Love's pilgrimage

She shuddered at the thought; there came to her a perfectly definite impulse of hatred—hatred of the child, of its noise and its demands. She had felt it before—sometimes as a dull, cold dislike, sometimes as something passionate. Why should she have to sacrifice herself to this insatiable creature, whom she did not love? What did it matter to her if other women loved their children ? She had wanted life—and was this life? At that moment the cry of "hoodaloo-mungie" symbolized for her all the sordid cares and nervous agony of her existence.

And suddenly, unexpectedly, a daring impulse seized her. "No!" she thought, and set her teeth—"I'll let him cry! I'll cure him of this—and I'll do it to-night!" So she turned and told Cedric to go to sleep; at which, of course, the child began to scream.

Corydon lay very still in the dark, her eyes wide and every nerve tense. She could not feel, she could not think; it seemed as though she were deprived of every sense except that of hearing; and in her, through her, and around her rang a senseless din, piercing, intense, increasing in volume every minute, and completely drowning out the beating of the rain.

"Can I stand it?" she thought. "Or will his lungs

burst? And yet, I must, I must—this can't go on forever !" And so she clenched her hands and waited. But the sounds did not diminish in the slightest; ten minutes, twenty minutes must have passed, and the baby only seemed to gain increased power with each crescendo.

It seemed to Corydon at last as«though she had always lain like this, and as though she. must for endless time. She found herself getting used to it even; her muscles relaxed. There came to her a sense of the ludicrous side of .it. "He means to conquer me!" she thought. "Can I hold out? If I only had something to think about, then I'd be a match for him." And suddenly the inspiration came to her. •"!'!! write a poem!"

What should it be about ? The rain had been increasing in violence, and she became conscious of the steady downpour; it fascinated her, and she concentrated her attention upon it, and began

•"I am the rain, that comes in spring!"

%

So, after a while, she found herself in the throes of composition; she was eager, excited—and marvel of marvels, utterly forgetful of the baby! She had never tried to write verses before; but it did not seem at all difficult to her now.

The poem was simple and optimistic—it told of the beneficent qualities of rain, as it would appear to one whose roof did not leak. Somewhere in the course of it there was this stanza:

"I am the rain that comes at night, When all in slumber is folded light— Save one by weary vigils worn Who counteth the drops unto the morn."

This seemed to her an impressive bit, and she wondered what Thyrsis would think of it.

There were eight stanzas altogether, and when she finished the last of them the dawn was breaking, and it seemed hours since she had begun. As for the baby, he was still crying. She turned and peered at him; his eyelids drooped, and the crying came in spasms and gasps—it sounded very feeble, and a trifle perfunctory. Obviously he could not hold out much longer; Corydon would win, yes, she had won already. She lay still, andi thrills of happiness went through her. Was it the poem, or the thought of her release, and the nights of quiet sleep in the future?

When Thyrsis came in, an hour or two later, he found her huddled up in blankets on the floor of the living-room, her cheeks bright, her hair dishevelled. How fascinating she looked in such a guise! She was eagerly pondering her poem; and the baby was sleeping quietly, save for a few convulsive gasps, the last stragglers of his routed forces.

"And oh, Thyrsis," she exclaimed, "to-morrow night he will only cry half as long, and still less the next night. And soon he will go to sleep quietly like any well brought-up, civilized baby. And, my dear, I believe I'm going to be a poetess—I think that to-night I was really inspired!"

So he made haste to build a fire, and then came and sat and listened to the poem. How eagerly she waited for his verdict! How she hung upon his words! And what should a man do in such a case—should he be a husband or a critic? Should he be an amateur or a professional?

But even as he hesitated, the damage was done. "Oh,

you don't like it!" she cried. "You don't think it's good at all!"

"My dear," he argued, "poetry is such a difficult thing to write. And there are so many standards— a thing can be good, and yet not good! The heights are so far away "

"But oh, how can I ever get there," wailed Corydon, "if nobody gives me any encouragement?"

§ 9. THE time had now come for Thyrsis to put his job through. There was no longer any excuse for hesitation or delay. The book had come to ripeness in him; the birth-hour was at hand, and he must go and have it out with himself. He explained these things to Corydon, sitting beside her and holding her hands; they ascended once more to the heights of consecration; they renewed their vows of fortitude and faith, and then he went away.

For weeks thereafter he would be like the ghost of a man in the house, haggard and silent and preoccupied. All the work that he had ever done in his life seemed but child's play in comparison. Before this he had portrayed the struggles of men and women; but now he was to portray the agony of a whole nation—his heart must beat with the pulse of millions of suffering people. And the task was like a fiend that came upon him in the night-time and laid hold of him, dragging him away to sights of terror and madness. He was never safe from the thing for a moment—he could never tell when it might assail him. He might be washing the dishes, or wrestling with the refractory pump; but the vision would come to him, and he would wander off into the forest—perhaps to sit, crouching

in the snow, trembling, and staring at the pageant in his soul.

He lived in the midst of battles; the smoke of powder always in his nostrils, the crash of musketry and the thunder of cannon in his ears. He saw the cavalry sweeping over the plains, the infantry crouching behind intrenchments; he heard the yells of the combatants, the shrieks of the wounded and dying; he saw the mangled bodies, and the ground slippery with blood. New aspects of the thing kept coming to him—new glimpses into meanings yet untold. They would come to him in great bursts of emotion, like tempests that swept him away; and these things he had to wrestle with and master. It meant toil, the like of which he had never faced before, a tension of all his faculties, that would last for hours and hours, and leave him bathed in perspiration, and utterly exhausted.

A scene would come to him, in some moment of insight ; and he would drop everything else, and follow it. He would go over it, at the same time both creating and beholding it, at the same time both overwhelmed by it and controlling it—but above all things else, remembering it! He would be like Aladdin in the palace, stuffing his pockets with priceless jewels; coming away so loaded down that he could hardly stagger, and spilling them on every side. Then, scarcely pausing to rest, he would go back after what he had lost; he would grope about, gathering diamonds and rubies that he had all but forgotten—or perhaps coming upon new vaults and new treasure-chests.

So he would labor over a description, going over it and over it, not so much working it out, as letting it work itself out and stamp itself upon his memory. It made no difference how long the scene might be, he

would not write a word of it; it might be some battle-picture, that would fill thirty or forty pages—he would know it all by heart, as Demosthenes or Webster might have known an oration. And only at the end would he write it down.

Over some of the scenes in this new book he labored thus for two or three weeks at a stretch; there would be literally not a moment of the day, nor perhaps of the night, when the thing was not working in some part of his mind. He would think about it for hours before he fell asleep; and when he opened his eyes it would be waiting at his bedside to pounce upon him. If he tried for even a few minutes to rest, or to divert his mind to some other work, he would find himself ill at ease and troubled, with a sense as of something pulling at him, calling to him. And if anything came to interrupt him, then he would be like a baker whose oven grows cold before the bread is half done—it would be a sad labor making anything out of that batch of bread.

§ 10. AND this work he had to do as a married man, the father of a family and the head of a household; living with a child who was one incessant and irrepressible demand for attention, and a wife who was wrestling with weakness and sickness—eating out her heart in cruel loneliness, and cowering in the grip of fiends of melancholia and despair!

He had thought that when they moved into the new home, their domestic trials would be at an end. But now the cruel winter fell upon them. They had never known what a winter in the country was like; they came to see why the farmer had protested against their building in such a remote place. There were many days when they could not get to town, and some when they

could not even get to the farm-house. Also there was the pump, which was continually freezing, and necessitating long and troublesome operations before they could get any water.

It was, as fate would have it, the worst winter in the oldest inhabitant's memory. The farmer's well froze over on three occasions, and it had never frozen before, so he declared. For such weather as this they were altogether unprepared; they had only a wood-stove, and could not keep a fire all night; and the cheap blankets they had bought were made all of cotton, and gave them almost no protection. They would not sleep with the windows down; and so, for weeks at a time, they would go to bed with their clothing, even their overcoats on; and would pile curtains and rugs upon these—and even so, they would waken at two or three o'clock in the morning, shivering and chilled to the bone.

And in this icy room they would have to get up and build a fire; and it might be half an hour before they could get the house warm. Also, they had no facilities for bathing; and so little by little they began to lose their habits of decency—there were days when Corydon left her face unwashed, and forgot to brush her hair. Everyday, it seemed, they slipped yet further down the grade. Thyrsis would work until he was faint and exhausted, and then he would come over, and find there was nothing ready to eat. By the time that he and Corydon had cooked a meal, they would both of them be ravenous, and they would sit and devour their food like a couple of savages. Then, because they had overeaten, they would have to rest before they cleared things away; and like as not Thyrsis would get to thinking about his work, and go off and leave everything—and the dishes and the food might stay up on the table until

the next meal. There was nearly always a piled-up mass of dishes and skillets and sauce-pans in the house —to Thyrsis these soiled dishes were the original source of the myth of Sisyphus and his labor.

And then there was the garbage-pail that he had forgotten to empty, and the lamps he had neglected to fill, and the slop-pails and the other utensils of domesticity. There were the diapers that somebody had to wash— and outside was always the bitter, merciless cold, that drove them in and shut them up with all this horror. The time came, as the winter dragged on, when the house which they had built with so many sacrifices, and into which they had moved with such eager anticipations, came to seem to them like a cave in which a couple of wild beasts cowered for shelter.

§ 11. THERE was another great change which this cold weather effected in their lives; it broke down the barriers they had been at such pains to build up between them. It was all very well for them to agree that they were "brother and sister," and that it was impossible for them ever to think of anything else. But now came a time when night after night the thermometer went to ten or fifteen degrees below zero; and first Thyrsis gave more bedding to Corydon—because she was able to suffer more than he; and he would go over to his cold hut alone, and crawl into a cold bed, and lie there the whole night through without a wink of sleep. But then, as the cold held on for a week or more, the resistance of both of them was broken down—they were like two animals which crawl into the same hole to keep each other from freezing. They piled all their bedding upon one narrow cot; and sleeping thus, they could be warm. Even then, they tried to keep to the resolution

they had made; but this, it seemed, was not within the power of flesh and blood; and so, once more, the sex-factor was introduced into the complications of their lives.

To Thyrsis this thing was like some bird of prey that circled in the sky just above him—its shadow filling him with a continual fear, the swish of its wings making him cringe. He was never happy about it; there was no time in his life when he was not in a state of inward war. His intellect rebelled; and on the other hand, there was a part of his nature that craved this sex-experience and welcomed it—and this part, it seemed, was favored by all the circumstances of life. There was no chance to settle the matter in the light of reason, to test it by any moral or aesthetic law; blind fate decreed that one part of him should have the shaping of his character, the determining of his needs.

He tried to make clear to himself the basis of his distrust. Sexual intercourse as a habit —this was the formula by which he summed it up to himself. To be right, to win the sanction of the intellect and the conscience, the sex-act must be the result of a supreme creative impulse. Its purpose was the making of a new soul—and this could never be right until those who took that responsibility had used their reasons, and determined that circumstances were such that the new soul might be a sound and free and happy and beautiful soul. And how different was this from the customs which prevailed under the sanction of the "holy bonds of matrimony"! When sexual intercourse became a self-indulgence, like the eating of candy, or the drinking of liquor; a thing of the body, and the body alone; a thing determined by physical propinquity, by the

eight and contact of the flesh, the dressing and undressing in the same room!

Then again, the means which they had to use to prevent conception—which destroyed all spontaneity in their relationship, and dragged the thing out into the cold light of day! And the continual fear that they might have made another blunder! Something of this sort was always happening, or seeming to have happened, or threatening to have happened, so that they waited each month in suspense and dread. It was this which made the terror of the whole matter to Thyrsis, and had so much to do with his repugnance. They were like people drawing lots for a death-sentence; like people who ate from dishes, one of which they knew to contain poison. What was the tragic destiny that hung over them—the Nemesis that gripped them, and forced them to take such a chance?

But the barriers were down, and there was no building them up again; Thyrsis never even tried, because of the revelation which came to him from Corydon's side. Corydon was craving, reaching out hungrily for something which she had not in herself, and which life did not give her in sufficiency. She called this thing "love"; and she had no hesitations and no limits to her demand for it. To Thyrsis this "love" was something quite else—it was sustenance and support. To demand it was an act of weakness, and to yield it was a kind of spiritual blood-transfusion. It was the first law of his life-code that every soul must stand upon its own feet and walk its own way; and to surrender that spiritual autonomy was the one blunder for which there could be no pardon.

But then—he would argue with himself—what folly it was to talk of such things in their position! They

were not souls at all—the life of the soul was not for them, the laws of the soul had nothing to do with them. They were two bodies—two miserable and cold and sick and tormented bodies; and with yet a third body, utterly helpless and dependent upon them—in defiance of all the most high-sounding pronouncements about "the soul"!

So Thyrsis would mock himself into subjection once more, and go on to play his part as husband and father and head of a household of bodies. He would play the game of "love" as Corydon wanted it played; he would yield to her demands, he would gratify her cravings, he would force himself to take her point of view. But then the other mood would come upon him—the mood that he knew to be the real expression of himself. He would begin the battle of his genius again; he would "hear the echoes afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting". If one gave one's self up to the body, and accepted the regimen and the laws of the body, how should the soul ever come to be free? To make such a concession was to pass upon it a sentence of life-imprisonment!

So would come to Thyrsis again that sense of the awful tragedy that was impending in their lives. Some day, he knew, he would break out of this prison. Some day, he knew, he would have to be himself, and live his own life!

And meanwhile, how pitiful were Corydon's attempts to shape him to her needs, and to persuade herself that she was succeeding in doing it! She would set forth to him elaborately how much he had improved; how much gentler and more human he was—in contrast with that blind and stupid and egotistical and impossible person she had first known. And with what bitterness Thyrsis

would hear this—and how he had to struggle to suppress his feeling! For he knew that those qualities which were so hateful to her, were but the foam cast up to the surface of his soul by the seething of his genius within. When it had ceased altogether, how placid and still would be tl?2 pool—and what a beautiful mirror it would make fo^ Corydon to behold her own features in!

