimed the girl.

“I am harder than anything you can find for your simile,” he answered.
“I know simply that there is no force existing that can turn me from my
task.”

“You might meet some woman who would fascinate you.”

“Perhaps,” he replied. “I have done things I’m ashamed of, and I’ve
a wholesome fear of doing more of them. But I know that that woman,
whoever she might be, would wake up some morning and find me missing.”

Then for a while he sat staring at the eddies in the pool below. “I have
a vision of another kind of woman,” he said--“a woman to whom my ideal
would be the same compelling force that it is to me--a living thing that
would drive her, that she was both master of, and slave to, as I am. So
that she would feel no fears, and ask no favors! So that she would not
want mercy, nor ask pledges--but just give herself, as I give myself,
and take the chances of the game. Don’t you think there may be just one
such woman in the world?”

“Perhaps,” was the reply. “But then--mightn’t a woman be sure of your
ideal, but not of you?”

“As to that,” said Thyrsis, “she would have to know me.

“As to that,” said Corydon, “she would have to love you.”

And Thyrsis smiled. “As in most arguments,” he said, “it’s mainly a
matter of definitions.”

Section 5. At this point there came a call from the distance, and
Corydon started. “There is mother,” she exclaimed. “How the afternoon
has flown!”

“And must you go home now?” he asked.

“I’m afraid so,” she replied. “We have a long row.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted to advise you about books to read. You
must let me help you to find what you are seeking.”

“Ah,” said Corydon, “if you only will!”

“I will do anything I can,” he said. “I am ashamed of not having helped
you before.”

They had risen and started towards the house. “Can’t you come to-morrow,
and we can talk it over,” he said.

“But I thought you were going to work,” she objected.

“I can spare another day,” he replied. “A rest won’t hurt me, I know.
And it’s been a real pleasure to talk to you this afternoon.”

So they settled it; and Thyrsis saw them off in the boat, and then he
went back to the little cabin.

On the steps he stood still. “Corydon!” he muttered. “Little Corydon!”

That was always the way he thought of her; not only because he had known
her when she was a child, but because this expressed his conception of
her--she was so gentle and peaceable and meek. She was now eighteen, and
he was only twenty, but he felt towards her as a grandfather might.
But now had come this new revelation, that astonished him. She had
been deeply stirred by his work--she had loved it; and this was no
affectation, it was out of her inmost heart. And she was not really
contented at all--she had quite a hunger for life in her!

It had been like an explosion; the barriers had been destroyed between
them, and he saw her as she really was. And he could hardly believe
it--all through the adventures that followed he would find himself
standing in the same kind of daze, whispering to himself--“Corydon!
Little Corydon!”

He did not try to do any work that evening. He thought about her, and
the problem of her life. She had stirred him strangely; he saw her
beautiful with a new kind of beauty. He resolved that he would put her
upon the way to some of the joy she sought.

She came early the next morning, and they sat by the lake-shore and
talked. They talked about the things she needed to study, and how she
should study them; about the books she had read and the books she was
to read next. And from this they went on to a hundred questions of
literature and philosophy and life. They became eager and excited; their
thoughts took wings, and they lost all sense of time and place. There
were so many things to be discussed!

Corydon, in spite of all her anti-clericalism, believed in immortality;
she laid claim to intuitions and illuminations concerning it. And to
Thyrsis, on the other hand, the idea of immortality was the consummation
of all unfaith. To him life was a bubble upon the stream of time, a
shadow of clouds upon the mountains; there was nothing about it that
could be or should be immortal.

“The act of faith,” he cried, “is to give ourselves into the arms of
life, to take it as it comes, to rejoice in its infinite unfoldment, the
‘plastic dance of circumstance’; to behold the budding flower and the
new-born suns as equal expressions of the joy of becoming. But people
are weak, they love themselves, and they set themselves up as the centre
of existence!”

But Corydon was personal, and loved life; and she stood out that death
was unthinkable--that she had the sense of infinity within her. Thyrsis
strove to make her see that one was to wreak one’s hunger for infinity
at each moment, and not put it off to any future age; that life was
a thing for itself, and needed no sequel to justify it. “It is a free
gift, and we have no claim upon it; we must take it on the terms of the
giver.”

From that they came to religion. Thyrsis loved the forms of the old
faiths, because of the poetry there was in them; and so he wrestled with
Corydon’s paganism. He tried to show her how one could read “Paradise
Lost” and the English prayer-book, precisely as one read Virgil and
Homer; to which Corydon answered that she had been to Sunday-school.

“But you once believed in Santa Claus!” he retorted. “And does that make
you quarrel with him now? Every time you read a novel, don’t you pretend
to believe in people who never existed?”

He went on to show her how much she lost of the sublime and inspiring
things of the past. He took the story of Jesus. It mattered not in the
least if it was fiction or fact--it was there, as an achievement of
the human spirit. He showed her the man of the gospels--not the
stained-glass god with royal robes and shining crown, but the humble
workingman, with his dream of a heaven nearby, and a father who loved
his children without distinction. He went about among the poor and
humble, the world’s first revolutionist; teaching the supremacy of the
soul--a doctrine which was to be as dynamite beneath the pillars of all
established institutions. He lived as a tramp and an outcast, and he
died the death of a criminal; and now those who had murdered him were
using his doctrines to enslave the world!--All this was a new idea to
Corydon, and she resolved forthwith that she would begin her readings
with the New Testament.

Section 6. So it went, until Thyrsis looked up with a start, and saw
that the shadows were falling. It was five o’clock, and they had not
stopped to eat! Even so, they had no time to cook, but made a cold
meal--and talked all the time they were eating.

Then Corydon said, “I must start for home.”

“You won’t want any supper,” said Thyrsis. “Let’s see the sunset first.”

“But mother will be expecting me,” she objected.

“She’ll know you’re all right,” he replied.

So they climbed the hill, and sat and watched the sunset and the rising
full moon. The air was clear, and the sky like opal, and the pale,
pearly tints of the clouds were ravishing to behold. To Thyrsis it
seemed that these colors were an image of the soul that was disclosed
to him. He would have been at a loss for words to describe the
extraordinary sense of purity that Corydon gave to him; it was not
simply her maidenhood--it was something far more rare than that.
Here was an utterly perfect human soul; a soul without speck or
blemish--without a base idea, with no trace of a vanity, unaware what
a pretense might be. The joy and wonder of life welled spontaneously in
her, she moved to a noble impulse as a cloud moves before the wind. She
was like a creature from the skies they were watching.

And here, in the silver moonlight, a memorable hour came to them.
Thyrsis told her of his consecration, and why he lived his hermit-life.
He had known for years that he was not as other men; and now every hour
it was becoming clearer to him. He shrunk from the word, because it
had been desecrated by the world; but it was Genius. More and more
frequently there was coming to him this strange ecstasy, the source
of which he could not guess; it was like the giving way of flood-gates
within him--the pouring in of a tide of wonder and joy. It made him
tremble like a leaf, it made him cry aloud and fall down upon the ground
exhausted. And yet, whatever the strain might be, he never lost his
grip upon himself; rather, all the powers of his mind seemed to be
multiplied--it seemed as if all existence became one with his soul.

Never before had he uttered a word of this to anyone. No one could
understand the burden it had laid upon him. For this was the thing that
all the world was seeking, for the lack of which the world was dying;
and it was his to give or to withhold, to lose or to save. He had to
forge it and shape it, he had to embody it, to set it forth in images
and symbols. And that meant a terrific labor, a feat of mental and
emotional endurance quite indescribable. He must hold it, though it
burned like fire; he must clutch it to his bosom, though it tore at his
heart-strings.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I fail and have to give up; and then I have
nothing but a memory without words--or perhaps a few broken phrases that
seem mere nonsense. Then I am like a man who has seen some loved one
drowned or burned to death before his eyes. It is a thing so ineffable,
so precious; and some power seeks to tear it away from me, to bear it
into oblivion forever. I can’t know, of course--it might come to some
one else--or it might never come again. The feeling I have is like that
of a mother for an unborn child; if I do not give it life, no one ever
will. And don’t you see--compared with that, what does anything else
count? I would lie down and be crushed to pieces, if that would help;
truly, I would suffer less than I suffer in what I try to do. And so,
the things that other men care for--they simply don’t exist for me. I
must have a little money, because I have to have something to eat, and a
place to work in. But I don’t want position or fame--I don’t shrink from
any ridicule or humiliation. It seems like a mad thing to say, but I
have nothing to do either with men’s evil or with their good. I am not
bound by any of their duties; I can’t have any country or any home, I
can’t have wife or children--I can hardly even have any friends. Don’t
you see?”

“Yes,” whispered Corydon, deeply moved, “I see.”

“Look,” he went on--“see all the vice and misery in the world--the
cruelty and greed and hate. And see all the stupid and petty things, the
narrow motives, the vanities and the jealousies! And all that is because
people haven’t this thing that has come to me; they don’t know the
possibilities of life, they lack the sense of its preciousness and
sacredness. And they seek and seek--and go astray! Take drunkenness, for
instance; that brings them joy, but it’s a false scent, it leads them
over a precipice. I’ve been down at the bottom of it--you know why I
have to go there, and what I’ve seen. And that is where the best of
men’s faculties go--yes, it’s literally true! The men who are dull
and plodding, they are contented; it’s the men who are adventurous and
aspiring who come to that precipice. I walk down an avenue and see the
lines of saloons with their gleaming lights, and that thought is like
a scream of anguish in my soul; there came a phrase to me once, that
I wanted to cry out to people--‘the graveyards of your genius! the
graveyards of your genius!’”

Corydon was gazing at his uplifted face. She said, “That is how Jesus
must have felt, when he wept over Jerusalem.”

“Yes,” said Thyrsis. “It is a new religion trying to be born. Only
nowadays they don’t persecute you, they just ignore you. They don’t
hang you up on a cross and make you conspicuous and picturesque--they
ridicule you and let you starve. And that is what I face, you see. I’ve
saved a hundred dollars--just barely enough to buy me food until I’ve
written the book!”

“And other people have so much!” cried Corydon.

“So much--and no idea what to do with it. They just fling it away, in
a drunken frenzy. And down below are the poor, who slave to make
civilization possible. Such lives as they have to live--I can’t ever get
the thought out of my mind, not in any happiest moment! I feel as if I
were a man who had escaped from a beleaguered city, and it all depended
upon me to carry the tidings and bring relief. I’m their one hope, and
if I fail them I’m a traitor, an accursed being! They are ignorant and
helpless, and their cry comes to me like some great storm-wind of grief
and despair. Oh, some day I mean to utter words that will reach them--I
can’t fail! I can’t fail!”

