“I am the rain, that comes in spring!”
So, after a while, she found herself in the throes of composition; she was eager, excited—and marvel of marvels, utterly forgetful of the baby! She had never tried to write verses before; but it did not seem at all difficult to her now.
The poem was simple and optimistic—it told of the beneficent qualities of rain, as it would appear to one whose roof did not leak. Somewhere in the course of it there was this stanza:
“I am the rain that comes at night,When all in slumber is folded light—Save one by weary vigils wornWho counteth the drops unto the morn.”
This seemed to her an impressive bit, and she wondered what Thyrsis would think of it.
There were eight stanzas altogether, and when she finished the last of them the dawn was breaking, and it seemed hours since she had begun. As for the baby, he was still crying. She turned and peered at him; his eyelids drooped, and the crying came in spasms and gasps—it sounded very feeble, and a trifle perfunctory. Obviously he could not hold out much longer; Corydon would win, yes, she had won already. She lay still, and thrills of happiness went through her. Was it the poem, or the thought of her release, and the nights of quiet sleep in the future?
When Thyrsis came in, an hour or two later, he found her huddled up in blankets on the floor of the living-room, her cheeks bright, her hair dishevelled. How fascinating she looked in such a guise! She was eagerly pondering her poem; and the baby was sleeping quietly, save for a few convulsive gasps, the last stragglers of his routed forces.
“And oh, Thyrsis,” she exclaimed, “to-morrow night he will only cry half as long, and still less the next night. And soon he will go to sleep quietly like any well brought-up, civilized baby. And, my dear, I believe I’m going to be a poetess—I think that to-night I was really inspired!”
So he made haste to build a fire, and then came and sat and listened to the poem. How eagerly she waited for his verdict! How she hung upon his words! And what should a man do in such a case—should he be a husband or a critic? Should he be an amateur or a professional?
But even as he hesitated, the damage was done. “Oh, you don’t like it!” she cried. “You don’t think it’s good at all!”
“My dear,” he argued, “poetry is such a difficult thing to write. And there are so many standards—a thing can be good, and yet not good! The heights are so far away—”
“But oh, how can I ever get there,” wailed Corydon, “if nobody gives me any encouragement?”
Section 9. The time had now come for Thyrsis to put his job through. There was no longer any excuse for hesitation or delay. The book had come to ripeness in him; the birth-hour was at hand, and he must go and have it out with himself. He explained these things to Corydon, sitting beside her and holding her hands; they ascended once more to the heights of consecration; they renewed their vows of fortitude and faith, and then he went away.
For weeks thereafter he would be like the ghost of a man in the house, haggard and silent and preoccupied. All the work that he had ever done in his life seemed but child’s play in comparison. Before this he had portrayed the struggles of men and women; but now he was to portray the agony of a whole nation—his heart must beat with the pulse of millions of suffering people. And the task was like a fiend that came upon him in the night-time and laid hold of him, dragging him away to sights of terror and madness. He was never safe from the thing for a moment—he could never tell when it might assail him. He might be washing the dishes, or wrestling with the refractory pump; but the vision would come to him, and he would wander off into the forest—perhaps to sit, crouching in the snow, trembling, and staring at the pageant in his soul.
He lived in the midst of battles; the smoke of powder always in his nostrils, the crash of musketry and the thunder of cannon in his ears. He saw the cavalry sweeping over the plains, the infantry crouching behind intrenchments; he heard the yells of the combatants, the shrieks of the wounded and dying; he saw the mangled bodies, and the ground slippery with blood. New aspects of the thing kept coming to him—new glimpses into meanings yet untold. They would come to him in great bursts of emotion, like tempests that swept him away; and these things he had to wrestle with and master. It meant toil, the like of which he had never faced before, a tension of all his faculties, that would last for hours and hours, and leave him bathed in perspiration, and utterly exhausted.
A scene would come to him, in some moment of insight; and he would drop everything else, and follow it. He would go over it, at the same time both creating and beholding it, at the same time both overwhelmed by it and controlling it—but above all things else, remembering it! He would be like Aladdin in the palace, stuffing his pockets with priceless jewels; coming away so loaded down that he could hardly stagger, and spilling them on every side. Then, scarcely pausing to rest, he would go back after what he had lost; he would grope about, gathering diamonds and rubies that he had all but forgotten—or perhaps coming upon new vaults and new treasure-chests.
