"Come not, except to sorrow thou be born!"

And again, in the cave--

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

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

Section 4. This had come so very easily to Thyrsis that he could not
believe that it was good. "Just a little story," he said to Corydon,
when he read it to her, and he was surprised to see how it affected
her--how the tears welled into her eyes, and she clung to him
sobbing. It meant more to her than any other thing that he had
written; it was the very voice of their tenderness and their grief.

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

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

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

Thyrsis, from much work and little sleep, was haggard and wild of
aspect; the cry of the world, "Take a position!" rang in his ears
day and night. The springs of book-reviews had dried up entirely,
and by sheer starvation he was forced to a stage lower yet. A former
college friend was editing a work of "contemporary biography", and
offered Thyrsis some hack-writing. It meant the carrying home of
huge bundles of correspondence from the world's most brightly-shining
lights, and the making up of biographical sketches from their eulogies
of themselves. With every light there came a portrait, showing what
manner of light it was. As for Thyrsis, he did his writing with the
feeling that he would like to explore with a poniard the interiors
of each one of these people.

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

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

Thyrsis held himself in, and parted from the editor with all
courtesy; but then, as he walked down Fifth Avenue, his fury burst
into flame. Here, too, was power--here, too, the signs of it!
Palaces of granite and marble, arid towering apartment-hotels; an
endless vista of carriages and automobiles, with rich women lolling
in them, or descending into shops whose windows blazed with jewels
and silver and gold. Here were the masters of the metropolis, the
masters of life; the dispensers of patronage--that "public" which he
had to please. He would bring his vision and lay it at their feet,
and they would give him or deny him opportunity! And what was it
that they wanted? Was it worship and consecration and love? One
could read the answer in their purse-proud glances; in the barriers
of steel and bronze with which they protected the gates of their
palaces; in the aspects of their flunkeys, whose casual glances were
like blows in the face. One could read the answer in the pitiful
features of the little errand-girl who went past, carrying some bit
of their splendor to them; or of the ragged beggar, who hovered in
the shelter of a side-street, fearing their displeasure. No, they
were not lovers of life, and protectors; they were parasites and
destroyers, devourers of the hopes of humanity! Their splendors were
the distilled essence of the tears and agonies of millions of
defeated people--their jewels were drops of blood from the heart of
the human race!

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

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

Corydon voiced her perplexity.

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

"I belong to their line," he said.

"But--you are poor!" she exclaimed.

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

"But--why do they ask me?"

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

"Are they people of culture?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

The family was going to the matinГ©e; as there was room in their car,
they asked Thyrsis to go with them. So he watched the lumber-king
(who had refused to lend him money, but had offered him a
"position") draw out a bank-note from a large roll, and pay for a
box in one of Broadway's great palaces of art. And now--having been
advised so often to study what the public wanted--now Thyrsis had a
chance to recline at his ease and follow the advice.

"The Princess of Prague", it was called; it was a "musical comedy";
and evidently exactly what the public wanted, for the house was
crowded to the doors. The leading comedian was said by the papers to
be receiving a salary of a thousand dollars a week. He held the
center of the stage, clad in the costume of a lieutenant of marines,
and winked and grinned, and performed antics, and sang songs of no
doubtful significance, and emitted a fusillade of cynical jests. He
was supposed to be half-drunk, and making love to a run-away
princess--who would at one moment accept his caresses, and then
spurn him coquettishly, and then execute an unlovely dance with him.
In between these diverting procedures a chorus would come on, a
score or so of highly-painted women, hopping and gliding about, each
time clad in new costumes more cunningly indecent than the last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I should think you would become a cannibal," Thyrsis replied.

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

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

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

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

"Of course not," said he.

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

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

Section 7. A famous scientist began the story--reasoning along the
lines of Dr. Holland's argument. The grass took the inorganic
matter, and made it into food; the steer ate the grass, and carried
it to the next stage; and beyond that was one stage more. So the
scientist began making experiments--in a quiet way, of course. He
reported the results before a learned scientific body, but his
colleagues were so scandalized that the matter was hushed up.