“No!” whispered Corydon. “You must not fail!”

They sat in silence for a while.

“How I wish that I could help you!” she said.

“Who can tell?” he answered. “Perhaps you may. A true friend is a rare
thing to find.”

“I would do anything in the world to share in such a work.”

“You really mean that? As hard as it is?”

“I would bear anything,” she said. “I would go to the ends of the earth
for it. I would fling away the whole world--just as you have done.”

“Ah, but are you strong enough? Could you stand it?”

“I don’t know that--I’m only a child. But I wouldn’t mind dying.”

And so it came. It came as the dawn comes, unheralded,
unheeded--spreading wider, till the day is there. Months afterwards they
talked about it, and Thyrsis asked, “When did I propose to you?”

“I don’t think you ever proposed to me,” she answered. “It just came. It
had to come--there was no other way.”

“But when did I first kiss you?” he asked.

“I don’t know even that,” she said, and pondered.

“Did I kiss you that night when we sat on the hill?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t have known it if you had,” said Corydon. “It was as natural
for you to kiss me as it was for me to draw my breath.”

Section 7. The moon was high when they went down the hill, and he rowed
her home. They were silent with the awe that was upon them. They found
the people at home in a panic, but they scarcely knew this--and they
scarcely troubled to explain.

Then Thyrsis went home, and spent half the night roaming about in
excitement. And early in the morning he was sitting on the edge of his
canvas-cot, whispering to himself again, “Corydon! Little Corydon!”

He could not think of work that day, but set out to walk to the village
by the lonely mountain-road; and half-way there he met the girl, coming
in the other direction. There was a light of wonder in her eyes; and
also there was perplexity. For all that morning she had been whispering
to herself, “Thyrsis! Thyrsis!”

They sat by the roadside to talk it over.

“Corydon,” he began, “I’ve been thinking about what we said last night,
and it frightens me horribly. And I want to ask you please not to think
about it any more. I could not take anyone else into my life--before
God, I couldn’t be so cruel. I have been shuddering at the thought of
it. Oh please, please, run away from me--before it is too late!”

“Is that the way it seems?” she asked.

“Corydon!” he cried. “I am a tormented man! There can’t be any happiness
in the world for me. And you are so beautiful and so pure and so good--I
simply dare not think of it! You must be happy, Corydon!”

“I have never yet been happy,” she said.

“Listen,” he went on--“there is a stanza of Walter Scott’s that came
to me this morning--an outlaw song. It seemed to sum up all my feeling
about it:

   “‘Maiden! a nameless life I lead,
      A nameless death I’ll die;
    The fiend whose lantern lights the mead
      Were better mate than I!’”

Corydon sat staring ahead. “You can’t frighten me away from you,” she
said, in a low voice. “It isn’t worth your while to try. But let me tell
you what I came to say. I’m so ignorant and so helpless--I didn’t see
how I could be of any use to you. And so I wanted to tell you that you
must do whatever seemed best to you--just don’t count me at all. You
see what I mean--I’m not afraid for myself, but just for you. I couldn’t
bear the thought that I might be in your way. I felt I had to come and
tell you that, before you went back to your work.”

Now Thyrsis had set out with mighty battlements reared about him; and
not all the houris and the courtesans of all the ages could have found
a way to breach them. But before those simple sentences of Corydon’s,
uttered in her gentle voice, and with her maiden’s gaze of wonder--the
battlements crumbled and rocked.

And that was always the way of it. There were endless new explanations
and new attitudes, new excursions and discoveries. They would part with
a certain understanding, but they never knew with what view they would
meet in the morning. They were swung from one extreme to the other, from
certitude to doubt, from joy to dismay and despair. And so, day after
day they would sit and talk, for uncounted hours. Corydon would come to
the little cabin, or Thyrsis would come to the village, and they would
wander about the roads or the woods, forgetting their meals, forgetting
all the world. Once they wandered away into the mountains, and they sat
until the dusk closed round them; they were almost lost that night.

“Of course,” Thyrsis had been saying, “we should not be married like
other men and women.”

“No,” said Corydon, “of course not.”

“We should be brother and sister,” he said.

“Yes,” she assented.

“And it would not be real marriage--I mean, it would be just for the
world’s eyes.”

“So I don’t see how it could hinder you,” Corydon added. “Whatever I
did that was wrong, you would tell me. And then too, about money. I
shouldn’t be any burden; for I have twenty-five dollars a month of my
own.”

“I had no idea of that,” said Thyrsis.

“I’ve only had it for a year,” said Corydon. “An aunt left me nearly
four thousand dollars. I can’t touch the principal until I’m thirty,
but I have the income, and that will buy me everything I need. And so it
would be just as if you didn’t have me to think of.”

“I don’t think the money side matters so much,” was his reply. “It’s
only this summer, you see--until I’ve finished the book.”

Section 8. The key to all the future was the book; but alas, the book
was not coming on. How could one write amid such excitement? This was a
new kind of wine in Thyrsis’ blood. This was reality! And before it his
dream-phantoms seemed to have dissolved into nothingness.

They would make a compact for so many days, and he would start to work;
but he would find himself thinking of Corydon, and new problems would
arise, and he would take to writing her notes--and finally realize in
despair that he might as well go and see her.

Meantime Corydon would be wrestling with tasks of her own. They had
talked over her development, and agreed that what she needed was
discipline. And because Thyrsis had read her some of Goethe’s lyrics,
she had decided to begin with German. Thyrsis had wasted a great deal
of time with German courses in college, and so he was able to tell her
everything not to do. He got her a little primer of grammar, just enough
to make clear the language-structure; and then he set her to acquiring
a vocabulary. He had little books full of words that he had prepared for
himself, and these she drilled into her brain, all day and nearly all
night. She stopped for nothing but to eat--in the woods when the weather
was fair and in her room when it rained, she studied words, words,
words! And she made amazing progress--while Thyrsis was wrestling with
his angels she read Grimm’s fairy tales, and some of Heyse’s “Novellen,”
 and “Hermann and Dorothea,” and “Wilhelm Tell.”

But these were children’s tasks, and her pilgrimage was one of despair.
Above were the heights where Thyrsis dwelt, inaccessible, almost
invisible; and how many years must she toil to reach them! She would
come to him with tears in her eyes--tears of shame for her ignorance and
her stupidity. And then Thyrsis would kiss the tears away, and tell her
how many brilliant and clever women he had met, who had the souls of
dolls behind all their display of culture.

So Corydon would escape that unhappiness--but alas, only to fall into
another kind. For she was a maiden, beautiful and tender, and ineffably
precious to Thyrsis; and when they met, their hands would come
together--it was as natural for them to embrace as for the flowers to
grow. And this would lead to moods of weakness and satisfaction--not to
that divine discontent, that rage of impatience which Thyrsis craved. It
seemed to him that Corydon grew more and more in love with him, and
more willing to cling to him; and he was savage because of his own
complaisance. They would spend hours, exchanging endearments and
whispering youthful absurdities; and then, the next day, he would write
a note of protest, and Corydon would be wild with misery, and would tear
up his love-notes, and vow in tears that he should never touch her hand
again. Now and then he would try to suggest to her that what she needed
for the fulfillment of her life was not a madman like himself, but a
husband who would love her and cherish her, as other women were loved
and cherished; and there was nothing in all the world that galled her
quite so much as this.

Section 9. There came a time when all these happenings could no longer
be hid from parents. This unthinkable “engagement” had to be announced,
and the furies of grief and rage and despair unchained. No one could
realize the change that had come over Corydon--Cory-don, the meek and
long-suffering, who now was turned to granite, and immovable as the
everlasting hills. As for Thyrsis, all kinds of madness had come
from him, and were expected from him. But even he was appalled at the
devastation which this thunderbolt caused.

“You have ruined your career! You have ruined your career!” was the cry
that rang in his ears all day. And he knew what the world meant by
this. Young men of talent who wished to rise in the world did not burden
themselves with wives at the age of twenty; they waited until their
careers were safe--and meantime, if they felt the need, they satisfied
their passions with the daughters of the poor. And it was for some such
“eligible man” as this that the world had been preparing Corydon; it was
to save her for his coming that her sheltered life had been intended.
Her beauty and tenderness would appeal to him, her innocence would bring
a new thrill to his jaded passions; and when he offered his hand, there
would be no whisper of what his past might have been, there would be
no questions asked as to any vices or diseases he might bring with him.
There would be trousseaus and flowers and wedding-cake, rice and white
ribbons and a honeymoon-journey; and then an apartment in the city,
or perhaps even a whole house, with a butler and a carriage--who could
tell? With wealth pouring into the metropolis from North and West and
South, such things fell often to beautiful and innocent maidens in
sheltered homes.

And here was this one, flinging herself away upon a penniless poet who
could not support her, and did not even propose to try! “Does he mean to
get some work?” was the question; and gently Corydon explained that
they intended “to live as brother and sister.” And that capped the
climax--that proved stark, raving madness, if it did not prove downright
knavery and fraud.

In the end, being utterly baffled and helpless with dismay, the mothers
turned upon each other; for to each of them, the virtues of her own
offspring being so apparent, it was clear that this hideous tragedy must
have come from the machinations of the other. One day Thyrsis and his
mother, walking down a road, met Corydon and her mother, upon a high
hill where the winds blew wildly; and here they poured out their grief,
and hurled their impeachments against the storm. To Thyrsis they
assumed heroic proportions, they towered like queens of tragedy; in
after-history this was known as the Meeting of the Mothers, and he
likened it to the great contest in the Nibelungenlied between Brunhild
and Kriemhild.

Then, on top of it all, there came another calamity. In the
boarding-house with Corydon lived some elderly ladies, who had a
remarkable faculty for divining the evil deeds of other people. They had
divined the evil deeds of Corydon and Thyrsis, and one of them was moved
to come to Corydon’s mother one day, and warn her lest others should
divine them too. And so there was more agony; the discovery was made
that Corydon had become a social outcast to all the maids and matrons
of the summer population--a girl who went to visit a poet in his lonely
cabin, and stayed until unknown hours of the night. And so there came to
Thyrsis a note saying that Corydon must come no more to the cabin;
and later in the day came Corydon herself, to bring the tidings that
a telegram had come from the city, and that she and her mother were to
leave the place the next day.

Thyrsis was aflame with anger, and was for going to the nearest parson
and having the matter settled there and then. But Corydon dissuaded him
from this.

“I’ve been thinking it over,” she said, “and it’s best that I should
go. You must finish the book--everything depends upon that, and you know
that if I came here now you couldn’t do it. But if I go away, there’ll
be nothing to disturb you. I can study meantime; and when we meet in the
city in the fall, everything will be clear before us.”

