Love's pilgrimage

Corydon was coming back from her stupor; the strife began again. She cried out for its end, she could bear no more. "Help me! Help me!" she moaned.

The head was the size of a saucer now—but each time that she screamed it would go back. Thyrsis stood up to get the strength to grip her hand; her face stared up into the air, looking like the face of a wolf. And still there was no end—no end!

There was an hour more of that—the room seemed to Thyrsis to reel. Corydon was crying, moaning that she wished to die. There was now in sight a huge, bulging object—black, monstrous—rimmed with a band of bleeding, straining flesh, tight like the top of a drum. The doctor was bent over, toiling, breathless.

"No more! No more!" screamed the girl. "Oh, my God! my God!"

And the doctor answered her, panting: "Once more! once more! Now! now!" And so on, for minute after minute; luring her on, pleading with her, promising her, lying to her—"Once more! Once more! This will be the last!" He called to her, he rallied her; he signalled to Thyrsis to help him—to inspire her, to gOad her to new endurance.

And then another titan effort, and suddenly—Incredibly—there burst upon Thyrsis' sight an apparition. Sick at heart, numb with horror, dazed—he scarcely knew what it was. It happened so swiftly that he had hardly time to see; but something leaped forth, something enormous, supernatural! It came—it came —there seemed never to be an end to it! He started to his feet, staring, crying out; and at the same moment the doctor lifted the thing aloft, with a cry of exultation. He held it dangling by one leg. Great God! It was a man!

A man! A thing with the head of a man, the body of a man, the legs and arms, the face of a man! A thing hideous—impish—demoniac ! A thing purple and dripping with blood—ghastly—unthinkable— monstrous—a spectre of nightmare dreams!

And suddenly the doctor lifted his hand and smote it; and the mouth of the thing opened, and there came forth a purplish froth—and then a cry! It was a sound like a tin-pan beaten—a sound that was itself a living presence, an apparition; a thing superhuman, out of another world—like the wailing of a lost spirit, terrifying to every sense! With Thyrsis it was like the falling down of towers within him—his whole being collapsed, and he sunk down upon the bed, sobbing, choking, convulsed.

§ 11. WHEN he looked up again the elder nurse had the baby in her arms; and there was a wan smile on Corydon's face.

The doctor's hand was in the ghastly wound, and he was talking to the young nurse, giving her instruction, in a strange, monotonous tone. "The placenta," he was saying, "often has to be removed; we do it by

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twisting it round and round—very gently, of course. Then it comes—so !"

There came a rush of blood, and Thyrsis turned away his head.

"Give me the basin," said the doctor. "There!— And now the next thing is to see that the uterus contracts immediately. We assist it by compressing the walls, thus. It must be tightly bandaged."

Thyrsis had turned to see the child. He looked at it, and clenched his hands to control his emotions. Yes, it was a man! it was a man! Not a monster, not a demon—a baby !

His boy! himself! God, what a ghastly thing to realize! It had his forehead, it had his nose! It was a caricature of himself! A caricature grotesque and impish, and yet one that no human being could mistake — a caricature by the hand of a master!

And it was a living thing! It had power of motion

-it twisted and writhed, it bent its arms and legs! It

winked its eyelids, it opened and shut its mouth, it

breathed and made sounds! And it had feeling, too!

It had cried out when it was struck!

Gently, with one finger, he touched it; and the contact with its flesh sent a shudder through every nerve of him. His child! His child ! And a living child! A creature that would go on; that would eat and sleep and grow, that would learn to make sounds, and to understand things! That would come to think and to will! That would be a man!

"Is it—is it all right?" he asked the nurse, in a trembling whisper.

"It's a magnificent boy," she said. And then she struck a match, and held the light in front of its eyes;

and the eyes turned to follow the light. "He sees!" she said.

Yes, he could see! And Thyrsis had already heard that he could speak! What could it not do—this marvellous object! It was Nature's supreme miracle—it was the answer to all the riddles, the solution of all the mysteries! It was a vindication of the subterfuges, a reward for the sacrifices, a balm for the pain! It was the thing for which all the rest had been, it was the crown and consummation of their love—it was Life's supreme shout of triumph and exultation!

The nurse was holding the child up before Cory-don ; and she was gazing at it, she was feeding her eyes upon it. And oh, the smile that came upon her fac3 •—the ineffable smile! The pride, and the relief, and the beatific happiness! This thing she had done—it was her act of creation! Her battle that had been fought, her victory that had been won; and now they brought her the crown and the guerdon! To Thyrsis there came suddenly the words of Jesus: "A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour hath come; but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world." And he sunk down beside the bed, and caught the woman's hand in his, and began to sob softly to himself.

§ 12. LATER on he went into the street. Evening was come again—for twenty-two hours that siege had lasted! And the boy had eaten nothing since noon of the day before, and he was weak and dizzy.

But how strange the world seemed to him all at once! Peopled with, phantom creatures, that came he knew not whence, and went he knew not whither! Crea-

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tures of awe and horror, who came out of chaos, and went back into annihilation! Who were flung here and there by cosmic forces, played with by tragic destinies! And all of them without any sense of the perpetual marvel of their own being! They ate and dressed and slept, they laughed and played and worked, they hated and loved and got and spent, with no thought of the wonder of their lightest breath, with no sense of the terrors that ringed them about—the storms that swept them hither and thither, the million miracles that were wrought for them every instant of their lives!

He went into a restaurant, and sat down; and in the seat beside him, close at his elbow, was a man. He was a fat man—eating roast pork, and apple-sauce, and mashed potatoes, and bread. And Thyrsis looked at him with wondering eyes. "Man," he imagined himself saying, "do you know how you came into this world? A thing impish, demoniac—purple and dripping with blood—a spectre of nightmare dreams?"

"W-what?" the man gasped.

"And you know nothing of the pain that it cost! You have no sense of the strangeness of it! You never think what your coming meant to some woman!"

And then—in the seat opposite was a woman; and Thyrsis watched her.

"You!" he thought, "a woman! Can it be that you know what you are? The fate that you play with— the power that dwells in you! To create new life, that may be handed down through endless ages!"

Thyrsis did not say these things; they were what he wanted to say—what he thought that he ought to say. But then he reminded himself that these things were forbidden; these mighty facts of child-birth, of life-creation—they might not be spoken about! They

must be kept hidden, veiled with mystery—if one wished to refer to them, he must employ metaphors and polite evasions.

And as Thyrsis sat and thought about this, he clenched his hands. Some day the world would hear about it—some day the world would think about it! Some day people would behold life—would realize what it was and what it meant. They did not realize it now —else how could it be that women, who bore the race with so much pain and sorrow, should be drudges and slaves, or the ornaments and playthings of men? Else how could it be that life, which cost such a fearful price, should be so cheap upon the earth? For every man that lived and walked alive, some woman had had to bear this agony; and yet men were pent up in mines and sweatshops, they were ground up in accidents in factories and mills—nay, worse than that, were dressed up in gaudy uniforms, and armed with rifles and machine-guns, and marched out to slaughter each other by tens and hundreds of thousands!

So, as he walked the streets that night, Thyrsis made a vow. Some day he would put before the world this vision that had come to him, some day he would blast men's souls with it. He would shake them with this horror, he would thrill them with this sense of the infinite preciousness and holiness of life! He would drive it into them like a barbed arrow—that never afterwards in all their lives would they be rid of. Never afterwards would they dare to mock, never afterwards would they be able to rest until these things had been done away with, until these horrors had been driven from the earth.

PART II

Loves Captivity

BOOK VIII THE CAPTIVE BOUND

They sat with the twilight shadows about them. Memories too poignant assailed them, and her hand trembled as it lay upon his arm.

"How strange it was!" she whispered. "Have we kept the faith?"

"Who knows?" he answered; and m a low voice he read —•

"And long the way appears., which seemed so short To the less practised eye of sanguine youth; And high the mountain-tops, in cloudy air, The mountain-tops where is the throne of Truth, Tops in life's morning-sun so bright and bare!"

§ 1. THIS was a golden hour in Thyrsis' life. The gates of wonder were flung open, and all things were touched with a new and mystic glow. He scarcely realized it at the time; for once he was too much moved to think about his own emotions, the artist was altogether lost in the man. Even the room in which he lodged was relieved of its sordidness; it was a thing that men had made, and so .a part of the mystery of becoming. He yearned for some one to whom he could impart his great emotion; but because of the loneliness of his life he could find no one but the keeper of his lodging-house. Even she became a human thing to him, because of her interest in the great tidings. If all the world loved a lover, it loved yet more one through whom the supreme purpose of love had been accomplished.

Thyrsis went each day to the hospital, to watch the new miracle unfolding itself; to see the Child asserting its existence as a being with a life of its own. He could never tire of watching it; he watched it asleep, with the faint heaving of its body, and the soft, warm odor that clung to it; he watched its awakenings—the opening of its eyes, and the sucking movements that it made perpetually with its lips. They had dressed it up now, and hid some of its strangeness; but each morning the nurse would undress it, and give it a bath; and then he marvelled at the short crooked legs, and the tiny red hands that clutched incessantly at the air, and the strange prehensile feet, that carried one back to distant

ages, hinting at the secrets of Nature's workshop. Sometimes they would permit him to hold this mystic creature in his arms—after much exhortation, and assurance that his left arm was properly placed at the back of its head. One found out in this way what a serious business life really was.

Cory don lay back among her pillows and smiled at these things. Most wonderful it was to him to see how swiftly she recovered from her ordeal, how hourly the flush of health seemed to steal back into her cheeks. He became ashamed of the memory of his convulsive anguish and his blind rebellions. He saw now that her pain had not been as other pain; it was a constructive pain, a part of the task of her life. It was a battle in which she had fought and conquered; and now she sat, throned in her triumphal chariot, acclaimed by the plaudits of a multitude of hopes and joys unseen.

There came the miracle of the milk. Incessantly the Child's lips moved, and its hands groped out; it was an embodied demand for new experience—for life, it knew not what. But Nature knew, and had timed the event to this hour. And Thyrsis watched the phenomenon, marvelling—as one marvels at the feat of engineers, who tunnel from opposite sides of a mountain, and meet in the centre without the error of an inch.

It was in accordance with the impression which Corydon made upon him, as a dispenser of abundance, a goddess of fruitfulness, that there should have been more milk than the Child needed. The balance had to be drawn off with a little vacuum-pump; and Thyrsis would watch the tiny jets as they sprayed upon the glass bulb. The inilk was rich and golden-hued; he tasted it, with mingled wonder and shuddering.

These procedures filled the room with a warm, luscious

odor, as of a dairy; they were eminently domestic procedures, such as in fancy he had been wont to tease her about. But he had few jests at present—he was in the inner chambers of the temple of life, and hushed and stilled with awe. The things that he had witnessed in that room were never to be forgotten; each hour he pledged himself anew, to the uttermost limits of his life. The voice of skeptic reason was altogether silent in him now. And also he was interested to observe that all protest was ended in Corydon; the impulses of motherhood had now undisputed sway in her.

§ 2. BUT even in such an hour of consecration, the sordid world outside would not leave him unmolested. It was as if the black clouds had parted for a moment, while the sunlight poured through; and now again they rolled together. The great surgeon, who had told Thyrsis that he would wait for his money, professed now to have forgotten his agreement. Perhaps he had really forgotten it—who could tell, with the many things he had upon his mind? At any rate, Corydon found herself suddenly confronted with a bill, which she was powerless to pay; with white cheeks and trembling lips she told Thyrsis about it—and so came more worry and humiliation. The very food that she ate became tasteless to her, because she felt she had no right to it; and in a few days she was begging Thyrsis to take her away.

So he helped to carry her downstairs, and back to her parents' home; and then he returned to his own lonely room, and sat for hours in the bitter cold, with his teeth set tightly, and the nails dug into the palms of his hands. It so happened that just then the editor was beginning to change his mind about "The Hearer

of Truth"; and so he had new agonies of anxiety and disappointment.

Again he might not come to see Corydon; and this led to a great misfortune. For she could not do without him now, her craving for him was an obsession; and so she left her bed too soon, and climbed the stairs to his room. Again and again she did this, in spite of his protests; and when, a little later, the doctors found that she had what they called "womb-trouble", they attributed it to this. Perhaps it was not really so, but Corydon believed it, and through all the years she laid upon it the blame for innumerable headaches and backaches. Thus an episode that might have been soon forgotten, stayed with her, as the symbol of all the agonies of which her life was made.

She would come, bringing the baby with her; and they would lay it upon the bed, and then sit and talk, for hours upon hours, wrestling with their problems. Later on, when Corydon was able, they would go to the park, craving the fresh air. But in midwinter there were few days when they could sit upon a bench for long; and so they would walk and walk, until Corydon was exhausted, and he would have to help her back to the room.

Thyrsis in these days was like a wild animal in a cage; pacing back and forth and testing every corner of his prison. But they never thought of giving up; never in all their lives did that possibility come into their discourse. And doggedly, blindly, they kept on with their studies. Corydon mastered new lists of German words, and they read Freitag's "Verlorene Handscrift" together, and von Scheffel's "Ekkehard", and even attempted "Iphigenie auf Tauris"—though in truth they found it difficult to detach themselves to quite that ex-

tent from the world of every-day. It is not an easy matter to experience the pure katJiarsis of tragedy, with a baby in the room who has to be nursed every hour or two, and who is liable to awaken at any moment and make some demand.

He was such an intricate and complicated baby, with so many things to be understood—belly-bands and diapers and irrational length of skirts. Sometimes, when Corydon was quite exhausted, the attending to these matters fell to Thyrsis, who became for the time a most domestic poet. He once sent an editorial-room into roars of merriment by offering to review a book upon the feeding of infants. But he told himself that even the hilarious editors had been infants once upon a time; and he had divined that there were secrets about life to be learned, and great art-works to be dreamed, even amid belly-bands and diapers. Also, Thyrsis would brave a great deal of ridicule in order to be paid a dollar for the reading of a book that he really wanted to read. For books that one wanted to read came so seldom; and dollars were so difficult to earn!