So he would labor over a description, going over it and over it, not so much working it out, as letting it work itself out and stamp itself upon his memory. It made no difference how long the scene might be, he would not write a word of it; it might be some battle-picture, that would fill thirty or forty pages—he would know it all by heart, as Demosthenes or Webster might have known an oration. And only at the end would he write it down.
Over some of the scenes in this new book he labored thus for two or three weeks at a stretch; there would be literally not a moment of the day, nor perhaps of the night, when the thing was not working in some part of his mind. He would think about it for hours before he fell asleep; and when he opened his eyes it would be waiting at his bedside to pounce upon him. If he tried for even a few minutes to rest, or to divert his mind to some other work, he would find himself ill at ease and troubled, with a sense as of something pulling at him, calling to him. And if anything came to interrupt him, then he would be like a baker whose oven grows cold before the bread is half done—it would be a sad labor making anything out of that batch of bread.
Section 10. And this work he had to do as a married man, the father of a family and the head of a household; living with a child who was one incessant and irrepressible demand for attention, and a wife who was wrestling with weakness and sickness—eating out her heart in cruel loneliness, and cowering in the grip of fiends of melancholia and despair!
He had thought that when they moved into the new home, their domestic trials would be at an end. But now the cruel winter fell upon them. They had never known what a winter in the country was like; they came to see why the farmer had protested against their building in such a remote place. There were many days when they could not get to town, and some when they could not even get to the farm-house. Also there was the pump, which was continually freezing, and necessitating long and troublesome operations before they could get any water.
It was, as fate would have it, the worst winter in the oldest inhabitant’s memory. The farmer’s well froze over on three occasions, and it had never frozen before, so he declared. For such weather as this they were altogether unprepared; they had only a wood-stove, and could not keep a fire all night; and the cheap blankets they had bought were made all of cotton, and gave them almost no protection. They would not sleep with the windows down; and so, for weeks at a time, they would go to bed with their clothing, even their overcoats on; and would pile curtains and rugs upon these—and even so, they would waken at two or three o’clock in the morning, shivering and chilled to the bone.
And in this icy room they would have to get up and build a fire; and it might be half an hour before they could get the house warm. Also, they had no facilities for bathing; and so little by little they began to lose their habits of decency—there were days when Corydon left her face unwashed, and forgot to brush her hair. Everyday, it seemed, they slipped yet further down the grade. Thyrsis would work until he was faint and exhausted, and then he would come over, and find there was nothing ready to eat. By the time that he and Corydon had cooked a meal, they would both of them be ravenous, and they would sit and devour their food like a couple of savages. Then, because they had over-eaten, they would have to rest before they cleared things away; and like as not Thyrsis would get to thinking about his work, and go off and leave everything—and the dishes and the food might stay up on the table until the next meal. There was nearly always a piled-up mass of dishes and skillets and sauce-pans in the house—to Thyrsis these soiled dishes were the original source of the myth of Sisyphus and his labor.
And then there was the garbage-pail that he had forgotten to empty, and the lamps he had neglected to fill, and the slop-pails and the other utensils of domesticity. There were the diapers that somebody had to wash—and outside was always the bitter, merciless cold, that drove them in and shut them up with all this horror. The time came, as the winter dragged on, when the house which they had built with so many sacrifices, and into which they had moved with such eager anticipations, came to seem to them like a cave in which a couple of wild beasts cowered for shelter.
Section 11. There was another great change which this cold weather effected in their lives; it broke down the barriers they had been at such pains to build up between them. It was all very well for them to agree that they were “brother and sister,” and that it was impossible for them ever to think of anything else. But now came a time when night after night the thermometer went to ten or fifteen degrees below zero; and first Thyrsis gave more bedding to Corydon—because she was able to suffer more than he; and he would go over to his cold hut alone, and crawl into a cold bed, and lie there the whole night through without a wink of sleep. But then, as the cold held on for a week or more, the resistance of both of them was broken down—they were like two animals which crawl into the same hole to keep each other from freezing. They piled all their bedding upon one narrow cot; and sleeping thus, they could be warm. Even then, they tried to keep to the resolution they had made; but this, it seemed, was not within the power of flesh and blood; and so, once more, the sex-factor was introduced into the complications of their lives.