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

But there began to be strange rumors and suspicions. There were
young writers, who had developed a new technique, and had carried
poetic utterance to undreamed of heights; and in this poetry were
cryptic allusions, hints of diabolic things. A Socialist paper
printed the mГ©nu of a banquet given by these "Neo-Nietzscheans", and
demanded to know what one was to understand by _filet de mouton
blanc_, and wherein lay the subtle humor of _patГ© de petit bГЄte_.
And at last the storm broke--a youth scarcely in his teens published
a book of poems in which the dread secret was blazoned forth to the
world with mocking defiance. There were frantic attempts to suppress
this book, but they failed; and then a prosecuting officer, eager
for notoriety, placed the youth upon trial for his life. And so the
issue was drawn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But already Thyrsis himself had judged "The Higher Cannibalism" and
repudiated it. It was born of his pain and weakness, and it was not
the work he had come into the world to do. So at the end he had
placed a poem, which told of a visit from his muse, after the
fashion of Musset's "Nuits"; the muse had been sad and silent, and
in the end the poet had torn up the product of his hours of despair,
and had renewed his faith with the gracious one.

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

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

For one thing, they no longer heard any music at all--She was not
strong enough to practice the piano; and his violin was gone. Here
in the great city an endless stream of concerts and operas and
recitals flowed past; and here were they, like starving children who
press their faces against a pastry-cook's window and devour the
sweets with their eyes. Thyrsis kept up with musical and dramatic
progress by reading the accounts in the papers and magazines; but
this was a good deal like slaking one's thirst with a mirage. He
used to wonder sometimes if he were to write to these great
artists--would they invite him to hear them, or would they too
despise him? He never had the courage to try.

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

Also, alas, they had not been free to select the opera. It was "La
Traviata"; and there was not much food for their hungry souls in
this farrago of artificiality and sham sentiment. They shut their
eyes and tried to enjoy the music, forgetting the gallant young men
of fashion and their fascinating mistresses. But even the music, it
seemed, was tainted; or could it be, Thyrsis wondered, that he could
no longer lose himself in the pure joy of melody? Many kinds of
corruption he had by this time learned about; the corruption of men,
and of women, and of children; the corruption of painting and
sculpture, of poetry and the drama. But the corruption of music was
something which even yet he could not face; for music was the very
voice of the soul--the well-spring from which life itself was
derived. Thyrsis thought, as he and Corydon wandered about in the
foyers of this palatial opera-house, was there anywhere on earth a
place in which heaven and hell came so close together. A place where
the lust and pride of the flesh displayed themselves in all their
glory; and in contrast with the purest ecstasies the human spirit
had attained! He pointed out one rich dowager who swept past them;
her breasts all but jostling out of her corsage as she walked, her
stomach squeezed into a sort of armor-plate of jewels, her cheeks
powdered and painted, her head weighted with false hair and a tiara
of diamonds, her face like a mask of pride and scorn. And then, in
juxtaposition with that, the _Waldweben_ and the _Feuerzauber_, or
the grim and awful tragedy of the Siegfried funeral-march! There
were people in this opera-house who knew what such music meant;
Thyrsis had read it in their faces, in that suffocating top-gallery.
He wondered if some day the demons that were evoked by the music
might not call to them and lead them in revolt, to drive the money-
changers from the temple once again!

Section 9. Another editor was reading "The Hearer of Truth," and a
publisher was hovering on the brink of venturing "The Higher
Cannibalism"; and so the two had new hopes to lure them on. When the
spring-time had come, they would once more escape from the city, and
would put up their tent on the lake-shore! They spent long
afternoons picturing just how they would live--what they would eat,
and what they would wear, and what they would study. As for
Cedric--so they had called the baby--they saw him playing beneath
the big tree in front of the tent. And what fun they would have
giving him his bath on the little beach inside the point!

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

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

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

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

"Yes," she would answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thyrsis was under the necessity of sweeping clean his soul, because
of all the luxury and wantonness he saw in this metropolis, and the
madness to which it goaded his soul. Some day fame would come to
him, he knew--wealth also, perhaps; and oh, there must be one man in
all the city who was not corrupted, who did not learn extravagance
and self-indulgence, who practiced as well as preached the life
of faith! And so, again and again, he and Corydon would renew the
pledges of their courtship-days--pledges to a discipline of Spartan
sternness.

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

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

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

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

It was a new and curious occupation, which opened up to him whole
worlds whose existence he had not previously suspected. Through his
review-writing he had become acquainted with the books that had seen
the light of day; now he made the startling discovery that for every
one that was born, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, that died
in the womb. He could see how it went--the hordes of half-educated
people who read books and were moved to write something like them.
Each manuscript was a separate tragedy; and often there would be a
letter or a preface to make certain that one did not miss the sense
of it. Here would be a settlement-worker, burning with a message,
but unable to draw a character or to write dialogue; here would be a
business-man, who had studied up the dialect of the region where he
spent his summer vacations, and whose style was so crude that one
winced as he turned the pages; here would be a poor bookkeeper, or a
type-writer, or other cog in the business machine, who had read of
the fortunes made by writers of fiction, and had spent all his hours
of leisure for a year in composing a tale of the _grand monde_, or
some feeble imitation of the sugar-coated "historical romance" of
the hour.