She came and put herself in his arms. “You know, dear heart,” she said,
“it won’t be easy for me to go. But I’m sure it’s for the best!”

And Thyrsis saw that she was right, and so they settled it. She spent
that day with him--their last day; and floods of tenderness welled up in
their hearts, and the tears ran down their cheeks. It was only now that
she was going that Thyrsis realized how precious she had become to him,
and what a miracle of gentleness and trust she was.

They agreed that here, and not in the village, was the place for their
parting. So they poured out their love and devotion, and made their
pledges for the future; and towards sundown he kissed her good-bye, and
put her in the boat, and stood watching until it was a mere speck
down the lake. Then he went back to the house, with a great cavern of
loneliness in his soul.

And in spite of all resolves, he was up with the dawn next day, and
walking to the village--he must see her once again! He went to the depot
with her, and upon the platform they said another farewell; thereby
putting a seal upon Corydon’s damnation in the eyes of the maids and
matrons of the summer population.

BOOK III

THE VICTIM HESITATES

_They had opened a wooden box which lay beside them.

“Ten years!” she said. “How they have faded!”

“And the creases are tight,” said he; “they will be hard to read.”

“Letters! letters!” she exclaimed--“some of them sixty pages long! How
much would they make?”

“Perhaps a quarter of a million words,” he said.

“What is to be done about it?”

“They must be selected, and then cut, and then trimmed and pruned.”

“And will that leave any idea of it?”

He answered with a simile. “You wish to convey to a man how it feels to
pound stone for twelve hours in the sun. The only way you could really
do it would be to take him and let him pound for twelve hours. But he
wouldn’t stand for that.”

“So you let him pound for one hour,” said she, with a smile.

“I will put up a sign,” he said--_

   ‘HERE BEGINS THE STONE-POUNDING!’

_And then those who are interested will come in and try it; and the rest
will peer through the fence and pass on.”

To which she responded, “I would make the sign read,_

   ‘ADMISSION TO LOVERS ONLY!’”

MY THYRSIS!

Oh, if I might only stay in a convent until you are ready to take
me! Since I left you I find myself possessed of cravings, which, if I
indulged them, might bring me the fate of the Maid of Neidpath!

Truly I have known some miserable moments. But I am trying very hard to
cultivate a happy, confident activity. The people here are aggressive,
and I am afraid I have been rude, which I never like to be. I just
succeeded in getting away from a young man who wanted to walk to the
village with me. Do you know, it would drive me absolutely mad to talk
to anyone now!

My soul has only one cry, and I could sometimes go out on the
mountain-side and scream it aloud to the winds. I fear I shall be
a trifle wild, in fact utterly in pieces, until you come, with that
wonderful recipe of yours for binding me together, and making me
complete. I think of you in your house, and wish to God I were there, or
out in the desert even, if you were with me.

When I passed through the city I felt exactly as if I were in Hades.
The glaring lights and the fearful rattle, the lazy, lounging men--I
had dinner in a restaurant, in which all the people seemed to be feeding
demons! It has been distinctly shown me why so many people have thought
you a rude unmannerly boy! I don’t know what people would think, if I
had to be amongst them long.

I have begun so many letters to you in my mind, and oh, the times I have
told myself how much I loved you! I have read your letters and slept
with them under my pillow, like the veriest love-lorn maiden. But all my
happy thoughts are gone at present. It is distracting to me to have to
come into such close contact with people.

Oh, tell me, dearest one, what I shall have to do to control myself and
preserve the peace of my soul, until I go to you forever? I must not
long to see you, it prevents me from studying. If you might only come to
me at one moment in the day, and give me one kiss, and then go away! You
see, I am conducting myself in a very unwise manner--and it is necessary
I should study! I should love to have an indomitable capacity for work,
and eat only two meals a day, and never have to think about my body.

I want to tell you what I feel, how utterly and absolutely I am yours,
and how any image that comes between you and me enrages me. If only you
knew how I give myself up to you in thought, word, and deed!--My one
reason for acting now, is that I may show you something I have done, my
one thought is to be what you would wish me. No one, no one understands,
or ever will, what is in your heart and in mine--to be locked there for
ages. There I have placed all my power of love and religion and hope of
the life that is to be. To you I give all my trust, all my worship, you
are the one link that binds me to myself and to God. Without you I feel
now that I should be a poor wanderer.

You give me my feeling of wholeness, of the possibility of completion,
that I never had before. In my best and truest moments I know that with
you I can be what I have hoped. With you before my eyes I have a grim
resolution to conquer or die. The one thing I am sure of always is my
love for you. It might be possible for you to stop loving me; but I,
now that I have begun, shall continue to love you to the day I die--and
after, I hope. I do not love you for what you can give me, I love you
because you are you, I must love you now no matter what you are. I
believe Shakespeare was right when he said that “love is not love which
alters, when it alteration finds.” I do not believe that a person can
really love more than once.

I must go to my German again and leave you. Do you love me? Do you love
me? Do you love me?

II

My dearest Corydon:

I received a letter from you before dinner, and as usual had one of my
flights of emotion, and thought of many things to write to you. Now I
am up on the mountain-side, trying to recall them. Dearest, you are,
as always, more precious to me. I am glad to see that you are suffering
some, and I think that it is well that you have to be away from me for
awhile, to fight some of your own soul’s battles. You see that I am in
my stern humor; as convinced as ever that the soul is to be deepened
only by effort, and that the great glory of life cannot be bought or
stolen, or even given for love, but must be earned.

I will tell you what I have been doing since you left. I spent three
whole days in the most unimaginable wretchedness; I had no hindrances
like yours--only the most fearful burden of dullness and sloth, that
had crept upon me and mastered me, during all the weeks that I had let
myself be so upset and delayed. I cannot picture what I go through when
I lose my self-command in that way, but it is like one who is tied
down upon a railroad track and hears a train coming. He gets just as
desperate as he pleases, and suffers anything you can imagine--but he
does not get free. And always the book would be hanging before me, a
kind of external conscience, to show me what I ought to have been.

Now I have gotten myself out of that, by an effort that has quite worn
me out. When I found myself at work again, I felt a kind of savage joy
of effort, a greater power than I ever knew before. In the reckless mood
that I had got to, it seemed to me that I could keep so forever.

Now dearest, you must get the same unity in your life; you must
concentrate all your faculties upon that--get for yourself that precious
habit of being “instant in prayer”, and “strenuous for the
bright reward”. As Wordsworth has it, “Brook no continuance of
weak-mindedness!” Let it come to you with a pang that hurts you, that
for one minute you have been idle, that you have admitted to yourself
that life is a thing of no consequence, and that you do not care for it.
I shall have to talk to you that way--perhaps not so often as I do to
myself, because I do not think you are really in your heart such a very
dull and sodden creature as I am.

I think the greatest trial we shall have will be our fondness for each
other, and the possibility of being satisfied simply to hold each other
in our arms. But we shall get the better of that, as of everything else;
and that is not the problem now. You must learn to strive, learn to
master yourself; you must prove your power so. Do not care how rude you
have to be to those people; look upon the things about you as a kind of
dream-world, and know that your own soul’s life is the one real thing
for you. And don’t write any more about how circumstances hold you back.
When you have got to work you will know that you are given your soul for
no purpose but to fight circumstances; that they are the things to make
you fight. When they are removed, as I know to my cost, there is still
the same necessity of fighting; only it is like a horse who has to win a
race without the spurs.

You must talk to yourself about this, night and day, until this desire
is so awake in you that you can’t go idle many moments without its
rushing into your mind, and giving you a kind of electric shock. And
when that happens you fling aside every thing else, every idea but the
work that you ought to be doing, and put all your faculties upon that;
and every time that you catch them wandering, you do the same thing
again, and again. Some times when I become very keenly aware of myself,
and of what a shallow creature I really am, it seems to me that it is
only by wearing myself out in that grim and savage way that I can make
myself even tolerable.

I _must_ stop. Do you know that for five precious hours by my watch I
have sat up here thinking about you and writing to you? Dear me--and I
am tired, and frozen, for there is a cold wind. I shall have, I see, to
prove some of _my_ powers, by not writing letters to you when I should
be at the book.

I see that it takes four or five days for letters to come and go between
us; and so if we write often, our letters will be crossing. Four or five
days is time enough for us to change our moods a dozen times, so our
correspondence will be apt to be complicated!

III

MY DEAREST THYRSIS:

It has worried me somewhat to-day that you might be utterly disappointed
in the letter I wrote you. It was a wild jumble of words, but I was
fighting all sorts of uncomfortable things within me. To-day I have been
anything but despairing, and have “gone at” the German. In fact, I quite
lost myself in it, and believe I understand thoroughly the construction
of the first poem. Wonderful accomplishment!

Your words, as I read them again, dear heart, are full of a great beauty
and fire and energy, and I only hope you may keep them always. I believe
that the possibility of the marriage we both desire, depends greatly if
not entirely on _your_ sternness. You must realize it.

I cannot tell with the proper conditions and training what energy I
might be able to accumulate for myself, but in the meanwhile the thing
that makes me most wretched is my utter incapacity at times, and my
inability to share with you your work. In my weaker and more helpless
moods, I ask myself with a pang, whether I ought to go with you at all,
when I cannot help you. But I must stop fuming. I have come out of my
mudpuddle for good and for all, and that is the main consideration. I
don’t intend to go back.

We must not think of each other in any way but as co-workers in a great
labor; we must simply know that our love is rooted deeply, and the
harder we work the more firm it will be. There is no reason why we
should not go to the altar with just this sternness, and from now on
preserve this attitude until the day when we have earned the right to
consider what love means. Can you do it? I will prove to you that I can.

IV

MY DEAR THYRSIS:

I am trying very dreadfully, and go away alone and pound at the German
as if my life depended upon it. I go to bed every night with a tight
feeling in my head, but I do not mind, as I take it for a guarantee that
I have not rested.

And oh, my dearest, dearest and best, I am trying not to think of you
too much--that is too much in a way that does not help me to study. But
I love you really, yes, truly, and I know I would follow you anywhere.
I am not particularly joyful, but then I do not expect to be for a great
many years.

V

DEAR THYRSIS:

Only a few words. I have been hovering to-day between spurts of hopeful
energy, and the most indescribable despair. It positively freezes my
heart, and I have been on the point of writing to you and telling you to
relieve yourself of the responsibility of me. The reason is because it
seems a perfectly Herculean task to read “Egmont”. I have to look up
words in the dictionary until I am absolutely so weary I care not about
anything; and then I think of you, and what you are able to do, and at
one word from you I would give up all idea of marrying you.