§ 12. *!N later years they used to discuss this problem, and they could never be sure what would have happened in their lives—what would have been the reaction of their different temperaments—if they had been given any fair chance to live and grow as they wanted to. But here they were, mashed together in this stew-pot of domesticity, with all the most unlovely aspects of things forced continually upon their attention. Each was in some way a handicap and a torment to the other —a means which fate used to limit and crush and destroy the other; and as ever, they had in their hours of anguish no recourse save to sit down and reason it out together, and absolve each other from blame. i Thyrsis invented a phrase whereby he might make this point clear to Corydon, and keep it in her thoughts. The phrase was "the economic screw"; it pressed upon him, and through him it crushed her. All things that he sought to be and could not be, all things that he would not be and was ; all that was hard and unloving in him—his irritability and impatience, his narrowness and bitterness—in all this he showed her that cruel force that was destroying them both.

It was a hard role for Thyrsis, to be the judge and the jury and the executioner of the stern will of this "economic screw". There was, for instance, the episode

of the "turkey-rred table-cover", which became a classic in their later lives. Corydon was always chafing at the bareness of their little home; and going into the shops in the town, and discovering things which might have made it lovely. One evil day she went alone; and when she came back, Thyrsis, as usual, pounced upon his mail, and came upon a letter from a magazine-editor whom he had been trying to please with an article, and who now scolded him mercilessly for his obstinacy and his egotism and his didacticism, and all his other un-publishable qualities. Then came the unwrapping of the bundles, and Corydon's guileless and joyful announcement that she had come upon a wonderful bargain in the dry-goods store, a beautiful piece of "turkey-red" cloth which would serve as the table-cover for which her soul had been pining—and which she had obtained for the incredibly small sum of thirty cents!

Whereupon, of course, Thyrsis began to exclaim in dismay. Thirty cents was a third of all they had to live upon for a day! And to pay it for a fool piece of rag for which they had no earthly need! So Corydon sank down in the middle of the floor and dissolved in floods of tears; and at the next trip into town the "turkey-red table-cover" was returned, and over the bare board table there were new expositions of the theory of the "economic screw"!

To these arguments Corydon would listen and assent. With her intellect she was at one with him, and she strove to make this intellect supreme. But always, deep underneath, was the other side of her being, that had nothing to do with intellect, but was pure primitive impulse—and that pushed and drove in her always, and carried her away the moment that intellect loosened its brake. Corydon was ashamed of this primitive self

—she was always repudiating it, always shutting her eyes to it. There was no way to wound her so deeply as to posit its reality and identify it with her.

She was always fighting to make her temperament like Thyrsis'; she despised her own temperament utterly, and set up his qualities as her ideal. He was self-contained and masterful; he knew What he wanted and how to get it; he was not dependent upon anyone else, he needed no one's approval or admiration; he could control his emotions, and destroy those that inconvenienced him. So Corydon must be these things also; she was these things, and no one must gainsay it! And if ever she had felt or wished or said or done anything else— that was all misunderstanding or delusion or accident; she would repudiate it with grief and indignation, and proclaim herself the creature of pure reason that every person ought to be!

But then would come something that appealed t.o her emotions—to her love of beauty, her craving for joy; and there in a flash was the primitive self again. The task of compelling Corydon to economy reminded her husband of a toy which had been popular in his childhood days. The name of it was "Pigs in Clover"; there were five little balls which vou had to coax into

•>

a narrow entrance, and while you were getting the last one in, the other four were almost certain to roll out. It was a labor of hours to get Corydon to recognize an unpleasant fact; and then—the next day she had forgotten it. There were some things about himself and his life that he could never get her to understand; for instance, his preoccupation with the newspaper—that symbol of all that was hateful in life. Just then was the beginning of the Russian revolution; and to Thyrsis the Russian revolution was like the coming of relief to

a shipwrecked mariner. It was a personal thing to him —the overthrow of a horror that pressed upon the fife of every human being upon earth. And so each day he hungered for the news, and when the paper came he would pounce upon it.

"Now dearest," he would say, "please don't disturb me. I want to read."

"All right," she would answer; and five minutes

would pass.

Then—"Do you want potatoes for supper, Thyrsis?'

"Yes, dear. But I'm reading now."

"All right." And then another five minutes.

"Thyrsis, who was Boadicea?"

"I'm reading now, dearest."

"Oh yes." And then another five minutes.

"Thyrsis, do you spell choke with an a?"

At which Thyrsis would put down the paper. 'Tell me, Corydon—isn't there something I can do so that you won't interrupt me?"

Instantly a look of pain would sweep across her face. "Do you have to speak to me like that, Thyrsis ? If you'd only just tell me, kindly and pleasantly "

"But I've told you three or four times!'

"Thyrsis! How can you say that?"

"But didn't I?"

"Why, of course not!"

And then they would have an argument. He would bring up each case and confront her with it; and how very unloving a procedure was that—and how exasperating was his manner as he did it!

§ 13. THEN again, Corydon would be going into town to do some shopping; and he would ask her to bring out the afternoon paper. It would be the day

of the October massacre, for instance; and he would be on fire for the next batch of news. He would explain this to her; he would tell her again and again—^whatever else she forgot, she must remember the afternoon paper. He would walk out to meet her, burning with impatience; and he would ask for the paper, and see a blank look come over her face.

Then, of course, he would scold. He had certain phrases—"How perfectly unspeakable! Perfectly paralyzing !" How she hated these phrases!

"I had so many things to get!" she would exclaim. "But only one thing for me, Corydon!" "Everything is for you—just as much as for myself! AH these groceries—look at the bundles! I

haven't had a single moment "

"But how many moments does it take to buy a newspaper?"

"But Thyrsis "

"And how many times would I have to tell you? Have I got to go into town myself, just for the sake of a newspaper?"

"I tell you I tried my very best to remember it "

"But what's the matter with you? Is your mind getting weak?"

And then like as not Corydon would burst into tears. "Oh, I think you are a brute!" she would cry. "A perfect brute!"

Or else, perhaps, she would grow angry, and they would rail at each other, exchanging recriminations.

"I think I have burdens enough in my life," he would exclaim. "I've a right to some help from you."

'You have no sense of proportion!" she would answer. 'You are impossible! You would drive any saint to distraction."

"Perhaps so. But I can't drive you anywhere, and I'm sick of trying."

"Oh, if you only weren't such a talker! You talk— talk—talk!"

And all the while they did this, what grief was in the depths of them! And afterwards, what ghastly wounds in Corydon's soul, that had to be bound up and tended and healed! The pity of it, the shame of it—that they should be able to descend to such sordidness! That their love, which they had planned as a noble temple, should turn out an ugly hovel!

"Oh Thyrsis!" the girl would cry. "The idea that you should think less of my soul than of an old newspaper !"

"But that is not so, dearest," he would answer. He would try to explain to her how much the newspaper had meant to him, and just why his annoyance had got the better of him. So they would rehearse the scene over again; and like as not their irritation would sweep over them, and before they realized it they would find themselves disputing once more.

Thyrsis would be making a desperate attempt to bring her to a realization of his difficulties; he would be in the midst of pouring out some eloquence, when she would interrupt him.

"But Thyrsis, wait a moment—you do not understand !"

"I am speaking!" he would say.

"But, Thyrsis "

"I am speaking!" He would not be interrupted.

But then would come a time when they sat down together and talked all this out, perceiving it as one more aspect of the disharmony of their temperaments. It was no fault of either of them, they would agree; it

was just that they were different. Thyrsis had a simile that he used—"It's a marriage between a butterfly and a hippopotamus. You don't blame the butterfly because it can't get down into the water and snort; and on the other hand, when the hippopotamus tries to flap his wings and flit about among the flowers, he doesn't make a success of it."

There would be times when he took Corydon's point of view entirely. She was beautiful and good; her naivete and guilelessness were the essence of her charm; and how preposterous it was to expect her to think about newspapers, or to be familiar with the price of beefsteaks ! As for him—he was a blundering creature, dull and pragmatical; he was a great spiny monster that she had drawn up from the ocean-depths. She would cut off his spines, but at once they grew out again; she could do nothing with him at all!

But then she would protest. "It's not so bad as that, Thyrsis. You have your work."

"Yes, that's it," he would answer. "My work! I'm just a thinking-machine. I'm fit for nothing else. And here I am—married!"

He would say that, and he would mean it; he would try to act upon the conviction. Of course Corydon's nature was a thing more lovely than his ; and, of course, it ought to have its way, to grow in freedom and joy. But alas—there was "the economic screw"! His qualities—hateful though they might be—were the product of stern conditions; they were the qualities which had to dominate in their lives, if they were to survive in the grim struggle for life.

§ 14. IT was, as always, their tragedy that they had no means of communicating, except through suffering;

they had no work, and they had no art, and they had no religion. To Thyrsis it seemed that this last was the supreme need of their lives; but it was quite in vain that he tried to supply it. He had no theologies to offer, but he had a rough working faith that served his needs. He had a way of prayer—informal prayers, to the undiscovered gods—"Oh infinite Holiness of life, I seek to be reminded of Thee!" He would contemplate their failures and agonies and despairs, and floods of pity would well up in him; and then he would come back to Corydon, seeking to make these things real to her. But this he could never do—he could never carry her with him, he could never find anything with her but failure and disappointment.

This was, in part, the outrage that the creed-mongers had done to her; with their dead formulas and their grotesque legends and their stupid bigotries they had sullied and defaced all the symbols of religion—they had made a noble temple into a sepulchre of dead bones. They had taken her by force, when she was a child, and dragged her into it, and filled her with terror and loathing. To abandon the language of metaphor, they had sent her to a Protestant-Episcopal Sunday-school, where a vinegary spinster had taught her the catechism and the ten commandments. And so forever after the whole content of Christianity was a thing alien and hateful to her.

But also, in their disharmony was something even more fundamental. Corydon's emotions did not come in the same way as her husband's. With her a joy had to be a spontaneous thing; there could be no reasoning about it, and it was not the product nor the occasion of any act of will. In fact, if anyone were to say to Corvdon, "Come, let us experience a certain emotion"

then straightway it would become certain that she might experience any emotion in the world, save only that one.

Thyrsis told himself that he was to blame for this, having destroyed her spontaneity in the very beginning. But how was he to have known that, understanding as he did no temperament but his own, being powerless to handle any tools but his own? The process of his soul's life was to tell himself all his vices over; and so he would become filled with hatred of himself, and would forthwith evolve into something different. But with Corydon, this method produced, not rage and resolution, but only black despair. The process of Corydon's soul-life was that some one else should come to her, and tell her that she was radiant and exquisite; and straightway she would become these things, and yet more of them; and until such a person came to her, all her soul's life stood still.

This was illustrated whenever there was any misunderstanding between them, any crisis of unhappiness or fit of melancholia. It was quite in vain at such times that Thyrsis would ask her to sweep these things aside and forget them; it was disastrous to suggest that she put any blame upon herself, or scold herself into a different attitude. He might take days to make up his mind to do what he had to do—yet that fit of misery would last until he had come and done it. He had to put his arms about her, and make her realize that she was precious to him, that she was necessary to him, that he loved her and appreciated her and believed in her; so, and so only, would the current of her life begin once more to flow.

And why could he not do this more quickly? Why did he have to wait until she had suffered agonies ? Why did he have to be dragged to it by the hair of his head, as

it were—as a means of keeping her from going insane from misery? Was it that he did not really love her? Mocking voices in his soul told him that was it—but he knew it was not so. He loved her; but he loved her in his way, and that was not her way. And how shall one explain that strange impulse in the heart of man, that makes it impossible for him to be content with anything that is upon the earth—that makes him restless in the presence of beauty and love and joy, and all those things with which he so obviously ought to be content?

It is so clearly irrational and unjustifiable; and yet that impulse continues to drive him forth, as it drove him to destroy the statues in the Athenian temples, and to burn the silken robes and the jewelled treasures in the public-squares of Venice. One contemplates the thing in its most unlovely aspects—in the form of Simeon Stylites upon his pillar, devoured by worms, or of Bernard Gui, with his racks and his thumb-screws and his "secular arm"—and it seems the very culmination of all human madness and horror. And yet, it does not cease to come; and he upon whom it seizes may not free himself by any power of his will, by any cunning of his wit; and no agony of yearning and grief may be sufficient to enable him to love a woman as a woman desires to be loved.

§ 15. THYRSIS would work over the book until he was utterly exhausted; and then, limp as a rag, he would come back to the world of reality and face these complications. He needed to rest, he needed to be soothed and comforted and sung to sleep; he needed to receive—and instead he had to give. Sometimes he wondered vaguely if this might not have been otherwise;

he knew nothing about women—but surely there might have been, somewhere in the world, some woman who would have understood, and would have asked nothing from him. But he dwelt on that thought but seldom, for it seemed a kind of treason; he was not married to any such hypothetical woman—he was married to Cory-don, and it was Corydon he had to save from the wolves.

So, time after time, he would come back to her, and take the cup of her pain in his trembling hands, and put it to his lips and drain it to the dregs. He would sit with her, and hear the tale of her struggles, he would fan the sparks of his exhausted emotions into flame, so that she might warm herself by the glow. And when the burden became too great for him, when the black floods of anguish and despair which she poured out upon him threatened to engulf him altogether— then he would tramp away into the forest, or out upon the snow-encrusted hills, and call up the demons of his soul once more, and proclaim himself unconquered and unconquerable. He would spread his wings to the glory of his vision; he would feel again the surge and sweep of it, he would sing aloud with the power of it, and pledge himself anew to live for it—if need be even to die for it.