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

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

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

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

"Ah!" said the other.

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

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

Thyrsis told him the outline of a plot. He would write a story of
the struggles of a young author in the metropolis--not such a young
author as himself, a rebel and a frenzied egotist, but a plain,
everyday young author whom other people could care about. He had the
"local color" for such a tale, and he could do it without too much
waste of time. Mr. Ardsley thought it an excellent idea.

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

"Why, yes," said the other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He sat and held her hands, and saw her bite her lips and fight to
keep back the tears in her eyes. Their hearts had grown together, so
that it was like tearing their flesh to separate them. They had
never imagined that such a thing could come into their lives.

"Thyrsis," she whispered--"you'll forget me!"

He pressed her hands more tightly. "No, dear! No!" he said.

"But you'll get used to living without me!" she cried. "And it's the
time in my life when I need you most!"

"I will stay, dearest, if you say so."

She exclaimed, "No, no! I must stand it!"

And seeing her grief, his heart breaking with pity, a strange
impulse came to Thyrsis. He took her hands in his, and knelt down
before her, and began to pray. It had been years since he had
thought of prayer, and Corydon had never thought of it in her life.
It came from the deeps of him--a few stammering words, simple,
almost childish, yet exquisite as music. He prayed that they might
have courage to keep up the fight, that they might be able to hold
their love before them, that nothing might ever dim their vision of
each other. It was a prayer without theology or metaphysics--a
prayer to the unknown gods; but it set free the well-spring of
tenderness and pity within them; and when he finished Corydon was
sobbing upon his shoulder.






BOOK IX

THE CAPTIVE IN LEASH





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

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

She paused.

"Go on," he said, and she quoted--

   "Then through the great town's harsh, heart-wearying roar,
    Let in thy voice a whisper always come,
        To chase fatigue and fear:
    Why faintest thou? I wandered till I died.
        Roam on! The light we sought is shining still."_

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

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

But it took him only a day or two to drive such things out of his
mind. There was no time for sentiment now--it was "Clear ship for
action!" For once in his life he was free, and had a chance to work.
He was full of his talk with Mr. Ardsley, and meant to do his best
to be "practical." And so behold him wandering about in the
water-soaked forests, or tramping the muddy roads, or sitting by his
little stove while the cold storms beat upon the tent--wrestling
with his unruly Pegasus, and dragging it back a hundred times a day
to what was proper, and human, and interesting!

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

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

Perhaps all these mishaps had something to do with the refusal of
his ideas to flow. But apparently it was in vain that Thyrsis tried
at any time to work at things that were interesting to other people.
Perhaps he could have worked better at them, if there had not been
so many things that were interesting to _him_. He would find himself
confronted with the image of the society clergyman, or of the sleek
editor in his club, or some other memory out of the world of luxury
and pride. And each day came the newspaper, with its burden of
callousness and scorn; and perhaps also a letter from Corydon, with
something to goad him to new tilts with the enemies of his soul.

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

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

"Genius surrounded by Commercialism"--that was his theme; and it
would have to be a play. Its hero would be a young musician, a mere
boy, a master of the demon-voices of the violin; he would be rapt in
his vision, and around him a group of people who would be
embodiments of the world and all its forces of evil. One by one they
came trooping before Thyrsis' fancy, with all their trappings of
pomp and power, their greatness and their greed--sinister and
cruel figures, but also humorous, very creatures of the spirit of
comedy! Yes, he had a comedy this time--a real comedy!

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

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

Only of late had the family come to realize what an asset to their
career this "Genius" might be. They had humored him in his strange
whim to devote his life to fiddling; money had been spent on him
freely--he brought home with him a famous Cremona instrument for
which three thousand dollars had been paid. But now it was dawning
upon them that this was an "ugly duckling"; he was to make his
_dГ©but_ in the metropolis, where an overwhelming triumph was
expected; and then he would return to the home city in the middle
West, and would play at _musicales_, which even the most exclusive
of the "_Г©lite_" must attend.

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

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

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