To Thyrsis this thing was like some bird of prey that circled in the sky just above him—its shadow filling him with a continual fear, the swish of its wings making him cringe. He was never happy about it; there was no time in his life when he was not in a state of inward war. His intellect rebelled; and on the other hand, there was a part of his nature that craved this sex-experience and welcomed it—and this part, it seemed, was favored by all the circumstances of life. There was no chance to settle the matter in the light of reason, to test it by any moral or aesthetic law; blind fate decreed that one part of him should have the shaping of his character, the determining of his needs.
He tried to make clear to himself the basis of his distrust. Sexual intercourse as a habit—this was the formula by which he summed it up to himself. To be right, to win the sanction of the intellect and the conscience, the sex-act must be the result of a supreme creative impulse. Its purpose was the making of a new soul—and this could never be right until those who took that responsibility had used their reasons, and determined that circumstances were such that the new soul might be a sound and free and happy and beautiful soul. And how different was this from the customs which prevailed under the sanction of the “holy bonds of matrimony”! When sexual intercourse became a self-indulgence, like the eating of candy, or the drinking of liquor; a thing of the body, and the body alone; a thing determined by physical propinquity, by the sight and contact of the flesh, the dressing and undressing in the same room!
Then again, the means which they had to use to prevent conception—which destroyed all spontaneity in their relationship, and dragged the thing out into the cold light of day! And the continual fear that they might have made another blunder! Something of this sort was always happening, or seeming to have happened, or threatening to have happened, so that they waited each month in suspense and dread. It was this which made the terror of the whole matter to Thyrsis, and had so much to do with his repugnance. They were like people drawing lots for a death-sentence; like people who ate from dishes, one of which they knew to contain poison. What was the tragic destiny that hung over them—the Nemesis that gripped them, and forced them to take such a chance?
But the barriers were down, and there was no building them up again; Thyrsis never even tried, because of the revelation which came to him from Corydon’s side. Corydon was craving, reaching out hungrily for something which she had not in herself, and which life did not give her in sufficiency. She called this thing “love”; and she had no hesitations and no limits to her demand for it. To Thyrsis this “love” was something quite else—it was sustenance and support. To demand it was an act of weakness, and to yield it was a kind of spiritual blood-transfusion. It was the first law of his life-code that every soul must stand upon its own feet and walk its own way; and to surrender that spiritual autonomy was the one blunder for which there could be no pardon.
But then—he would argue with himself—what folly it was to talk of such things in their position! They not souls at all—the life of the soul was not for them, the laws of the soul had nothing to do with them. They were two bodies—two miserable and cold and sick and tormented bodies; and with yet a third body, utterly helpless and dependent upon them—in defiance of all the most high-sounding pronouncements about “the soul”!
So Thyrsis would mock himself into subjection once more, and go on to play his part as husband and father and head of a household of bodies. He would play the game of “love” as Corydon wanted it played; he would yield to her demands, he would gratify her cravings, he would force himself to take her point of view. But then the other mood would come upon him—the mood that he knew to be the real expression of himself. He would begin the battle of his genius again; he would “hear the echoes afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting”. If one gave one’s self up to the body, and accepted the regimen and the laws of the body, how should the soul ever come to be free? To make such a concession was to pass upon it a sentence of life-imprisonment!
So would come to Thyrsis again that sense of the awful tragedy that was impending in their lives. Some day, he knew, he would break out of this prison. Some day, he knew, he would have to be himself, and live his own life!
And meanwhile, how pitiful were Corydon’s attempts to shape him to her needs, and to persuade herself that she was succeeding in doing it! She would set forth to him elaborately how much he had improved; how much gentler and more human he was—in contrast with that blind and stupid and egotistical and impossible person she had first known. And with what bitterness Thyrsis would hear this—and how he had to struggle to suppress his feeling! For he knew that those qualities which were so hateful to her, were but the foam cast up to the surface of his soul by the seething of his genius within. When it had ceased altogether, how placid and still would be the pool-and what a beautiful mirror it would make for Corydon to behold her own features in!