The world was trying to crush it in him; the world hated it and feared it, and was bound that it should not live; and Thyrsis had sworn to save it—and so the issue was joined. He would hearten himself for the struggle—he would fling himself into the thick of it, again and again; he would summon up that thing which he called his Genius, that fountain of endless force that boiled up within him. Whatever strength they brought against him, he could match it; he might

be knocked down, trampled upon, left for dead upon the field, but he could rise and renew the conflict! He would talk to himself, he would call aloud to himself, he would repeat to himself formulas of exhortation, cries of defiance, proclamations of resolve. He would summon his enemies before him, sometimes in hosts, sometimes as individuals—all those who ever in his life had mocked and taunted him, scolded him and threatened him. He would shake his clenched fists at them; they might as well understand it—they could never conquer him, not all the power they could bring would suffice! He would call upon posterity also; he would summon his friends and lovers of the future, to give him comfort in his sore distress. Was it not for them that he was laboring—that they might some day feed their souls upon his faith?

Thyrsis would think of the "Song of Roland", recalling that heroic figure and his three days' labor: when he had read that poem, his heart had seemed to throb with pain every time that Roland lifted his sword-arm. He would think of the old blind "Samson Agonistes"; he would think of the Greeks at Thermopylae, of the siege of Haarlem. History was full of such tales of the agonies that men had endured for the sake of their faith; and why should he expect exemption, why should he shrink from the fiery test?

§ 16. So he lived and fought two battles, one within and one without; and little by little these two became merged in his imagination. He had conceived a figure which should embody the War; and that figure had come to be himself.

The War of which he was writing had come upon a people unsuspecting and unprepared; they had not

sought it nor desired it, they did not love it, they did not understand it. But the nation must be preserved; and so they set out to forge themselves into a sword. They had wealth, and they poured it out lavishly; and they had enthusiasm—whole armies of young men came forward. They were uniformed and armed and drilled, and one after another they marched out, with banners waving, and drums rolling, and hearts beating high with hope; and one after another they met the enemy, and were swallowed up in carnage and destruction, and came reeling back in defeat and despair. It happened so often that the whole land moaned with the horror of it —there was Bull Run and then again Bull Run, and there was the long Peninsula Campaign—an entire year of futility and failure; and there was the ghastly slaughter of Fredericksburg, and the blind confusion of Chancellorsville, and the bitter, disappointment of Antietam.

Thyrsis wished to portray all this from the point of view of the humble private, who got none of the glory, and expected none, but only suffering and toil; whose lot it was to march and countermarch, to delve and sweat in the trenches, to be stifled by the heat and drenched by the rain and frozen by the cold; to wade through seas of blood and anguish, to be wounded and captured and imprisoned, to be lured by victory and blasted by defeat. And into it all he was pouring the distillation of his own experiences. For there was not much of it that he had not known in his own person. Surely he had known what it was to be cold and hungry ; surely he had known what it was to be lured by victory and blasted by defeat. He had watched by the deathbed of his dearest dreams, he had listened to the moaning of multitudes of imprisoned hopes. He had known

what it was to set before him a purpose, and to cling to it in spite of obloquy and hatred; he had known what it was to suffer until his forehead throbbed, and all things reeled and swam before his eyes. He had known also what it was to sacrifice for the sake of the future, and to see others, who thought of no one but themselves, preying upon him, and upon the community, r.nd living in luxury and enjoying power.

Little by little, as he studied this War, Thyrsis had come upon a strange and sinister fact about it. Roughly speaking, the population of the country might have been divided into two classes. There were those to whom the Union was precious, and who gave their labor and their lives for it; they starved and fought and agonized for it, and came home, worn, often crippled, and always poor. On the other hand there were some who had cared nothing for the Union, but were finding their chance to grow rich and to establish themselves in the places of power. They were selling shoddy blankets and paper shoes to the government; they were speculating in cotton and gold and food. There were a few exceptions to this, of course; but for the most part, when one came to study the gigantic fortunes which were corrupting the nation, he discovered that it was just here they had begun.

So this was the curious and ironic fact; the nation had been saved—but only to be handed over to the

•/

money-changers! And these now possessed it and dominated it; and a new generation had come forward, which knew not how these things had come to be— which knew only the money-changers and their power. And who was there to tell them of the War, and all that the War had meant? Who was there to make

that titan agony real to them, to point them to the high destinies of the Republic?

Along with his war-books, Thyrsis was reading his daily newspaper, which came to him freighted with the cynicism of the hour. It was when the revelations of corruption in business and political affairs were at their flood; high and low, in towns and cities, in states and in the nation itself, one saw that the government of the country had been bought. Everywhere throughout the land Mammon sat upon the throne, and men cringed before him—there was only persecution and mockery for those who believed in the things for which America stood to all the world.

And this new Lord, who had purchased the people, and held them in bond, was extracting a toll of suffering and privation, of accident and disease and death, that was worse than the agony of many wars. The whole land was groaning and sweating beneath the burden of it; and Thyrsis, who shared the pain, and knew the meaning of it, was sick with the responsibility it put upon him, yearning for a thousand voices with which he might cry the truth aloud.

Some one must bring America face to face with its soul again; and who was there to do it—who was there that was even trying? Thyrsis had seen the statues of St. Gaudens, and he knew there was one man who had dreamed the dream of his country. But who was there to put it into song, or into story, that the young might read? Like the newspapers and the churches, the authors had sold out; they were writing for matinee-girls, and for the Pullman-car book-trade; and meantime the civilization of America was sliding down into the pit!

So here again was War! Here again were pain and

sickness, hunger and cold, solitude and despair, to be endured and defied; death itself to be faced—madness even, and soul-decay! Armies of men had gone out, had laid themselves down and filled up the ditches with their bodies, to make a bridge for Freedom to pass on. And the ditches were not yet full—another life was needed!

Nor must he think himself too good for the sacrifice; there had been greater men than he, no doubt, burned up in the Wilderness, and blown to pieces by the cannon at "Bloody Angle"; there had been dreamers of mighty dreams among them—and they were dead, and all their dreams were dead. And neither must he love his own too dearly; there had been women who had suffered and died in that War, and babes who had perished by tens of thousands; and they, too, had been born with agony, had been loved and yearned for, and wept and prayed for.

So, out of the dead past, were voices calling to Thyrsis; he heard them in the night-time as one mighty symphony of grief. They had died for nothing, unless the Republic should be saved, unless their dream of freedom and justice could be made real. And for what was the poet but that? So that the new generations might know what their fathers had done—that the youth of America might be roused and thrilled once more! Surely it could not be that the land was all sunk in selfishness and unfaith—that there were no longer any generous souls who could be stirred by a trumpet-call, and led forth to strike a new blow for the great hope of Humanity!

§ 17. THE long winter dragged by, and the fury of it seemed to increase; they were as if besieged by

demons of cold and storm. There came another blizzard, and the snows drifted down to their hollow by the edge of the woods, so that it was two days before they could get out, even to the farm-house. And there was no place for them to walk —a path from their house to Thyrsis' study was a labor of half a day to dig. Also Corydon caught a cold, which ran in due course through the little family, and added to their misery and discomfort.

The snow seemed to be symbolical, walling them in from all the world. "There is no help", it seemed to say to them; whatever strength they got they must wring out of their own hearts. Here in this place, it seemed to Thyrsis, he learned the real meaning of Winter; he saw it as primitive man had seen it, a cruel and merciless assailant, a fiend that came ravening, dealing destruction and death. He thought of the ode by Thomas Campbell—

"Archangel! Power of desolation!

Fast descending as thou art, Say, hath mortal invocation

Spells to touch thy stony heart?"

Surely no Runic Odin, who "howled his war-song to the gale", no Lapland savage who cowered in his hut, ever panted for the respite of the spring-time more than these two lovers in their tiny cottage.

It was evident that Corydon was going down-hill under the strain. She became more and more nervous and wretched, her headaches and her fits of exhaustion were more frequent. Then, too, her old mental trouble, the habit of "thinking things", was plaguing her again. She would come to Thyrsis with long accounts of her

psychological entanglements, and he would patiently unravel the skein. Or sometimes, if he was very tired, he might give some signs of a desire to escape the ordeal ; and then he would see a look of terror stealing into Corydon's eyes. So these things were real after all—they were real even to Thyrsis!

One morning he opened his eyes, and looked from his study-window, to find that another heavy snow had fallen; and when he had dressed and gone over to the house, he found Corydon in bed. She complained of a headache, and had had chills during the night, and was now quite evidently feverish. He was alarmed, and after he had made her as comfortable as he could, he dressed the baby and took him upon his shoulder, and made his way with difficulty to the farm-house. He left the baby there, and with a horse and sleigh set out for town. The horse had to walk all the way, and several times the sleigh was upset in the drifts, so that it was two hours before he reached his destination. As the doctor was out upon his rounds, he had to wait a couple of hours more—and then only to learn that the man could not possibly attempt the trip. He had several patients who were dangerously ill, and he had to be on hand.

He sent Thyrsis to another doctor, but this one said exactly the same; and so the boy spent the day wandering about the town. The thought of Corydon's lying there alone, helpless and suffering, made him wild; but everywhere he met with the same response—the cold weather had apparently brought an epidemic of disease, and there was no doctor in the place who could spare three or four hours to make the long journey in the snow.

So there was nothing for him to do but go back.

The farmer's wife offered to take care of the baby over night, and he went down to the cottage alone-where he found Corydon much worse. He sat and held her hand, a terror clutching at his heart; and all night long he sat and tended her—he filled hot water bottles when she was chilled, and got ice when she was hot, and made cool lemonade, and prepared tidbits and tempted her to eat. He would whisper to her and soothe her; and later, when she fell into a doze, he sat nodding in his chair and shivering with cold, but afraid to touch the fire for fear of disturbing her.

Then, towards dawn, she wakened; and Thyrsis was almost beside himself with anguish and fear—for she was delirious, and did not know where she was, or what she was doing. She kept talking as if to the baby— in their baby-talk. Thyrsis would listen, until he would choke up with tears.

He left her, and went up to the farm, and got the horse and sleigh again, and drove to another town. It made no difference what doctor he got—to Thyrsis all doctors were alike, the keepers of the keys of health. After several hours' pursuit he found that this man also was busy. All he could say was that he would try to get out that night.

So Thyrsis went back again, to find his wife with flushed face, and beads of perspiration upon her forehead; now sitting up and babbling aimlessly, now sinking back exhausted. He sat once more through a night of torment, holding her hot hands in his, and praying in vain for the coming of the doctor.

It was afternoon of the next day before the man finally came, and brought some relief to Thyrsis' soul, and perhaps also to Corydon's body. He took her ^°rpperature and listened to her breathing, and pro-

nounced it a severe attack of grippe, with a touch of bronchitis; and he laid out an assortment of capsules and liquids, and promised to come again if Thyrsis sent for him.

And so the boy set out in the double role of trained nurse and mother's assistant. He gave Corydon her medicines, and brought fresh water for her, and smoothed her pillows and talked to her, and prepared some delicacies for her when she wished to eat; also he dressed and bathed the baby, and cooked his complex meals and fed them to him; he put on his rubbers and his leggings and his mittens, and the overcoat and peaked hood (which Corydon had devised for him out of eighty cents' worth of woolly red cloth), and turned him out to "bongie cowtoos" in the snow. Likewise he got his own meals and washed the dishes, and tended the fires and emptied the ashes and filled the lamps and swept the floors ; and in the interim between these various duties he fought new battles within himself, and got new side-lights upon Chickamauga and "Bloody Angle".

§ 18. IT was two weeks before this siege was lifted, and Corydon was able to take up her burdens once more. It was then March, and the snow had given place to cold sleety rains, and the fields and the ground about their home were miniature swamps full of mud. Thyrsis would tramp through this to the hill-tops where the storm-winds howled, and there vow defiance to his foes, and come home to pour new hope and courage and resolution into a bottomless pit.

He was finishing his vision of the field of Gettysburg—the three-days' grapple between two titan armies, that meant to him three weeks of soul-terrifying toil.

Men had said that Gettysburg meant the turning of the tide, that victory was certain; and yet there had followed Sherman's long campaign, and all the horror of the Wilderness fighting, and Mine Run and Cold Harbor and the ghastly siege of Petersburg. And now Thyrsis had to fight his way through this. He saw the figure that he had dreamed, and that possessed him; a soldier who was the rage of the War incarnate, the awakened frenzy of the nation. He was a man lifted above pain and cold and hunger; he was gaunt and wild of aspect, restless and impatient, driving, driving to the end. He went about the duties of the camp like one in a dream; he marched like an automaton—for hours, or for days, as need might be—his thoughts flying on to those moments that alone were real to him, to the charge and the fury of the conflict, the blows that were the only things that counted. He lived amid sights and sounds of horror, with groans and weeping in his ears, with a mist of blood and cannon-smoke before his eyes; he drove on, grim and implacable, the very ground about him rocking and quivering in a delirium of torment. He was the War!

Meantime Corydon was growing paler, and more wretched than ever. For her, too, this winter was symbolized as a battle-ground. To him it was a field in which armies clashed, and the issue was uncertain; but to her it was a field of inevitable defeat, strewn with the corpses of her hopes. For hours she would lie upon her couch in the night-watches, silent, alone, staring out of the window at the wide waste of snow in the pitiless moonlight.

Thyrsis would have preferred to sleep in his own study, as he worked so late at night; but Corydon

begged him not to do this, she would rather be wakened, she said.

So, on one occasion, he came over at about two o'clock in the morning, and found her sleeping, as he thought, and crawled into his own cot. He was just dozing off to sleep, when he heard what he thought was a stifled sob.