It seemed as if the task grew harder every week. He went without cuffs, and wore old and frayed collars, and washed his solitary necktie until it was threadbare, and lived upon prunes and crackers, and gave up the gas-stove in his room—and still he could scarcely manage to get together the weekly rent. He studied the magazines in the libraries, and racked his wits for new ideas to interest their editors. He haunted editorial-rooms until his presence became a burden, and he brought new agonies and humiliations upon himself. He would part from Corydon in the afternoon, and shut himself in his room; and sitting in bed to keep warm, he would work until midnight at some new variety of pot-

LOVE'S PILGRIMAG

boiler. After which he would go out to walk and clear his brain — and even then, exhausted as he was, his vision would come to him again, wonderful and soul-shaking. So he would walk on, and go back to write until nearly dawn at something he really loved.

§ 3. IT was so that he wrote his poem, "Caradrion". It was out of thoughts of Corydon, and of the tears which they shed in each other's presence, that this poem was made. Thyrsis had a fondness for burrowing into strange old books, in which one found the primitive wonder of the soul of man, first awakening to the mystery of life. Such a book was Physiologus, with his tales of strange beasts and magic jewels. "There is a bird called Caradrion", Thyrsis had read. . . . "And if the sick man can be healed, Caradrion goes to him, and touches him upon the mouth, and takes his sickness from him ; and so the man is made well." And out of this hint he had fashioned the legend of the two children who had grown up together in "the little cot, fringed round with tender green" ; one of them Cedric, and one Eileen — for he had given the names that Corydon preferred.

They grew "unto the days of love", so the story ran —

"And Cedric bent above her, stooping Iight 3 To press a kiss upon her tender cheek. And said, 'Eileen, I love thee ; yea I love, And loved thee ever, them my soul's delight.'

So time sped on, until there came

"To Cedric once a strange unlovely thought, That haunted him and would not let him be.

'Eileen,' he said, 'there is a thing called death, Of which men speak with trembling at the lips; And I have thought how it would be with me If I should never gaze upon thee more.'

So Cedric went to find out about these matters; he

•

sought a witch—"the haggard woman, held in awe."

"He found her crouching by a caldron fire; Far gleams of light fled through the vault away. And tongues of darkness flickered on the wall. Then Cedric said, 'I seek the fate to know'. And the witch laughed, and gazed on him and sang:

'Fashioned in the shadow-land,

Out into darkness hurled; Trusted to the Storm-wind's hand, By the Passion-tempest whirled! Ever straining, Never gaining, Never keeping,

Young or old! Whither going Never knowing, Wherefore weeping,

Never told!

Rising, falling, disappearing, Seeking, calling, hating, fearing; Blasted by the lightning- shock, Trampled in the earthquake rock; Were I man I would not plead In the roll of fate to read!'

"Then Cedric shuddered, but he said again, 'I seek the fate,' and the witch waved her hand; And straight a peal of thunder shook the ground, And clanged and battered on the cavern walls, Like some huge boulder leaping down the cliff. And blinding light flashed out, and seething fire Shattered the seamy crags and heaving floor."

And so in a vision of terror Cedric saw the little vale, and the cot "fringed round with tender green"; and upon the lawn he saw Eileen, lying as one dead.

"And Cedric sprang, and cried, 'My love! Eileen!' And on the instant came a thunder-crash Like to the sound of old primeval days, Of mountain-heaving shock and earthquake roar, Of whirling planets shattered in the dark."

And so, half wild with grief and despair, Cedric wandered forth into the world; and after great suffering, the birds took pity upon him, and gave him advice—that he should seek Caradrion.

" 'Caradrion ?' cried Cedric, starting up, 'Speak swiftly, ere too late, where dwelleth he?' 'Ah, that I know not,' spake the little voice, 'Yet keep thy courage, seek thou out the stork,

The ancient stork that saw from earliest days,

Sitting in primal contemplation lost,

Sphinx-like, seraphic, and oracular,.

Watching the strange procession of men's dreams.'

But the stork was cruel and would not heed him, and led Cedric a weary chase through the marshes and the brakes. But Cedric pursued, and finally seized the bird by the throat, and forced the secret from him—

" 'Fare southward still,

Fronting the sun's midnoon, all-piercing shaft, Unto the land where daylight burns as fire; Where the rank earth in choking vapor steams, And fierce luxurious vegetation reeks. So shalt thou come upon a seamed rock, Towering to meet the sun's fierce-flashing might, Baring its granite forehead to the sky. There on its summit, in a cavern deep, Dwells what thou seekest, half a bird, half man, Caradrion, the consecrate to pain.'

Then came the long journey and the search for the seamed rock.

" 'Twas night; and vapors, curling, choked the ground, And the rock writhed like flesh of one in pain. But Cedric mounted up to find the cave, Crying aloud: 'I seek Caradrion.' And so, till from the cavern depth a voice:

'Come not, except to sorrow thou be born.' And Cedric, panting, stretched his shrunken arms:

'Another's sorrow would I change to joy, And mine own joy to sorrow; help thou me.' To which the voice, sunk low, replied: 'Come thou.* And Cedric came, unfearing, in the dark, And saw in gloomy night a form in pain, With wings stretched wide, and beating faint and fast.

'Art thou Caradrion?' he murmured swift, And echo gave reply, 'Caradrion'."

So Cedric told of his errand, and pleaded for help; and he heard the answer of the voice:

£98 LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

" 'Yea, I can save her, if thou be a soul

That can dare pain and face the rage of fate; A soul that feareth not to look on death.'

'Speak on,' said Cedric, shaking, and he spoke:

'This is my law, that am Caradrion, Whose way is sorrow and whose end is death; That by my pain some fleeting grace I win, Some joy unto another I can give. Far through this world of woe I seek, and find Some soul crushed utterly, and steeped in pain; And when it sleeps, I stoop on silent wing, And with a kiss take all its woe away— Take it for mine, and then into this cave Return alone, the blessing's price to pay.' Then up sprang Cedric. 'Nay,' he cried, 'then swift, Ere life be gone!' But once more spake the voice:

'Nay, boy, my race is run, my power is spent; This hope alone I give thee, as thou wilt; Whoso stands by and sees my heart-throb cease, Who tastes its blood, my power and form are his, And forth he fares in solitary flight, Caradrion, the consecrate to pain. And so my word is said; now hide thee far In the cave's night, and wrestle there in prayer.' But Cedric said, 'My prayer is done; I wait.' So in the cave the hours of night sped by, And sounds came forth as when a woman fights In savage pain a life from hers to free."

Then in the dawn a dark shadow flew from the cave, and sped across the blue, and came to the little vale, where Eileen lay dying, as he had seen her in the vision in the "haggard woman's" cavern.

"Then Cedric sprang, and cried, ']\ly love! Eileen!' And Eileen heard him not; nor knew he wept.— For mighty sorrow burst from out his heart, And flooded all his being, and he sunk, And moaned: 'Eileen, I love thee ! Yea, I love, And loved thee ever; and I can not think That I shall never gaze upon thee more. My life for thine—ah, that were naught to give, Meant not the gift to see thee nevermore! Never to hear thy voice. Nay, nay, Eileen, Gaze on me, speak to me, give me but one word, And I will go and never more return.' But Eileen answered not; he touched her hand, And she felt nothing. Then he whispered, low, 'Oh, may God keep thee—for it must be done-Guard thee, and bless thee, thou my soul's delight! And when thou waken'st, wilt thou think of me, Of Cedric, him that loved thee, oh so true? Nay, for they said thou shouldst no sorrow know, And that would be a sorrow, yea, it would. And must thou then forget me, thou my love? And canst not give me but one single word, To tell me that I do not die in vain? Gaze at me, Eileen, see, thy love is here, Here as of old, above thee stooping light, To press a kiss upon thy tender lips.— Ah, I can kiss thee—kiss thee, my Eileen, Kiss as of yore, with all mj passion's woe!' And as he spoke he pressed her to his heart, Long, long, with yearning, and he felt the leap Of molten metal through his throbbing veins ; His eyes shot fire, and anguish racked his limbs, And he fell back, and reeled, and clutched his brow. An instant only gazed he on her face,

And saw new life w r ithin her gray cheek leap,

And her dark eyelids tremble. Then with moan,

And fearful struggle, swift he fled away,

That she might nothing of his strife perceive.

And then, reminded of his gift of flight,

He started from the earth, and beat aloft,

Each sweep of his great wings a torture-stroke

Upon his fainting heart. And thus away,

With languid flight he moved, and Eileen, raised

In new-born joy from off her couch of pain,

Saw a strange bird into the distance fade."

And so Cedric went back to the seamed rock, and there he heard a voice calling, "I seek Caradrion!" And as before he answered,

"Come not, except to sorrow thou be born!" And again, in the cave—

"The hours of night sped by. And sounds came forth as when a woman fights In savage pain, a life from hers to free.

But Eileen dwelt within the happy vale, Thinking no thought of him that went away."

§ 4. THIS had come so very easily to Thyrsis that he could not believe that it was good. "Just a little story," he said to Corydon, when he read it to her, and he was surprised to see how it affected her—how the tears welled into her eyes, and she clung to him, sobbing. It meant more to her than any other thing

that he had written; it was the very voice of their tenderness and their grief.

Then Thyrsis took it to the one editor he knew who was a lover of poetry, and was surprised again, at this man's delight. But he smiled sadly as he realized that the editor did not use poetry—they did not praise so recklessly when it was a question of something to be purchased!

''The poem is too long for any magazine," was the verdict, "and it's not long enough for a book. And besides, poetry doesn't sell." But none the less Thyrsis, who would never take a defeat, began to offer it about; and so "Caradrion" was added to the list of stamp-consuming manuscripts, and set out to see the world at the expense of its creator's stomach.

So there was one more wasted vision, one more futile effort—and one more grapple with despair, in the hours when he and his wife sat wrapped in a blanket in the tenement-room. Corydon was growing more nervous and unhappy every day, it seemed to him. There were, apparently, endless humiliations to be experienced by a woman "whose husband did not support her". Some zealous relative had suggested to her the idea that the "hall-boys" might think she was not really married; and so now she was impelled to speculate upon the psychology of these Ethiopian functionaries, and look for slights and disapproval from them!

Thyrsis, from much work and little sleep, was haggard and wild of aspect; the cry of the world, "Take a position!" rang in his ears day and night. The springs of book-reviews had dried up entirely, and by sheer starvation he was forced to a stage lower yet. A former college friend was editing a work of "contemporary biography", and offered Thyrsis some hack-

writing. Ic meant the carrying home of huge bundles of correspondence from the world's most brightly-shining lights, and the making up of biographical sketches from their eulogies of themselves. With every light there came a portrait, showing what manner of light it was. As for Thyrsis, he did his writing with the feeling that he would like to explore with a poniard the interiors of each one of these people.

For nearly three months now an eminent editor had been trying to summon up the courage to accept "The Hearer of Truth". He had written several letters to tell the author how good a work it was; and now that it was to be definitely rejected, he soothed his conscience by inviting the author to lunch. The function came off at one of the most august and stately of the city's clubs, a marble building near Fifth Avenue, where Thyrsis, with a new clean collar, and his worn shoes newly shined, passed under the suspicious eyes of the liveried menials, and was ushered before the eminent editor. About the vast room were portraits of bygone dignitaries; and there were great leather-upholstered arm-chairs in which one might see the dignitaries of the present—some of them with little tables at their sides, and decanters and soda and cracked ice. They went into the dining-room, where everyone spoke and ate in whispers, and the waiters flitted about like black and white ghosts; and while Thyrsis consumed a cupful of cold bouillon, and a squab en casserole, and a plate of what might be described as an honorific salad, he listened to the soft-voiced editor discussing the problem of his future career.

The editor's theme was what the public wanted. The world had existed for a long time, it seemed, and was not easily to be changed; it was necessary for an author

to take its prejudices into consideration—especially if he was young, and unknown, and—er—dependent upon his own resources. It seemed to Thyrsis, as he listened, that the great man must have arranged this luncheon as a stage-setting for his remarks—planning it on purpose to light a blaze of bitterness in the soul of the hungry poet. "Look at me," he seemed to say—"this is the way the job is done. Once I was poor and unknown like you—actually, though you might not credit it, a raw boy from the country. But I had taste and talent, and I was judicious; and so now for thirty years I have been at the head of one of the country's leading magazines. And see—by my mere word I am able to bring you here into the very citadel of power! For these men about you are the masters of the metropolis. There is a rich publisher—his name is a household word —and you saw how he touched me on the shoulder. There is an ex-mayor of the city—you saw how he nodded to me! Yonder is the head of one of the oldest and most exclusive of the city's landed families—even with him I am acquainted! And this is power! You may know it by all these signs of mahogany furniture, and leather upholstery, and waiters of reverential deportment. You may know it by the signs of respectability and awesomeness and chaste abundance. Make haste to pay homage to it, and enroll yourself in its

service!"

Thyrsis held himself in, and parted from the editor with all courtesy; but then, as he walked down Fifth Avenue, his fury burst into flame. Here, too, was power—here, too, the signs of it! Palaces of granite and marble, and towering apartment-hotels; an endless vista of carriages and automobiles, with rich women lolling in them, or descending into shops whose windows

blazed with jewels and silver and gold. Here were the masters of the metropolis, the masters of life; the dispensers of patronage—that "public" which he had to please. He would bring his vision and lay it at their feet, and they would give him or deny him opportunity! And what was it that they wanted? Was it worship and consecration and love? One could read the answer in their purse-proud glances; in the barriers of steel and bronze with which they protected the gates of their palaces; in the aspects of their flunkeys, whose casual glances were like blows in the face. One could read the answer in the pitiful features of the little errand-girl who went past, carrying some bit of their splendor to them; or of the ragged beggar, who hovered in the shelter of a side-street, fearing their displeasure. No, they were not lovers of life, and protectors; they were parasites and destroyers, devourers of the hopes of humanity! Their splendors were the distilled essence of the tears and agonies of millions of defeated people —their jewels were drops of blood from the heart of the human race!

§ 5. So, with rage and bitterness, Thyrsis was gnawing out his soul in the night-time; distilling those fierce poisons which he was to pour into the next of his works —the most terrible of them all, and the one which the world would never forgive him.

