"And I thought they were through with us!" Darrell whispered, with a
shudder. "I thought it was all over!"

He sat in a chair, with his face hid in his arms. Thyrsis put his
hand upon his shoulder, and the man caught it. "Listen," he
exclaimed. "You can see this thing from the outside, you know the
literary world. Do you think that I can ever rise above this? Is
there any use in trying?"

"How do you mean?" Thyrsis asked, perplexed.

"I mean--is it worth while for me to go on writing? Can I ever have
any influence?"

Thyrsis was shocked at the question--as he had been at the way
Darrell took the whole thing. He knew that his friend had money
enough to live comfortably; and why should any sort of criticism
matter to a man who was economically free?

"Brother," he said, "you have forgotten your Dante."

"How do you mean?" asked the other.

"_Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le gente!_" quoted Thyrsis; and
then he added, "You don't seem to realize that these are newspapers,
and nobody really credits them."

"Ah, but they do!" cried Darrell. "You don't know what I have been
through with! My oldest friends have cut me! Clergymen have refused
to sit at table with me! The organization that I gave ten years of
my life to founding has gone all to pieces. I have been utterly
ruined--I have been wiped out, destroyed!"

"But, my dear man," Thyrsis argued, "you are setting out to teach a
new doctrine, one that is abhorrent to people. And how can you
expect to avoid being attacked? It seems to me that either you ought
not to have done it, or else been prepared for some of this uproar."

"But because a man becomes a Socialist, are they to libel him in
these foul ways?"

"I don't mean that. It's not only that you are a Socialist, but that
you have defied their marriage-laws."

"But I haven't!" exclaimed Darrel.

"What do you mean?" asked Thyrsis, perplexed.

"I have defied no law--nor even any convention. I have done
everything that the world requires."

Thyrsis stared at him, amazed. "Why, surely," he gasped, "you
and--and Mrs. Darrell--you are not _married?_"

"Married!" exclaimed the other. "We were married here in New York,
by a regularly-ordained clergyman!"

Thyrsis could not find words to express his dismay. "I--I had no
idea of that!" he gasped. I thought--"

"You see the lies!" cried the other. "Even _you_ had swallowed
them!"

It took Thyrsis some time to adjust himself to this new point of
view. He had thought of his friend as a man who had boldly defied
the convention of marriage; and instead of that he was apparently a
man cowering under the lash of the world's undeserved rage. But if
so--what an amazing and incredible thing was the mesh of slander and
falsehood in which he had been entangled!

Section 12. Little by little Thyrsis drew from Darrell the story of
his marital experience. Before he had been of age, as a poor
student, he had boarded with a woman many years his senior, who had
set out to lure him into marrying her. "I don't believe that she
ever loved me one hour," he said. "She had made up her mind that I
was a man of brilliant parts, and that I would have worldly success.
To me the thing was like an evil dream--I couldn't realize it. And I
can't tell you about it now--it was too horrible. She was older than
I, and so different--she was more like a man. And for twenty years
she held me; I had to stay--I was utterly at her mercy!"

The man's voice fell to a whisper, and he pressed Thyrsis' hand
convulsively; there were tears upon his cheeks. "I could not tell it
all to anyone," he said. "It makes me cry like a child to think of
it. I'm only getting over it little by little--realizing how I was
tortured. This woman had no interest in me, intellectual or
spiritual; she brought up my children to despise me. I would stay
upstairs in my study, writing sermons--that was all my life! For
twenty years I waded through my own blood!"

Darrell paused to get control of himself, and then went on.

"One of my parishioners was my present wife's mother. She was one of
the old-time abolitionists, and she was wealthy; and now, in her old
age, she saw the new light, and became a Socialist. This, of course,
was like gall to her family; they were powers in the state--the
railroad people, who control the legislature and run the government.
And so their newspapers denounced me, and denounced the university
where I taught.