He listened; he thought that she was crying in her sleep. But then, as the sound grew clearer, he sat up. The moonlight was shining in upon her, and Thyrsis caught a bright glint of steel. Swift as a flash the meaning of that swept over him. He had provided her with a revolver, that she might feel safe when she was left alone; and now he bounded out of bed and sprang-across the room, and found her with the weapon pointed at her head.

He struck it away; and Corydon, with a terrified cry, clutched at him and collapsed in his arms.

"Oh Thyrsis!" she wailed. "Save me! Save me!"

"What is it?" he gasped.

"I couldn't do it!" she cried, choking. "I couldn't! I tried— I tried so hard!"

"Sweetheart", he whispered, in terror.

"Don't let me do it!" she sobbed. "Oh, Thyrsis, you must save me!"

He pressed her to his bosom, shuddering with dread, and trying to soothe her hysterical outburst. So, little by little, he dragged the story from her. For three days she had been making up her mind to shoot herself, and she had chosen that night for the time.

"I've been sitting here for an hour," she whispered —"with the revolver in my hand. And I couldn't get up the courage to pull the trigger."

He clasped her, white with horror.

"I heard you coming," she went on. "I lay down and pretended to sleep. Then I tried again—but I can't, I can't! I'm a coward!"

"Corydon!" he cried.

"There was only one thing that stopped me. You would have got on without me—

"Don't say that, dearest!"

"You would—I know it! I'm only in your way. But oh, my baby! I loved him so, and I couldn't bear to leave him!"

She clung to him convulsively. "Oh, Thyrsis," she panted, "think what it meant to me to leave him. He'd have been without a mother all his life! And something might have happened to you, and he'd have had no one to love him at all!"

"Why did you want to do it?" he cried.

"Oh Thyrsis, I've suffered so! I'm weary—I'm worn out—I'm sick of the fight. I can't stand it any more —and what can I do?"

"My poor, poor girl," he whispered, and pressed her to his heart in a paroxysm of grief. "Oh, my Corydon! My Corydon!"

The horror of the thing overwhelmed him; he began to weep himself—his frame was shaken with tearless, agonizing sobs. What could he do for her, how could he help her?

But already he had helped her; it was not often that she saw him weeping, it was not often she found that she could do something for him. "Thyrsis, do you really want me?" she whispered. "Do you truly love me that much?"

"I love you, I love you!" he sobbed.

And she replied, "Then I'll stay. I'll bear anything, if you need me—if I can be of any use at all."

§ 19. So their tears were mingled; so once more, being sufficiently plowed up with agony, they might behold the deeps of each other's souls. Being at their last gasp, and driven to desperation, they would make the convulsive effort, and break the crust of dullness and commonplace, and reveal again the mighty forces hidden in their depths. At such hours he beheld Cory-don as she was, the flaming spirit, the archangel prisoned in the flesh. If only he could have found the key to those deep chambers, so that he could have had access to them always!

But alas, they knew only one path that led to them, and that through the valley of despair. From despair it led to anguished struggle, and from struggle to defiance, to rage and denunciation—and thence to visions and invocations, raptures and enthralments. So this night, for instance, behold Corydon, first holding her husband's hands, and shuddering with awe, and pledging her faith all over again; and then, later on, when the dawn was breaking, sitting in the cold moonlight with a blanket flung about her, her wild hair tossing, and in her hand the revolver with which she had meant to destroy herself. Behold her, making sport of her own life-drama—turning into wildest phantasy her domestic ignominies, her inhibitions and her helpmate's blunderings; evoking the hosts of the future as to a festival, rehearsing the tragedy of her soul with all posterity as her audience. When once these mad steeds of her fancy were turned loose, one could never tell where their course would be; and strange indeed were the adventures that came to him who rode with her!

There seemed to be no limit to the powers of this subliminal woman within Corydon. Her cheeks would

kindle, her eyes would blaze, and eloquence would pour from her—the language of great poetry, fervid and passionate, with swift flashes of insight and illumination, tumultuous invocations and bursts of prophecy. Thyrsis would listen and marvel. What a mind she had —sharp, like a rapier, swift as the lightning-flash! The powers of penetration and understanding, and above all the sheer splendors of language—the blazes of metaphor, the explosions of coruscating wit! What a tragic actress she might have made—how she would have shaken men's souls, and set them to shuddering with terror! What an opera-singer she could have been, with that rich vibrant voice, and the mien of a disinherited goddess!

It was out of such hours that the faith of their lives was made; and it was out of them also that Thyrsis formed his idea of woman. To him woman was an equal; and this he not only said with his lips, he lived it in his feelings. The time came when he went out into the world, and learned to understand the world's idea, that woman meant vanity and pettiness and frivolity; but Thyrsis let all this pass, knowing the woman-soul. Somewhere underneath, not yet understood and mastered, was pent this mighty force that in the end would revolutionize all human ideas and institutions. Here was faith, here was vision, here was the power of all powers; and how was it to be delivered and made conscious, and brought into the service of life?

Most women liked Thyrsis, because they divined in some vague way this attitude; and some men hated him for the same reason. These men, Thyrsis observed, were the slave-drivers; they held that woman was the weaker vessel, and for this they had their own motive.".

There were women, too, who liked to be ruled; but Thyrsis never argued with them—it was enough, he judged, to treat any slave as a free man, or any servant as a gentleman, and sooner or later they would divine what he meant, and the spirit of revolt would begin to flicker.

BOOK XIII THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE

They stood upon the porch of the little cabin-, listening to the silence of the night.

"How far away it all seems!" she said —

"How many a dingle on the loved hill-side

Hath since our day put by The coronals of that forgotten time!"

"It makes one feel old," he said — "like the coming of the night!"

"The night!" she repeated, and went on —

"/ feel her finger light

Laid pausefully upon life's headlong train; — The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew, The heart less bounding at emotion new, And hope once crushed less quick to spring again!"

§ 1. THROUGHOUT this long winter of discontent came to them one ray of hope from the outside world. "The Genius" was given in the little town in Germany, and Thyrsis' correspondent sent the twenty-five dollars, and wrote that it had made a great impression, and that more performances were to be expected. Then, after an interval, Thyrsis was surprised to receive from his clipping-bureau some items to the effect that his play was to be produced in one of the leading theatres in Berlin. He wrote to his correspondent for an explanation, and learned to his dismay that his play had been "pirated"; it was, of course, not copyright .in Germany, and so he had no redress, and must content himself with what his friend referred to as "the renowns which will be brought to you by these performances".

The play came out, in the early spring, and apparently made a considerable sensation. Thyrsis read long reviews from the German papers, and there were accounts of it in several American papers. So people began to ask who this unknown poet might be. The publishers of "The Hearer of Truth" were moved to venture new advertisements of the book—whereby they sold perhaps a hundred copies more; and Thyrsis was moved to pay some badly-needed money to have more copies of the play made, so that he might try to interest some other manager. He carried on a long correspondence with a newly-organized "stage society", which thought a great deal about trying the play at a matinee,

but did nothing.

Also, Thyrsis received a letter from one of the country's popular novelists, who had heard of the play abroad, and asked to read it. When he had read it, and told what an interesting piece of work it was, Thyrsis sat down and wrote the great man about his plight, and asked for help; which led to correspondence, and to the passing round of the manuscript among a group of literary people. One of these was Haddon Channing, the critic and essayist, who was interested enough to write Thyrsis several long letters, and to read the rest of his productions, and later on to call to see him. Which, visit proved a curious experience for the family.

He arrived one day towards spring, when it chanced that Corydon was in town visiting the dentist. Thyrsis had just finished his dinner when he saw two people coming through the orchard, and he leaped up in haste to put the soiled dishes away, and make the place as presentable as possible. Mr. and Mrs. Channing had come in their car (they lived in Philadelphia), and were followed by an escort of the farmer's children—since an automobile was a rare phenomenon in that neighborhood. The entrance to the peach-orchard proved not wide enough for the machine, so they had to get out and walk; and this they found annoying, because the ground was wet and soft. All of which seemed to emphasize the incongruity of their presence.

Haddon Channing might have been described as a dilettante radical. He employed a highly-wrought and artificial style, which scintillated with brilliant epigram; one had a feeling that it rather atoned for the evils in human life, that they became the occasion of so much cleverness in Channing's books. Perhaps that was the reason why most people did not object to the vague-

THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE 605

ness of his ideas, when it came to any constructive suggestion. In fact he rather made a point of such vagueness—when you tried to do anything about a social evil, that was politics, and politics were vulgar. One could never pin Channing down, but his idea seemed to be that in the end all men would become free and independent spirits, able to make their own epigrams; after which there would be no more evil in the world.

And here he was in the flesh. It seemed to Thyrsis as if he must have made a study of his own books, and then proceeded to fit his person and his clothing, his accent and his manner, to make a proper setting thereto. He was tall and lean, immaculate and refined; he spoke with airy and fastidious grace, pouring out one continuous stream of cleverness—any hour of his conversation was equivalent to a volume of his works at a dollar and a quarter net.

Also, there was Mrs. Channing, gracious and exquisite, looking as if she had stepped out of one of Hossetti's poems. She was a poetess herself; writing about Acteon, and Antinoiis, and other remote subjects. Thyrsis assumed that there must be something in these poems, for they were given two or three pages in the thirty-five-cent magazines; but he himself had never discovered any reason why he should read one through.

§ 2. THEY seated themselves upon his six-foot piazza; and Thyrsis, who had very little sense of personality, and was altogether wrapped up in ideas, was soon in the midst of a free and easy discussion with them. It seemed ages since he had had an opportunity to exchange opinions with anyone except Corydon. With these people he roamed over the fields of litera-

ture; and as they found nothing to agree about anywhere, the conversation did not flag.

A strange experience it must have been to them, to come to a lonely shanty in the woods, and encounter a haggard boy in a cotton-shirt and a pair of frayed trousers, who was all oblivious of their elegance, and unawed by their reputation, and who behaved like a bull in the china-shop of their orderly opinions. Mrs. Channing, it seemed, was completing her life-work, a volume which was to revolutionize current criticism, and lead the world back to artistic health; to her, modern civilization was a vast abortion, and in Greek culture was to be sought the fountain-head of health. She sang the praises of Athenian literature and art and life; there was sanity and clarity, there was balance and serenity! And to compare it with the jangled confusion and the frantic strife of modern times!

To which Thyrsis answered, "We'd best let modern times alone. For here you've all facts and no generalization ; and in the case of the Greeks you've all generalization and no facts."

And so they went at it, hot and heavy. Mrs. Channing, her Greek serenity somewhat ruffled, insisted that she had studied the facts for herself. The other proceeded to probe into her equipment, and found that she knew Homer and Sophocles, but did not know Aristophanes so well, and did not know the Greek epigrams at all. Thyrsis maintained that the dominant note in the Greek heritage was one of bewilderment and despair ; in support of which alarming opinion he carried the discussion from the dreams of Greek literature to the realities of Greek life. Did Mrs. Channing know how the Greeks had persecuted all their great thinkers?

Did she know anything about the cruelties of their slave-code ?

"Have you ever studied Greek politics?" he asked. "Do you realize, for instance, that it was the custom of statesmen and generals who were defeated by their political rivals, to go over to the enemy and lead an expedition against their homes?"

"Isn't that putting it rather strongly?" asked Mrs. Channing.

"I don't think so," he answered. "Didn't the conquerors of both Salamis and Plataea afterwards sell out to the Persian king? And then you talk about the noble ideal of woman which the Greeks developed! Don't you know that it was nothing but a literary tradition?"

"I had never understood that," said Mrs. Channing.

To which the other answered: "It was handed down from imaginary Homeric days. The Greek lady of the Periclean age was a domestic prisoner and drudge."

§ 3. THEN, late in the afternoon, came Corydon; and this part of the adventure must have seemed stranger yet to the Channings. Corydon wore a shirtwaist and a ten-cent straw hat, trimmed with some white mosquito-netting, and an old blue skirt which she had worn before her marriage, and had enlarged little by little during the period of her pregnancy, and had taken in again after the baby was born. Also she was pale and sad-looking, much startled by the sight of the automobile, and the sudden apparition of elegance. She got rid of her armfuls of groceries and bundles, and seated herself in an inconspicuous place, and sat listening while the argument went on. For a full hour she never uttered a word; only once during the controversy over the "Greek lady", Mrs. Channing

turned to her and asked, "Don't you agree with me?" But Corydon could only answer, "I don't know, I have not read much history." And who was there to tell the visitor that this strange, wide-eyed girl knew more about the tragedies and terrors of the Greek temperament than she with all her culture and her college-degrees could have learned in many life-times?

The two stayed to supper, and Corydon and Thyrsis set out the meal upon the rustic outdoor table; they apologized for thfeir domestic inadequacies, but Mrs. Channing declared that she "adored pickriicking". The evening was spent in more discussion; and finally it was decided that the visitors should stay over night at the hotel in town, and come out again in the morning.

Thyrsis concluded, as he thought the matter over, that the two must have been fascinated by this domestic situation, and curious to look deeper into it. Perhaps they saw "material" in it; or perhaps it was that Haddon Channing was really impressed by Thyrsis' powers, and sought to understand his problems and help him. Whatever may have been the motive for it, when they came the next morning, the critic took Thyrsis for a walk in the woods nnd proceeded to discuss his affairs. And meanwhile his wife had set herself to the task of probing the innermost corners of Corydon's soul.

The burden of Channino-'s discourse was Thyrsis' impatience and lack of balance, his fanaticism and his too great opinion of his own work. "My dear fellow," he said, "you are the most friendless human being I have ever encountered upon earth. How can you expect to interest men if you don't get out into the world and learn what they are doing?"

"That means to get a position, I suppose?" said Thyrsis.

"No, not necessarily " began the other.

"But I haven't money to live in the city otherwise."