There came another episode, to bring matters to a crisis. In the far Northwest lived another branch of Thyrsis' family, the head of which had become what the papers called a "lumber-king". One of this great man's radiant daughters was to be married, and the family made the selecting of her trousseau the occasion for a flying visit to the metropolis. So there were

family reunions, and Thyrsis was invited to bring his wife and call.

Corydon voiced her perplexity.

"What do they want to see us for?" she asked.

"I belong to their line," he said.

"But—you are poor!" she exclaimed.

"I know," he said, "but the family's the family, and they are too proud to be snobbish."

"But—why do they ask me?"

Thyrsis pondered. "They know we have published a book," he said. "It must be their tribute to literature."

"Are they people of culture?" she asked.

"Not unless they've tried very hard," he answered. "But they have old traditions—and they want to be aristocratic."

"I won't go," said Corydon. "I couldn't stand them."

And so Thyrsis went alone—to that same temple of luxury where he had called upon the college-professor. And there he met the lumber-king, who was tall and imposing of aspect; and the lumber-queen, who was verging on stoutness; and the three lumber-princesses, who were disturbing creatures for a poet to gaze upon. It seemed to Thyrsis that he had been dwelling in the slums all his life—so sharp was the shock which came to him at the meeting with these young girls. They were exquisite beyond telling: the graceful lines of their figures, the perfect features, the radiant complexions; the soft, filmy gowns they wore, the faint, intoxicating perfumes that clung to them, the atmosphere of serenity which they radiated. There was that in Thyrsis which thrilled at their presence—he had been born into such a world, and might have had such a woman for his mate.

But he put such thoughts from him—he had made his

gns

choice long ago, and it was not the primrose-path. Perhaps he was over-sensitive, acutely aware of himself as a strange creature with no cuffs, and with hardly any soles to his shoes. And all the time of these women was taken up by the arrival of packages of gowns and millinery; their conversation was of diamonds and automobiles, and the forthcoming honeymoon upon the Riviera. So it was hard for him not to feel bitterness; hard for him to keep his thoughts from going back to the lonely child-wife wandering about in the park—to all her deprivations, her blasted hopes and dying glories of soul.

The family was going to the matinee; as there w T as room in their car, they asked Thyrsis to go with them. So he watched the lumber-king (who had refused to lend him money, but had offered him a "position") draw out a bank-note from a large roll, and pay for a box in one of Broadway's great palaces of art. And now— having been advised so often to study what the public wanted—now Thyrsis had a chance to recline at his ease and follow the advice.

"The Princess of Prague", it was called; it was a "musical comedy"; and evidently exactly what the public wanted, for the house was crowded to the doors. The leading comedian was said by the papers to be receiving a salary of a thousand dollars a week. He held the center of the stage, clad in the costume of a lieutenant of marines, and winked and grinned, and performed antics, and sang songs of no doubtful significance, and emitted a fusillade of cynical jests. He was supposed to be half-drunk, and making love to a runaway princess—who would at one moment accept his caresses, and then spurn him coquettishly, and then execute an unlovely dance with him. In between these di-

verting procedures a chorus would come on, a score or so of highly-painted women, hopping and gliding about, each time clad in new costumes more cunningly indecent than the last.

From beginning to end of this piece there was not a single line of real humor, a spark of human sentiment, a gleam of intelligence; it was a kind of delirium tremens of the drama. To Thyrsis it seemed as if a whole civilization, with all its resources of science and art—its music and painting and costumes, its poets and composers, its actors, singers, orchestra, and audience—had all at once fallen victims to an attack of St. Vitus' dance. He sat and listened, while the theatre full of people roared and howled its applause; while the family beside him—mother and father and daughters— laughed over jokes that made him ashamed to turn and look at them. In the end the realization of what this scene meant—not only the break-down of a civilization, but the trap in which his own spirit was caught—made him sick and faint all over. He had to ask to be excused, and went out and sat in the lobby until the "show" was done.

The family found him there, and the bride-to-be inquired if he "felt better"; then, looking at his pale face, an idea occurred to her, and after a. bit of hesitation, she asked him if he would not stay to dinner. In her mind was the conflict between pity for this poor boy, and doubt as to the fitness of his costume; and Thyrsis, having read her mind in a flash, was divided between his humiliation, and his desire for some food. In the end the baser motive won; he buried his pride, and went to dinner. —And so, as the fates had planned it, the impulse to his next book was born.

§ 6. THERE came another guest to the meal—the rector of the fashionable church which the family attended at home. He was a young man, renowned for the charm of his oratory; smooth-shaven, pink-and-white-cheeked, exquisite in his manners, gracious and insinuating. His ideas and his language and his morals were all as perfectly polished as his finger-nails; and never before in his life had Thyrsis had such a red rag waved in his face. But he had come there for the dinner, and he attended to that, and let Dr. Holland provide the flow of soul; until at the very end, when the doctor was sipping his demi-tasse.

The conversation had come, by some devious route, to Vegetarianism; and the clergyman was disapproving of it. That made no difference to Thyrsis, who was not a vegetarian, and knew nothing about it; but how he hated the arguments the man advanced! For that which made the doctor an anti-vegetarian was an attitude to life, which had also made him a Republican and an Imperialist, a graduate of Harvard and a beneficiary of the Apostolic Succession. Because life was a survival of the fittest, and because God had intended the less fit to take the doctor's word as their sentence of extermination.

The duty of animals, as the clergyman set it forth to them, was to convert plant-tissue into a more concentrated and perfect form of nutriment. "The protein of animal flesh," he was saying, "is more nearly allied to human tissue; and so it is clearly more fitted for our food."

Here Thyrsis entered the conversation. "Doctor Holland," he said, mildly, "I should think it would occur to you to follow your argument to its conclusion."

The other turned to look at him. "What conclusion?" he asked.

"I should think you would become a cannibal," Thyr-sis replied.

And then there was silence at the table. When Dr. Holland spoke again it was to hurry the conversation elsewhere; and from time to time thereafter he would steal a puzzled glance at Thyrsis.

But this the boy did not see. His thoughts had gone whirling on; here, in this elegant dining-room, the throes of creation seized hold of him. For this was the image he had been seeking, the phrase that would embrace it all and express it all—the concentrated bitterness of his poisoned life! Yes, he had them! He had them, with all their glory and their power! They were Cannibals. Cannibals!

So, when he set out from the hotel, he did not go home, but walked instead for uncounted hours in the park. And in those hours he lived through the whole of his new book, the unspeakable book—"The Higher Cannibalism"!

In the morning he told Corydon about it. She cried in terror, "But, Thyrsis, nobody would publish it!"

"Of course not," said he.

"But then," she asked, "how can you write it?"

"I shall write it," he said, "if I have to die when I get through". So he shut himself up in his room once more.

§ 7. A FAMOUS scientist began the story—reasoning along the lines of Dr. Holland's argument. The grass took the inorganic matter, and made it into food; the steer ate the grass, and carried it to the next stage; and beyond that was one stage more. So the scientist

began making experiments—in a quiet way, of course. He reported the results before a learned scientific body, but his colleagues were so scandalized that the matter was hushed up.

The seed had been sown, however, A younger man took up the idea, and made researches in the South Seas —substantiating the claim that those races which took to anthropophagy had invariably supplanted the others. The new investigator printed his findings in a book, which was circulated privately; and pretty soon he was called into consultation by the master-mind of the country's finance—the richest man in the world. This man was old and bald and feeble; and now suddenly there came to him a new lease of life—new health and new enthusiasm. It was given out that he had got it by wandering about bare-footed in the grass, and playing golf all day—an explanation which the public accepted without question. No one remarked the fact that the old man began devoting his wealth to the establishing of foundling asylums; nor did any one think it suspicious that the younger generation of this multi-millionaire should rise so suddenly to power and fame.

But there began to be strange rumors and suspicions. There were young writers, who had developed a new technique, and had carried poetic utterance to undreamed of heights; and in this poetry were cryptic allusions, hints of diabolic things. A Socialist paper printed the menu of a banquet given by these "Neo-Nietzscheans", and demanded to know what one was to understand by filet de mouton blanc, and wherein lay the subtle humor of pate de petit bete. And at last the storm broke—a youth scarcely in his teens published a book of poems in which the dread secret was blazoned forth to the world with mocking defiance. There were

frantic attempts to suppress this book, but they failed; and then a prosecuting officer, eager for notoriety, placed the youth upon trial for his life. And so the issue was drawn.

The public at large awakened to a dazed realization of the head-way which the new idea had made. It had become a cult of the ruling-class, the esoteric religion of the state; everywhere its defenders sprang up—it seemed as if all the intellectual as well as the material power of the community was under its spell. To oppose it was not merely bad form—it was to incur a stigma of moral inferiority, to be the victim of a "slave-ethic".

With the scientific world, of course, its victory was speedy; the new doctrine was in line with recognized evolutionary teaching. The great names of Darwin and Spencer were invoked in its support; and, of course, when it came to economic science, there could be no two opinions. Had laissez-faire ever meant anything, if laissez-faire did not mean this?

At the very outset, the country was startled by the publication of a book by a college professor, famed as a leading sociologist, in which the case was presented without any attempt at sophistication. It was a fact, needing no attestation, that the mass of mankind had always lived in a state of slavery. At the present hour, under the forms of democracy, there were a quarter of a million men killed every year in industry, and half a million women living by prostitution, and two million children earning wages, and ten million people in want; and in comparison with these things, how humane was the new cult, how honest and above-board, how clean and economical! For the first time there could be offered to the submerged tenth a real social function to be performed. Once let the new teaching be applied

upon a world-wide scale, and the proletariat might follow its natural impulse to multiply without limit; there would be no more "race-suicide" to trouble the souls of eminent statesmen.

And this at the time when the attention of the community was focussed upon the new cause celebre! When the public prints were filled with an acrimonious discussion as to the meaning of the instructions given to the jury. If anyone chose to will his body to a purchaser, said the judge, and then go and commit suicide, there was no law to prevent him; and, of course, the subsequent purposes of the purchaser had nothing to do with the point at issue. This was a matter of taste— here the learned justice rapped for order—a matter of prejudice, largely, and the question at issue was one of law. There was no law controlling a man's dietetic idiosyncrasies, and it was to be doubted if constitutionally any such law would stand—certainly not in a federal court, unless it chanced to be a matter of interstate commerce.

In their bewilderment and dismay, the people turned to the Church. Surely the doctrines of Christianity would stand like a barricade against this monstrous cult. But already within the Church there had been rumors and disturbances; and now suddenly a bishop arose and voiced his protest against this attempt "to drag the Church into the mire of political controversy." It must be made perfectly clear, said the bishop, that Christianity was a religion, and not a dietetic dogma. Its purpose was to save the souls of men, and not to concern itself with their bodies. It had been stated that we should have the poor always with us; which made clear the futility of attempting to change the facts of Nature. Also it was certain that the founder

of Christianity had been a meat-eater; and though there might be more than one interpretation placed upon his

command concerning little children

There we might leave Thyrsis with the established Church. He had it just where he wanted it, and he shook it until its smoothly-shaven pink and white cheeks turned purple, and the demi-tasse went flying out of its beautifully manicured fingers! And while he did it he laughed aloud in hideous glee, and in his soul was a cry like the hunting-call of the lone gray wolf, that he had heard at midnight in his wilderness camp. So far a journey had come the little boy who had been dressed up in scarlet and purple robes, and had carried the bishop's train at the confirmation service! And so heavy a penalty did the church pay for its alliance with "good society"!

§ 8. THYRSIS paid a week's living expenses to have this manuscript copied; and then he took it about to the publishers. First came his friend Mr. Ardsley, who had become his chief adviser. When Thyrsis went to see him, Mr. Ardsley drew out an envelope from his desk, and took from it the opinion of his reader. "'What in the world is the matter with this boy?'' he read. "That's the opening sentence."

And then he fixed his eyes upon the boy. "What in the world is the matter?" he asked.

Thyrsis sat silent; there was no reply he could make. He was strongly tempted to say to the man, "The matter is that I am not getting enough to eat!"

But already Thyrsis himself had judged "The Higher Cannibalism" and repudiated it. It was born of his pain and weakness, and it was not the work he had come into the world to do. So at the end he had placed

LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

a poem, which told of a visit from his muse, after the fashion of Musset's "Nuits"; the muse had been sad and silent, and in the end the poet had torn up the product of his hours of despair, and had renewed his faith with the gracious one.

Meantime the long winter months dragged by, and still there was no gleam of hope. For Corydon it was even harder than for her husband. He at least was expressing his feelings, while she could only pine and chafe, without any sort of vent. Her life was a matter of colorless routine, in which each day was like the last, except in increased monotony. She tried hard not to let him see how she suffered; but sometimes the tears would come. And her unhappiness was bad for the child, which in the beginning had been robust and mag^ nificent, but now was not growing properly. Thyrsis would have ridiculed the idea that nervousness could affect her milk; but the time came when, in later life, he saw the poisons of fatigue and fear in test-tubes, and so he understood why the child had not been able to lift its head until it was a year old, and had then been well on the way to having "rickets."

All their life was so different from the way they had dreamed it! The dream still lured them; but its voice grew fainter and more remote. How were they to keep it real to themselves, how were they to hold it? Their existence was made up of endless sordidness, of dreary commonplace, that opposed them with its passive inertia where it did not actively attack them. "Ah, Thyrsis!" Corydon would cry to him, "this will kill us if it lasts too long!"

For one thing, they no longer heard any music at all. She was not strong enough to practice the piano; and his violin was gone. Here in the great city an end-

less stream of concerts and operas and recitals flowed past; and here were they, like starving children who press their faces against a pastry-cook's window and devour the sweets with their eyes. Thyrsis kept up with musical and dramatic progress by reading the accounts in the papers and magazines; but this was a good deal like slaking one's thirst with a mirage. He used to wonder sometimes if he were to write to these great artists—would they invite him to hear them, or would they too despise him ? He never had the courage to try.

Once in the course of the long winter some one presented Corydon with two tickets to the opera, and they went together, in a state of utter bliss. It was an unusual experience for Thyrsis, for their seats were in the orchestra, and hitherto he had always heard his operas from the upper rows in the fifth balcony, where the air was hot and stifling, and the singers appeared as a pair of tiny arms that waved, and a head (frequently a bald head) that emitted a thin, far-distant voice. This had become to him one of the conventions of the opera; and now to discover the singers as full-sized human beings, with faces and legs and loud voices, was very disturbing to his sense of illusion.