I tell you I am up and down in this mood. Great God, I could work all
day and all night if I could do what you do, but to strain at iron
fetters--a snail! Oh, I cannot tell you--I simply groan under it. At
such times I have no more idea of marrying you than of journeying to
the moon. I repeat to you, to be constantly choked back, while you are
rapidly advancing, will kill me. I don’t know what you will say to this,
but it is intolerable, unendurable, to me. When I think of your ability
and mine, I simply laugh about it--Thyrsis, it is simply ridiculous. I
do not ask you to take me with you, Thyrsis.

Do you wonder at my writing all this? You would not if you understood.
It is so hard for me to keep any joy in my heart, and I get tired of
repeated failures, that is all. I thought I must write you this, and
have it over with. This is the style of letter I have always torn up,
but this time it goes. I think I will practice the piano now, and try to
get some gladness into my soul again.

VI

MY DEAR, DEAR THYRSIS:

There is a dreadful sort of letter which I wrote you last night which I
haven’t sent you yet.

I have been studying, or trying to most of the day, and my mind has
wandered most painfully. There were two days in which I seemed to have
hold of myself, but with an effort that was a fearful strain. I must try
so, that it almost kills me, if I wish to accomplish even a little of
what I ought. The heat here is almost insupportable, it is stifling, and
I spent an hour or so in the water this afternoon.

And the thought is always torture to me--that you are accomplishing
so much more than I! I was thinking of your letters to-night, and I
recalled some words that seemed to speak more of your love for me. Oh,
Thyrsis, if your letters are fiery and passionate, is it for love
of _me_ that they are? I’m almost afraid at times, when I read your
letters--when you tell me of the kind of woman you _want_ to love.

I at present am certainly not she. And do you know that when we are
married we shall be united forever? I don’t know why I write you these
things, they are not at all inspiring thoughts to me.

And yet I was able to go in swimming this afternoon, and forget
everything and frolic around as happily as any water-baby!

VII

MY DEAR CORYDON:

I came off to write my poem, but I have been thinking about you, and I
must write a long letter. It is one of the kind that you do not like.

In the first place, you complain of the contradictions in my letters. I
am sorry. I live so, struggling always with what is not best in me, and
continually falling down. Also, in this matter I am an utter stranger,
groping my way; and there is an element of passion in it, a dangerous
element, which leads me continually astray.

I can only say that in my ideal of love, which is utter love and
spiritual love, I think of living my life with you in entire nakedness
of soul. Therefore, I shall always be before you exactly as I should be
by myself. And I shall write you now exactly what I have been thinking,
what is hard and unkind in it, as well as the rest. You will learn to
know me as a man far from perfect, often going astray himself, often
feeling wrong things, often leading you astray and making you wretched.
But behind all this there is the thing often lost sight of, but always
present--the iron duty that I have, and the force in me which drives me
to it.

All this morning I have been thinking of my book, losing myself in it
and filling myself with its glory. This afternoon I fell to thinking
about us; and thoughts which have been lurking in my mind for a long
time got the upper hand for the first time. They were that I did not
love you as I ought to, that I could not; that the love which I felt was
a thing from my own heart, and that it had carried me away because I
was anxious to persuade myself I had found my ideal upon earth; that
you _could_ not satisfy the demands upon life that I made, and that if
I married you it would be to make you wretched, and myself as well; that
you had absolutely nothing of the things that I needed, and that the
life which your nature required was entirely different from mine; that
you had no realization of the madness that was driving me, could find
and give me none of the power I needed; and that I ought to write and
tell you this, no matter what it cost--that I owed it to the sacred
possibility of my own soul, to live alone if I could live better alone.
And when I had said these words, I felt a sense of relief, because they
were haunting me, and had been for a long time.

How they will affect you I cannot tell, it depends upon deep your love
for me is; certainly they mean for me that _my_ love is not deep, that
you have not made yourself necessary to me. I think that in that last
phrase I put the whole matter in its essence--you have not _bound_
yourself to me; I am always struggling to keep my love firm and right,
to hold myself to you. The result is that there is no food for my soul
in the thought of our love, in my thought of you; and therefore, I
am continually dissatisfied and doubting, continually feeling the
difference between the love I have dreamed and our love.

I tried to think the matter out, and get to the very bottom of it. The
first thing that came to me on the other side was your absolute _truth_;
your absolute devotion to what was right and noble in our ideal.
So that, as I was thinking, I suddenly stopped short with this
statement--“If you cannot find right love with that girl, it must be
because you do not honor love, or care for it.” And then I thought of
your helplessness, of your lack of training and opportunity for growth;
and I told myself how absurd it was of me to expect satisfying love from
you--when all that I knew about in life, and thought of, was entirely
unknown to you. I realized that I was a man who had tasted more or less
of all knowledge, and had an infinite vision of knowledge yet before
him, and an infinite hunger for it; and that you were a school-girl,
with all of a school-girl’s tasks on your hands. So I said to myself
that the reason for the dissatisfaction was a fault of my own, that it
had come from my own blindness. I had gone wrong in my attitude to you;
I had failed in my sternness and my high devotion to perfection; I had
contented myself with lesser things, had come down from my best self,
and had failed to make you see what a task was before you, if you ever
meant to know my best self. You perceive that this is a return to my
old-time attitude; I am sorry if it makes you wretched, but I cannot
help it. It is a surgical operation that must be borne. I shall not make
it necessary again, I hope.

Now, dear Corydon, I am not trying to choose pleasant words in this
letter, this is the way I talk to _myself_. And if anything good comes
from our love, it will be because of this letter. I challenge what is
noblest in you to rise to meet the truth of it. I should not care to
write to you if I did not feel that it would.

You have had a possibility offered to you, and because you are very
hungry for life you have clasped it to you, placed all your happiness
in it. The possibility is the love of a man whose heart has been filled
with the fire of genius. There are few men whom life takes hold of as
it does me, who sacrifice themselves for their duty as I do, who demand
_experience_--knowledge, power, beauty--as I do. There are very few men
who will wrest out of existence as much as I will, or know and have as
much of life. I am a boy just now, and only beginning to live; but I
have my purpose in hand, and I know that if I am given health and life,
there is nothing that men have known that I shall not know, nothing that
is done in the world that I shall not do, or try to. I have a strong
physique, and I labor day and night, and always shall. I shall always
be hungry and restless, always dissatisfied with myself, and with
everything about me, and acting and feeling most of the time like a
person haunted by a devil. I make no apologies to you for the conceit
of what I am saying; it is what I think of myself, without caring
what other people think. I know that I have a tremendous temperament,
tremendous powers hidden within me, and they have got to come out. When
they do, the world will know what I know now.

Now Corydon, as you understand, I dream love absolute, and would scorn
any other kind. I can master my passion, if it be that upon earth
there is no woman willing or able to go with me to the last inch of my
journey. I dream a life-companion to follow wherever my duty drives me;
to feel all the desperateness of desire that I feel, to be stern and
remorseless as I must be, wild and savage as I must be; to race through
knowledge with me and to share my passion for truth with me; a woman
with whom I need have no shame in the duty of my genius! As I tell you,
if I marry you, I expect to give myself to you as your own heart; and
then I think of the gentle and mild existence you have led!

It is very hard for me even to tell about my life, or to explain this
thing that drives me mad. But I am writing this letter to you for the
purpose of making clear to you that there are two alternatives before
you, and that you must choose one or the other and stick by it, and bear
the consequences. It is painful to me to think that I have fascinated
you by what opportunities I have, even by what power and passion and
talents I have, and filled you with a hunger for me--when really you do
not realize at all what I am, or what I must be, and when what I have to
do will terrify you. I write in the thought of terrifying you _now_, and
making you give up this red-hot iron that you are trying to hold on to;
or else to show you my life so plainly that never afterwards can you
blame me, or shrink back except by your own fault.

You must not blame me for writing these words, for wondering if a woman,
if _any_ woman has power to stand what I need to do. And when I talk to
you about giving me up, you must not think that is cold, but know that
it is my faithfulness to my vision, which is the one thing to which I
owe any duty in the world. Nor is it right that you should expect to
be essential to me, when I have labored to be all to myself. You could
become necessary to me in the years to come; if I marry you to-day I
shall marry you for what you are to become, and for that _alone_--at any
rate if I am true to myself.

If you are to be my wife you are to be my soul--to live my soul’s life
and bear its pain. You are to understand that I talk to you as I talk to
myself, call you the names I call myself, and if you cry, give you up in
disgust; that I am to deny you all pleasure as I do myself, and what God
knows will be ten thousand times harder, let you take pleasure, and then
spring up in the very midst of it--you know what I mean! That I am to
be ever dissatisfied with you, ever inconsiderate of your feelings, and
ever declaring that you are failing! That however much I may love you, I
am to be your conscience, and therefore keep you--just about as you are
now, miserable! You told me that you would gladly be whipped to learn to
live; and this can be the only thing to happen to you.

You must understand why I act in this way. I am a weak and struggling
man, with a thousand temptations; and when I marry you, you will be the
greatest temptation of all. You are a beautiful girl, and I love you,
and every instinct of my nature drives me to you; for me to live with
you without kissing you or putting my arms about you, will remain always
difficult. It will be so for you, as for me, and it will always be our
danger, and always make us wretched. Your soul rises in you as I write
this, and you say (as you’ve said before) that if I offered to kiss you
after it, it would be an insult. But only wait until we meet!

This is the one thing that has become clear to me: just as soon as there
comes the least thought of satisfaction in our love, just so soon does
it cease to satisfy my best self. You cannot satisfy my best self, you
do not even know it; and if it were a question of that, I should never
dream of marrying you! I love you for this and for this alone--because
you are an undeveloped soul, the dream of whose infinite possibilities
is my one delight in the matter. I think that you are _perfect_ in
character, that you are truth itself; and therefore, no matter how
helpless you may be, I have no fear of failing to make you “all the
world to me”, provided only that I am not false to my ideal. You must
know from what I have written before that I _can_ love, that I do know
what love is, and that you may trust me. I am not trying to degrade
passion--I simply see how passion throws the burden on the woman, and
therefore it is utterly a crime with us--the least thought of it! I
ought to consider you as a school-girl, really just that; and instead of
that I write you love letters!

I tell you there is nothing more hateful for me to look back upon than
that childish business of ours, that time when we went upstairs that we
might kiss each other unseen. I tell you, it revolts my soul, from love
and from you! I should be perfectly willing to take all the blame--I do;
only I have led you to like that (or to act as if you did) and I must
stop it. Can you not understand how hateful it is to me to think of
making you anything that I should be disgusted with?