Section 12. In later years they used to discuss this problem, and they could never be sure what would have happened in their lives—what would have been the reaction of their different temperaments—if they had been given any fair chance to live and grow as they wanted to. But here they were, mashed together in this stew-pot of domesticity, with all the most unlovely aspects of things forced continually upon their attention. Each was in some way a handicap and a torment to the other—a means which fate used to limit and crush and destroy the other; and as ever, they had in their hours of anguish no recourse save to sit down and reason it out together, and absolve each other from blame.
Thyrsis invented a phrase whereby he might make this point clear to Corydon, and keep it in her thoughts. The phrase was “the economic screw”; it pressed upon him, and through him it crushed her. All things that he sought to be and could not be, all things that he would not be and was; all that was hard and unloving in him—his irritability and impatience, his narrowness and bitterness—in all this he showed her that cruel force that was destroying them both.
It was a hard rôle for Thyrsis, to be the judge and the jury and the executioner of the stern will of this “economic screw”. There was, for instance, the episode of the “turkey-red table-cover”, which became a classic in their later lives. Corydon was always chafing at the bareness of their little home; and going into the shops in the town, and discovering things which might have made it lovely. One evil day she went alone; and when she came back, Thyrsis, as usual, pounced upon his mail, and came upon a letter from a magazine-editor whom he had been trying to please with an article, and who now scolded him mercilessly for his obstinacy and his egotism and his didacticism, and all his other unpublishable qualities. Then came the unwrapping of the bundles, and Corydon’s guileless and joyful announcement that she had come upon a wonderful bargain in the dry-goods store, a beautiful piece of “turkey-red” cloth which would serve as the table-cover for which her soul had been pining—and which she had obtained for the incredibly small sum of thirty cents!
Whereupon, of course, Thyrsis began to exclaim in dismay. Thirty cents was a third of all they had to live upon for a day! And to pay it for a fool piece of rag for which they had no earthly need! So Corydon sank down in the middle of the floor and dissolved in floods of tears; and at the next trip into town the “turkey-red table-cover” was returned, and over the bare board table there were new expositions of the theory of the “economic screw”!
To these arguments Corydon would listen and assent. With her intellect she was at one with him, and she strove to make this intellect supreme. But always, deep underneath, was the other side of her being, that had nothing to do with intellect, but was pure primitive impulse—and that pushed and drove in her always, and carried her away the moment that intellect loosened its brake. Corydon was ashamed of this primitive self—she was always repudiating it, always shutting her eyes to it. There was no way to wound her so deeply as to posit its reality and identify it with her.
She was always fighting to make her temperament like Thyrsis’; she despised her own temperament utterly, and set up his qualities as her ideal. He was self-contained and masterful; he knew what he wanted and how to get it; he was not dependent upon anyone else, he needed no one’s approval or admiration; he could control his emotions, and destroy those that inconvenienced him. So Corydon must be these things also; shewasthese things, and no one must gainsay it! And if ever she had felt or wished or said or done anything else—that was all misunderstanding or delusion or accident; she would repudiate it with grief and indignation, and proclaim herself the creature of pure reason that every person ought to be!
But then would come something that appealed to her emotions—to her love of beauty, her craving for joy; and there in a flash was the primitive self again. The task of compelling Corydon to economy reminded her husband of a toy which had been popular in his childhood days. The name of it was “Pigs in Clover”; there were five little balls which you had to coax into a narrow entrance, and while you were getting the last one in, the other four were almost certain to roll out. It was a labor of hours to get Corydon to recognize an unpleasant fact; and then—the next day she had forgotten it. There were some things about himself and his life that he could never get her to understand; for instance, his preoccupation with the newspaper—that symbol of all that was hateful in life. Just then was the beginning of the Russian revolution; and to Thyrsis the Russian revolution was like the coming of relief to a shipwrecked mariner. It was a personal thing to him—the overthrow of a horror that pressed upon the life of every human being upon earth. And so each day he hungered for the news, and when the paper came he would pounce upon it.
“Now dearest,” he would say, “please don’t disturb me. I want to read.”
“All right,” she would answer; and five minutes would pass.
Then—“Do you want potatoes for supper, Thyrsis?”
“Yes, dear. But I’m reading now.”
“All right.” And then another five minutes.
“Thyrsis, who was Boadicea?”
“I’m reading now, dearest.”
“Oh yes.” And then another five minutes.
“Thyrsis, do you spell choke with an a?”