Also, alas, they had not been free to select the opera. It was "La Traviata"; and there was not much food for their hungry souls in this farrago of artificiality and sham sentiment. They shut their eyes and tried to enjoy the music, forgetting the gallant young men of fashion and their fascinating mistresses. But even the music, it seemed, was tainted; or could it be, Thyrsis wondered, that he could no longer lose himself in the pure joy of melody? Many kinds of corruption he had by this time learned about; the corruption of men,

and of women, and of children; the corruption of painting and sculpture, of poetry and the drama. But the corruption of music was something which even yet he could not face; for music was the very voice of the soul—the well-spring from which life itself was derived. Thyrsis thought, as he and Corydon wandered about in the foyers of this palatial opera-house, was there anywhere on earth a place in which heaven and hell came so close together. A place where the lust and pride of the flesh displayed themselves in all their glory; and in contrast with the purest ecstasies the human spirit had attained! He pointed out one rich dowager who swept past them; her breasts all but jostling out of her corsage as she walked, her stomach squeezed into a sort of armor-plate of jewels, her cheeks powdered and painted, her head weighted with false hair and a tiara of diamonds, her face like a mask of pride and scorn. And then, in juxtaposition with that, the Waldweben and the Feuerzauber, or the grim and awful tragedy of the Siegfried funeral-march! There were people in this opera-house who knew what such music meant; Thyrsis had read it in their faces, in that suffocating top-gallery. He wondered if some day the demons that were evoked by the music might not call to them and lead them in revolt, to drive the moneychangers from the temple once again!

§ 9. ANOTHER editor was reading "The Hearer of

O

Truth," and a publisher was hovering on the brink of venturing "The Higher Cannibalism"; and so the two had new hopes to lure them on. When the spring-time had come, they would once more escape from the city, and would put up their tent on the lake-shore! They spent long afternoons picturing just how they would

live—what they would eat, and what they would wear, and what they would study. As for Cedric—so they had called the baby—they saw him playing beneath the big tree in front of the tent. And what fun they would have giving him his bath on the little beach inside the point!

"I'll fix up a clothes-basket for him to sleep in!" declared Thyrsis.

"Nonsense, dear!" said Corydon. "I've told you many times before—we'll have to have a crib for him!"

"But why?" cried he; and there would follow an argument which gave pain to his economical soul.

Corydon declared herself willing to do her share in the matter of saving money; but it seemed to him that whenever he suggested a concrete idea, there would be objections. "We can get up at dawn," he would say, "and save the cost of oil."

"Yes," she would answer.

"And we can do our own laundry," he would continue. But immediately another argument would begin; it was impossible to persuade Corydon that diapers could be washed in cold water, even when one had the whole of the Great Lakes for a washtub.

They would go on to contemplate the glorious time when they would have money enough to build a home of their own, that could be inhabited in winter as well as in summer; Corydon always referred to it with the line from "Caradrion"—"the little cot, fringed round with tender green." It would be fine for the baby, they agreed—he should never have to go back to the city again. Thyrsis had a vision of him as he would be in that home: a brown and freckled country boy, with what were known, in the dialect of "dam-fool talk", as "yagged panties and bare feets".

But Corydon would protest at that picture. "It's all right," she said, "to put up with ugliness if you have to. But what's the use of making a fetish of it?"

"It wouldn't be ugliness," replied he. "It would be Nature ! 'Blessings on thee, little man !'

"That's all very well. But I want Cedric to have curls '

"Curls!" he cried. "And then a Fauntleroy suit, I suppose!"

"No—at least not while we're poor. But I want him to look decent '

"If you have curls, then you'll want a nurse-maid to brush them!"

"Nonsense, Thyrsis! Can't a mother take care of her child's own hair?"

"Some mothers can—they have nothing better to do. But if you were going in for the hair-dresser's art, why did you cut off your own?"

And so would come yet new discussions. "You'll be wanting me to maintain an establishment!" Thyrsis would cry, whenever these aesthetic impulses manifested themselves. He seemed to be haunted by that image of an establishment. All married men came to it in the end —there seemed to be something in matrimony that predisposed to it; and far better adopt at once the ideals and habits of the gypsies, than to settle into respectability with a nurse-maid and a cook!

Thyrsis was under the necessity of sweeping clean his soul, because of all the luxury and wantonness he saw in this metropolis, and the madness to which it goaded his soul. Some day fame would come to him, he knew—wealth also,, perhaps; and oh, there must be one man in all the city who was not corrupted, who did not learn extravagance and self-indulgence, who prac-

ticed as well as preached the life of faith! And so, again and again, he and Corydon would renew the pledges of their courtship-days—pledges to a discipline of Spartan sternness.

Poor as he was, Thyrsis still found time to figure over the things he meant to do when he got money: the publishing-house that was to bring out his books at cost, and the free reading-rooms and the circulating libraries. Also, he wanted to edit a magazine; for there was a great truth which he wished to teach the world. "We must make these things that we have suffered count for something!" he would say to Corydon, again and again. "We must use them to open people's eyes!" He was thinking how, when at last he had escaped from the pit, he would be in a position to speak for those others who were left behind. Men would heed him then, and he could show them how impossible it was for the creative artist to do his work, and at the same time carry on the struggle for bread. He would induce some rich man to set aside a fund for the endowment of young writers; and so the man who had a real message might no longer have to starve.

Thyrsis had by this time tried all the world, and he knew that there was no one to understand. Just about now he was utterly stranded, and had to borrow money for even his next day's food. And oh, the humiliations and insults that came with these loans! And worse yet, the humiliations and insults that came without any loans! There was one rich man who advanced him ten dollars; Thyrsis, when he returned it, sent a check he had received from some out-of-town magazine—and in return was rebuked by the rich man for failing to include the "exchange" on the check. Thyrsis wrote humbly to inquire what manner of thing the "exchange"

on a check might be; and learned that he was still in the rich man's debt to the sum of ten cents!

His case was the more hopeless, he found, because he was a married man. The world might have pardoned a young free-Jance who was willing to "rough it" and take his chances for a while; but a man who had a wife and child—and was still prating about poetry! To the world the possession of a wife and child meant self-indulgence; and when a man had fallen into that trap, he simply had to settle down and take the consequence. How could Thyrsis explain that his marriage had not been as other men's? How could he hint at such a thing, without proving himself a cad?

§ 10. THE work of "contemporary biography" had come to an end; there followed weeks of seeking, and then another opening appeared—Mr. Ardsley offered him a chance to do some manuscript-reading. This was really a splendid opportunity, for the work would not be difficult, and the payment would be five dollars for each manuscript. Thyrsis accepted joyfully, and forthwith carried off a couple of embryo books to his room.

It was a new and curious occupation, which opened up to him whole worlds whose existence he had not previously suspected. Through his review-writing he had become acquainted with the books that had seen the light of day; now he made the startling discovery that for every one that was born, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, that died in the womb. He could see how it went—the hordes of half-educated people who read books and were moved to write something like them. Each manuscript was a separate tragedy; and often there would be a letter or a preface to make

certain that one did not miss the.sense of it. Here would be a settlement-worker, burning with a message, but unable to draw a character or to write dialogue; here would be a business-man, who had studied up the dialect of the region where he spent his summer vacations, and whose style was so crude that one winced as he turned the pages; here would be a poor bookkeeper, or a typewriter, or other cog in the business machine, who had read of the fortunes made by writers of fiction, and had spent all his hours of leisure for a year in composing a tale of the grand monde, or some feeble imitation of the sugar-coated "historical romance" of the hour.

Sometimes as he read these manuscripts, a shudder would come over Thyrsis; how they made him realize the odds in the game of life! These thousands and tens of thousands panting and striving for success; and he lost in the throng of them! What madness it seemed to imagine that he might climb over their heads -that he had been chosen to scale the heights of fame! Their letters and prefaces sounded like a satire upon his own attitude, a reductio ad absurdum of his claims to "genius". Here, for instance, was a man who wrote to introduce himself as America's first epic poet —stating incidentally that he was an inspector of gas-meters, and had a wife and six children. His poem occupied some six hundred foolscap sheets, finely bound up by hand; it set forth the soul-states of a Byron from Alabama—an aristocratic hero who was refused by the lady of his heart, and voiced his anger and perplexity in a long speech, two lines of which stamped themselves forever upon the mind of the reader

"But I! he cried. My limbs are straight, My purse well-filled, my veins all F. F. V. !"

LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

As a method of earning one's living, this was almost too good to be true. The worse the manuscripts were, the easier was his task; in fact, when he came upon one which showed traces of real power and interest he cursed his fate, for then it might take several days to earn his five dollars. But for the most part the manuscripts were bad enough, and he could have earned a year's income in a week, if only there had been enough of them. So he made a great effort to succeed at the work, and filled his reports with epigrams and keen observations, carefully adapted to what he knew was Mr. Ardsley's point of view. He allowed time for these devices to be effective, and then paid a visit to find out about the prospects.

"Mr. Ardsley," he began, "I am going to try to meet you half way with a book."

"Ah!" said the other.

"I want to write a novel that you can publish. I believe that I can do it."

Mr. Ardsley warmed immediately. "I have always been certain that you could," said he. He went on to expound to Thyrsis the ethics of opportunism—how it would not be necessary to be false to his convictions, to write anything that he did not believe—but simply to put his convictions into a popular form, and to impart no more than the public could swallow at the first mouthful.

Thyrsis told him the outline of a plot. He would write a story of the struggles of a young author in the metropolis—not such a young author as himself, a rebel and a frenzied egotist, but a plain, everyday young author whom other people could care about. He had the "local color" for such a tale, and he could do

it without too much waste* of time. Mr. Ardsley thought it an excellent idea.

After which Thyrsis came, very cautiously, to the meat of the matter. "I want to get away into the country to write it," he said; "and so I wanted to ask you about the manuscripts you are sending me. Have you found my work satisfactory?"

"Why, yes," said the other.

"And do you think ^you can send them through the summer?"

"I presume so. It depends upon how many come to

us.'

"You—you couldn't arrange to let me have any more of them?"

"Not at present," said Mr. Ardsley. "You see, I have regular readers, whose work I know. I'll send you what I have to spare."

"Thank you," said Thyrsis. "I'll be glad to have all you can give me."

So he went away; and in the little room he and Corydon had an anxious consultation. He had been getting about twenty dollars a month; which was not enough for the family to exist upon. "Our only hope is a new book," he declared; and Corydon saw that was the truth. "Each week that I stay here is a loss," he added. "I have to pay room-rent."

"But can you stand tenting out in April?" asked she.

"I'll chance it," he replied—"if you'll say the word."

She saw that her duty was before her; she must nerve herself and face it, though it tore her heartstrings. She must stay and take care of the baby, while he went away to work!

He sat and held her hands, and saw her bite her lips

and fight to keep back the tears in her eyes. Their hearts had grown together, so that it was like tearing their flesh to separate them. They had never imagined that such a thing could come into their lives. "Thyrsis," she whispered—"you'll forget me!" He pressed her hands more tightly. "No, dear! No!" he said.

"But you'll get used to living without me!" she cried. "And it's the time in my life when I need you most!" "I will stay, dearest, if you say so." She exclaimed, "No, no ! I must stand it!" And seeing her grief, his heart breaking with pity, a strange impulse came to Thyrsis. He took her hands in his, and knelt down before her, and began to pray. It had been years since he had thought of prayer, and Corydon had never thought of it in her life. It came from the deeps of him—a few stammering words, simple, almost childish, yet exquisite as music. He prayed that they might have courage to keep up the fight, that they might be able to hold their love before them, that nothing might ever dim their vision of each other. It was a prayer without theology or metaphysics—a prayer to the unknown gods; but it set free the well-spring of tenderness and pity within them; and when he finished Corydon was sobbing upon his shoulder.

BOOK IX THE CAPTIVE IN LEASH

They were standing on the hill-top, watching the last glimmer of the sinking moon. As the faint perfume of the clover came to them upon the warm evening wind, she sighed, and whispered —

: 'Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here! 'Mid city noise, not as with thee of yore, Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home!

She paused.

"Go 07?," he said, and she quoted-

"Then through the great town's harsh, he art-weary ing

roar, Let in thy voice a whisper always come,

To chase fatigue and fear: Why faintest thou? I wandered till I died.

on! The light we sought is shining still."

§ 1. THYRSIS made his plans and packed his few belongings. There came another pass from the "higher regions", and he took the night-train once more, and came to the little town upon the shores of Lake Ontario. Once more the sun shone on the crystal-green water, and the cold breeze blew from off the lake. There was still snow in the ravines of the deep woods, but Thvrsis got his tent out of the farmer's barn, and patched up the holes the mice had gnawed, and put it up on the old familiar spot.

It was strange to him to be there without Corydon. There were so many things to remind him of her— a sudden memory would catch him unawares, and stab him like a knife. There was the rocky headland where they had swam, and there was the pine-tree that the lightning had splintered, one day while they were standing near. When darkness came, and he was unpacking a few old things that they had left up in the country, his loneliness seemed to him almost more than he could bear; he sat by the little stove, holding a pair of her old faded slippers in his hands, and felt his tears trickling down upon them.

But it took him only a day or two to drive such things out of his mind. There was no time for sentiment now—it was "Clear ship for action!" For once in his life he was free, and had a chance to work. He was full of his talk with Mr. Ardsley, and meant to do his best to be "practical." And so behold him wandering about in the water-soaked forests, or tramping

the muddy roads, or sitting by his little stove while the cold storms beat upon the tent—wrestling with his unruly Pegasus, and dragging it back a hundred times a day to what was proper, and human, and interesting !

The neighbors had warned him that it was too early for tenting, but Thyrsis had vowed he would stand it. And now, as if to punish him for his defiance, there was emptied out upon him the cave of all the winds; for four weeks there were such storms of rain and sleet and snow as the region had never known in April. There were nights when he sat wrapped in overcoats and blankets, with a fire in the stove; and still shivering for the gale that drove through the canvas. There came one calm, starlit night when he lay for hours almost frozen, and sat up in the morning to find a glass of water at his bedside frozen solid. Thirteen degrees the thermometer showed, according to the farmer; and oh, the agony of getting out of bed, and starting a fire with green wood! In the end Thyrsis poured in half a can of kerosene, and got the stove red-hot; and then he turned round to warm his back, and smelled smoke, and whirled about to find his tent in a blaze!