That was too definite for Charming, and he went off on another tack. He had been reading "The Higher Cannibalism", and he could not forgive it. A boy of Thyrsis' age had no right to be seething with such bitterness; there must be some fundamental and terrible cause. He was destroying himself, he was eating out his heart in this isolation ; he was so wrapped up in his own miseries, his own wrongs—in all the concerns of his own exaggerated ego f

They were seated beside a little streamlet in the woods. "What you need is something to get you out of yourself," the critic was saying—"something to restore your sanity and balance. It'll come to you some day. Perhaps it'll be a love-affair—you'll meet some woman who'll carry you away. I know the sort you need— they grow in the West —the great brooding type of woman-soul, that would fold you in her arms and give you a little peace."

Thyrsis was silent for a space. "You forget," he said, in a low voice, "that I am already married."

The other shrugged his shoulders. "Such things have happened, even so," he said.

Thyrsis had taken his part in the conversation before this, defending himself and setting forth his point of view. But now he fell silent. The words had cut him to the quick. It seemed to him an insult and a bitter humiliation; here, at his home, almost in the presence of his wife! What was the man's idea, anyway ?

And suddenly he turned upon Channing with the question, ^You think that I've married a doll?"

The other was staggered for a moment. "I don't know what you've married," he replied.

"No," said Thyrsis. "Then how can you advise me in such a matter?"

"I see that you're not happy " the other began.

"Yes," said the boy. "But I don't want any more

women.'

There was a pause, while Thyrsis sat pondering, Should he try to explain to this man? But he shook his head. No, it would be useless to try. "She is not in your class," he said.

"How do you mean?" asked the other.

"She has none of your culture, none of your social graces. She can't write, and she can't sing—she can't do anything that your wife does."

"I'm afraid," said Channing, in a low voice, "you don't take my remarks in the right spirit."

"Even suppose that she were not what you call a 'great woman-soul'," persisted Thyrsis—"at least she has starved and suffered for me; and wouldn't common loyalty bind me to her?"

"I have tried to do something very difficult," said the other, after a silence. "I have tried to talk to you frankly. It is the most thankless task in the world to tell a man his own faults."

"I know," said Thyrsis. "And that's all right—I'm perfectly willing. I don't mind knowing my faults."

"It is evident that you have resented it," declared the other.

Thyrsis answered with a laugh, "Don't you admit of replies to your criticisms? Suppose I'm pointing out some of your faults—your faults as a critic?"

Channing said that he did not object to that.

"Very well, then," said Thyrsis. "I simply tell you

THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE 511

that you have missed the point of my trouble. There's nothing the matter with me but poverty and lack of opportunity ; and there's nothing else the matter with my wife. We're doing our best, and it's the simple fact that we've endured and dared more than anybody we've ever met. And that's all there is to it."

It was evident that Channing was deeply hurt. He turned the conversation to other matters, and pretty soon they got up and strolled on. When they came near to the house, he went off to see his chauffeur, and Thyrsis stood watching him, and pondering over the episode.

It was the same thing that had happened to him in the city; it was the thing that would be happening to him all the time. He saw that however wretched he might be with Corydon, he would always take her part against the world. Whatever her faults might be, they were not such as the world could judge. Rather would he make it the test of a person's character, that they should understand and appreciate her, in spite of her lack of that superficial thing called culture—the ability to rattle off opinions about any subject under the sun.

So it was that loyalty to Corydon held him fast. So her temperament was his law, and her needs were his standards; and day by day he must become more like her, and less like himself!

§ 4. HE returned to the house, entering by the rear door. The baby was lying in the room asleep, and out upon the piazza he could hear Corydon and Mrs. Channing. Corydon was speaking, in her intense voice.

"The trouble with me," she was saying, "is that I have no confidence! Other women are sure of themselves—they are self-contained, serene, satisfied."

"But why shouldn't you be that way?" Thus Mrs. Charming.

"I aim too high," said Corydon. "I want too much. I defeat myself."

"Yes," said the other, "but why "

"It's been the circumstances of all my life! I've been defeated—thwarted-—repressed ! Everything drives me back into myself. There is nothing I can do — I can only endure and suffer and wait. So all the influences in my life are negative—

'I was sick with the Nay of life— With my lonely soul's refrain!'

"What is that you are quoting?" asked Mrs. Chan-ning.

"It's from a poem I wrote," said Corydon.

"Oh, you write poetry?"

"I couldn't say that," was the reply. "I have no technique—I never studied anything about it."

"But you try sometimes?"

"I find it helps me," said Corydon—"once in a great while I find lines in my mind; and I put them together, so that I can say them over, and remind myself of things."

"I see," said Mrs. Channing. "Tell me the poem you quoted."

"I—I don't believe you'd think much of it," said Corydon, hesitating. "I never expected anybody "

"I'd be interested to hear it," declared her visitor.

So Corydon recited in a low voice a couple of stanzas which had come to her in the lonely midnight hours. Thyrsis listened with interest—he had never heard them before:

"What matters the tired heart,

What matter? the weary brain? What matters the cruel smart Of the burden borne again?

I was sick with the Nay of life— With my lonely soul's refrain;

OBut the essence of love is strife, And the meaning of life is pain."

There was a pause. "Do you—do you think that is worth while at all?" asked Corydon.

"It is evidently sincere," replied Mrs. Channing. "I think you ought to study and practice."

"I can't make much effort at it '

But the other went on: "What concerns me is the attitude to life it shows. It is terrible that a young girl should feel that way. You must not let yourself get into such a state!"

"But how can I help it?"

"You must have something that occupies your mind! That is what you need, truly it is! You've got to stop thinking about yourself—you've got to get outside yourself, somehow!"

Thyrsis caught his breath. He could tell from the tone of the speaker's voice that she was laboring with Corydon, putting forth all her energies to impress her. He was tempted to step forward and cry out, "No, no! That's not the way! That won't work!"

But instead, he stood rooted to the spot, while Mrs. Channing went on— "This unhappiness comes from the fact that you are so self-centred. You must get some constructive work, my dear, if it's only training your baby. You must realize that you are not the only

person who has troubles in the world. Why, I know a poor washerwoman, who was left a widow with four children to care for ' :

And then suddenly Thyrsis heard a voice cry out in anguish, "Oh, oh! stop!" He heard his wife spring up from her chair.

"What's the matter?" asked Mrs. Channing.

"I can't listen to you any more!" cried Corydon. "You don't know what you're saying!—You don't understand me at all!"

There was a pause. "I'm sorry you feel th^t," said Mrs. Channing.

"I had no right to talk to you!" exclaimed the other. "There's no one can understand! I have to fight alone!"

At this point Thyrsis went into the kitchen, and made some noise that they would hear. Then he called, "Are you there, dearest?"

"Yes," said Corydon; and he went out upon the piazza. He saw her standing, white and tense.

"Are you still talking?" he said, with forced carelessness.

And as Mrs. Channing answered "Yes," Corydon said, quickly, "Excuse me a moment," and went into the house.

So the poet sat and talked with his guest about the state of the weather and the condition of the roads; until at last her husband arrived, saying that it was time they were starting. Corydon did not appear again, and so finally Thyrsis accompanied them out to their car, and saw them start off. They promised to come again, but he knew they would not keep that promise.

§ 5. HE went back to the house, and after some search he found Corydon down in the woods, whither she had fled to have out her agony.

"Has that woman gone?" she panted, when he came near.

"Yes, dear," he said. "She's gone."

"Oh!" cried Corydon. "How dared she! How dared she!"

"Get up, sweetheart," said Thyrsis. "The ground is wet."

"She's gone off in her automobile!" exclaimed the girl, passionately. "She spent last night at a hotel that charged twelve dollars a day, and then she told me about her washerwoman! Now she's gone back to her beautiful home, with servants and a governess and a piano and everything else she wants! And she talked to me about 'occupation'! What right had she to come here and trample on my face?"

"But why did you let her, dearest?"

"How could I help myself? I had no idea "

"But how did you get started?"

"I've nobody to confide in—nobody!" cried Corydon. "And she wanted to know about me—she led me on. I thought she sympathized with me—I thought she understood!"

"She's a woman of the world, my dear."

"She was just pulling me to pieces! She wanted to see how I worked! Don't you see what she was looking for, Thyrsis—she thought I was material!"

"She only writes about the Greeks," said Thyrsis, with a smile.

"I'm a horrible example! I'm neurasthenic and self-centred—I'm the modern woman! She read me a long lecture like that! I ought to get busy!"

"Dearest!" he pleaded, trying to soothe her.

"Busy"! repeated Corydon, laughing hysterically. "Busy! I wash and dress and amuse a baby! I get six meals a day for him, I get three meals for us, and clean up everything. And the rest of the day I'm so exhausted I can hardly stand up, and a good part of the time I'm sick besides. And then, if I think about my troubles, it's because I've nothing to do!"

"My dear," Thyrsis replied, "you should not have put yourself at her mercy."

"How I hate her!" cried Corydon. "How I hate her!"

'You must learn to protect yourself from such people, Corydon."

"I won't meet them at all! I'm not able to face them —I've none of their weapons, none of their training. I don't want to know about them, or their kind of life! They have no souls!"

"It isn't easy for them to understand," said Thyrsis. "They have never been poor "

"That woman talks about the Greek love of beauty! What sacrifice has she ever made for beauty—what agony has she ever dared for it? And yet she can prattle about it—the phrases roll from her! She's been educated—polished—finished! She's been taught just what to say! And I haven't been taught, and so she despises me!"

"It's deeper than that, my dear," he said. "You have something in you that she would hate instinctively."

"What do you mean?"

"I've told you before, dearest. It's genius, I think."

"Genius! But what use is it to me, if it is? It only unfits me for life. It eats me up, it destroys me!"

"Some day," he said, "you will find a way to express

THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE 517

it. It will come, never fear.—But now, dear, be sensible. The ground is wet, and if you sit there, you will surely be laid up with rheumatism."

He lifted her up; but she was not to be diverted. Suddenly she turned, and caught him by the arms. "Thyrsis!" she cried. "Tell me! Do you blame me as she does? Do you think I'm weak and incompetent?"

Whatever answer he might have been inclined to make, he saw in her wild eyes that only one answer was to be thought of. "Certainly not, my dear!" he said, quickly. "How could you ask me such a question?"

"Oh, tell me! tell me!" she exclaimed. And so he had to go on, and sing the song of their love to her, and pour out balm upon her wounded spirit.

But afterwards he went alone; and then it was not so simple. Little demons of doubt came and tormented him. Might it not be that there was something in the point of view of the Channings? He took Corydon at her own estimate—at the face value of her emotions; but might it not be that he was deluding himself, that he was a victim of his own infatuation?

He would ponder this; he tried to have it out with himself for once. What did he really think about it? What would he have told Corydon if he had told her the bald truth? But such doubts could not stay with him for long. They brought shame to him. He was like a man travelling across the plains, who comes upon the woman he loves, being tortured by a band of Apaches; and who is caught and bound fast, to watch the proceedings. Would such a man spend his time asking whether the woman was weak and incompetent? No—his energies would be given to getting his arms loose, and finding out where the guns were. He would set her free, and give her a chance; and then it would

be time enough to measure her powers and pass judgment upon her.

§ 6. IT was a long time before the family got over that visitation. Corydon burned all Channing's books, and she wrote a long and indignant letter to Mrs. Chan-ning, and then burned the letter. Thyrsis never told her about his conversation with the husband, for he knew she would never get over that insult. For himself, he concluded that the Channings were lucky in having got into a quarrel with them, as otherwise he would surely have compelled them to lend him some money.

In truth, the advent of some fairy-godmother or Lady Bountiful was badly needed just then. They had struggled desperately to keep within the thirty-dollar limit, but it could no longer be done. Illnesses were expensive luxuries; and there was the typwriting of the book—some twenty dollars so far; also, there were many things that happened when one was running a household—a tooth-ache, or a telegram, or a hot-water bottle that got a hole in it, or a horse that ran away and broke a shaft. Little by little the bills they had been obliged to run up at the grocer's and the butcher's and the doctor's had been getting beyond the limits of their monthly check; and to cap the climax, there came a letter from Henry Darrell, saying that the next two checks would be the last he could possibly send.

So Thyrsis set to work once more at the shell of that tough old oyster, the world. He made out a "scenario" of the rest of his new book, and sent it with the part he had already done to his friend Mr. Ardsley. Then for three weeks he waited in dread suspense; until at last came a letter asking him to call and talk over his proposition.

Mr. Ardsley had been reading all Thyrsis' manuscripts, nor had he failed to note the triumph of "The Genius" abroad. It became at once apparent to Thyrsis that the new book had scored with him; it was a book that could hardly fail, he said—if only it were finished as it had been begun. Thyrsis made it clear that he intended to finish it; no man could gaze into his wild eyes, and hear him talk of it in breathless excitement, without realizing that he would die, if need be, rather than fail.

So then the author went in to have a talk with the head of the firm. He spread out the treasures of his soul before this merchant, and the merchant sat and appraised them with a cold and critical eye. But Thyrsis, too, had learned something about trade by this time, and was watching the merchant; he made a desperate effort and summoned up the courage to state his demands—he wanted five hundred dollars advance, in installments, and he wanted fifteen per cent, royalty upon the book. To his wonder and amazement the merchant never turned a hair at this; and before they parted company, the incredible bargain had been made, and waited only the signing of the contracts!

Thyrsis went out from the building like a blind man who had suddenly received his sight. It seemed to him at that moment as if the last problem of his life had been solved. He sent off a telegram to Corydon to tell her of the victory, and a letter to Darrell, saying that he need send no more money—that the path was clear before his feet at last!

§ 7. THIS marked a new stage in the family's financial progress; and as usual it was signalized by a grand debauch in bill-paying* Alst> there was a real table-

cover for Corydon, and a vase in which she might put spring-flowers; there were new dresses for the baby, and more important yet, a new addition to the house. This was to be a sort of lean-to at the rear, sixteen feet wide and eight feet deep, and divided into two apartments, one of which was to be the kitchen, and the other an extra bed-room. For they were going to keep a servant!