At which Thyrsis would put down the paper. “Tell me, Corydon—isn’t there something I can do so that you won’t interrupt me?”
Instantly a look of pain would sweep across her face. “Do you have to speak to me like that, Thyrsis? If you’d only just tell me, kindly and pleasantly—”
“But I’ve told you three or four times!’
“Thyrsis! How can you say that?”
“But didn’t I?”
“Why, of course not!”
And then they would have an argument. He would bring up each case and confront her with it; and how very unloving a procedure was that—and how exasperating was his manner as he did it!
Section 13. Then again, Corydon would be going into town to do some shopping; and he would ask her to bring out the afternoon paper. It would be the day of the October massacre, for instance; and he be on fire for the next batch of news. He would explain this to her; he would tell her again and again—whatever else she forgot, she must remember the afternoon paper. He would walk out to meet her, burning with impatience; and he would ask for the paper, and see a blank look come over her face.
Then, of course, he would scold. He had certain phrases—“How perfectly unspeakable! Perfectly paralyzing!” How she hated these phrases!
“I had so many things to get!” she would exclaim.
“But only one thing for me, Corydon!”
“Everything is for you—just as much as for myself! All these groceries—look at the bundles! I haven’t had a single moment—”
“But how many moments does it take to buy a newspaper?”
“But Thyrsis—”
“And how many times would I have to tell you? Have I got to go into town myself, just for the sake of a newspaper?”
“I tell you I tried my very best to remember it—”
“But what’s the matter with you? Is your mind getting weak?”
And then like as not Corydon would burst into tears. “Oh, I think you are a brute!” she would cry. “A perfect brute!”
Or else, perhaps, she would grow angry, and they would rail at each other, exchanging recriminations.
“I think I have burdens enough in my life,” he would exclaim. “I’ve a right to some help from you.”
“You have no sense of proportion!” she would answer. “You are impossible! You would drive any saint to distraction.”
“Perhaps so. But I can’t drive you anywhere, and I’m sick of trying.”
“Oh, if you only weren’t such a talker! You talk—talk—talk!”
And all the while they did this, what grief was in the depths of them! And afterwards, what ghastly wounds in Corydon’s soul, that had to be bound up and tended and healed! The pity of it; the shame of it—that they should be able to descend to such sordidness! That their love, which they had planned as a noble temple, should turn out an ugly hovel!
“Oh Thyrsis!” the girl would cry. “The idea that you should think less of my soul than of an old newspaper!”
“But that is not so, dearest,” he would answer. He would try to explain to her how much the newspaper had meant to him, and just why his annoyance had got the better of him. So they would rehearse the scene over again; and like as not their irritation would sweep over them, and before they realized it they would find themselves disputing once more.
Thyrsis would be making a desperate attempt to bring her to a realization of his difficulties; he would be in the midst of pouring out some eloquence, when she would interrupt him.
“But Thyrsis, wait a moment—you do not understand!”
“I am speaking!” he would say.
“But, Thyrsis—”
“I am speaking!” He would not be interrupted.
But then would come a time when they sat down together and talked all this out, perceiving it as one more aspect of the disharmony of their temperaments. It no fault of either of them, they would agree; it was just that they were different. Thyrsis had a simile that he used—“It’s a marriage between a butterfly and a hippopotamus. You don’t blame the butterfly because it can’t get down into the water and snort; and on the other hand, when the hippopotamus tries to flap his wings and flit about among the flowers, he doesn’t make a success of it.”
There would be times when he took Corydon’s point of view entirely. She was beautiful and good; her naïveté and guilelessness were the essence of her charm and how preposterous it was to expect her to think about newspapers, or to be familiar with the price of beefsteaks! As for him—he was a blundering creature, dull and pragmatical; he was a great spiny monster that she had drawn up from the ocean-depths. She would cut off his spines, but at once they grew out again; she could do nothing with him at all!
But then she would protest—“It’s not so bad as that, Thyrsis. You have your work.”
“Yes, that’s it,” he would answer. “My work! I’m just a thinking-machine. I’m fit for nothing else. And here I am—married!”
He would say that, and he would mean it; he would try to act upon the conviction. Of course Corydon’s nature was a thing more lovely than his; and, of course, it ought to have its way, to grow in freedom and joy. But alas—there was “the economic screw”! His qualities—hateful though they might be—were the product of stern conditions; they were the qualities which had to dominate in their lives, if they were to survive in the grim struggle for life.