With a bucket of water and a broomstick he beat out the fire, and went for a run to warm up. But when he came back there was more wind, so that he could not keep warm in the tent, and more rain, so that he could not find shelter in the woods. In the end he discovered a ruined barn, in a corner of which he would sit, wrapped in his blankets and writing with cold fingers.

Perhaps all these mishaps had something to do with the refusal of his ideas to flow. But apparently it was in vain that Thyrsis tried at any time to work at things

thcit were interesting to other people. Perhaps he could have worked better at them, if there had not been so many things that were interesting to him. He would find himself confronted with the image of the society clergyman, or of the sleek editor in his club, or some other memory out of the world of luxury and pride. And each day came the newspaper, with its burden of callousness and scorn; and perhaps also a letter from Corydon, with something to goad him to new tilts with the enemies of his soul.

So, before long, almost without realizing it, he was putting the "interesting" things aside, and girding himself for another battle. His message was still undelivered ; and in vain he sought to content himself by blaming the world for this. Until he had forced the world to hear him, he had simply not yet done his work. He must take his thought and shape it anew-into some art-work finer, stronger, truer than he had yet achieved.

Day after day he pondered this idea—eating with it and walking with it and sleeping with it; until at last, of a sudden, the vision came to him. It came late at night, while he was undressing; and he sat for five or ten minutes, with his shirt half off, as if in a trance. Then he put the shirt on again, and went out to wander about the woods, laughing and talking to himself.

"Genius surrounded by Commercialism"—that was his theme; and it would have to be a play. Its hero would be a young musician, a mere boy, a master of the demon-voices of the violin; he would be rapt in his vision, and around him a group of people who would be embodiments of the world and all its forces of evil. One by one they came trooping before Thyrsis* fancy, with all their trappings of pomp and power, their great-

ness and their greed—sinister and cruel figures, but also humorous, very creatures of the spirit of comedy! Yes, he had a comedy this time—a real comedy!

§ 2. IN this hour, of course, Thyrsis forgot all about the "plot" he had outlined to Mr. Ardsley, and about his promises to be "practical." Something arose within him, imperious and majestic, and swept all this out of the way with one gesture of the hand. He dropped everything else and plunged into the play. Never yet in his life had anything taken hold of him to such an extent; it drove him so that he forgot to eat, he forgot to sleep. He would work over some part of it until he was exhausted—and then, without warning, some other part would open out in a vista before him, and he would spring up in pursuit of that. Characters and episodes and dialogue, wild humor, scalding satire, grim tragedy—they thronged and jostled and crowded one another in his imagination.

"The Genius" was the title of the play. Its protagonist had come home after completing his education in Vienna; and there was- the family gathered to greet him. Mr. Hartman, the father, was a wholesale grocer —a business large enough to have brought wealth, but painfully tainted with "commonness". Then there was Mrs. Hartman, stout and tightly-laced, who had studied the science of elegance while her husband studied sugar. There was the elder son, who under his mother's guidance had married well; and Miss Violet Hartman, who was looking up to the perilous heights of a foreign alliance.

Only of late had the family come to realize what an asset to their career this "Genius" might be. They had humored him in his strange whim to devote his life

to fiddling; money had been spent on him freely—he brought home with him a famous Cremona instrument for which three thousand dollars had been paid. But now it was dawning upon them that this was an "ugly duckling"; he was to make his debut in the metropolis, where an overwhelming triumph was expected; and then he would return to the home city in the middle West, and would play at music ales, which even the most exclusive of the "elite" must attend.

There was also the great Prof. Reminitsky, the teacher who had made Lloyd, and had come to New York with him; and there was the Herr Prof, von Arne, of the University of Berlin, a world-renowned psychiatrist, author of "The Neurosis of Inspiration". The Herr Professor had come to America to make some studies for his forthcoming masterpiece on the religious mania; and he was glad to see his old friend Reminitsky, whose seventeen-year-old musical prodigy was most interesting material for study.

Prof. Reminitsky was the world's greatest authority in the art of tearing the human soul to pieces by means of horse-hair rubbed with resin and scraped over the intestines of a pig. There were no tricks of finger-gymnastics and of tone-production that he had not mastered. As for the emotions produced thereby, he felt them, but in a purely professional way; that is, the convictions he had concerning them related to their effects upon audiences, and more especially upon the score or two of critical experts whose psychology had been his life-study. But having studied also the psychology of youth, he knew that his protege must needs have other convictions concerning his performances. This fras his .,upreme greatness—that he understood

the paranoia of enthusiasm, and used this understanding to tempt his pupils to new heights of achievement.

In all of which, of course, his friend von Arne was a great help to him. Von Arne had dug through a score of great libraries, and had travelled all the world over, frequenting cafes and salons, monasteries and prayer-cells, prisons and hospitals and asylums—wherever one might get new glimpses of the extraordinarily intricate phenomena of the aberration called "Genius". He had several thousand cases of it at his finger-tips -he had measured its reaction-times and calculated its cephalic index, and analyzed its secretions and tested it for indecan. He knew trance and clairvoyance, autosuggestion and telepathic hallucination, epilepsy and hysteria and ecstasy; and over the head of any disputatious person he would swing the steam-shovel of his erudition, and bury the unfortunate beneath a wagon-load of Latin and Greek derivatives.

Also, there was Moses Rosen, the business-manager. Moses was short, and wore a large diamond ring, and he also was a specialist in the phenomena of "Genius". He studied them from the point of view of the box-office, and his tests were quite as definite as those of the psychological laboratory. There came to Moses an endless stream of prodigies, all of them having long hair and picturesque aspects, and talking rapidly and rolling their eyes; the problem was to determine which of them had the faculty of true Genius, which not only talked rapidly and rolled its eyes, but also had the power of causing money to flow in through a box-office window.

In this case Moses felt that the prospects were good; the only trouble being that the prodigy intended to render a concerto by a strange composer —a stormy

and unconventional thing which would annoy the critics. Moses suggested something that was "classic"; and agreed with Mrs. Hartman that there ought to be something corresponding to "good form" in music.

§ 3. So all these strange creatures were poking and peering and smelling about the "Genius" ; and meanwhile, there came at intervals faint strains of music from a distant room. At last Lloyd Hartman entered; beautiful, pale and sensitive—a haunted boy, and the most haunting figure that had yet come to Thyrsis' imagination. Also, it was the hardest piece of work he had ever undertaken; for the character had come to him, not as a formula or a collection of phrases, but as an intuition, a part of his own soul; and he would work out a scene a score of times, finding words to phrase it, and then rejecting them. By what speeches could he give his sense of the gulf that lay between Lloyd and the people about him? For this boy could not cope with them in argument, he would have no mastery of the world of facts. He must be without any touch of sophistication, of cynicism; and yet, when he spoke to them, it must be clear that he knew them for different beings from himself. He would go with them meekly; but one would feel that it was because his path lay in their direction. When the point came that their ways parted, he would go his own way; and just there lay the seed of the tragi-comedy.

The family gathers about him, and he answers their questions. He will wear the kind of tie that his sister prefers, and they may set any date they please for the musicales at home. He hears the "copy" which Moses has prepared for his advertisements; and then he sits, absent-minded, while they talk about him. Music is in

his thoughts, and gradually it steals into his aspect and the gestures of his hand. They watch him, and a pall comes over them: until at last the mother exclaims that he makes her nervous, and leads the family off.

Then Miss Arnold is announced—Helena Arnold, who has been recommended as accompanist at the great concert. She is young and beautiful; and the two go into the next room to play, while the professors remain to talk over this new complication.

Prof, von Arne, of course, lays especial emphasis upon the sex-element in psychopathology; he and Remi-nitsky have talked the subject out many years ago, and adopted a definite course of action. The abnormalities incidental to sex-repression were innumerable, and for the most part destructive; but there could be no question that all the more striking phenomena of the neurosis called "Genius" were greatly increased in their intensity by this means. So, in dealing with his pupils, and especially with a prodigy like young Hartman, Prof. Reminitsky would call into service all the paraphernalia of religious mysticism; teaching his pupil to regard woman as the object of exalted adoration, a being too holy to be attained to even in thought. And now, of course, when the proposed accompanist turns out to be a decidedly alluring young female, it is necessary to take careful heed.

Meanwhile from the distance come bursts of wild music; and at last Helena returns—pale, and deeply agitated. "It is that concerto!" she says, and then asks to be excused from talking. Lloyd comes, and stands by the door watching her. When his teacher begins to open business negotiations, he asks him abruptly to leave them alone.

Helena asks, "Who wrote that music?" He tells

her a ghastly story of a titan soul who starved in a garret and shot himself, crushed by the mockery of the world.

"I might have saved him!" the boy exclaims. "I was so busy with the music I forgot the man!"

They talk about this epoch-making concerto, and how Lloyd means to force it upon the public. "And you shall play it with me!" he exclaims. "You are the first that has ever understood it!"

"I cannot play it!" she protests ; to which he answers, "It was like his voice come back from the grave!" And so we see these two souls cast into the crucible together.

§ 4. THE second act showed the aftermath of the great concert, and took place in the drawing-room of the Hartman family's apartment, at four o'clock in the morning. We see Moses and the two professors, who have not been able to tear themselves away; dishevelled, distrait, wild with vexation, they pace about and lament. Failure, utter ruin confronts them—the structure of their hopes lies in the dust! They blame it all on "that woman"—and members of the family concur in this. It was she who kept Lloyd to his resolve to play that mad concerto; and then, to cast aside all the master had taught them, all the results of weeks of drilling—and to play it in that frantic, demonic fashion. Now the men await the morning papers, which will bring them the verdict of "the world"; and they shudder with the foreknowledge of what that verdict will be.

Lloyd and Helena enter. They have been walking for hours, and have not been thinking of "the world". They listen, half-heeding, to the protests and laments;

they could not help it, they explain—the music took hold of them.

The two professors go off to get the papers, and Moses goes into the next room to rest; after which it becomes clear to the audience that Lloyd and Helena are fight; ing the sex-duel.

"You do not care about people," she is saying, sombrely.

To which his reply is, "It is not to be found in people."

"And yet from people it must come!" she insists.

He answers, "They do not even know what I mean; and they have no humility."

"It is a problem," Lloyd continues, after a pause. "Shall one go on alone, or wait and bring others with him?—You have brought that problem into my life."

She answers to this, "I cannot see how my love will hinder you."

He replies, "If you love me, who will love my art?"

So it goes—until the professors return with their freight of the world's Philistinism. And here came a scene, over which Thyrsis shook for many a day with merriment. The accounts of the concert are read; Moses awakens and comes in; and as the agony increases, the members of the family appear, one by one, clad in their dressing-gowns, and adding their lamentations to the chorus. Gone is all the prestige of the two professors, gone all the profits of Moses, gone all the visions of social triumphs in the city of the middle West!

To all of which uproar the two listen patiently; until at last the mother, in a transport of vexation, turns upon Helena, and accuses her of ensnaring the boy. And then—the climax of the scene—Lloyd springs up;

all that Genius in him, which has so far gone into music, turns now into rage and scorn. He pictures these people—pawing over his inspiration with their unclean hands—peering at it, weighing it, chaffering over it— taking it into the market-place to be hawked about. He shows them what they are, and what that "world" is, to which they would offer his muse as a whore. And then at the climax of his speech, as he is waving his violin in the air, the Herr Prof, von Arne ventures to put in a word; and the boy whirls upon him, and brings down the three thousand-dollar treasure upon the eminent psychiatrist's head!

§ 5. THE third act, which was the hardest of all to write, was to take place in a garret. Lloyd has gone away alone, and three years have passed, and now he lies dying of a wasting disease. Helena has come to him again—and still they are fighting the duel. "A woman will do anything for a man but renounce him," says Lloyd; and she cannot understand this fierce instinct of his.

She has come and found him; and he lies gasping for breath, and speaking in broken sentences. Yet he will not have her bring grief into his chamber; he has fought his way through grief, and through hatred and contempt, and now he lies at peace upon the bosom of nature. No longer is he wrapped up in his own vision; he has learned from the million suns in the sky and the million trees of the forest. He tells her that the thing called "Genius" springs ceaselessly from the heart of life.

He has cast out fear; and with it he has cast out love. "What are you?" he asks. "What am I?" And he sets forth in blazing words his vision of the soul,

which is as a flash of light in a raindrop, and yet one with the eternal process. As the fruit of his life he leaves one symphony in manuscript, and some pages of writing in which he has summed up his faith. That is enough, he says—that is victory; for that he fled away, and killed his love.

The two professors come, having learned that Lloyd is dying. But even they cannot divert him. He tells von Arne that his learning will submit itself, and that scientists will be as gardeners, tending the young flowers of faith. His mother and father come, and he whispers that even for them there is hope—that in the deepest mire of respectability the spark of the soul still glows. His mother bursts into weeping by his bed, and he tells her that even from the dungeon of pride there may be deliverance. So he sends them all away to pray.

Then Helena sits at the piano and plays a few bars of that sonata of Beethoven's which is an utterance of most poignant grief, and which some publisher has cruelly misnamed the "Moonlight". And after long silence, the dying man communes with his muse. A light suffuses the room, and he whispers, "Take thine own time; for the seeds of thy glories are planted in the hearts of men!"

§ 6. OVER these things Thyrsis would work for six hours at a stretch, sitting without moving a muscle; for days and nights he would wander about at random in the woods. He ate irregularly, of such things as he could put his hands upon; and sleep fled from him like a mistress spurned. When, after a couple of months, he had finished the task, there was an incessant throbbing in his forehead, and—alas for the sudden

tumble from the heights of Parnassus!—he had lost almost entirely the power of digesting food.

But the play was done. He sent it off to be copied, and wrote paeans of thanksgiving to Corydon. Once more he had a weapon, newly-forged and sharpened, wherewith to pierce that tough hide of the world!