This was a new decision, to which they had come after much hesitation and discussion. It would be a frightful expense—including the cost of the extra food it would add over thirty dollars a month to their expenses ; but it was the only way they could see the least hope of freedom, of any respite from household drudgery. It had been just a year now since they had set out upon their adventure in domesticity; and in that time Corydon figured that she had prepared two thousand meals for the baby. She had fed each one of them, spoonful by spoonful, into his mouth; and also she had washed two thousand spoons and dishes, and brushed off two thousand tables, and swept two thousand floors. And with every day of such drudgery the heights of music and literature seemed farther away and more unattainable.

Thyrsis had seen something of servants in earlier days—he had memories of strange figures that during intervals of prosperity had flitted through his mother's home. There had been the frail, anaemic Swedish woman, who lived on tea and sugar, and afterwards had gone away and borne nine children, more frail and anaemic than herself; there had been the stout personage with the Irish brogue who had dropped the Christmas turkey out of the window and had not taken the trouble to go down after it; there had been the little

old negress who had gone insane, and hurled the salt-box at his mother's head. But Thyrsis was hoping that they might avoid such troubles themselves; he had an idea that by watching at Castle Garden they might lay hold upon some young peasant-girl from Germany, who would be untouched by any of the corruptions of civilization. "A sort of Dorothea", he suggested to Cory-don ; and they agreed that they would search diligently and find such a "treffliches Madchen", who would be trusting and affectionate, and w r ould talk in German with the baby. •

So now he spent several days hunting in strange places; and at last, in a dingy East-side employment-office, he came upon his Schatz. She was buxom and hearty, and fairly oozed good-nature at every pore; she had only been a week in the country, and was evidently naive enough for any purpose whatever. She had no golden hair like Dorothea, but was swarthy— her German was complicated with a Hungarian accent^ and with strange words that one had not come upon in Goethe and Freitag, and could not find in any dictionary.

Thyrsis helped to gather up her various bags and bundles, and transported her out to the country. On the train he set to work to gain her confidence, and was forthwith entertained with the tale of all her heart-troubles. Back in the Hungarian village she had fallen in love with the son of a rich farmer, quite in Hermann and Dorothea fashion; but alas, in this case there had been no "gute verstandige Mutter" and no "wiird&ger Pfarrer" —instead there had been a hateful step-mother, and so the "treffliches Madchen" had had to come away.

They reached the little cottage at last; and then what a house-cleaning there was, what scrubbing of floors

and brushing out the cobwebs, and scouring of lamp-chimneys and scraping of kettles and sauce-pans! And what a relief it was for Corydon and Thyrsis to be able to go off for a walk together, without first having to carry the baby up to the farm-house! And how very, poetical it was to come back and discover Dorothea with the baby in her lap, feeding it a supper of butter-brod with a slice of raw bacon!

As time went on, alas, it came more and more to seem that the Dorothea idyl had not been meant to be taken as a work of* realism. The "treffliches Madchen" was perhaps too kind-hearted; her emotions were too voluminous for so small a house, her personality seemed to spread all over it. She would sing Hungarian love-ditties at her work; and somehow calling these "folksongs" did not help matters. Also, alas, she distributed about the house strange odors—of raw onions, boiled cabbage and perspiration. So, after three weeks, poor Dorothea had to be sent away—weeping copiously, and bewildered over this cruel misfortune. Corydon and Thyrsis went back again to washing their own dishes; being glad to pay the price for quietness and privacy, and vowing that they would never again try to "keep a servant".

§ 8. THE spring-time had come; not so much the spring-time of poets and song-birds, as the spring-time of cold rains and wind. But still, little by little, the sun was getting the better of his enemies; and so with infinite caution they reduced the quantity of the baby's apparel, and got. him and his "bongie cowtoos" out upon the piazza.

Meantime Thyrsis was over at his own place, wrestling with the book again. He had told himself that it

THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE 523

would be easy, now that he was free from the money-terror. But alas, it was not easy, and nothing could make it easy. If he had more energy, it only meant that his vision reached farther, and set him a harder task. Never in his life did he write a book, the last quarter of which was not to him a nightmare labor. He would be staggering, half blind with exhaustion— like a runner at the end of a long race, with a rival close at his heels.

Also, as usual, his stomach was beginning to weaken under the strain. He would come over sometimes, late in the afternoon, and lay his head in Corydon's lap, almost sobbing from weariness; and yet, after he had eaten a little and helped her with the hardest of her tasks, he would go away again, and work half through the night. There was nothing else he could do—there was no escaping from the thing; if he lay down to rest, or went for a walk, it would be only to think about it the whole time. He would feel that he was not getting enough exercise, and he would drive himself to some bodily tasks; but there was never anything that he could do, that he did not have the book eating away at his mind in the meantime. It was one of the calamities of his life that there was no way for him to play; all he could do was to take a stroll with Corydon, or to tramp over the country by himself.

He finished the book in May; and he knew that it was good. He sent it off to Mr. Ardsley, and Mr. Ardsley, too, declared himself satisfied, and sent the balance of the money. So Thyrsis sank back to get his breath, and to put back some flesh upon his skeleton. He was wont to say when he was writing, one could measure his progress upon a scales; every five thousand words he finished cost him a Shylock's price.

This summer was, upon the whole, the happiest time they had yet known. The book was scheduled to appear early in September; and they had money enough to last them meantime, with careful economy. Their little home was beautiful; they planted some sweet peas and roses, and Thyrsis even began to dig at a vegetable-garden. Also, it was strawberry-time, and cherry-time was near; nor did they overlook the fact that they lived in close proximity to a peach-orchard. These, perhaps, were prosaic considerations, and not of the sort which Thyrsis had been accustomed to associate with spring-time. But this he hardly realized—so rapidly was the discipline of domesticity bringing his haughty spirit to terms!

He built a rustic seat in the woods, where they might sit and read; he built a table beside the house, where the dishes might be washed under the blue sky; and he perfected an elaborate set of ditches and dykes, so that the rain-storms would not sweep away their milk and butter in the stream. He talked of building a pen for chickens—and might have done so, only he discovered that the perverse creatures would not lay except at the time when eggs were cheap and one did not care so much about them. He even figured on the cost of a cow, and the possibility of learning to milk it; and was so much enthralled by these bucolic occupations that he wrote a magazine-article to acquaint his struggling brother and sister poets with the fact that they, too, might escape to the country and live in a homemade house!

With the article there went a picture of the house, and also one of the baby, who had been waxing enormous, and now constituted a fine advertisement. The winter had seemed to agree with him, and the summer agreed with him even better. Thyrsis would smile now

THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE 525

and then, thinking of his ideas of martyrdom; it was made evident that one member of the family was not minded for anything of the sort. The parents might become so much absorbed in their soul-problems that they forgot the dinner-hour; but one could have set his watch by the appetite of the baby. Nature had provided him, among other protections, with a truly phenomenal pair of lungs; and whenever life took a course that was not satisfactory to him, he would roar his face to a terrifying purple.

He was one overwhelming and incessant outcry for adventure. He would toddle all day about the place, getting his "mungies" into all sorts of messes. He was hard to fit into so small a place, and there were times when his parents were tempted to wish that some phenomenon a trifle less portentous had fallen to their lot. But for the most part he was a great hope—a sort of visible atonement for their sufferings. He at least was an achievement; he was something they had done. And he could not be undone, nor doubted—he put all skepticism to flight. In his vicinity there was no room for pessimistic philosophies, for Weltschmerz or Karma.

Thyrsis would sit now and then and watch him at play, and think thoughts that went deep into the meaning of things. Here was, in its very living presence, that blind will-to-be which had seized them and flung them together. And it seemed to Thyrsis that somehow Nature, with her strange secret chemistry, had reproduced all the elements they had brought to that union. This child was immense, volcanic, as their impulse had been; he was intense, highly-strung, and exacting— and these qualities too they had furnished. Curious also it was to observe how Nature, having accomplished her purpose, now flung aside her concealments and de-

vices. From now on they existed to minister to this new life-phenomenon, to keep it happy and prosperous; and she cared not how plain this might become to them —she feared not to taunt and humiliate them. And they accepted her sentence meekly, they no longer tried to oppose her. Her will was become an axiom which they never disputed, which they never even discussed. No matter what might happen to them in future, the Child must go on!

§ 9. THYRSIS utilized this summer of leisure to begin a course of reading in Socialism—a subject which had been stretching out its arms to him ever since he had made the acquaintance of Henry Darrell. He had held away from it on purpose, not wishing to complicate his mind with too many problems. But now he had finished with history, and was free to come back to the world of the present.

There were the pamphlets that Darrell had given him, and there was Paret's magazine. Strange to say, the latter's reckless jesting with the philanthropists and reformers no longer offended Thyrsis—he had been travelling fast along the road of disillusionment. Also, there was a Socialist paper in New York—"The Worker"; and more important still, there was the "Appeal to Reason". Thyrsis came upon a chance reference to this paper, which was published in a little town in Kansas, and he was astonished to learn that it claimed a circulation of two hundred thousand copies a week. He became a subscriber, and after that the process of his "conversion" was rapid.

The Appeal was an "agitation-paper". Its business was to show that side of the capitalist process which other publications tried to conceal, or at any rate to

THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE 527

gild and dress up and make presentable. Each week came four closely-printed newspaper-pages, picturing horrors in mills and mines, telling of oppression and injustice, of unemployment and misery, accident, disease and death. There would be accounts of political corruption—of the buying of legislatures and courts, of the rule of "machines" of graft in city and state and nation. There would be tales of the manners and morals of the idle rich, set against others of the sufferings of the poor. And week by week, as he read and pondered, Thyrsis began to realize the absurd inadequacy of the placid statement which he had made to his first Socialist acquaintance—that the solution of such problems was to be left to "evolution". It became only too clear to him that here was another war —the class-war; and that it was being fought by the masters with every weapon that cunning and greed could lay hands upon or contrive. In that struggle Thyrsis saw clearly that his place was in the ranks of the disinherited and dispossessed.

This was not a difficult decision; for in the first place he was one of the disinherited and dispossessed himself ; and in the next place, even before the "economic screw" had penetrated his consciousness, he had been a rebel in his sympathies and tastes. Jesus, Isaiah, Milton, Shelley—such men as these had been the friends of his soul; and he had sought in vain for their spirit in modern society—he had thought that it was dead, and that he, and a few other lonely dreamers in garrets, were the only ones who knew or cared about it. But now he came upon the amazing discovery that this spirit, driven from legislative-halls and courts of justice, from churches and schools and editorial sanctums, had flamed into life in the hearts of the working class,

and was represented in a political party which nurrb bered some thirty millions of adherents and cast some seven million votes!

Beginning nearly a century ago, these workingmen had taken the spirit of Jesus and Isaiah and Milton and Shelley, and had worked out a scientific basis for

v •*

it, and a method whereby it could be made to count in the world of affairs. They had analyzed all the evils of modern society—poverty and luxury, social and political corruption, prostitution, crime and war; they had not only discovered the causes of them, but had laid down with mathematical precision the remedies, and had gone on to carry the remedies into effect. In every civilized land upon the globe they were at work as a political party of protest; they were holding conventions and adopting programs; they had an enormous literature, they were publishing newspapers and magazines, many of them having circulations of hundreds of thousands of copies.

The strangest thing of all was this. Thyrsis was an educated man—or was supposed to be. He had spent five years in schools, and nine years in colleges and universities ; he had given the scholars of the world full opportunity to guide him to whatever was of importance. Also, he had been an omnivorous reader upon his own impulse; and here he was, at the end of it all—practically ignorant that this enormous movement existed!

In economic classes in college there had, of course, been some mention of Socialism; but this had been of the Utopian variety, the dreams of Plato and St. Simon and Fourier. There had been some account of the innumerable communities which had sprung up in America—with careful explanation, however, that they had all proven failures. Also one heard vaguely of Marx

THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE 529

and Lassalle, two violent men, whose ideas were still popular among the ignorant masses of Europe, but could be of no concern to the fortunate inhabitants of a free Republic.

And then, after this, to come upon some piece of writing—such as, for instance, the "Communist Manifesto" ! To read this mile-stone in the progress of civilization, this marvellous exposition of the development of human societies, and of the forces which drive and control them; and to realize that two lonely students, who had cast in their lot with the exploited toilers, had been able to predict the whole course of political and industrial evolution for sixty years, and to foresee and expound with precision the ultimate outcome of the whole process—matters of which the orthodox economists were still as ignorant as babes unborn!

Or to discover the writings of such a man as Karl Kautsky, the intellectual leader of the modern movement in Germany; such books as "The Social Revolution", and "The Road to Power"—in which one seemed to see a giant of the mind, standing in a death-duel with those forces of night and destruction that still made of the fair earth a hell! With what accuracy he was able to measure the strength of these powers of evil, to anticipate their every move, to plan the exact parry with which to meet them! To Thyrsis he seemed like some general commanding an army in battle, with the hopes of future ages hanging upon his skill. But this was a general who fought, not with sword and fire, but with ideas ; a conqueror in the cause of "right reason and the will of God". He wrote simply, as a scientist; and yet one could feel the passion behind the quiet words—the hourly shock of the incessant conflict, the grim persistence which pressed on in the face

of obloquy and persecution, the courage which had been tested through generations of anguish and toil.

Thyrsis' mind rushed through these things like a prairie-fire; and all the time that he read, his wonder grew upon him. How could he have been kept ignorant of them? He was quick to pounce upon the essential fact, that this was no accident; it was something that must have been planned and brought about deliberately. He had thought that he was being educated, when in reality he was being held back and fenced off from truth. It was a world-wide conspiracy—it was that very class-war which the established order was waging upon these men and their ideas!