"Then came her daughter--a young girl out of college. I was at their
home often, and we became friends. She saw how unhappy I was, and
she tried to open my wife's eyes, and to win her over to me. But, of
course, she failed in that; and then, little by little we found that
we loved each other. You know me--you know that I am not a base man,
nor a careless man; and you will believe me when I tell you that
there was nothing between us that the world could have called wrong.
We knew that we loved, and we knew that there was no hope. And that
went on for eight years; for eight years I renounced--and strove
with every power of my heart and soul to make something out of that
renunciation, to transmute it into spiritual power. And I failed--I
could not do it; and in the end I knew the reason. It was not beauty
and nobility--it was madness and horror; it was not life--it was
death! The time came when I knew that our renunciation was simply a
crime against the soul. Can you see what I mean?"

"Yes," said Thyrsis, "I can see."

'And see what that meant to me--the situation I faced! I was a
clergyman--and preaching a new crusade to the world. It was like
being in a cage, with bars of red-hot metal. A hundred times I would
go towards them--and a hundred times I would shrink back. But I had
to grasp them in the end."

"I see!" whispered the other.

"The thing was becoming a scandal anyway; the world was bound to
make a scandal of it, whether we would or no. It was a scandal that
I visited in another woman's home, it was a scandal that I spent her
money in my propaganda. The very children on the streets would taunt
my children about it. And then, my health broke down from overwork;
and the mother was going abroad, and she invited me to go with her
and her daughter; and, of course, that made it worse. So at last the
old lady came to me. 'You love my daughter,' she said, 'and the
world has thrown her into your arms. You must let a divorce be
arranged, and then marry my daughter.'"

"And you got the divorce yourself?" asked Thyrsis.

"No," said Darrell. "There were grounds enough; but it would have
meant to attack my wife in the public prints, and I would not do it.
I had to let her charge me with desertion, and say nothing."

"And, of course, they distorted that," said Thyrsis.

"They distorted everything!" cried the other. "My present wife gave
my first wife all her patrimony; and I thought that was generous--I
thought it was a proof of love. But the newspapers made it that she
had bought me!"

"And they distorted your second marriage?" asked Thyrsis.

"They lied about it deliberately," was Darrell's reply--"Some of
our friends gave little addresses of greeting; and so the newspapers
called it a new kind of wedding--a 'Socialist wedding', which we
had designed for our new kind of unions! And now, when we buy a
farm, so that we can live quietly in the country, they turn that
into a 'free love colony'!"

Section 13. Thyrsis went away from this interview with some new
problems to ponder upon. He had seen a little of this power of the
newspapers to defile and torment a man; but he had never dreamed of
anything as bad as this. This was murderous, this was monstrous. He
saw these papers now as gigantic engines of exploitation and
oppression--irresponsible, unscrupulous, wanton--turned loose in
society to crush and destroy whom they would.

They had taken this man Darrell and they had poured out their
poisons upon him; they had tortured him hideously, they had burned
him up as with vitriol. As a public force he was no longer a human
being at all--he was a deformity, a spectre conjured up to bring
fright to the beholder. And through it all he was utterly
helpless--as much at their mercy as an infant in the hands of
savages. And what had he done? Why had the torture been visited upon
him?

Thyrsis pictured the men who had led in this soul-hunt. They were
supposed to be enlightened Americans at the dawn of the twentieth
century; and did they truly hold to the superstition of marriage as
a religious sacrament, not to be dissolved by mortal power? Did they
really believe that a man who had once been drawn into matrimony was
obligated for life--no matter how unhappy he might be, no matter to
what indignities he might be subjected? Or, if they did recognize
the permissibility of divorce--then why this hue and cry after
Darrell, who had borne his punishment for twenty years, and had
waited for eight or ten years to test the depths of his new love?

The question answered itself; and the answer fanned Thyrsis' soul
into a blaze of indignation. All this patter about the deserted
wife, sitting at home with her children and weeping her eyes
out--all that was so much hocus-pocus for the ears of the mob. The
chiefs of this Inquisition and their torturers and slaves wrote it
with their tongues in their cheeks. What they saw was that they had
got securely strapped upon their rack the man who had threatened
their power, who had laid bare its sources and exposed its iniquity.
And they meant that if ever he came out of their torture-chamber,
it should be so mangled and crippled that never again would he lift
a finger against them!