There remained the practical question: What did one do when he had a play completed? What was the first step to be taken? Thyrsis pondered the problem for several days; and then, as chance would have it, his eye was caught by a newspaper paragraph to the effect that "Ethelynda Lewis, the popular comedienne, is to be starred in a serious drama next season, under the management of Robertson Jones. Miss Lewis's play has not yet been selected." Now, as it happened, "Ethelynda Lewis" had been on the play-bill of "The Princess of Prague", that tragic "musical comedy" to which Thyrsis had been taken; but he never noticed the names of actors and actresses, and had no suspicions. He sent his manuscript to this future star; and a week later came a note, written on scented monogram paper in a tall and distinguished chirography, acknowledging the receipt of his play and promising to read it.

Then Thyrsis turned to attack the manuscripts which had been accumulating while he was writing. They were coming more frequently now—apparently Mr. Ardsley liked his work. To Corydon, who had gone to the country with her parents, he wrote that he was getting some money ahead, and so she might join him before long.

This brought him a deluge of letters; and it forced him to another swift descent into the world of reality. "I have told you nothing of my sufferings," wrote Corydon. "At least a score of times I have written you long

letters and then torn them up, saying that your work must not be disturbed. But oh, Thyrsis, I do not think I can stand it much longer! Can you imagine what it means to be shut up in a boarding-house, without one living soul to understand about me?"

She would go on to tell of her griefs and humiliations, her longings and rages and despairs. Then, too, Cedric was not growing as he should. "He is beautiful," she wrote, "and every one loves him. But he makes not the least attempt to sit up, and I am very much worried. I fear that I ought not to go on nursing him—I am too nervous to eat as I should. And then I think of the winter, and that we may still be separated, and I do not see how I am to ctand it. It is as if I were in a prison. I think of you, and I cannot make you real to me."

To all of which Thyrsis could only reply with vague hopes—and then go away for a tramp in the forest, and call to his soul for new courage. He had still troubles enough of his own. For one thing, the fiend in his stomach was not to be exorcised by any spell he knew. It was all very picturesque to portray one's hero as dying of disease; but in reality it was not at all satisfactory. Thyrsis did not die, he merely ate a bowl of bread and milk, and then went about for several hours, feeling as if there were a football blown up inside of him.

He had a touching faith in the medical profession in those days, and whenever there was anything wrong with him, he would turn the problem over to a doctor and his soul would be at rest. In this case the doctor told him that he had dyspepsia—not a very difficult diagnosis—and gave him a bottle full of a red liquid to be taken after meals. To Thyrsis this seemed an

example of the marvels of science, of the adjustment of means to ends; for behold, when he had taken the red liquid, the bread and milk disappeared as if by magic! And he might go on and eat anything else—if there was trouble, he had only to take more of the red liquid! So he plunged into work on a pot-boiler, and wrote Cory-don to be of cheer, that the dawn was breaking.

§ 7. CORYDOX, in the meantime, had received a copy of his play; and he was surprised at the effect it had upon her. "It is marvellous," she wrote; "it is like a blaze of lightning from one end to the other. And yet, much as I rejoice in its power, the main feeling it brought me was of anguish; for it seemed to me as if in this play you had spoken out of your inmost soul. Can it be that you are really chafing against the bond of our love? That you feel that I have hold of you and cling to you; and that you resent it, and shrink from me? Oh Thyrsis, what can I do? Shall I bid you go, and blot the thought of you from my mind? Is that what you truly want? 'A woman will do anything for a. man but renounce him!' Did you not shudder for me when you wrote those words ?

"It is two o'clock in the morning, and so far I have not been able to sleep. I have lain awake with torturing thoughts; and then the baby wakened up, and I had to put him to sleep again—any indisposition of mine always affects him. I am sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, writing with a candle; and hoping to get myself sufficiently exhausted, so that I shall no longer lie awake.

"Go and find your vision over my corpse, and may God bless you! . . . I wrote that hours ago, and I tried to mean it. I try to tell myself that I will take the

LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

child and go away, and crush my own hopes and yearnings, and give my life to him. But no—I cannot, I cannot! It is perfectly futile for me to think of that— I crave for life, and I cannot give up. There is that in me that will never yield, that will take no refusal. Sometimes I see myself as a woman of seventy, still seeking my life. Do you not realize that? I feel that I shall never grow old!

"How strange a thing it is, Thyrsis, that you and I, who might do so much with so little chance, should have no chance at all. I read of other poets and their wives —at least they managed to have a hut on some hillside, and they did not absolutely starve.

"I am tired now; perhaps I can sleep. But I will tell you something, Thyrsis—does it sound so very foolish? Not only will I never grow old, but I will never give up your love! Yes, some day you will find out how to seek your vision in spite of the fact that I am your wife!"

§ 8. ANOTHER day, there would be moods of peace, and even of merriment; it was always like putting one's hand into a grab-bag, to open a new letter from Cory-don. In after years he would read them, and strange were the memories they brought!

"My Thyrsis," she wrote: "I have been reading a story of Heine in ZangwilPs "Dreamers of the Ghetto". I did not know about Heine. He loved and married a sweet little woman of the people—Mathilde—who didn't appreciate his writings. I am not only going to love you, but I am going to appreciate your writings ! Some day I am going to be educated—and won't it be fine when I am educated?

''I keep very busy, but I have not so much time as I

had last summer. I live almost all my life in hope—the present is nothing. I think I get more strength by gazing at my baby than in any other way. I wonder if I can ever infuse into him my inspiration and my desire. It is wonderfully exciting to me to think of what a free soul could do, if it possessed my spirit and my dreams. Ah, even you don't know! I smile to myself when I think how surprised you might some day be! Oh, my baby, my baby, surely you will not fail me—little soul that is to be. This is what I say to him, and then I squeeze him in ecstasy, and he coughs up his milk. Dear funny little thing, that is so pleased with a red, white and blue rattle. At present he is grinning at it ecstatically—and he is truly most horribly cunning. His favorite expression is 'Ah-boo, ah-boo'; and is not that just too bright? Everybody tries to spoil him—even a twelve-year-old boy here wanted to kiss him. And wonder of wonders, he has two teeth appearing in his lower gums! Poor me—he bites hard enough as he is."

And then again:

"My Beloved: I am sitting with my candle once more. It is too hot for a lamp. I have been reading 'Paradise Lost', and truly I am astonished that it is so beautiful. Also I have been reading a book about Unitarianism, and I did not know that such things had been written. But I think it is hardly worth while to call one's self a Unitarian. I was thinking that I will go back and read the Bible through. I would not mind, if I knew I did not have to believe it.

"Also', this week, I read 'Paul and Virginia*. Oh, do not write anything to me about our meeting, until you are sure it can be! It breaks my heart.

"Did it ever occur to you that we might embark

LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

for the tropics? We'd have a hut, and I might learn to raise fruits and vegetables. I sigh for some verdant isle—and I am not joking. We might find some place where steamers came now and then, and some one in New York coul$ attend to your manuscripts.

"To-night I was trying to put my baby to sleep and he wouldn't go, but just lay in my lap and kicked and grinned. I tried to coax him to go to sleep, but if I was the least bit impatient he'd begin to cry. And then he'd grin at me so roguishly, as if to say, 'Let's play before I go to sleep!' Finally I looked right at him and said, 'Now, you have played long enough, and I wish you to be a good boy and g'o to sleep!' And then he laughed, and I put him on his side and he went to sleep! Wasn't that bright for a baby just seven months old?

"I think I write you much more interesting letters than you write me. To be sure I have no books into which to put my thoughts. Also, I have a great deal of time to compose letters to you; Cedric wakes me up so much in the night, and often I cannot go to sleep again. It plays havoc with me as a rule; and yet sometimes, when I'm not too exhausted, there is a certain joy in watching by the dim candle light the rosy upturned face and the little groping mouth. Oh Thyrsis, he is all mine and yours, and we must make him glad he was borned, mustn't we?"

§ 9. SUCH letters would come at a time when Thyrsis was almost prostrated with exhaustion; and great waves of loneliness and yearning would sweep over him. Ah God, what a fate it was—to labor as he labored, and then to have no means of recreation or respite, no hand

to smooth his forehead, no voice to whisper solace! Who could know the tragedy of that aspect of his life ?

There came one day an incident that almost broke his heart. Down the lake came a private yacht, beautiful and swift, clean as a new penny, its bronze and white paint glistening in the sunlight. It anchored not far out from the point where Thyrsis camped, and a boat put off, and from it three young girls stepped ashore. They were slender and graceful, clad all in white—as spotless as the vessel itself, and glowing with health and joyfulness. They cast shy glances at the tent, and asked Thyrsis to direct them to the nearest farm-house; he watched them disappear through the woods, and saw them return with a basket of fruit.

It was just at sunset, and there was a new moon in the sky, and the evening star trembled upon the bosom of the waters. There in the magic stillness lay the vessel—and suddenly came the sounds of a guitar, and of young voices singing. Wonderful to tell, they sang —not "ragtime" and "college songs," but the chorus of the "Rheintochter," and Schubert's "Auf dem Was-ser zu singen", and other music, unknown to Thyrsis, exquisite almost beyond enduring. It pierced him to the heart; he sat with his hands clenched, and every nerve of him a-quiver, and the hot tears raining down his cheeks. It was loveliness not of this earth, it was an apparition; that presence which had been haunting him ever since he had come to this spot—

"So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,

And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

The music died away, and rose again; and the deeps

of his spirit were opened, and ecstasy and grief welled up together within him. Then he made out that the anchor was being lifted; and he was tempted to spring up and cry out to them to stay. But no—what did they know of him? What would they care about him? So he crouched by the bank, drinking greedily the precious notes; and as the yacht with its gleaming lights stole away into the twilight, all the poet's soul went yearning with it. Still he could hear the faint strains swelling—

"Blow, blow, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea!"

He sat with his face hidden in his hands, shuddering. Here he was, wrestling in the pit with sickness and despair—and there above him were the heights of art. If only he could live with such music, what prodigies could he not perform. And they who possessed it— did it mean to them what it meant to him? They who had everything that life could offer—music and art, freedom and beauty and health—all the treasures of life as their birthright—had they never a thought of those who had nothing, and were set to slave in the galleys of their pleasure-craft?

Thyrsis was always coming upon some aspect of this thing called Privilege. Corydon had suggested that there might be some work that she could do at home; and so one day he was looking over the advertisements in a newspaper, and came upon a composition by a man who was seeking a governess for his three children. It was written in a style all its own; it revealed a person accustomed to specify exactly what he wanted, and it occupied three or four inches, as if symbolic of the fact

that he did not consider expense. He described the life of his children; they had servants and a tutor to attend to their physical and mental needs, and the father now sought a friend anci companion, to take charge of their spiritual and social development. The specifications evoked a picture of an establishment, in which all the community's resources, all the sciences and arts of civilization, were set at work to create joy and power for three young people. What a contrast it made with the care that little Cedric was getting, as revealed in his mother's letters!

Thyrsis could see in his mind's eye the master and provider of this establishment. How well he knew the type—how often had he sat in some quiet corner and listened while it revealed itself. A man alert and aggressive; immaculate in appearance as the latest fashion-plate, and overlaid with a veneer of culture— yet underneath it still the predatory talons, the soul of the hawk. He was a "practical" man-; that is, he understood profit. He was trained to see where profit lay, and swift to seize upon it. As a business-man he ruled labor, and crushed his competitors, and directed legislatures and political machines; as a lawyer he protected his kind from attack, as a judge he bent the law to the ends of greed. So he lived in palaces, and travelled about in private-cars and yachts, and had servants and governesses for his children, and valets and secretaries to attend himself. And whenever by any chance he got a glimpse of Thyrsis' soul, how he hated it! On the other hand, to Thyrsis he was a portent of terror. He ruled in every field of human activity; and yet one saw that if his rule continued, it would mean the destruction of civilization ! Whenever Thyrsis met one of these men, whether in imagination or reality,

he found himself with hands clenched, and every nerve of him a-tingle with the lust of combat.

§ 10. A MOST trying thing it was to a man who carried the burden of the future in his soul—to have to wrestle with an obstinate stomach! But so it was again; the magic red liquid seemed to be losing its power. Then, the pot-boiler was not going well; and to cap the climax, the manuscripts stopped coming. Thyr-sis, after waiting two or three weeks in suspense and dread, wrote to Mr. Ardsley, and received a reply to the effect that he would not be able to send any more. Mr-Ardsley had sent them because of his interest in the proposed "practical" novel; and now he had learned that the poet had been giving his time to the writing of an impossible play!

Thyrsis' predicament was a desperate one, and drove him to a desperate course. It was now midsummer ; and ru'n down from overwork as he was, could he face the thought of returning to the sweltering city, to go to work in some office? Or was he to hire out as a farm-laborer, under he knew not what conditions? He recoiled from either of these alternatives; and then suddenly, as he racked his brains, a wild idea flashed over him. For years he had talked and dreamed of escaping from civilization. He had pictured himself upon some tropic island, where bananas and cocoanuts grew; or again in some Northern wilderness, where he might hunt and fish, and live like the pioneers. And now—why not do it? He had an axe and a rifle and a fishing-rod; and only a few days previously he had heard a man telling of a lake in the Adirondacks, where not a dozen people went in the course of a year.

It was early one morning the idea came to him; and

within an hour he had struck his tent and packed his trunk. He stowed his camp-stuff and bedding in a dry-goods box, and leaving his tent with the farmer, he purchased a ticket to a place on the edge of the wilderness. He put up at a village-hotel, and the next day oVo-ve fifteen miles by a stage, and five more by a wagon, and spent the night at a lumber-camp far in the wilderness. The next day, carrying as much of his belongings as he could, he walked three miles more, and came to the tiny lake that was his goal.

It was perhaps half a mile long; the virgin forest hung about it like a great green curtain, and the shadows of the blue mountains seemed as if painted upon its surface. Thyrsis gave a gasp of delight as he pushed through the bushes and saw it; he stripped and plunged into the crystal water—and hot and tired and soul-sick as he- was, the coolness of it was like a clasp of protecting arms. There was a rock rising from the centre, and he swam out and stood upon it, and gazed about him at all the ravishing beauty, and laughed and whooped so that the mountains rang with the echoes.