Section 14. It was, as always, their tragedy that they had no means of communicating, except through suffering; they had no work, and they had no art, and they had no religion. To Thyrsis it seemed that this last was the supreme need of their lives; but it was quite in vain that he tried to supply it. He had no theologies to offer, but he had a rough working faith that served his needs. He had a way of prayer—informal prayers, to the undiscovered gods—“Oh infinite Holiness of life, I seek to be reminded of Thee!” He would contemplate their failures and agonies and despairs, and floods of pity would well up in him; and then he would come back to Corydon, seeking to make these things real to her. But this he could never do—he could never carry her with him, he could never find anything with her but failure and disappointment.
This was, in part, the outrage that the creed-mongers had done to her; with their dead formulas and their grotesque legends and their stupid bigotries they had sullied and defaced all the symbols of religion—they had made a noble temple into a sepulchre of dead bones. They had taken her by force, when she was a child, and dragged her into it, and filled her with terror and loathing. To abandon the language of metaphor, they had sent her to a Protestant-Episcopal Sunday-school, where a vinegary spinster had taught her the catechism and the ten commandments. And so forever after the whole content of Christianity was a thing alien and hateful to her.
But also, in their disharmony was something even more fundamental. Corydon’s emotions did not come in the same way as her husband’s. With her a joy had to be a spontaneous thing; there could be no reasoning about it, and it was not the product nor the occasion of any act of will. In fact, if anyone were to say to Corydon, “Come, let us experience a certain emotion”—then straightway it would become certain that she might experience any emotion in the world, save only that one.
Thyrsis told himself that he was to blame for this having destroyed her spontaneity in the very beginning But how was he to have known that, understanding as he did no temperament but his own, being powerless to handle any tools but his own? The process of his soul’s life was to tell himself all his vices over; and so he would become filled with hatred of himself, and would forthwith evolve into something different. But with Corydon, this method produced, not rage and resolution, but only black despair. The process of Corydon’s soul-life was that some one else should come to her, and tell her that she was radiant and exquisite; and straightway she would become these things, and yet more of them; and until such a person came to her, all her soul’s life stood still.
This was illustrated whenever there was any misunderstanding between them, any crisis of unhappiness or fit of melancholia. It was quite in vain at such times that Thyrsis would ask her to sweep these things aside and forget them; it was disastrous to suggest that she put any blame upon herself, or scold herself into a different attitude. He might take days to make up his mind to do what he had to do—yet that fit of misery would last until he had come and done it. He had to put his arms about her, and make her realize that she was precious to him, that she was necessary to him, that he loved her and appreciated her and believed in her; so, and so only, would the current of her life begin once more to flow.
And why could he not do this more quickly? Why did he have to wait until she had suffered agonies? Why did he have to be dragged to it by the hair of his head, as it were—as a means of keeping her from going insane from misery? Was it that he did not really love her? Mocking voices in his soul told him that was it—but he knew it was not so. He loved her; but he loved her in his way, and that was not her way. And how shall one explain that strange impulse in the heart of man, that makes it impossible for him to be content with anything that is upon the earth—that makes him restless in the presence of beauty and love and joy, and all those things with which he so obviously ought to be content?
It is so clearly irrational and unjustifiable; and yet that impulse continues to drive him forth, as it drove him to destroy the statues in the Athenian temples, and to burn the silken robes and the jewelled treasures in the public-squares of Venice. One contemplates the thing in its most unlovely aspects—in the form of Simeon Stylites upon his pillar, devoured by worms, or of Bernard Gui, with his racks and his thumb-screws and his “secular arm”—and it seems the very culmination of all human madness and horror. And yet, it does not cease to come; and he upon whom it seizes may not free himself by any power of his will, by any cunning of his wit; and no agony of yearning and grief may be sufficient to enable him to love a woman as a woman desires to be loved.
Section 15. Thyrsis would work over the book until he was utterly exhausted; and then, limp as a rag, he would come back to the world of reality and face these complications. He needed to rest, he needed to be soothed and comforted and sung to sleep; he needed to receive—and instead he had to give. Sometimes he wondered vaguely if this might not have been otherwise; he knew nothing about women—but surely there might have been, somewhere in the world, some woman who would have understood, and would have asked nothing from him. But he dwelt on that thought but seldom, for it seemed a kind of treason; he was not married to any such hypothetical woman—he was married to Corydon, and it was Corydon he had to save from the wolves.