§ 10. IT was not difficult for any one to understand the ideas, if he really wished to. They began with the fact of "surplus value". One man employed another man for the sake of the wealth he could be made to produce, over what he was paid as wages. That seemed obvious enough; and yet, what consequences came from following it up! Throughout human history men had been setting other men to work; whether they were called slaves, or serfs, or laborers, or servants, the motive-power which had set them to work had been the desire for "surplus value". And as the process went on, those who appropriated the profits combined for mutual protection; and so out of the study of "surplus value" came the discovery of the "class-struggle". Human history was the tale of the arising of some dominating class, and of the struggle of some subject class for a larger share of what it produced. Human governments were devices by which the master-class preserved its power; and whatever may have been the original purposes of arts and religions, in the end they

THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE 531

had always been seized by the master-class, and used as aids in the same struggle.

One came to the culmination of the process in modern capitalist society. Here was a class entrenched in power, owning the sources of wealth, the huge machines whereby it was produced, and the railroads whereby it was distributed, and above all, the financial resources upon which the other processes depended. One saw this class holding itself in power by means of the policeman's club and the militiaman's rifle, by machine-gun and battle-ship; one saw that, whether by bribery or by outright force, it had seized all the powers of government, of legislatures and executives and courts. One saw that in the same way it had seized upon the sources of ideas; it controlled the newspapers and the churches and the colleges, that it might shape the thoughts of men and keep them content. It set up in places of authority men whose views were agreeable to it—who believed in the beneficence of its rule and the permanence of its system; who would pour out ridicule and contempt upon those who suggested that any other system might be conceivable. And so the class-war was waged, not merely in the world of industry and politics, but also in the intellectual world.

And step by step, as the processes of capitalism culminated, this war increased in bitterness and intensity. For, of course, as capital heaped up and its control became concentrated, the ratio of exploitation increased. The great mass of labor was unorganized and helpless; whereas the masters had combined and fixed their prices ; and so day by day the cost of living increased, and misery and discontent increased with it. As capital expanded, and new machines of production were added, there were more and more goods to sell, and more and

more difficulty in finding markets; and so came overproduction and unemployment, panics and crises; so came wars for foreign markets—with new opportunities of plunder for the exploiters and new hardships and new taxes for the producers. And so was fulfilled the prophecy of Marx and Engels; under the pressure of bitter necessity the proletariat was organizing and disciplining itself, training its own leaders and thinkers, forming itself into a world-wide political party, whose destiny it was to conquer the powers of government in every land, and use them to turn out the exploiters, and to put an end to the rule of privilege.

This change was what the Socialists meant by the "revolution"—the transfer of the ownership of the means of production; and it was about that issue that the class-war was waged. Nothing else but that counted; without that all reform was futility, and all benevolence was mockery, and all knowledge was ignorance. So long as the means of producing necessities were owned by a few, and used for the advantage of a few, just so long must there be want in the midst of plenty, and darkness over all the earth. Whatever evil one went out into the world to combat, he came to realize that he could do nothing against it, because it was bound up with the capitalist system, was in fact itself that system. If little children were shut up in sweat-shops, if women were sold into brothels, it was not for any fault of theirs, it was not the work of any devil—it was simply because of the "surplus value" they represented. If weaker nations were conquered and "civilized", that, too, was for "surplus value". And these epidemics of "graft" that broke out upon the body politic—they were not accidental or sporadic things, and they were not to be remedied by putting

THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE 533

any number of men in jail; they were to be understood as the system whereby an industrial oligarchy had rendered impotent a political democracy, and had fenced it out from the fields of privilege.

And so also was it with the dullness and sterility that prevailed in the intellectual world. The master-class did not want ideas—it only wanted to be let alone; and so it put in the seats of authority men who were blind to the blazing beacon-fires of the future. It would be no exaggeration to say that the intellectual and cultural system of the civilized world was conducted, whether deliberately or instinctively, for the purpose of keeping the truth about exploitation from becoming clear to the people.

The master-class owned the newspapers and ran them. It had built and endowed the churches, and taught the clergy to feed out of its hand. In the same way it had founded the colleges, and named the trustees, who in turn named the presidents and professors. The ordinary mortal took it for granted that because venerable bishops and dignified editors and learned college-professors were all in agreement as to a certain truth, there must be some inherent probability in that truth; and never once perceived how the cards were stacked and the dice loaded—how those clergymen and editors and professors had all been selected because they believed that truth to be true, and believed the contrary falsehood to be false!

And how smoothly and automatically the system worked! How these dignitaries stood together, and held up each other's hands, maintaining the august tradition, the atmosphere of authority and power! The bishops praising the editors, and the editors praising the professors,* and the professors praising the bishops!

And when the circle was completed, what Use majeste it seemed for an ordinary mortal to oppose their conclusions !

The bishops, one perceived, were "orthodox"—that is to say they were concerned with barren formulas; and they were "spiritual"—they were concerned with imaginary future states of bliss. The editors were "safe" and "conservative"—that is to say, their souls were dead and their eyes were sealed and their god was property. And when it came to the selecting of the college professors, of the men who were to guide and instruct the forthcoming generations—what precautions would be taken then! What consultations and investigations, what testimonials and interviews and examinations ! For after all, in these new days, it could be no easy matter to find men whose minds were sterilized, who could face without blenching all the horrors of the capitalist regime! Who could see courts and congresses bought and sold; who could see children ground up in mills and factories, and women driven by the lash of want to sell their bodies; who could see the surplus of the world's wealth squandered in riot and debauchery, and the nations armed and drilled and sent out to slaughter each other in the quest for more. Who could know that all these things existed, and yet remain in their cloistered halls and pursue the placid ways of scholarship; who could teach history which regarded them as inevitable; who could care for literature that had been made for the amusement of slave-drivers, and art which existed for the sake of art, and not for the sake of humanity; who could know everything that was useless, and teach everything that was uninteresting, and could be dead at once to the warnings of the past, and to all that was vital and important in the present.

THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE 535

§ 11. NOT since he had discovered the master-key of Evolution had Thyrsis come upon any set of ideas that meant so much to him. It was not that these were new to him—they were the stuff out of which his whole life had been made; but here they were ordered and systematized—he had a handle by which to take hold of them. The name of this handle was "the economic interpretation of history". And its import was that ideas did not come by hazard, or out of the air, but were products of social conditions; and that when one knew by what method the wealth of any community was produced, and by what class its "surplus value" was appropriated—then and then only could one understand the arts and customs, the sciences and religions, which that community would evolve.

In the light of this great principle Thyrsis had to revise all his previous knowledge; he had to cast out tons of rubbish from the chambers of his mind, and start his thinking life all over again. Just as, in early days, he had exchanged miracles and folk-tales for facts of natural science; so now he saw political institutions and social codes, literary and artistic canons, and ethical and philosophical systems, no longer as things valid and excellent, having relationship to truth—but simply as intrenchments and fortifications in the class-war, as devices which some men had used to deceive and plunder some other men. What a light it threw upon philosophy, for instance, to perceive it, not as a search for truth, but as a search for justification upon the part of ruling classes, and for a basis of attack upon the part of subject-classes !

So, for instance, on the one side one found Rousseau, and on the other Herbert Spencer. Thyrsis had read Spencer, and had cordially disliked him for his dogma-

tism and his callousness; but now he read Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution", and came to a realization of how the whole science of biology had been distorted to suit the convenience of the British ruling-classes. Laissez-faire and the Manchester school had taught him that "each for himself and the devil take the hindmost" was the universal law of life; and he had accepted it, because there seemed nothing else that he could do. But now, in a sudden flash, he came to «ee that the law of life was exactly the opposite; everywhere throughout nature that which survived was not ruthless egotism, but co-operative intelligence. The solitary and predatory animals were now almost entirely extinct; and even before the advent of man with his social brain, it had been the herbivorous and gregarious animals which had become most numerous. When it came to man, was it not perfectly obvious that the races which had made civilization were those which had developed the nobler virtues, such as honor and loyalty and patriotism? And now it was proposed to trample them into the mire of "business"; to abandon the race to a glorified debauch of greed! And this travesty of science was taught in ten thousand schools and colleges throughout America—and all because certain British gentlemen had wished to work their cotton-operatives fourteen hours a day, and certain others had wished to keep land which their ancestors had seized in the days of William the Conqueror! Shortly after this Thyrsis came upon Edmond Kelly's great work, "Government, or Human Evolution"; and so he realized that Herbert Spencer's social philosophy had at last been cleared out of the pathway of humanity. And this was a great relief to him—it was one more back-breaking task that he did not have to contemplate!

THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE 537

§ 12. THEN one of his Socialist friends sent him Thorstein Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class"; a book which he read in a continuous ebullition of glee. Truly it was a delicious thing to find a man who could employ the lingo of the ultra-sophisticated sociologist, and use it in a demonstration of the most revolutionary propositions. The drollery of this was all the more enjoyable because Thyrsis could never be sure that the author himself intended it—whether his sesquipedalian irony might not be a pure product of nature, untouched by any human art.

Veblen's book might have been called a study of the ultimate destiny of "surplus value"; an economic interpretation of the social arts and graces, of "fashions" and "fads". Where men competed for the fruit of each other's labor, the possession of wealth was the sign of excellence. This excellence men wished to demonstrate to others; and step by step, as the methods of production and exploitation changed, one might trace the change in the methods of this demonstration. The savage chief began with nose-rings and anklets, and the trophies of his fights; then, as he grew richer, he would employ courtiers and concubines, and shine by vicarious splendor. He would give banquets and build palaces -—the end being always "the conspicuous consumption of goods". j.

Later on came those stages when he no longer had to gain his wealth by physical prowess; when cunning took the place of force, and he ruled by laws and religions and moral codes, and handed down his power through long lines of descendants. Then ostentation became a highly specialized and conventionalized thing—its criterion changing gradually to "conspicuous waste of time". Those characteristics were cultivated which

served to advertise to the world that their possessor had never had to earn wealth, nor to do anything for himself ; the aristocrat became a special type of being, with small feet and hands and a feeble body, with special ways of walking and talking, of dressing and eating and playing. He developed a separate religion, a separate language, separate literatures and arts, separate vices and virtues. And fantastic and preposterous as some of these might seem, they were real things, they were the means whereby the leisure-class individual took part in the competition of his own world, and secured his own prestige and the survival of his line. Some philosopher had said that virtue is a product like vinegar ; and it was a pleasant thing to discover that French heels and "picture-hats" and course-dinners were products also.

Thyrsis would read passages of this book aloud to Corydon, and they would chuckle over it together; but the reading of it did not bring Corydon the same unalloyed delight. In the leisure-class regime, the woman is a cherished possession—for it is through her that the ability to waste both time and goods can best be shown. So came Veblen's grim and ironic exposition of the leisure-class woman, an exposition which Corydon found almost too painful to be read. For Corydon's ancestors, as far back as documents could trace, had been members of that class. They had left her the frail and beautiful body, conspicuously useless and dependent; they had left her all the leisure-class impulses and cravings, all the leisure-class impotences and futilities to contend with. They had taught her nothing about cooking, nothing about sewing, nothing about babies, nothing about money; they had taught her only the leisure-class dream of "love

THE MASTERS OF THE SNAKE 539

in a cottage"—and she had run away with a poor poet to try it out!

The depth of these instincts in Corydon was amusingly illustrated by the fact that she always woke up dull and discouraged, and was seldom really herself until afternoon; and that along about ten o'clock at night, when for the sake of her health she should have been going to bed, she would be laughing, talking, singing, ablaze with interest and excitement. Thyrsis would point this out to her, and please himself by picturing the role which she should have been filling— wearing an empire gown and a rope or two of rubies, and presiding in an opera-box or a salon. Corydon would repudiate all this with indignation; but all the same she never escaped from the phrases of Veblen— she remained his "leisure-class wife" from that day forth. Not so very long afterwards they came upon Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler"; and Thyrsis shuddered to observe that of all the heroines in the world's literature, that was the one which most appealed to her. Nor did he fail to observe the working of the thing in himself; the subtle and deeply-buried instinct which made him prefer to be wretched with a "leisure-class wife" rather than to be contented with a plebeian one!

BOOK XIV THE PRICE OF RANSOM

The faint grey of dawn was stealing across the lake; and still the spell was upon them.

There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here Sole in these fields! yet will I not despair"

So she whispered; and he answered her —•

"He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep, Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.

Some life of men unblest

He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head. He went; his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground"

§ 1. IN the course of that summer there befell Cory-don an adventure; Thyrsis had gone off one day for a walk, and when he came back she told him about it— how a young lady had stopped at the house to ask for a drink of water, and had sat upon the piazza to rest s and had talked with her. Now Corydon was in a state of excitement over a discovery.

Whenever Thyrsis met a stranger, it was necessary for him to go through elaborate intellectual processes, to find the person out by an exchange of ideas. And if by any chance the person was insincere, and used ideas as a blind and a cover, then Thyrsis might never find him out at all. In other words, he took people at the face-value of their cultural equipment; and only after long and tragic blunderings could he by any chance get deeper. But with his wife it happened quite otherwise; this case was the first which he witnessed, but the same thing happened many times afterwards. With her there would be a strange flash of recognition; it was a sort of intuition, perhaps a psychic thing—who could tell? By some unknown process in soul-chemistry, she would divine things about a person that he might have been a life-time in finding out.

It might be a burst of passionate interest, or on the other hand, of repugnance and fear. And long years, of practice taught Thyrsis that this instinct of hers was never to be disregarded. Not once in all her life did he know her to give her affection to a base person; and if ever he disregarded her antipathies, he did it to

his cost. Once they were sitting in a restaurant, and a man was brought up to be introduced by a friend; he was a person of not unpleasant aspect, courteous and apparently a gentleman, and yet Corydon flushed, and could scarcely keep her seat at the table, and would not give the man her hand. Years after Thyrsis came upon the discovery about this man, that he made a practice of unnatural vices.