I expect you to read over this letter until you realize that it is,
every word of it, completely true and noble, and until you can write me
so. You and I are to feel ourselves two school-children and live just
so. It is not usual for school-children to marry, but that we dare upon
the strength of our purpose, and in defiance of all counsel, and of
every precedent. We are to feel that we owe our duty to our ideal; and
that simply _because_ of the strength and passion of our love for each
other, we demand perfection, each of the other. My setting this stern
challenge before you is nothing but my determination to give you my
right love, to demand that you be a perfect woman.

I promise you therefore no quarter; I shall make no sacrifice of my
ideal for your sake. As I wrote you, I mean to be absolutely one with
you, and I expect you to be the same. You shall have (if you wish it)
all of my soul--I shall live my life with you and think all my thoughts
aloud--study to give you _everything_ that I have. And God only, who
knows my heart, knows what utter love for you lies in those words, what
utter trust of you--how I think of you as being purity and holiness
itself. To offer to take any other being into my soul, to lay bare all
the secret places of it to its gaze, all the weaknesses as well as all
the strength, and all that is vain as well as all that is sacred! You
cannot know how I feel about my heart, but this you may know, that no
one else has had a glimpse of it, you are the first and the last; and
so sure am I of you that I dare to say it, _all_ my life will I live in
your presence, and trust to your sympathy and truth--and feel that I am
false to love if I do not. If there were anything in my heart so foul
that I feared to speak of it, I should give you that first, as the
sacrifice of love; or any vanity or foible--such things are really
hardest to have others know, so great is our conceit.

If I could talk to you to-night, I should do just as I did up on the
hill in the moonlight--frighten you, and make you wonder if there was
_any_ woman who wished to bear such a burden; and perhaps the saddest
thing of all to me is that I do not bear it--instead I bear the gnawing
of a conscience bitter and ashamed of itself. And could you bear _that_
burden? For Corydon, as I look at myself to-night, I am before God, a
coward and a dastard! I have not done my work! I have not borne the pain
He calls me to bear, I have not wrested out the strength He put in my
secret heart! And here I am chattering, _talking_ about work to you!
And these things are like a nightmare to me; they turn all my
life’s happiness to gall. And you are taking upon yourself this same
burden--coming to help me to get rid of it. Or if you do not wish to,
for God’s sake, and mine, and yours, don’t come near me--you have come
too near as it is! Can you not see that when I am face to face with
these fearful things--and you come and ask me to give my life to you, to
worship you with the best faculties I possess--that I have no right to
say yes?

You once told me you were happy because I called you “mein guter Geist,
mein bess’res Ich”; well, you are not in the least that. The name that
I give you, and that you may keep, is “the beautiful possibility of a
soul”. Remember a phrase I told you at the very beginning of our love,
of the peril of “ceasing to love perfection and coming to love a woman.”
 And read Shelley’s sad note to “Epipsychidion”!

VIII

Dear Corydon:

You tell me in your last letter that you are leaving all who love you;
and you ask “How do you know that because you love beauty, you will love
_me_?”

I have been thinking a good deal about this; I do not believe, Corydon,
that a man more haunted by the madness of desire ever lived upon earth
than I. And when I get at the essence of myself, I do not believe that I
am a kind man; I think that a person with less patience for human hearts
never existed, perhaps with less feeling. There is only one thing in the
world that I can be sure of, or that you can, my fidelity to my ideal!
I know that however often I may fail or weaken, however many mistakes
I may make, my hunger for the things of the soul will _never_ leave me,
and that night and day I shall work for them. I do not believe I have
the right to promise you anything else, I have no right to dream of
anything else; this is not my pleasure, as I feel it, it is a frenzy,
it is that to which some blind and nameless and merciless impulse
drives me. And I may try to persuade myself all my life that I love you,
Corydon, and nothing else, and want nothing else; and all the time in
the depths of my heart I hear these words from my conscience--“You are a
fool.” I love power, I love life, and seek them and strive for them, and
care for nothing else and never have; and nothing else can satisfy me.
And I cannot give any other love than this, any other promise.

IX

My dear Corydon:

I have been taking a walk this morning, thinking about us, and that I
had treated you fearfully. The whole truth of it all is this--that I am
so raw and so young and so helpless (and you are as much, if not more
so) that I cannot, to save my life, be sure if my love for you is what
it ought to be, or even if I could love any one as I ought. And I am
so wretchedly dissatisfied! Do you know that for two weeks I have been
trying to write a passage of my book--and before God, I _cannot!_ I have
not the power, I have not the life!

Dear Corydon, it comes to me that you are _miserable_ to be in love with
me--that I had no right to put this burden on your shoulders. I would
say better things if I could, but I think that our marriage will be a
setting out across a wild ocean in the dark! It is for you to be the
heroine, to dare the voyage if you choose. These sound like wild words,
but they are the truth of my life, and I dare not say any others. Can a
girl who has been brought up in gentleness and sweetness, in innocence
of life and of pain--can she say things, feel things like these?

X

Thyrsis:

God did not endow me with your tongue, or else it would not be the great
effort it is to me to tell you some of the thoughts that have rushed
through my mind in the last hour.

It is an hour since I began to read your letter of Horrible Truth. Now
it seems to me it might have been in the last year, in the last century.
Actually I feel like a stranger to myself; and my movements are
very slow. First, I will tell you that I believe in God, oh, so
implicitly--this thought gives me infinite hope. I long to let you know
as much of my heart as I can, if I am to be your life-companion, as I
firmly believe I am to be. I have such a strange calmness now, and I
imagine that I must feel very much the way Rip Van Winkle did when he
awoke. I want to try to show you my heart--it is right that I should
try, is it not?

Know that I have placed much faith and trust in you, in anything that
you did. If you opened one door to me and told me it led to the great
and permanent truth, I believed you absolutely. If you hauled me back
and put me through an opposite one, telling me that there my road lay,
I believed you with equal faith. Now, now, at the end of an hour, I am,
through you, convinced of one door, the only and true entrance; and I am
as sure as I am that the sun is shining at this moment, that nothing in
God’s world can ever again make me lose sight of it. I have found that
_you_ can lose sight of it, Thyrsis,--something shows me that I have in
the last month been more right than you. Yes, I have, Thyrsis, though
you may not know it. And the reason I couldn’t stay right was because I
am not strong enough to grasp my good impulses, and keep hold of them:
because I have not enough faith in the soul within me.

I will try to tell you what I have felt since reading your letter. All
is so disgustingly calm in me now. But listen, I believe I have had a
little glimpse this afternoon of what it is to _feel_; and because of
that knowledge I now am not afraid to tell you that I claim something of
God and life--that I can get it if you can. This has been very strong
in me at moments, but, as I tell you, I have not yet learned to hold my
glimpses of truth--they seem to come to me, and as quickly disappear.

I began to read your letter, and I cannot describe to you the convulsion
that came over me. It seemed that I had the feeling of an empty skull
on a desert; such a feeling--you can never have it! All the horror and
despair! I tried to form my thoughts and tell myself it was not true.
I tried to pray, and I did pray--out loud--and asked God to give me
strength to read the letter.

I tried to use all the penetration I was capable of, to find out
one thing, whether you were purely and unreservedly sincere in it. I
wondered whether you really wished to live your life alone, but could
not find the courage to tell me so. I firmly believe that no failure in
the future, no disgust or helplessness, could ever bring me the complete
anguish of those moments.

Can you realize what such a thing meant to me, Thyrsis?

Last spring, I had succeeded in bringing myself into an almost complete
state of coma--I saw that I could do nothing, and because I would not
endure such profitless pain I drugged myself to sleep. And you, you
fiend, waked me up; and may your soul be thrice cursed if you have only
pulled the doll to pieces _to see what it was made of!_ Know, you that
have a soul which says it lives and suffers--that I can’t go to sleep
again! There is no joy for me in mother or father, in friends or
admiration--I can tolerate nothing that I tolerated before you came with
your cursed or blessed fire!

Also, if you do not marry me, or if I do not find some man who has your
strength and desire for life, and who will take me and help me to learn,
I shall die without having lived.--And I cried out in misery--only
forty-two years, only forty-two little years, and I shall be an old
woman of sixty! Only forty-two years in which to learn to live!

I believe if I had you here now I could almost strangle you. We may kill
each other some day. I sometimes feel that there is nothing that will
give me any relief, that I cannot breathe, I cannot support my body. But
these are foolish and unprofitable feelings--and I believe I will yet be
saved, if not by you, perhaps by myself. I think some heavenly aid came
to me to-day. I asked for it, I simply said it _must_ come--and now I
am able to bear myself and look around me, and say that the secret of my
liberation is not death but life.

Please realize, Thyrsis, that I know you do not need me, that I cannot
either entertain you or help you. My dear, do you not know that I have
been conscious of this from the very beginning--and it has been this
thought that has often made me worry, and doubt, and question. And then
I have told myself that you had found _something_ in me to love; and
that I also was very hungry to know about life and God; and that if you
loved me enough to believe I was not dross, we might, with our untiring
devotion--well, we might be right in going with each other. And
now--would you rather I should tell you I will not marry you, be my
desire, or effort, what it may? I do not know--even though I want to
live so terribly. I have no word, no proof to give!

And now, Thyrsis, I have no more strength to write. I only wish I had
some power to make you know what I have felt this afternoon--I think
if I could, you would have no more doubt of me. And I believe it is my
God-given right not to doubt myself.

I will write no more--I have written enough to make you answer one of
two things. “Come with me,” or, “I would rather go alone.” I know which
one it will be, even now in my wretchedness. The sky is so blue this
evening, and everything is so beautiful--and I am trying so hard to be
right, to feel strong and confident!

XI

Dear Thyrsis:

I have just arisen. I woke in the middle of the night, and there was a
spectre sitting by my bedside to frighten me; he succeeded at first,
but I managed finally to get rid of him, and to find some peace. Many of
your sentences came to me, and I was able to get behind the words, and I
saw plainly that the letters were just what you should have written,
and that they could not but benefit me. They have accomplished their
purpose, I believe--they are burned into my soul, and have placed me
rightly in our relation. I shall simply never trust the permission you
may give me, in the future, to rest or be satisfied. I shall only hate
you, for the pain of some of your words I shall _never_ forget.

The memory of the first two pages of your letter will always put me in
mortal terror of you. For the rest, I am very grateful, and I will try
to show you how I love your ideal. I can never repay you as long as I
live for letting me come with you. Oh Thyrsis, I am sure that I will
never think or care whether you love me or not, if only I may go with
you and learn how to strive!