The gist of the "Darrell case", when you got right down to it, was a
quarrel over property; it was the snarling of wolves who had been
disturbed at their feeding. Darrell had denounced wealth and the
exploiters of wealth, and now he had married a woman of wealth; and
was he to get away with his prize? That was the meaning of all the
loud halloo--for that the hounds were unleashed and the
hunting-horns sounded. Thyrsis pictured the men who "wrote up" the
Darrell story. He had known them in the newspaper-world--the
servants of the giant publicity-machine; living and working in the
roar and rush of it, in a stifling atmosphere where the finer
qualities of the soul were poisoned and withered over night. They
lived their lives, almost without exception, by means of alcohol and
coffee and tobacco; they were scornful, disillusioned, cynical
beyond all telling and all belief. Their only god in heaven or earth
or the waters under the earth was "copy". To such men there were two
possible bonds of interest in a woman--the first being lust, and the
second money. In the case of Henry Darrell they found both these
motives; and so how clear the story was to them!

Thyrsis thought, also, of the men who owned and managed the papers;
those who had turned loose the hunt and directed it. Rich men were
they, who had built these publicity machines for their own purposes.
And what were they in their private lives? Some of them were
notoriously dissolute; and still others hid their ways under a veil
of hypocrisy--just as in their editorials they hid their
class-interests under pretenses of principle. And how easy it would
have been for Darrell to get what he wanted without losing his
reputation--if only he had been willing to follow the example of
these eminent citizens! Thyrsis knew one man, the editor of an
appallingly respectable journal, who had invited a young girl to his
wife's home and there attempted to seduce her. He knew the
proprietor of another, whose cheerful custom it was to go about
among his newly-married women-friends and suggest that, inasmuch as
he was a "superman," and their husbands were weaklings, they should
let him become in secret the father of their children. This amateur
eugenist was accustomed to maintain that the great men in history
had for the most part been bastards; and Thyrsis, knowing this fact
about him, would read editorials in his papers, in which Henry
Darrell was denounced as an enemy of the home!

Meantime Thyrsis was reading Darrell's books and pamphlets, and
coming to realize what a mind was here being destroyed. For this
man, it seemed to him, was master of the noblest prose utterance
that had been heard in America since Emerson died. He went again to
hear him speak, in another ill-lighted and stuffy hall before less
than a hundred people; and the pain of this was more than he could
bear. He went home that night with his friend, and labored with him
with all the force of his being. "You stay here," he declared, "and
put yourself at the mercy of your enemies! You waste your faculties
contending with them--even knowing about them is enough to destroy
you. And all the while you might escape from them altogether--might
do your real work, that the world knows nothing of. No one can
hinder you. And when you have written the book of your soul, then
your tormentors will be--they will be like the tormentors of Dante!
Go away! Go away to Europe, where you can be free!"

And so before long, he stood upon a steamer-pier and waved Henry
Darrell and his wife farewell. And every now and then would come
letters, telling of long, long agonies; for Darrell had to fight for
those few rare days when ill health would permit him to think. So
year by year he labored at what Thyrsis knew, if it was ever
finished, would be America's first world-poem; and in the meantime
eminent statesmen and moralists who were alarmed at the progress of
"Socialist agitation", would continue to conjure up before the
public mind the night-mare spectre of the once-respected clergyman,
who had deserted his weeping wife and children, and run away with a
rich woman to found a "free-love colony"!

Section 14. A couple of days after the Darrells sailed, Thyrsis set
out himself to find a home. On account of the new book, he would
have to be near a library, and so he had selected a college-town not
far from New York. He went there now, and put up for a week at a
students' boarding-house, while prosecuting his search.