So, time after time, he would come back to her, and take the cup of her pain in his trembling hands, and put it to his lips and drain it to the dregs. He would sit with her, and hear the tale of her struggles, he would fan the sparks of his exhausted emotions into flame, so that she might warm herself by the glow. And when the burden became too great for him, when the black floods of anguish and despair which she poured out upon him threatened to engulf him altogether—then he would tramp away into the forest, or out upon the snow-encrusted hills, and call up the demons of his soul once more, and proclaim himself unconquered and unconquerable. He would spread his wings to the glory of his vision; he would feel again the surge and sweep of it, he would sing aloud with the power of it, and pledge himself anew to live for it—if need be even to die for it.
The world was trying to crush it in him; the world hated it and feared it, and was bound that it should not live; and Thyrsis had sworn to save it—and so the issue was joined. He would hearten himself for the struggle—he would fling himself into the thick of it, again and again; he would summon up that thing which he called his Genius, that fountain of endless force that boiled up within him. Whatever strength they brought against him, he could match it; he might be knocked down, trampled upon, left for dead upon the field, but he could rise and renew the conflict! He would talk to himself, he would call aloud to himself, he would repeat to himself formulas of exhortation, cries of defiance, proclamations of resolve. He would summon his enemies before him, sometimes in hosts, sometimes as individuals—all those who ever in his life had mocked and taunted him, scolded him and threatened him. He would shake his clenched fists at them; they might as well understand it—they could never conquer him, not all the power they could bring would suffice! He would call upon posterity also; he would summon his friends and lovers of the future, to give him comfort in his sore distress. Was it not for them that he was laboring—that they might some day feed their souls upon his faith?
Thyrsis would think of the “Song of Roland”, recalling that heroic figure and his three days’ labor: when he had read that poem, his heart had seemed to throb with pain every time that Roland lifted his sword-arm. He would think of the old blind “Samson Agonistes”; he would think of the Greeks at Thermopylae, of the siege of Haarlem. History was full of such tales of the agonies that men had endured for the sake of their faith; and why should he expect exemption, why should he shrink from the fiery test?
Section 16. So he lived and fought two battles, one within and one without; and little by little these two became merged in his imagination. He had conceived a figure which should embody the War; and that figure had come to be himself.
The War of which he was writing had come upon a people unsuspecting and unprepared; they had not sought it nor desired it, they did not love it, they did not understand it. But the nation must be preserved; and so they set out to forge themselves into a sword. They had wealth, and they poured it out lavishly; and they had enthusiasm—whole armies of young men came forward. They were uniformed and armed and drilled and one after another they marched out, with banners waving, and drums rolling, and hearts beating high with hope; and one after another they met the enemy, and were swallowed up in carnage and destruction, and came reeling back in defeat and despair. It happened so often that the whole land moaned with the horror of it—there was Bull Run and then again Bull Run, and there was the long Peninsula Campaign—an entire year of futility and failure; and there was the ghastly slaughter of Fredericksburg, and the blind confusion of Chancellorsville, and the bitter, disappointment of Antietam.
Thyrsis wished to portray all this from the point of view of the humble private, who got none of the glory, and expected none, but only suffering and toil; whose lot it was to march and countermarch, to delve and sweat in the trenches, to be stifled by the heat and drenched by the rain and frozen by the cold; to wade through seas of blood and anguish, to be wounded and captured and imprisoned, to be lured by victory and blasted by defeat. And into it all he was pouring the distillation of his own experiences. For there was not much of it that he had not known in his own person. Surely he had known what it was to be cold and hungry; surely he had known what it was to be lured by victory and blasted by defeat. He had watched by the death-bed of his dearest dreams, he had listened to the moaning of multitudes of imprisoned hopes. He had known what it was to set before him a purpose, and to cling to it in spite of obloquy and hatred; he had known what it was to suffer until his forehead throbbed, and all things reeled and swam before his eyes. He had known also what it was to sacrifice for the sake of the future, and to see others, who thought of no one but themselves, preying upon him, and upon the community, and living in luxury and enjoying power.