I tore up all your love-letters this morning. I kept the last
letter--though I do not think I could bear to read it over. I should be
afraid of again going through with that despair. Oh, I beg for the time
when I shall be obliged to waste none of my minutes--and when I shall
have no opportunity of writing you! What _time_ I have spent over your
letters and mine!

XII

Dear Thyrsis:

I am restlessly waiting for the supper-bell to ring, and my head is
aching intensely, and I am generally topsy-turvy. Alas! alas! the
distance that separates us and our understanding!

I received a letter to-day while I was studying--but said I would not
open it for a week, that I wanted strength to study. Well, I studied all
the afternoon and found it none too easy. When I came home, I thought
perhaps it was better to read your letter, which I grimly did.

Do you know, you are keeping me on the rack, literally on the rack, and
my flesh and blood do not seem to be able to stand it--my body seems to
be the organ that first fails me, my brain is never so tired as my body.
I love to think that you are not less merciful to me than you would be
to yourself, I feel that you could not have used more cruel whips to
yourself. Do you suppose that any disgust, scolding, or malediction to
me could, as your wife, hurt me, as your doubt of me hurts me now?

And I just begin to read your letter again, and I tell you, you are
a fool. You say you do not know whether you could love any one as you
ought--well, I, with all my weakness, know whether _I_ can love, and I
love you a thousand times more than you have given me cause to. And you
are so _hungry!_ Will you always starve because you are blind? As to
being _satisfied,_ how could you be? But you say you will love me as
much as I deserve. How much do I deserve--do you know? I sometimes cry
out against you and long to get hold of you. If you have genius, why
doesn’t it give you some inkling whether you are a man with a heart,
not only a stupid boy? And then I see it all plainly, or think I do,
and know that you are trying so hard to be right towards us, because you
think you love me the way other people love; and you know if I am weak,
it would degrade your genius; and you cannot be sure of my character or
strength. You cannot know whether I realize the life I am selecting--you
have found it hard, and you have every reason to think that I will
find it ten times harder; and you love me in a way that is not the
highest,--but yet you love me enough, thank God, to tell me the whole
truth!

I have come to a pass where I can say to myself with truth, that I do
not care how much or how little you love me. That depends upon _you_, as
well as myself. I believe the time will come, when you will love me
as you ought, and I say this in perfect calm conviction, in all my
weakness, and with all my maudlin habits clinging to me. Strangely
enough your doubt of me has made me rise up in arms to champion my
cause, or else I should lie down forever in the dust, and deny my God.

I wonder whether it is my love for you that makes me believe? I cling
to you, as a mother might cling to her child; I cling to you as the
embodiment, the promise, of all I will ever find true in life. I look
to live in you, to fulfil all my possibilities in you, and if you die
or forsake me, all my hope is gone, and I am dead. This is a letter in
which I have no scorn or doubt, or ridicule of myself, as formerly.

And then you ask me, “Can a girl brought up in gentleness and sweetness,
and innocence of life and of pain, can she say things, feel things
like these?” It is the gentleness and sweetness and innocence that are
galling to me. I can tolerate no more of them. They have warped me, they
have given me no chance. But I have had some pain in my life, and since
I have known you I have known more about pain and what it brings, and
leaves.--And now I am feeling ill, and I cannot control that. Oh, God!

XIII

Dearest Corydon:

I have a chance to finish the first part of my book to-day, and save
myself from Hades; and here I am writing to you--just a line. (Of course
it turned out to be six pages!)

Your last letter was very noble; I can only say to you, that the
treatment which makes you upbraid me is not done for _my_ sake; that the
life which I live is not lived for _my_ sake. You say perhaps you are
better than I; it is very possible--I often think so myself; but that is
nothing to the point. I should be very wretched if I sat down to think
what I am. Oblige me by being better than my ideal--if you can! You must
understand, dearest, that behind all that I am doing, there is truth to
the soul; and that truth to the soul is love, and the only love. I am
seeking for nothing but the privilege of treating you as myself; and
rest assured, that if I treat you any differently it will be better than
I treat myself! There is no peril in our life except that!

Some day you will understand that I can sometimes feel about myself that
I am utterly hateful, utterly false, utterly shallow and _bad_; and that
to get away from myself would be all that I desire in life. I cannot
imagine my having such opinion of you; but some dissatisfaction--just a
little--I may have. Only let us love perfection, you and I, with all our
souls, and I think our love for each other may safely be allowed to take
care of itself. Remember the two ships in Clough’s poem, which parted,
but sailed by the compass, and reached the same port.

I shall spend no more time comforting you about this.

And dear Corydon, when you are angry at my doubting your power, and say
that I do not know you, I can only reply--Why of course I don’t, and
neither do you. You find your own self out little by little--why get
angry with me because I don’t know it until you tell me? You are a grown
woman compared to what you were three months ago; and this character
that you ask me to know--well, it takes years of hard labor to prove a
character.

XIV

Dearest Corydon:

Do you ever realize how much _faith_ in you I have? As utterly different
is your whole life, as if you had been in another world; and through all
the wilderness that I have travelled, I hope to drag you. But I cannot
carry you, or take you; I must trust in the frenzy of your grip upon me.
There is nothing else you could have that I would trust. You might be
wonderfully clever and wonderfully wise--and I could do nothing with
you. Do you remember Beethoven’s saying, that he would like to take a
certain woman, if he had time, and marry her and break her heart, so
that she might be able to sing?

Ah dear heart, I wish you could read in my words what I feel! I wonder
if I am dreaming when I live in this ideal of what a woman’s love can
be--so complete and so utter a surrender, so complete a forgetting,
a losing of the self, so complete a living in another heart! I am
not afraid to ask just this from a woman--from you! For I have enough
heart’s passion to satisfy every thirst that you may feel. Ah, Corydon,
I want you! I am drunk with the thought of _making_ a woman to love.
I wonder if any man ever thought of that before! Artists go about the
world with the great hunger of their hearts, and expecting to find
by chance another soul like the one they have spent years in making
beautiful and swift and strong; but has anyone ever thought that instead
of writing books that no one understands, he might be making
another kind of an artwork--one that would be alive, and with sacred
possibilities of its own?

XV

DEAR THYRSIS:

Your last letters have been very beautiful. I see one thing--though you
inform me that you believe you are a hard man, your natural gentleness
and sympathy of heart would be the ruin of both of us in the future if
I would permit it. But I think you can trust me, not ever as long as I
live to lead you into weakness. My desperateness, before I received your
letter saying that I might come with you, was rather dreadful; it made
me doubt myself, for it was so difficult to keep myself from going to
pieces. I have been wicked enough, to wonder whether I could ever make
you feel as I felt for two days--if I could only bring to your heart
that one pang, the only real one I ever felt in my life! But it taught
me one thing, that the only road toward realization of life and one’s
self is through suffering. I found out that I could bear, for it seems
to me as I look back at that horrible nightmare, that it was almost by
a superhuman effort I was able to read the letter at all. But enough of
that!

I think I have effectually cured myself of any weak yearning for your
love. I go to you in gratefulness, knowing what I lack and what you
need. Anything my love can do for you, it shall do. It may have some
power--I sometimes think that it could have more than you realize.

I suppose every woman has thought that the man she loved was her very
life, but I do not think it of you, I simply _know_ it. I must go with
you, whether I loved you or not.

Meanwhile my love has assumed a strength to me that I never felt before.
I don’t know how my wild and incoherent letters have affected you, but
there were many times when I longed to get hold of you, literally, and
simply shake into you some recognition of my soul. Oh, I am afraid you
couldn’t get away from me; the more merciless you are to me, the wilder
I get.

I am possessed by so many opposite moods and influences. I am afraid of
you a little. I never know what you are going to do to me.

I feel, I cannot help but feel, that I am part of your life, now, you
could not neglect me any more than you could your own soul. I consider
you just as responsible for mine as you are for your own. I say this
with no doubts, but know that it is true, and you must know it.

XVI

DEAR THYRSIS:

You certainly have a wonderful task in store for me, and I pray God to
give me strength for it. I can see very plainly that you expect to find
the essence of my soul better than yours, because it seems that you are
making my task harder than yours.

Do you know, I have actually found myself asking, at times, with a
certain defiant rage--if you were actually going to give love to your
princess before you had made her suffer! So far you have not made her
suffer at all. I had become quite excited over this idea--though
perhaps I had no right to. I suppose it is all right, because she is
an imaginary person, and you can endow her with all the perfections you
please. She is triumphant and thrilling, and worthy of love--whereas I
am just little Corydon, whom you have known all your life, and who is
stupid and helpless, and impossible to imagine romances about! Is that
the way of it?

XVII

MY DEAREST THYRSIS:

A long letter has just come to me. I always receive your letters with
many palpitations, and by the time I get through reading, my cheeks are
flaming. It is too bad it takes letters so long to go to and fro.

I have finally come to bear the attitude towards myself, that I would
to a naughty child. I will have no nonsense, and all my absurdities and
inefficiencies _must_ be cured. I think I have come to know myself a
little better within the last few days. I know that I have no right to
quick victories, or any happiness at all, even your love. I tell you
truly, if it were only possible, I would go away this minute--do you
hear?--oh! to some lonely place, and then I would do something with
myself. I want to be alone, alone--I want to be face to face with
myself, and God, if possible! I have come to the conclusion that I can
do anything I must do. I think (I am not sure) I could give you up, if
I were obliged to, and go away by myself and try alone. If I do not have
you, I must have solitude.

XVIII

MY DEAREST CORYDON:

Thinking about my work this morning, and how hard it was, and how much
strength it would take, my thoughts turned to you, and I discovered, as
never before, just how I like to think of you. It seemed to me that you
were part of the raw material that I had to use; that I had mastered
you, and was going to make you what you had to be. And there woke in my
heart at those words a fierceness of purpose that I had never felt in
my life before--I was quite mad with it; and you cried out to escape me,
but I would not let you go, but held you right tightly in my arms. And
so--I do not mean to let you go! I shall bear you away with me, and make
you what I wish. And the promise of marriage that I make you is just
this: not that I love you--I do not love you; but what I wish the woman
to be whom I am to love--that I will make you!

And do not ever dare to ask me for any other promise, for you will not
get it. You will come with this.

XIX

MY THYRSIS:

I had an _iron grip_ at my heart just now, as I was trying to study.
I had a foreboding of something--and then I came home and found your
letter telling me I was yours, and I _must._ At last I may go to you the
way I wish! My love, my love, I do not care what you are, or what you do
to me, as long as I may go with you.

How I laugh at myself as I say it! You have mastered me to worship your
_life_--not you. I shall not work for your love, I shall work to live.
Our love will be one of the incidents of our life. Meanwhile, I may go
with you, that is all that I say--I sing it. I may go with you, not to
happiness, but to necessity!