He found an abandoned "open-camp", or shed, the roof of which he made water-proof with newspapers and balsam-boughs. He cut fresh boughs for his bed, and spread his blankets upon them, and went back to the lumber-shanties, and purchased a box of prunes and a bag of rice. There were huckleberries in profusion upon the hills, and in the lakes were fish, and in the forests squirrels and rabbits, partridges and deer. There were the game-laws, to be sure; but there was also a "higher law", as eminent authorities had declared. As one of the wits at the lumber-camp put

it, "If any wild rabbit comes rushing out to bite you, don't you hesitate to defend yourself!"

So, with the sum of one dollar and twenty-three cents in his pocket-book, Thyrsis began the happiest experience of his life. He watched the sun rise and set behind the mountains; and sometimes he climbed to the summits to see it further upon its way. He watched the progress of the tempests across the lake, and swam in the water while the rain splashed his face and the lightning splintered the pines in the forest. He crouched in the bushes and saw the wild ducks feeding, and the deer that came at sunset to drink. He watched the loons diving, and spying him out with their wild eyes—sometimes, as they rose in flight, beating the surface of the water with a sound like thunder. At night he heard their loud laughter, and the creaking cries of the herons flying past. Sometimes far up in the hills a she-fox would bark, or some too-aged tree of the forest would come down with a booming crash. Thyrsis would lie in his open camp and watch the moonlight through the pines, and prayers of thankfulness would well up within him—

"Peace of the forest, rich, profound, Gather me closely, fold me round 1"

There had been much carrying and hard work to do before he was settled, and there was more of it all through his stay. He had to cook all his meals and clean up afterwards; and because the nights were cold and his blankets few, there was much firewood to be cut. Also, there was no food unless he went out and found it, and so he spent hours each day tramping about in the forests. By the time he had got home and

had cleaned the game and cooked it, he was ravenously hungry, and there was never any question as to what would digest. This was just what he had sought; and so now, deliberately, he banned all the muses from his presence, and poured the rest of the dyspepsia-medicine into- the lake. His muscles became hard, and the flush of health returned to his cheeks, and as he went about his tasks he laughed and sang, and shouted his defiance to the world. And to Corydon he wrote his newest plan -to earn a little in the city that winter, and come back in the early spring and build a log-cabin for herself and the baby!

§ 11. TWICE a week his mail came to the lumber-camp, in care of the friendly foreman. Each time that he went out to get it, he hoped for some new turn. There was a publisher interested in "The Hearer of Truth,", and an editor was reading "The Higher Cannibalism"; also, and most important of all, Miss Ethelynda Lewis had now had "The Genius" for nearly two months, and had not yet reported. Thyrsis wrote to remind her, and after another two weeks, he wrote yet more urgently. At last came a note—"I have been away from the city, and have not had a chance to read the play. I will attend to it at once." And then, after three weeks more, Thyrsis wrote again—and at last came a letter that made his heart leap.

"I have read your play", wrote the popular comedienne-. "I am very much interested in it indeed. I have asked my manager to read it, and will write you again shortly."

Thyrsis sent this to Corydon, and again there was rejoicing and expectation. "If only I can get the play on," he wrote, "our future is safe, for the profits from

LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

plays are enormous. It will be a great piece of luck if I have found the right person at the first attempt."

More weeks passed. Thyrsis watched the pageant of autumn upon the mountains—he saw the curtains of the lake-shore change to gold and scarlet, and from that to pale yellow and brown; and now, with every lightest breeze that stirred, there were showers of leaves came fluttering to the ground. The deer left the lake-shore and took to the "hard-wood", and the drumming of partridges thundered at sunset. The nights were bitterly cold, and he spent a good part of his day chopping logs and carrying them to camp, so that he might keep a blazing fire all night. There were hunting-parties in the woods, and he got a deer, and sold part of it, and had the rest hanging near his camp.

And then one night came the first snow-storm; in the morning it lay white and sparkling in the sunlight— and oh, the wonder of a hunting-trip, when the floor of the wilderness was like a page on which could be read the tale of all that happened in the night! One could hardly believe that so many creatures were in these woods—there were tracks everywhere one looked. Here a squirrel had run, and here a partridge; here had been a porcupine, with feet like a baby's, and here a fox, and here a bear with two cubs. And in yon hollow a deer had slept through the night, and here he had blown away the snow from the moss; here two bucks had fought; and here one of them had been started by a hunter, and had bounded away with leaps that it was a marvel to measure.

Thyrsis nearly lost his life at these fascinating adventures ; for another storm came up, and covered his tracks, and when he tried to find his way back by the compass, he found that he had forgotten which end of

the needle pointed to the North! So he wandered about for hours; and in the end had to decide by the toss of a penny whether he should get out to the main road, or wander off into twenty miles of trackless wilderness, without either food or matches. Fortunately the penny fell right; and he spent the night at a farmhouse, and the next day got back to the lumber-camp.

And there was a letter from Ethelynda Lewis ! Thyr-sis tore it open and read this incredible message:

"Your play has been carefully considered, and I am disposed to accept it. It is certainly very unusual and interesting, and I think it can be made a success. There are, however, certain changes which ought to be made. I am wondering if you will come to the city, so that we can talk it over. It would not be possible to settle a matter so important by mail; and there is no time to be lost, for I am ready to go ahead with the work at once, and so is my manager."

§ 12. NOTHING that the mail had ever brought to Thyrsis had meant so much to him as this. He was transported with delight. Yes, for this he would go back to the city! —But then, he caught his breath, realizing his plight. How was he to get to the city, when he had only three dollars to his name?

He turned the problem over in his mind. Should he send a telegram to some relative and beg for help ? No, he had vowed to die first. Should he write to the actress, and explain? No, for that would kill his chances. There was just one way to be thought «of; venison in the woods was worth eleven cents a pound, and the smallest of deer would get him to the city!

And so began a great adventure. Thyrsis wrote Miss Ethelynda that he would come; and that night he

loaded up some more buckshot "shells", and before dawn of the next day was out upon the hunt. The snow was gone now; and with soft shoes on his feet he wandered all day through the wilderness—and was rewarded by two chances to shoot at the white tails of flying deer.

And then came night, and he rigged up a "jack", a forbidden apparatus made of a soap-box and a lantern and a tin-plate for a reflector. He had an ingenious arrangement of straps and cords, whereby he could fasten this upon his head; and he had found an old lumber-trail where the deer came to feed upon the soft grass. Down this he crept like a thief in the night, with the light gleaming ahead, and the deer tramping in the thickets and whistling their alarms. Now and then one would stand and stare, his eye-balls gleaming like coals of fire; and at last came the roar of the gun, and the jacklight tumbled to the ground. When Thyr-sis lighted up again and went to examine, there were spots of blood upon the leaves—but no deer.

So the next day he was up again at dawn, watching by one of the runways to the lake. And then came another tramp, through the thickets and over the mountains—and more shots at the "flags" of the elusive enemy. Thyrsis' back ached, and his feet were as if weighted with lead, but still he plodded on and on—it was his life against a deer's.

If only he had had a boat, so that he could have set up his "jack" in that! But he had no boat—and so he wrapped himself in blankets and sat to watch another runway at sunset; and when no deer came he decided to stay on until the moon rose. It was a bitterly cold night, and his hands almost froze to the gun-barrel

when he touched it. And the moon rose, and forthwith went behind a cloud—and then came a deer!

There was hardly a trace of motion in the air, but somehow the creature half-scented Thyrsis; and so it stood and trumpeted to the night. Oh, the wildness of that sound—and the thumping of the heart of the hunter, and the breathless suspense, and the burning desire. The deer would take a step, and a twig would crack; and then it would stand still again, and Thyrsis would listen, crouching like a statue, clutching his weapon and striving to penetrate the darkness. And then the deer would take two or three more steps, and stand again; and then, in sudden alarm, bound away; and then come back again, step by step—fascinated by this mysterious thing there in the darkness. For three mortal hours that creature pranced and cavorted about Thyrsis, while he waited with chattering teeth; then in the end it took a sudden fright, and went bounding away through the thicket.

So came another day's hunting; and at sundown another watch by a runway; and another deer, that approached from the wrong direction, and came upon a man, worn out by three days and nights of effort, lying sound asleep at his post!

But there could be only one ending to this adventure. Thyrsis was out for a deer, and he would never quit until he got one. All his planning and wandering had availed him nothing; but now, the next morning, as he stepped out from his camp with a bucket in his hand—behold, at the edge of a thicket, a deer! Thyrsis stood rooted to the spot, staring blankly; and the deer stood staring at him.

It was a time of agony. Should he try to creep back to his gun, or should he make a sudden dash? He started

to try the latter, and had a pang of despair as the deer whirled and bolted away. He leaped to the camp and grabbed his gun and sprang out into sight again— and there, off to the right, was another deer. It was a huge buck, with wide-spreading antlers, rising out of the bushes where it stood. It saw Thyrsis, and started away; and in a flash he raised his gun and fired. He saw the deer stumble, and he fired the other barrel; and then he started in wild pursuit.

He had been warned to beware of a wounded deer; but he forgot that—he forgot also that he had no more shells upon him. He ran madly through the forest, springing over fallen logs, plunging through thickets —he would have seized hold of the animal with his bare hands, if only he could have caught up with it.

The deer was badly hurt. It would leap ahead, and then stumble, half falling, and then leap again. Even in this way, the distance it covered was amazing; Thyrsis was appalled at the power of the creature, its tremendous bounds, the shock of its fall, and the crashing of the underbrush before it. It seemed like a huge boulder, leaping down a precipice; and Thyrsis stood at a safe distance and watched it. According to the poetry-books he should have been ashamed—perhaps moved to tears by the reproachful look in the great creature's eyes. But assuredly the makers of the poetry-books had never needed the price of a railroad-ticket as badly as Thyrsis did!

He only realized that night how desperate his need had been. He lay in his berth on board a train for the city—while back at his "open-camp" a wild blizzard was raging, and the thermometer stood at forty degrees below zero. But Thyrsis was warm and comfortable; and also he was brown and rugged, once more full

of health and eagerness for life. All night he listened to the pounding of the flying train; and fast as the music of it went, it was not fast enough for his imagination. It seemed as if the rails were speaking— saying to him, over and over and over again, "Ethelynda Lewis ! Ethelynda Lewis ! Ethelynda Lewis!"

BOOK X THE END OF THE TETHER

They sat still watching upon the hill-top, drinking in the scent of the clover.

"Ah, if only we might have come back here!" she sighed. "If only we had never had to leave!"

"That way lies unhappiness" he said.

"Perhaps" she answered; and then quotec

'Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour

In the old haunt, and find our tree-topped hill! Who, if not I, for questing here hath power?"

"I wonder," said he, "if the poet put as much mto these stanzas as we find in them!"

§ 1. THROUGH the summer Cory don had been living week by week upon the hope that her husband would be able to send for her; all through the fall she had been dreaming of the arrangements they would make for the winter. But by now it had become clear that they would have to be separated for a part of the winter as well. She had sent him long letters, full of hopes and yearnings, anxieties and rebellions; but in the end she had brought herself to face the inevitable. And then it transpired that even a greater sacrifice was required of her—she was to be forbidden to see Thyrsis at all! If a man did not support his wife, said the world, it was common-sense that he should not have any wife; that was the quickest way to bring him to his senses. And so the two had threshed out that problem, and chosen their course; they would live in the same city, and yet confine themselves to writing letters!

A curious feeling it gave Thyrsis, to know that she was so near to him, and yet not to be going to meet her! He could not endure any part of the city where he had been with her, and got himself a hall bedroom on the edge of a tenement-district far up town. Then he had his shoes shined, and purchased a clean collar, and wrote Miss Ethelynda Lewis that he was ready to call. While he was waiting to hear from her, there came to him a strange adventure; assuredly one of the strangest that ever befell a struggling poet, in a world where many strange adventures have befallen struggling poets.

For six months Thyrsis had not seen his baby; and

there had come in the meantime so many letters, telling so many miraculous things about that baby! So many dreams he had dreamed about it, so many hopes and so many prayers were centered in it! Twenty-two hours had he sat by the bedside when it was born; and through all the trials that had come afterwards, how he had suffered and wept for it! Now his heart was wrung with longing to see it, to touch it—his child. He wrote Corydon that he could not stand it; and Corydon wrote back that he was right—he should surely see the baby. And so it was arranged between them that Thyrsis was to be at a certain place in the park, and she would send the nurse-girl there with little Cedric.

He went and sat upon a bench; and the hour came, and at last down the path strolled a nurse-girl, wheeling a baby-carriage. He looked at the girl— yes, she was Irish, as Corydon had said, and answered all specifications ; and then he looked at the baby, and his heart sank into his boots. Oh, such a baby! With red hair and a pug-nose,plebeian and dull-looking—such a baby! Thyrsis stared at the maid again—and she smiled at him. Then she passed on, and he sank down upon a >• bench. Great God, could it be that that was his child? That he would have to go through life with something so ugly, so alien to him? A terror seized him. It was like a nightmare. He was hardly able to move.

But then he told himself it could not be! Corydon had written him all about the baby; it was beautiful, with a noble head; everyone loved it. But then, were not mothers notoriously blind? Had there ever been a mother dissatisfied with her child? Or a father either, for that matter? Was it not a kind of treason for him to be so disgusted with this one— since it so clearly must be his?

There was none other in sight; and though he waited half an hour, none came. At last he could stand it no more, but hurried away to the nearest telegraph-office. "Has baby red hair?" he wrote. "Did he come to the park?" And then he went to his room and waited, and soon after came the reply: "Baby has golden hair. Nurse was ill. Could not come."

Thyrsis read this, and then shut the door upon the messenger-boy, and burst into wild, hilarious laughter. He stood there with his arms stretched out, invoking all posterity to witness—"What do you think of that? What do you think of that?"

And a full hour later he was sitting by his bedside, his chin supported on his hands, and still invoking posterity. "Will you ever know what I went through?" he was saying. "Will you ever realize w T hat my books have cost?" Then he smiled grimly, thinking of Voltaire's cruel epigram—that "letters addressed to posterity seldom reach their destination!"