Little by little, as he studied this War, Thyrsis had come upon a strange and sinister fact about it. Roughly speaking, the population of the country might have been divided into two classes. There were those to whom the Union was precious, and who gave their labor and their lives for it; they starved and fought and agonized for it, and came home, worn, often crippled, and always poor. On the other hand there were some who had cared nothing for the Union, but were finding their chance to grow rich and to establish themselves in the places of power. They were selling shoddy blankets and paper shoes to the government; they were speculating in cotton and gold and food. There were a few exceptions to this, of course; but for the most part, when one came to study the gigantic fortunes which were corrupting the nation, he discovered that it was just here they had begun.
So this was the curious and ironic fact; the nation had been saved—but only to be handed over to the money-changers! And these now possessed it and dominated it; and a new generation had come forward, which knew not how these things had come to be—which knew only the money-changers and their power. And who was there to tell them of the War, and all that the War had meant? Who was there to make that titan agony real to them, to point them to the high destinies of the Republic?
Along with his war-books, Thyrsis was reading his daily newspaper, which came to him freighted with the cynicism of the hour. It was when the revelations of corruption in business and political affairs were at their flood; high and low, in towns and cities, in states and in the nation itself, one saw that the government of the country had been bought. Everywhere throughout the land Mammon sat upon the throne, and men cringed before him—there was only persecution and mockery for those who believed in the things for which America stood to all the world.
And this new Lord, who had purchased the people, and held them in bond, was extracting a toll of suffering and privation, of accident and disease and death, that was worse than the agony of many wars. The whole land was groaning and sweating beneath the burden of it; and Thyrsis, who shared the pain, and knew the meaning of it, was sick with the responsibility it put upon him, yearning for a thousand voices with which he might cry the truth aloud.
Some one must bring America face to face with its soul again; and who was there to do it—who was there that was even trying? Thyrsis had seen the statues of St. Gaudens, and he knew there was one man who had dreamed the dream of his country. But who was there to put it into song, or into story, that the young might read? Like the newspapers and the churches, the authors had sold out; they were writing for matinée-girls, and for the Pullman-car book-trade; and meantime the civilization of America was sliding down into the pit!
So here again was War! Here again were pain and sickness, hunger and cold, solitude and despair, to be endured and defied; death itself to be faced—madness even, and soul-decay! Armies of men had gone out, had laid themselves down and filled up the ditches with their bodies, to make a bridge for Freedom to pass on. And the ditches were not yet full—another life was needed!
Nor must he think himself too good for the sacrifice; there had been greater men than he, no doubt, burned up in the Wilderness, and blown to pieces by the cannon at “Bloody Angle”; there had been dreamers of mighty dreams among them—and they were dead, and all their dreams were dead. And neither must he love his own too dearly; there had been women who had suffered and died in that War, and babes who had perished by tens of thousands; and they, too, had been born with agony, had been loved and yearned for, and wept and prayed for.
So, out of the dead past, were voices calling to Thyrsis; he heard them in the night—time as one mighty symphony of grief. They had died for nothing, unless the Republic should be saved, unless their dream of freedom and justice could be made real. And for what was the poet but that? So that the new generations might know what their fathers had done—that the youth of America might be roused and thrilled once more! Surely it could not be that the land was all sunk in selfishness and unfaith—that there were no longer any generous souls who could be stirred by a trumpet-call, and led forth to strike a new blow for the great hope of Humanity!
Section 17. The long winter dragged by, and the fury of it seemed to increase; they were as if besieged by demons of cold and storm. There came another blizzard, and the snows drifted down to their hollow by the edge of the woods, so that it was two days before they could get out, even to the farm-house. And there was no place for them to walk—a path from their house to Thyrsis’ study was a labor of half a day to dig. Also Corydon caught a cold, which ran in due course through the little family, and added to their misery and discomfort.
The snow seemed to be symbolical, walling them in from all the world. “There is no help”, it seemed to say to them; whatever strength they got they must wring out of their own hearts. Here in this place, it seemed to Thyrsis, he learned the real meaning of Winter; he saw it as primitive man had seen it, a cruel and merciless assailant, a fiend that came ravening, dealing destruction and death. He thought of the ode by Thomas Campbell—