And now that cursed German! It hangs over my head like a sword of
Damocles I have heard of--though I don’t know why it was held over his
head!

You think our love was settling into the cooing state! Dear me, Thyrsis,
I hope I will not always have to yell to you over a foggy ocean!

XX

DEAR THYRSIS:

Can you imagine what it must be to be shut up in a little room on a
rainy night, with the children and people screaming under your window?
That is my position now.

I find myself hard to manage at times. I want to become discouraged or
melancholy or disgusted, but I drive myself better than I used to. I
even was happy a little for a few moments to-night. I was playing one of
my piano-pieces, and I found myself imagining all sorts of things. But
this happens very seldom, and only lasts for a moment. I often wonder at
myself. Two months ago I did not love you one particle; I love you now,
so that--so that it is impossible for me to do anything else. In fact I
did not realize how much I loved you until that terrible moment when I
read you did not love me. I saw how impossible it will be to cease to
love you, no matter what you do to me. I do not know _why_ it is; I
simply know it is, and perhaps some day I may teach _you_ how to love. I
do not imagine you know how very well, at present--no, Thyrsis, I don’t.

I know your true self now, and I love it better than ever I loved the
other. I say it with a certain grimness. I know you, your real self, and
I love it.

Know, oh, my Beloved, that in the last three months you have grown to me
from a boy into a man, into my husband! When I think of you as you were
at first you seem a child compared to what you are now.

XXI

DEAREST LOVE:

Last night, as I went to sleep, I was thinking of you and our problem,
and there were all sorts of uncertainties; but one thing I have to tell
you, my Corydon--that it came to me how sweet and true, and how pure and
good you have been; and I loved you very, very much indeed. I thought:
I should like to tell her that, and ask her always to be so noble and
unselfish. Can you not realize how all your deficiencies are as nothing
to me, in the sight of that one unapproachable perfection? For my
Corydon is all devotion and love, and pure, pure, maiden goodness! And
there is quite a whole heart full of feeling for you in that, and I wish
I had you here to tell you.

XXII

MY CORYDON:

I am coming more and more to realize myself, and what is the single
faculty I have been given. I think of a dear clergyman friend I used to
have, and I realize what a _loving_ heart is--what it is to delight in
a human soul for its own sake, and to be kind to it, fond of it. And
I know that there could not be a man with less of that than I have.
Certainly I know this, I never did love a soul for its own sake, and
don’t think I could. I love beauty, and truth, and power, and I hate
everything else, if it come across my way. If I had to live the life
of that clergyman friend I should be insane in a month. I see this as
something very hateful; but there is only one thing I can do, to see
that I hate my own self more than I hate any other self--and work, work,
for the thing I love.

You asked me once to tell you if your death would make any difference to
me. If you were to die to-morrow I should feel that a sacred opportunity
was gone out of my life, that all my efforts must have less result
forever after. But I do not think I should stop working a day.

I love you because you are something upon which I may exert the force
of my will. I honestly believe that the truest word, the nearest to my
character, I ever spoke. If I care about you it is for one thing,
and one only--because you are a soul hungry for life, because you are
capable of sacrifice and high effort, because you are sensitive and
eager. I love you and honor you for this; I take you to my bosom, I give
all my life to your service; and I shall make you a perfect woman, or
else kill you.

You must understand what I want; I want no concrete thing, no dozen
languages to throw you into despair. I want effort, effort, _effort!_
That’s all. And I believe that you might be a stronger soul than I at
this moment, if only you chose to hunt yourself out and fight! That is
truly what I feel about you, and that is why I love you.

XXIII

DEAREST THYRSIS:

I have no more to say, my precious one; I bow in joy before your will,
your certainty, your power. Let it be so, I shall adore you as I so long
to do.

You are giving me all I could ask for. What more could I wish from you,
dear Thyrsis, than to know you will never leave my side? I will try
not to do any more bemoaning of my shortcomings. To-night I reached a
wonderful security and almost sublimity, until I could have fallen on
my face and praised God for His mercy. I talked out loud to myself, I
exhorted myself, I explained to myself what is my beauty and possibility
in life--the _reason_ for which I was born. I was quite lifted out of
myself, by a conviction that came like a benediction, that the essence
of my soul was good and pure, and that if anybody upon earth had the
power to reach God, it was myself.

Dear God, _how_ I have spent the years of my life! like an imbecile! But
you--if you take me, I shall go mad--I shall love you like a tigress! I
shall implore you to invent any way that will enable me to realize life!
Oh, if you take me, how madly I shall love you! I fancy myself seeing
you now, and I don’t know what I should do--I love you so dreadfully! I
think of you, and everything about you seems so wondrously beautiful to
me!

I almost have a feeling that I have no right to love you so much. Oh,
tell me, do you want me to love you as I can? Already you seem part of
me, mine--mine! And it is wonderful how you help me.

XXIV

Thyrsis:

I spent the whole day in the park without a bite to eat, because I did
not want to take the trouble to come home after it, and I only had five
cents. I have tried, oh, tried to control myself and make myself saner.
I am seized with occasional fits of the horrors, and of wild cravings
for you, until I could scream. It is so unbearable, and I almost want
to die. Oh, but I do _not_ want to die! My imagination has become so
fevered in the last few days--if I do not see you soon, I know not what
will become of me!

I have never loved you so wildly--though I have always longed for you. I
sometimes feel now as if my brain were utterly wrecked. I know not what
is the matter; I gasp, when I think of you. I am convinced of heaven and
hell almost in the same breath--experience each in rapid succession. One
touch of your hand and one look, I think would cure me. I seem as if
in a thunder-storm--pitchy blackness with flashes of light--and in the
flashes I see you, my beloved!

XXV

Thyrsis:

I am atrociously weary of being able to depend upon myself not at all;
but oh, how marvellously sweet and good you are to me! I shall never be
able to pay you for your help!

Dear Heaven, what a cup of bitterness I have drunk, since I last saw
you! Dearest, you have really torn me to pieces, unwittingly. But now I
am healed, and I may go on in your blessed sight, with my terrors gone
forever.

And then I actually wonder if you have an earthly form! It will be very
strange to see you and touch you, I sometimes wake up with a start at
the thought of it!

XXVI

Thyrsis:

Here I am, the most restless and miserable and uncomfortable and pining
of creatures--a very Dido! Are you satisfied, now that you have made
it almost impossible for me to put my mind on anything but you, you? I
spend hours reading one page of my book.

I was reading peaceably just now, and I suddenly thought how I would
feel if I saw you coming in at the door. I started and could hardly
believe that I will really see you--in something besides visions. When
night comes I usually get fidgety, and can hardly realize I do not need
to worry over phantoms. Then I go on with “Classicism and Romanticism in
Music,” and I think of you--and read a line and think of you! You see,
it doesn’t do for me to be too intense, for I just devour myself,
and that is all. My only idea of a vent is to knock my head against
something.

I suppose it is the inevitable result of caring for someone you cannot
see. Here I might be studying now, but what do I do? I go around seeking
rest--and I write you a dozen times a day, and use up all the stamps in
the house.

Oh well, I dare say if you wished me to love you, you have accomplished
your purpose most successfully. There is nothing in life but you, and
to suddenly acquire a new self is most startling, and something hard to
believe. Thyrsis, I simply cannot realize that I may go to you and find
peace and security.

XXVII

MY DEAREST CORYDON:

I have just a few words to say. I have two weeks left in which to shake
off my shoulders the fearful animal that has been tearing me. _For just
three weeks to-day,_ not a line written!

The task seems almost beyond my powers. God, will people ever know how I
have worked over this book!

But unless you develop some new doubt, or I persist in writing letters,
I ought to get it done now. I shall see you as soon as I have finished,
and meantime I shall write no letters.

XXVIII

DEAR THYRSIS:

I would give a great deal to let you know how I have struggled and
suffered.

I have had almost _more_ than I could bear--the more horrible because
the more unreasonable. You must know it. If it disturbs you, please put
the letter away until a favorable time. I account my trouble greatly
physical--I have never been in such a nervous state. The murky despair
that has come over me--that I have writhed and struggled in, as in the
clutches of some fiend! It seems to me I have experienced every torment
of each successive stage of Dante’s Inferno. I know what is the emotion
of a soul in all the bloom and hope of youth, condemned _to die_.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night--and felt as if a
monster sat by to throw a black cloth over me and smother me. I got up
and shook myself, and my heart was beating violently.

I managed to get myself free. This morning I am better. God in Heaven
only knows--I would rather be torn limb from limb, yes, honestly, than
endure the blackness of soul that I have had through all these years of
strife and failure by myself.

Dearest Thyrsis:

Perhaps if I have written to you a few words, I shall be able to put my
mind on study--as so far I have not done. I actually to-night have been
indulging in all sorts of romantic moods about you. I felt in a singing
mood, and when I came up from dinner I put on a beautiful dress, just
for fun, and I looked quite radiant. I dreamed of you, and imagined that
you were at my feet, in true Romeo fashion--and I was your Juliet. I
imagined--I couldn’t help thinking of this, and I knew I ought to be
doing something else! Oh, but how I want a poor taste of joy! You were
my Romeo to-night--you were beautiful and young and loving; and well, I
had one dream of youth and happiness before my miseries begin.

I have felt that we were very near to each other lately. You have shown
me the tenderness of your heart, and I love you quite rapturously. I
love your goodness, your sympathy--perhaps when I see you I can tell
you!

XXX

DEAREST THYRSIS:

I received a postal just now, saying that you were coming soon. I had
my usual queer faintness. It was like receiving word from the dead--it
seemed such centuries--aeons--since I heard from you! I send you this
batch of notes I have written you at various times, a sort of mental
itinerary, for my mind has traveled into all sorts of queer places, back
and forth. I tell you that without your continual influence, I am lost
in doubt and uncertainty. Please try to understand these notes and my
fits of love and fear.

XXXI

DEAR THYRSIS:

I am in one of my cast-iron moods, this morning--in a fighting mood,
I do not care with whom or what. You, even you, have not altogether
understood me--you have often given me a dog’s portion. I have been a
slave, a cowering kitten before you, and you (unwittingly I know) have
done much to destroy all my courage and hope and love--by what you call
making me aware of your higher self. Fortunately I _know_ what your
higher self is, quite as well as you do, if not a little better--and I
know that it is the self that most strengthens my love and courage, the
self that most fills me with life. I have a right to life as well as
you, and a right to the love in you that most inspires me. I feel I am
capable of judging this, in spite of all my lack of education, and my
inability to follow you in your intellectual life.

I have thought lately that you were able to make yourself believe that
you were anything you wished to think yourself. Whenever you wring my
heart and deprive me of strength, I shall go somewhere alone, and when I
have controlled myself, come back to you.