§ £. THYRSIS received a reply to his note, and went to call upon Miss Ethelynda Lewis. Miss Lewis dwelt in a luxurious apartment-house on Riverside Drive, where a colored maid showed him into a big parlor, full of spindle-legged gilt furniture upholstered in flowered silk. Also the room contained an ebony grand piano, and a bookcase, in which he had time to notice the works of Maupassant and Marie Corelli.

Then Miss Lewis entered, clad in a morning-gown of crimson "liberty". She was petite and exquisite, full of alluring dimples—and apparently just out of a perfumed bath. Thyrsis sat on the edge of his chair and gazed at her, feeling quite out of his element.

She placed herself on the flowered silk sofa and

talked. "I am immensely interested in that play," she said. "It is quite unique. And you are so young, too—why, you seem just a boy. Really, you know, I think you must be a genius yourself."

Thyrsis murmured something, feeling uncomfortable.

"The only thing is," Miss Lewis went on, "it will need a lot of revision to make it practical."

"In what part?" he asked.

"The love-story, principally," said the other. "You see, in that respect, you have simply thrown your chances away."

"I don't understand," said he.

"You have made your hero act so queerly. Everyone feels that he is in love with Helena—you meant him to be, didn't you? And yet he goes away from her and won't see her! Everyone will be disappointed at that —it's impossible, from every point of view. You'll have to have them married in the last act."

Thyrsis gasped for breath.

"You see," continued Miss Lewis, "I am to play the part of Helena, and I am to be the star. And obviously? it would never do for me to be rejected, and left all up in the air like that. I must have some sort of a love-scene."

"But" -protested the poet—"what you want me to change is what my play is about!"

"How do you mean ?" asked the other.

"Why, it's a new kind of love," he stammered—"a different kind."

"But, people don't understand that kind of love."

"But, Miss Lewis, that's why I wrote my play! I want to make them understand."

"But you can't do anything like that on the stage," said Miss Lewis. "The public won't come to see your

play." And then she went on to explain to him the conditions of success in the business of the theatre.

Thyrsis listened, with a clutch as of ice about his heart. "I am very sorry, Miss Lewis," he said, at last —"but I couldn't possibly do what you ask."

"Couldn't do it!" cried the other, amazed.

"It would not fit into my idea at all."

"But, don't you want to get your play produced?"

"That's just it, I want to get my play produced. If I did what you want me to, it wouldn't be my play. It would be somebody else's play."

And there he stood. The actress argued with him and protested. She showed him what a great chance he had here—one that came to a new and unknown writer but once in a lifetime. Here was a manager ready to give him a good contract, and to put his play on at once in a Broadway theatre; and here was a public favorite anxious to have the leading role. It would be everything he could ask—it would be fame and fortune at one stroke. But Thyrsis only shook his head—he could not do it. He was almost sick with disappointment ; but it was a situation in which there was no use trying to compromise—he simply could not make a "love-story" out of "The Genius".

So at last there came a silence between them—there being nothing more for Miss Lewis to say.

"Then I suppose you won't want the play," said Thyrsis, faintly.

"I don't know," she answered, with vexation. "I'll have to think about it again, and talk to my manager. I had not counted on such a possibility as this."

And so they left it, and Thyrsis went away. The next morning he received a letter from "Robertson Jones, Inc.", asking him to call at once.

§ 3. ROBERTSON JONES, the great "theatrical producer", was large and ponderous, florid of face and firm in manner—the steam-roller type of business-man. And it became evident at once that he had invited Thyrsis to come and be rolled.

"Miss Lewis tells me you can't agree about the play," said he.

"No," said Thyrsis, faintly.

And then Mr. Jones began. He told Thyrsis what he meant to do with this play. Miss Lewis was one of the country's future "stars", and he was willing to back her without stint. He had permitted her to make her own choice of a role, and she should have her way in everything. There were famous playwrights bidding for a chance to write for her; but she had seen fit to choose "The Genius".

"Personally," said Mr. Jones, "I don't believe in the play. I would never think of producing it—it's not the sort of thing anybod}^ is interested in. But Miss Lewis likes it; she's been reading Ibsen, and she wants to do a 'drama of ideas', and all that sort of thing, you know. And that's all right—she's the sort to make a success of whatever she does. But you must do your share, and give her a part she can make something out of—some chance to show her charm. Otherwise, of course, the thing's impossible."

Mr. Jones paused. "I'm very sorry"—began Thyrsis, weakly.

"What's your idea in refusing?" interrupted the other.

Thyrsis tried to explain—that he had written the play to set forth a certain thesis, and that he was asked to make changes that directly contradicted this thesis.

THE END OF THE TETHER 367

"Have you ever had a play produced?" demanded the manager abruptly.

"No," said Thyrsis.

"Have you written any other plays?"

"No."

"Your first trial! Well, don't you think it a good deal to expect that your play should be perfect?"

"I don't think"—began Thyrsis.

"Can't you see," persisted the other, "that people who have been in this business all their lives, and have watched thousands of plays succeed and fail, might be able to give you some points on the matter?" -And then Mr. Jones went on to set forth to Thyrsis the laws of the theatrical game—a game in which there was the keenest competition, and in which the "ante" was enormously high. To produce "The Genius" would cost ten thousand dollars at the least; and were those who staked this to have no say whatever in the shaping of the play? Manifestly this was absurd; and as the manager pressed home the argument, Thyrsis felt as if he wanted to get up and run! When Mr. Jones talked to you, he looked you squarely in the eye, and you had a feeling of presumption, even of guilt, in standing out against him. Thyrsis shrunk in terror from that type of personality—he would let it have anything in the world it wanted, so only it would not clash with him. But never before had it demanded one of the children of his dreams!

Mr. Jones went on to tell how many things he would do for the play. It would go into rehearsal at once, and would be seen on Broadway by the first of February. They would pay him four, six and eight per cent., and his profits could not be less than three hundred dollars a week. With Ethelynda Lewis in the

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368 LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

leading role the play might well run until June—and there would be the road profits the next season, in addition.

Thyrsis' brain reeled as he listened to this; it was in all respects identical with another famous temptation —"The devil taketh him upon a high mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the earth!"

"And then there is England"—the man was saying.

"No, no!" cried Thyrsis, wildly. "No!"

'But why not?" demanded the other. 'It's impossible! I couldn't do it!"

"You mean you couldn't do the writing?"

"I wouldn't know how to!"

"Well then, that's easily arranged. Let me get some one to collaborate with you. There's Richard Haber-ton—you know who he is?"

"No," said Thyrsis, faintly.

"He's the author of 'The Rajah's Diamond'—it's playing with five companions now, and its third season. And he dramatized 'In Honor's Cause'—you've seen that, no doubt. We have paid him some sixty thousand dollars in royalties so far. And he'll take the play and fix it over—you wouldn't have to stir a finger."

Thyrsis sprang up in his agitation. "Please don't ask me, Mr. Jones," he cried. "I simply could not do it!"

It seemed strange to Thyrsis, when he thought it over afterwards, that the great Robertson Jones should have taken the trouble to argue so long with the unknown author of a play in which he did not believe. Was it that opposition incited him to persist? Or had he told Ethelynda Lewis he would get her what she wanted, and was now reluctant to confess defeat? At

iv rate, so it was—he went on to drive Thyrsis into

a corner, to tear open his very soul. Also, he manifested anger; it was a deliberate affront that the boy should stand out like this. And Thyrsis, in great distress of soul, explained that he did not mean it that way—he apologized abjectly for his obstinacy. It was the ideas that he had tried to put into his play, and that he could not give up!

"But," persisted the manager—"write other plays, and put your ideas into them. If you've once had a Broadway success, then you can write anything you please, and you can make your own terms for production."

That thought had already occurred to Thyrsis; it was the one that nearly broke down his resistance. He would probably have surrendered, had the play not been so fresh from his mind, and so dear to him; if he had had time enough to become dissatisfied with it, as he had with his first novel—or discouraged about its prospects, as he had with "The Hearer of Truth"! But this child of his fancy was not yet weaned; and to tear it from his breast, and hand it to the butcher— no, it could not be thought of!

§ 4». So he parted from Mr. Jones, and went home, to pass two of the most miserable days of his life. He had pronounced his "Apage, Satanas!" —he had turned his back upon the kingdoms of the earth. And so presumably—virtue being its own reward—he should have been in a state of utter bliss. But Thyrsis had gone deeper into that problem, and asked himself a revolutionary question: Why should it always be that Satan had the kingdoms of the earth at his bestowal? Thyrsis did not want any kingdoms—he only wanted a chance to live in the country with his wife and child.

And why, in order to get these things, must a poet submit himself to Satan?

Then came the third morning after his interview; and Thyrsis found in his mail another letter from Robertson Jones, Inc. It was a letter brief and to the point, and it struck him like a thunderbolt.

"Miss Ethelynda Lewis has decided that she wishes to accept your play as it stands. I enclose herewith a contract in duplicate, and if the terms are acceptable to you, will you kindly return one copy signed, and retain the other yourself."

Thyrsis read, not long after that, of a young playwright who died of heart-failure; and he was not surprised—if all playwrights had to go through experiences such as that. He could hardly believe his eyes, and he read the letter over two or three times; he read the contract, with Mr. Jones' impressive signature at the bottom. He did not know anything about theatrical contracts, but this one seemed fair to him. It provided for a royalty upon the gross receipts, to be paid after the play had earned the expenses of its production. Thyrsis had hoped that he might get some cash in advance, but that was not mentioned. In the flush of his delight he concluded that he would not take the risk of demanding anything additional, but signed the contract and mailed it, and sent a telegram to acquaint Corydon with the glorious tidings.

§5. ONE of the consequences of this triumph was that Thyrsis purchased a new necktie and half a dozen collars; and another was that an angry world was in some part appeased, and permitted the struggling poet to see his wife and child once more.

They met in the park; and strange it was to him to

see Corydon after six months' absence. She was beautiful as ever, somewhat paler, though still with the halo of motherhood about her. He could scarcely realize that she was his; she seemed like a dream to him—like some phantom of music, thrilling and wonderful, yet frail and unsubstantial. She clung to his arm, trembling with delight, and pouring out her longing and her grief. There came to them one of those golden hours, when the deeps of their souls welled up, and they pledged themselves anew to their faith.

Even stranger it was to see the child; to be able to look at him all he pleased, and to speak to him, and to hold him in his arms! He was as beautiful as Thyrsis could have wished, and the father had no trouble at all in being interested in him; his smiles were things to make the angels jealous. Thyrsis would push his carriage out into the park, and they would sit upon a bench and gaze at him—each making sure that the other had missed none of his fine points.

He was beginning to make sounds now, and had achieved the word "puss-ee". This originally had signified the woolly kitten he carried with him, but now by a metonymy it had come to include all kinds of living things; and great was the delight of the parents when a big red automobile flashed past, and the baby pointed his finger, exclaiming gleefully, "Puss-ee!" It is an astonishing thing, how little it takes to make parents happy; regarded purely as an abstract proposition, it would be difficult to explain why two people who possessed between them a total of sixty-four teeth, more or less, should have been so much excited by the discovery that the baby had four.

But parenthood, as Thyrsis found, meant more than charming baby-prattle and the counting of teeth. Little

Cedric's tiny fingers were twisted in his heart-strings —he loved him with a love the intensity of which frightened him when he realized it. And sometimes things went wrong, and then with a pang as from the stab of a knife would come the thought that he might some day lose this child. So much pain and toil a child cost, so much it took of one's strength and power; and then, such a fragile thing it was—exposed to so many perils and uncertainties, to the ravages of so many diseases, that struck like a cruel enemy in the dark! Corydon and Thyrsis were so ignorant—they were like children themselves; and where should they turn for knowledge? There were doctors, of course; but this took so much money—and even with all the doctors, see how many babies died!

Thyrsis was learning the bitter truth of Bacon's saying about "giving hostages to fortune." And dearly as he loved the child, the artist in him cried out against these ties. Where now was that care-free outlook, that recklessness, that joy in life as a spectacle, which made up so much of the artist's attitude? When one had a wife and child one no longer enjoyed tragedies —one lived them ; and one got from them, not katharsis, but exhaustion. One became timid and cautious and didactic, and. other inartistic things. One learned that life was real, life was earnest, and the grave was not its goal!

Cedric had been weaned; but still he was not growing properly. Could it be that there was something wrong with what they fed him ? Corydon would come upon advertisements telling of wonderful newly-discovered foods for infants, and giving pictures of the rosy and stalwart ones who were fed upon these foods. She would take to buying them—and they were not cteap foods

either. Then, during the winter, the child caught cold; and they took that to mean that it had been in some way exposed—that was what everybody said, and what the name "cold" itself suggested. So Corydon would add more flannel dresses and blankets, until the unfortunate mite of life would be in a purple stew. And still, apparently, these mysterious "colds" were not to be thwarted. Thyrsis felt that in all this there must be something radically wrong, and yet he knew not what to do. Surely it should not have been such a task to keep life in one human infant.

Then, too, the training of the baby was going badly. He lived in close contact with nervous people who were disturbed if he cried; and so Corydon's energies were given to a terrified effort to keep him from crying. He must be dandled and rocked to sleep, he must be played with and amused, and have everything he cried for; and it was amazing how early in life this little creature learned fhe hold which he had upon his mother. His chief want had come to be to sleep all day and lie awake half the night; and during these hours of wakefulness he pursued the delightful pastime of holding some one's hand and playing with it. Corydon, nervous and sick and wrestling with melancholia, would have to lie awake for uncounted hours and submit to this torment. The infant had invented a name for the diversion; he called it "Hoodaloo mungie" -which being translated signified "Hold your finger". To the mother this was like the pass-word of some secret order of demons, who preyed upon and racked her in the night; so that never after in her life could she hear the phrase, even in jest, without experiencing a nervous shock.

§ §. THIS was a period of great hopefulness for

Thyrsis, but also of desperate struggle. For until the production of his play in January, he had somehow to keep alive, and that meant more hack-work. Also he had to lay something by, for after the rehearsals the play would go on the road for a couple of weeks, to be "tried on the dog"; and during that period he must have money enough to travel, and stay at hotels, and also to take Corydon with him, if possible.