He came home now to find Corydon flushed with excitement. "She has such a beautiful soul!" she exclaimed. "I never met anyone like her. And we just took to each other; she told me all about herself, and we are going to be friends."

"Who is she?" asked Thyrsis.

"She's visiting Mr. Harding, the clergyman at Bellevue," was the answer.

Bellevue was a town in the valley, on the other side from the university; it had a Presbyterian church, whose young pastor Thyrsis had met once or twice in his tramps about the country. This Miss Gordon, it seemed, was the niece of an elderly relative, his housekeeper ; she was studying trained nursing, and afterwards intended to go out as a missionary to Africa.

"She's so anxious to meet you," Corydon went on. "She's coming up to see me to-morrow, and she's going to bring Mr. Harding. You won't mind, will you, Thyrsis?"

"I guess I can stand it if he can," said Thyrsis, grimly.

"You mustn't say anything to hurt their feelings," said Corydon, quickly. "She's terribly orthodox, you know; and she takes it so seriously. I was surprised —I had never thought that I could stand anybody like that."

Thyrsis merely grunted.

"I guess ideas don't matter so much after all," said Corydon. "It's a deep nature that I care about. But just fancy—she was pained because the baby hadn't been baptized!"

"You ought to have hid the dreadful truth," said he.

"I couldn't hide things from her," laughed Corydon. "But she says I can make a Socialist out of her, and she'll make a Christian out of me!"

His reply was, "Wait until she discovers the sensuous temperament!"

But Corydon answered that Delia Gordon had a sensuous temperament also. "She seemed to me like a Joan of Arc. Just think of her going away from all her family, to a station on the Congo River! She told me all about it—how wretched the people are, and what the women suffer. She woke up in the middle of the night, and a voice told her to go—told her the name of the place. And she'd never heard it before, and hadn't had the least idea of going away!"

Thyrsis was unmoved by this miracle. "I suppose," he said, "you'll be hearing voices yourself, and going with her. Tell me, is she pretty?"

"You wouldn't call her pretty," said Corydon, after a little thought. "She's just—just dear. Oh, Thyrsis, I simply fell in love with her!"

"You certainly chose an odd kind of an affinity," he said. "A Presbyterian missionary !"

"It's worse than that," confessed Corydon. "She's a Seventh-day Adventist."

"Good God! And what may that be?"

"Why, she keeps Saturday instead of Sunday. She calls it the Sabbath. And she thinks that 'evolution 5 is

wicked, and she believes in some kind of a hell! She's not just sure what kind, apparently."

"You watch out," said he, "or the first thing you know she'll be baptizing the baby behind your back."

"Would that do any good?" asked Cory don, guilelessly.

He laughed as he answered, "It would, from her point of view."

To which she replied, "Well, if we didn't know it and the baby didn't, I guess it wouldn't do any harm."

"And it might save him from some kind of a hell 1 added Thyrsis.

§ 2. Miss GORDON came the next morning, Mr. Harding with her; and the four sat out under the trees and talked. She was a girl some three years older than Corydon, but much more mature; she was short, but athletic in build, and with a bright personality. Thyrsis could see at once those fine qualities of idealism and fervor which had attracted Corydon; and to his surprise he found that, in addition to her religious virtues, the Lord had generously added a sense of humor. So Delia Gordon was really a person with whom one could have a good time.

The Lord had not been quite so generous with the Rev. Mr. Harding, apparently. Mr. Harding was about thirty years of age, tall and finely-built, with a slight, fair moustache, and a rather girlish complexion. He was evidently of a sentimental inclination, very sensitive, and a lovable person; but the sense of humor Thyrsis judged was underdeveloped. He was inclined towards social-reform, and had a club for working-boys in his town, of which he was very proud; he asked Thyrsis to come and give a literary talk to these boys,

and Thyrsis replied that his views of things were hardly orthodox. When the clergyman asked for elucidation, Thyrsis added, with a smile, "I don't believe that Jonah

*/

ever swallowed the whale". Whereupon Mr. Harding proceeded with all gravity to correct his misapprehension of this legend.

The fires of friendship, thus suddenly lighted between the two girls, continued to burn. Delia Gordon came nearly every day to see Corydon, and once or twice Corydon went down to the town and had lunch with her. They told each other all the innermost secrets of their hearts, and in the evening Corydon would retail these to Thyrsis, who was thus put in the way to acquire that knowledge of human nature so essential to a novelist. Delia had never been in love, it seemed—her only passion was for savage tribes along the Congo; but Mr. Harding had been involved in a heart-tragedy some time ago, and was supposed to be still inconsolable. Incredible as it might seem, he was apparently not in love with Delia.

Also, needless to say, the pair did not fail to thresh out problems of theology. Delia made in due course the dreadful discovery of the sensuous temperament; and also she probed to the depths the frightful ocean of unorthodoxy that was hid beneath the placid surface of Corydon. But strange to say, this did not repel her, nor make any difference in their friendship. Thyrsis took that for the sign of a liberal attitude, but Corydon corrected him with a shrewd observation —"She's so sure of her own truth she can't believe in the reality of any other. She knows I'll come to Jesus with her some day!"

It was a wonderful thing to Thyrsis to see his wife's happiness just then; she was like a flower which has

been wilting, and suddenly receives a generous shower of rain. It was just what he had prayed for; having seen all along that her wretchedness was owing to her being shut up alone with him. So now he did his best to repress his own opinions, and to let the two friends work out their problem undisturbed.

"Oh, Thyrsis," Corydon exclaimed to him* one night, "if I could only have her with me, I'd be happy always !"

"Then why don't you get her to stay with you?" asked Thyrsis, quickly.

"Ah, but she wouldn't think of it," said Corydon. "She doesn't really care about anything in the world but her Congo savages !"

"We might try," said he. "When does she complete her course?"

"Not until the end of the year."

"Well, we can do a lot of arguing in that time. And when the book is out, we'll have money enough, so that we can offer to pay her. She might become a sort of 'mother's helper.' "

§ 3. So Thyrsis began a struggle with Jesus and the Congo savages, for the possession of Delia's soul. He set to work to interest her in his work; he gave her his first novel, w r hich contained no theology at all; and also "The Hearer of Truth"—the social radicalism of which he was pleased to see did not alarm her. And then he gave her the war-novel, and saw with joy how she was thrilled over that. He laid himself out to make his purpose and his vision clear to her; and then, one afternoon, when Corydon had a headache and was taking a nap, he led her off to a quiet place in the w r oods, and set before her all the bitter tragedy of their lives.

He pictured the work he had to do, and the loneliness to which this consigned Corydon; he told her of the horrors they had so far endured, and what effect these had had upon his wife. He showed her what her power was—how she could make life possible for both of them. For she had that magic key which Thyrsis himself did not possess, she could unlock the treasure-chambers of Corydon's soul.

But alas, Thyrsis soon perceived that his efforts had been in vain. Delia was stirred by his eloquence, but the only effect was to move her to an equally eloquent account of the sufferings of the natives of the Congo basin. It was important that he should get his books written ; but how much more important it was that some help should be carried to these unhappy wretches! They never saw any books, they were altogether beyond his reach; and who was to take the light to them? She told him harrowing tales of sick women, beaten and tortured and burned with fire to drive the devils out of them.

Thyrsis met this by attempting to broaden the girl's social consciousness. He showed her how the waves of intelligence, beginning at the top, spread to the lowest strata of societv—changing the character of all human activities, and affecting the humblest life. He showed her the capitalist system, and explained how it worked; how it reached to the savage in the remotest corner of the earth, and seized him and made him over according to its will. It was true, for instance—and not in any poetic sense, but literally and demonstrably true—that the fate of the Congo native was determined in Wall Street, and in the financial centres of London and Paris and Brussels and Berlin. The essential thing about the natives was that they represented rubber and

ivory. And Delia might go there, and try to teach them and help them, but she would find that there were forces engaged in beating them down and destroying them—forces in comparison with which she was as helpless as a child. It was true of the Congo blacks, as it was true of the people of the slums, of the proletariat of the whole earth, that there was no way to help them save to overthrow the system which made of them, not human beings, but commodities, to be purchased and passed through the profit-mill, and then flung into the scrap-heap.

But Thyrsis found to his pain that it was impossible to make these considerations of any real import to Delia. She understood them, she assented to them; but that did not make them count. Her impulses came from another part of her being. Her savages were naked and hungry and ignorant and miserable; and they needed to be fed and clothed, and more important yet, to be baptized and saved. She was all the more impelled to her task by the fact that all the forces of civilization were arrayed against her. The fires of martyrdom were blazing in her soul. She meant to throw herself over a precipice—and the higher the precipice, and the more jagged the rocks beneath, the greater was the thrill which the prospect brought her.

§ 4. THEY went back to the house; as Delia had arranged to spend the night with them, and as Cory-don's headache was better, the controversy was continued far into the evening. Thyrsis took no part in it, he listened while Corydon pleaded for herself, and pictured her loneliness and despair.

Delia put her arms about her. "Don't you see, dear," she argued—"all that is because you are without

a faith! You cast out Jesus, and deny him; and so how can 7 help you? If you believed what I do, you would not be lonely, even if you were in the heart of Africa."

"But how can I believe what isn't true?" cried Cory-don ; and so the skeletons of theology came forth and rattled their bones once more.

A couple of hours must have passed, while Thyrsis said nothing, but listened to Delia and watched her, probing deeply into the agonies and futilities of life. He had given up all hope of persuading her to stay with them; he thought only of the tragedy, that this noble spirit should be tangled up and blundering about in the mazes of a grotesque dogma. And the time came when he could endure it no more; something rose up within him, something tremendous and terrible, and he laid hold of Delia Gordon's soul to wrestle with it, as never before had he wrestled with any human soul except Corydon's.

The truth of the matter was that Thyrsis loved the religious people; it was among them that he had been brought up, and their ways were his ways. This was a fact that came to him rarely now, for he was hard-driven and bitter; but it was true that when he sneered at the church and taunted it, he was like a parent who whips a child he loves. Perhaps Paret had spoken truly in one of his cruel jests—that when a man has been brought up religious, he can never really get over it, he can never really be free.

So now Thyrsis spoke to Delia as one who was himself of the faith of Jesus; he cried out to her that what she wanted was what he wanted, that all her attitudes and ways of working were his. And here were monstrous evils alive upon the earth—here were all the

forces of hell unleashed, and ranging like savage beasts, destroying the lives of men and women! And those who truly cared, those who had the conscience and the faith of the world in their keeping—they were wasting their time in disputations about barren formulas, questions which had no relationship to human life! Questions of the meaning of old Hebrew texts that had often no meaning at all, and of folk-tales and fairy-stories out of the nursery of the race—the problem of whether Jonah had swallowed the whale, or the whale had swallowed Jonah—the problem of whether it was on Friday or Saturday that the Lord had finished the earth. Because of such things as this, they drove all thinking men from their ranks, they degraded and made ridiculous the very name of faith! As he went on, the agony of this swept over Thyrsis—until it seemed to him as if he had the whole Christian Church before him, and was pleading with it in the voice of Jesus. Here was a new crucifixion—a crucifixion of civilization! Thyrsis cried out in the words, "Oh ye of little faith!" Truly, was it not the supreme act of infidelity, to make the spirit of religion, which was one with the impulse of all life— the force that made the flower bloom and oak-tree tower and the infant cry for its food—to make it dependent upon Hebrew texts and Assyrian folk-tales! Delia preached to him about "faith"; but what was her faith in comparison with his, which was a faith in all life— which trusted the soul of man, and reason as part of the soul of man, a thing which God had put in man to be used, and not to be feared and outraged.

Then came Delia. She would not admit that her faith depended upon texts and legends; it was a faith in the living God. She was not afraid of reason—she did not outrage it—

"But you do, you do!" cried Thyrsis. "Your whole attitude is an outrage to it! You never speak of 'science' except as an evil thing. You told Corydon that 'evolution' was wicked!"

"I don't see how evolution can help my faith" began the other.

"That's just it!" cried Thyrsis again. "That is exactly what I mean! You do not pay homage to truth, you do not seek it for its own sake! You require that it should fit into certain formulas that you have set up —in other words that it should not interfere with your texts and your legends! And what is the result of that —you have paralyzed all your activities, you have condemned your intellectual life to sterility! For we live in an age of science, we cannot solve our problems except by means of it; the forces of evil are using it, and you are not using it, and so you are like a child in their hands! Not one of the social wrongs but could be put an end to—child-labor, poverty and disease, prostitution and drunkenness, crime and war! But you don't know how, and you can't find out how—simply because you have thrown away the sharp tools of the intellect, and filled your mind with formulas that mean nothing! How can you understand modern problems, when you know nothing about economics? You have rejected 'evolution'—so how can you comprehend the evolution of society? How can you know that civilization at this hour is going down into the abyss—dragging you and your churches and your Congo savages with it? I who do understand these things—I have to go out and fight alone, while you are shut up in your churches, mumbling your spells and incantations, and poring over your Hebrew texts! And think of what I must suffer, knowing as I do that the spirit that animates you—the fervor

and devotion, the 'hunger and thirst after righteousness'—would banish horror from the earth forever, if only it could be guided by intelligence!"

§ 5. ALL this, of course, was effort utterly wasted. Thyrsis poured out his pleadings and exhortations, his longing and his pain; and when he had finished, the girl was exactly where she had been before—just as distrustful of "science", and just as blindly bent upon getting away to her savages and binding up their wounds and baptizing them. And so at last he gave up in despair, and left Delia to go to bed, and went out and sat alone in the moonlight.

Afterwards, though it was long after midnight, Corydon came out and joined him. He saw that she was flushed and trembling with excitement.

"Thyrsis!" she whispered. "That was a marvellous thing!"