You say you are master--but it must be master of the right. I want
strength, and why you should think it right ever to have helped to throw
me into more despair, I do not know. The reason I have written all this
is because such ideas have come to me lately, and a fear that sometimes
you might resort to your unloving methods, with the thought of its being
right. I tell you I would rather stay at home, than ever go through
with some of the pangs you have cost me, in what you called your higher
moods. You must not gainsay me, that I am also capable of respecting
high moods and bowing before them; but it would seem to me that they are
only high if they are a source of inspiration and joy to me.

Because we love each other, would that be any reason why we must dote
upon each other, or sink from our high resolves? I cannot see why our
love for each other should not always be a means of our reaching our
higher selves. You need not answer this letter--but when you come back,
tell me whether what I say impresses you as being right or wrong--if
there is not some justification in it. But perhaps I should wait. I have
no right to disturb you now.

XXXII

THYRSIS:

I woke up this morning with the feeling that I did not love you.
That same thing has happened to me two or three times, and I do not
understand it.

It must be because at the present moment you do not love _me!_ You are
writing your book, and telling yourself that you cannot love me as you
ought! Is this so? It is only a surmise on my part, and I do not know,
but I should not be surprised if you were. I only know that the one
thing that can bring us together is love, and I do not love you now.
Perhaps you can explain it to me. I write this absolutely without
emotion.

I tell you there have been things horribly wrong about you. You have
done anything but inspire love in my heart--you have never seen me with
love in my heart. Until lately, I never have felt any love for you;
before, I simply compelled myself to think I loved you, because my life
seemed to depend upon it. There have been many times when, as I look
back, you seem to me to have been base.

Well may you preach, while you are alone, and are monarch of yourself.
I shall have to have more of a chance than has ever come to me, before
I will bear your displeasure or your exhortations. If you come to me and
speak to me of the high, proud self that I must reach, every vestige
of love for you will leave my heart, and I would as soon marry a stone
pillar!

Great Heaven, what strange moods I have! I picture our meeting each
other, unmoved by love; you determined, energetic, indifferent to all
things, myself included; and I disappointed, but with a hardness in my
heart--no tears!

I am indulging now in the most lifeless and gloomy of broodings; if you
do not come back to me, the only soul I can love, if you are not joyful
and strong, sincere, sympathetic, and loving, all of these--I shall know
it is a farce for me to ever hope to gain any life with _you_. I do not
believe that any woman can grow without love, and a great deal of it.
Why do you suppose I am writing all this--I, who have felt such deep
and true love for you? I have no courage--the dampness of the day has
settled into my soul--and I shall be joyless until there is no more
cursed doubt of you and your love for me.

XXXIII

Dear Corydon: Against resolutions, I am writing to you again. I thought
of you--there is a boat up the lake to-day with some hunters, and if I
finish this letter, I can send it in by them as they pass. I have many
things to tell you, and you must think about them.

This is one of my paralyzing letters. It will reach you Monday. I can’t
tell where I may be then. I have been wrestling with the end of the
book, and I am wild with rage at my impotence. The fact has come to me
that no amount of will is enough, because all my life is cowardly and
false. I have found myself wanting _to sneak through this work_, and
come home and enjoy myself; and you can’t sneak with God, and that’s
all. I cannot come home beaten, and so here I am, still struggling--and
with snow on the ground, and the shack so cold that I sit half in the
fire-place.

I think of you, and at times when my soul is afire, I imagine I can do
anything. I see that you are helpless, but I think that I can change
your whole being, and _make_ you what I wish. But then that feeling dies
out, and I think of you as you _are_, and with despair. I do not allude
to any of your “deficiencies”--music, learning, and other stuff. I mean
your life-force, or your lack of it. I see that you have learned nothing
of the unspeakable, unattainable thing for which I am panting. And it
has come to me that I dare not marry you, that I should be binding my
life to ruin. My head is surging with plans, and a whole infinity of
future, and I simply cannot carry any woman with me on this journey.

As I say this, I see the tears of despair in your eyes. I can only tell
you what I am--God made me for an _artist,_ not a _lover!_ I have not
deep feelings--I do not care for human suffering; I can _work,_ that
is all. Art is no respecter of persons, and neither am I--I labor for
something which is not of self, and requires denial of self. And as I
think about you, the feeling comes to me that it is not this you want,
that I should make you utterly wretched if I married you. You love
_love;_ you do not wish to fling yourself into a struggle such as
my life must be. I see that in all your letters--your terror of this
highest self of mine. If you married me, you would have to fight a
battle that would almost kill you. You would have to wear your
heart out, night and day--you would have to lose yourself and your
feelings--fling away everything, and live in self-contempt and effort.
You would have to know it--I can’t help it--that I love life, and
that to human hearts I owe no allegiance; that to me they are simply
impatience and vexation.

Do you want such a life? If you can learn to love it for what it is--a
wild, unnatural, but royal life--very well. If you are coming to me with
pleading eyes, secretly wishing for affection, and in terror of me when
you don’t get it, then God help you, that is all!

You are a child, and you can not dream what I mean. But every day I
learn something more of a great savage force of mine, that will stand
out against the rest of this world, that is burning me up, that is
driving me mad. One of two things it will do to you--it will make you
the same kind of creature, or it will tear the soul out of you. Do you
understand that? And nothing will stop it--it cares for nothing in the
world but the utterance of itself! And if you wish to marry me, it will
be with no promise of mine save to wreak it upon you! To take you,
and make you just such a creature, kill or cure--nothing else! Not one
instant’s patience--but just one insistent, frantic demand that
you succeed--and fiery, writhing disgust with you when you do not
succeed--disgust that will make you scream--and make you live! Do you
understand this--and do you get any idea of the temper behind this? And
how it seems to you, I don’t know--it is the only kind of truth I am
capable of; I shall simply fling naked the force of my passionate,
raging will, and punish you with it each instant of your life--until you
understand it, and love it, and worship it, as I do.

Now, I don’t know what you will think about this letter--and I don’t
care. It is here--and you must take it. It does not come to you for
criticism, any more than it would come for criticism to the world. It
will rule the world. If I marry you I must live all my soul before you,
and you must share it; if you think you can do this without first
having suffered, having first torn loose your own crushed self, you are
mistaken. But remember this--I shall demand from you just as much fire
as I give; you may say you _cannot_, you may weep and say you cannot--I
will gnash my teeth at you and say you _must_.

Perhaps I’m a fool to think I can do this. At any rate, I don’t want to
do anything else; I am a fool to think of doing anything else, and you
to let me.

I _cannot_ be false to my art without having a reaction of disgust, and
you cannot marry me, unless you understand that. When I sat down to this
letter I called myself mad for trying to tie my life to yours. Now I am
interested in you again. You may wish to make this cast still; and oh,
of course I shall drop back as usual, and you’ll be happy, and I’ll be
your “Romeo”!

_Ugh_--how I hated that letter! _“Romeo”_ indeed! Wouldn’t we have a
fine sentimental time--you with your prettiest dress on, and I holding
you in my arms and telling you how much I loved you!

XXXIV

MY DEAR THYRSIS:

I shall be your wife. This thought takes hold of me firmly and calmly,
and I have no tears, nor fright, nor uncertainty. I suffered, of course,
while I read your letter, and my self-control toppled, but no “tears of
despair” came into my eyes. I am not despairing--I shall be your wife,
and I shall feel that for many years one of my greatest efforts will be
to prevent you from becoming my “Romeo.” I am very weak and human, and
you become that easily--do you know it?

Rejoice, I have gained my self-control, and well, I am going to be your
wife. Or else (it comes to me quite as a matter of course, without any
feeling of it being unnatural or unusual) I shall not care to live. But
after all, I do not fear that I shall die--I shall be your wife. You may
even gainsay it, you may _even_ tell me I shall ruin your life, you may
_even_ tell me that you refuse to take me--but sooner or later I shall
be your wife. I say it with perfect certainty, and almost composure.

It is unfortunate that at such a time as this I cannot see you--it is
quite cruelly wicked. There is so much to say, not all in _your_ favor
either. Some day I shall learn to bring out and keep before me that
higher self of yours, which _now_ I do not fear. I also have a higher
self, though it does not show itself very often. It is a self which
can meet that self of yours without flinching, but which loves it, and
stretches out its arms to it--which knows that without that self of
yours it cannot, _will_ not live. It is hard to realize such a thing,
but I beseech you no longer, I am going with you. You see now, I have no
fear of your not taking me--I simply have no fear of this.

If I had, I could not write you this way. But you have been the means of
showing me I _can_ awaken, and that I was not meant to live the life of
the people around me. Chance tried hard to put me to sleep forever, but
you have roused me. Dear me, how I smile to myself at my confidence!
But I am so sure--this feeling would not be in my heart if it had no
meaning! I was not meant for this life I am leading. I am not afraid
because I have no proof that I am a genius, and no prospect of being
one at present. I do not know whether what you have must come as an
inspiration direct from God, I do not know whether I am _capable_ of
winning any of this life that you are seeking; but I do know this--I’m
going to have the chance to try, and you are going to give it to me. Do
you suppose I could tell you that I am willing to stay at home and let
you leave me?

I have not even any fear now of your wishing to leave me. Why, I
wouldn’t hold my life at a pennyworth if you were out of it!

“You are my only means of breathing, you fool,” I thought. I sometimes
wonder how you could think of leaving me, when I feel as I do at
present. I ask myself why it is that you know nothing of it, and why
it does not make you put out your hand in gladness to me--how you could
write me that all my letters showed you I did not want to struggle to
lead your life!

My words are failing me now--this is probably the reason you know
nothing about me.

Besides, when I have written you before this, I have been worrying and
doubting and afraid. I am none of these now; and I do not believe I am
deluding myself--in fact I _know_ I am not. _I shall be your wife._ It
is indeed a pity I cannot talk to you now--yes, a very great pity. It is
also rather incomprehensible, that you can imagine leaving me _now._ And
all my letters have told you that I wish to be petted and cuddled, did
they? If you were here, I do not know that it would do any good to give
my feelings vent, it would profit me nothing to strike you, and what
could I do? I cannot hate you--it is not natural that one should hate
one’s husband.

Some day, oh, _some_ day, I tell myself--you will no lonnger play and
trifle with me and my soul!

Did you really think you are going to put me to sleep again? Surely my
life is something; and you have given me some reason for its existence.
I can hardly tell you what I wish to say; people run in and out, and I
am bothered--I suppose this is one of my tasks. But do you not see that
you have taken the responsibility of a soul into your hands? I
cannot live witho

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