A strange experience it was to him, after the years of struggle and
contact with the world, to come back to that academic atmosphere; to
find men who were still peacefully counting up the "feminine
endings" in Shakespeare's verse, and writing elaborate theses upon
the sources of the Spenserian legends. Upon his excursions into the
country some of these young men would tramp with him--threshing out,
student-fashion, the problems of the universe; and how staggering it
was to meet a man who was about to receive a master's degree in
literature--and who regarded Arthur Hugh Clough as a "dangerous"
poet, and Tennyson's "Two Voices" as containing vital thought, and
T. H. Green as the world's leading philosopher! And this was the
"education" that was dispensed at America's most aristocratic
university--for this many millions of dollars had been contributed,
and scores of magnificent buildings erected!

Thyrsis saw that a partial explanation lay in the fact that in
connection with the university there existed a great theological
seminary. Some of these future ministers came also to the
boarding-house, and Thyrsis listened to their shop-talk--about the
difference between "transubstantiation" and "consubstantiation", and
the status of the controversy over the St. John Gospel. He heard one
man cite arguments from Paley's "Moral Philosophy"; and another
making bold to state that he was uncertain about the verbal
inspiration of the Pentateuch!

To Thyrsis, as he listened to these discussions, it was as if he
felt a black shadow stealing across his soul. He wondered why he
should hate these men with a personal hatred; he tried to argue with
himself that they must be well-meaning and earnest. The truth was
that they seemed to him just like the law-students, men moved by
sordid and low ideals; the only difference was that their minds were
not so keen as the lawyers'. Thyrsis was coming little by little to
understand the economic causes of things, and he perceived that this
theological world represented a stagnant place in the stream of
national culture; it being a subsidized world, maintained half by
charity, vital men turned from it; it drew to itself the feebler
minds, or such as wished to live at ease, and not inquire too
closely into the difference between truth and falsehood.

Section 15. A few miles out from the town Thyrsis found a farm with
an abundance of wild woodland, where the farmer gave him permission
to camp. And so he went back and got some lumber, and loaded his
tent and supplies on a wagon, and wrote Corydon that he would meet
her the next afternoon. With the help of the farmer's boy he labored
the rest of the day at building the platform, and putting up the
tent, and getting their belongings in order. The next day he was up
at dawn, constructing tables and stands; and later on he hired the
farmer's "jagger-wagon", and drove in for Corydon and Cedric and the
trunks.

It was a glorious spring day, of turquoise sky and glinting
sunshine; and later, when the sun was low, the woods were flushed
with a glow of scarlet and purple. It lent a glory to the scene,
shedding a halo about the commonest tasks; the unpacking of blankets
and dishes, the ranging of groceries upon shelves. They were free
from all the world at last--they were setting out upon the journey
of their lives together!

So it was with singing and laughter that they went at their work.
The baby crawled about on the tent-floor and got into everybody's
way, and crowed with delight at the novel surroundings; and later on
his mother gave him his supper and put him to bed; and then she
spread a feast of bread and butter, and fresh milk and eggs and a
can of fruit, and they sat down to the first meal they had eaten
together in many a long, long month.

They were tired and ravenously hungry; but their happiness of soul
was keener even than any physical sensation, and they sat leaning
upon their elbows and gazing across the table, reading the wonder in
each other's eyes.

"It has been a year since we parted!" whispered Corydon.

"Just a year!" he said. "It seems like ten of them."

"And do you remember, Thyrsis, how we prayed! How we prayed for this
very hour!"

He took her hands in his. Once more they renewed their pledges of
devotion; once more the vision of their hopes unrolled before them.
"From now on," he whispered, "our life is our own! We can make it
whatever we will. Let us make it something beautiful."

And so there they made a compact. They would speak no more of the
year that was past; it was a bad dream, and now it was gone. Let it
be swept from their thoughts, and let them go on to make the future
what they desired it to be.






BOOK XII

THE TREADMILL





_They sat in the little cabin, where she had been reading some lines
from the poem again--

   "O easy access to the hearer's grace
    When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine!"

"Ah, yes!" he said. "But our lot was cast in a different time."

She put her hand upon his. "Even so," she said; and then turned the
page, and read once more--

   "What though the music of thy rustic flute
        Kept not for long its happy, country tone;
            Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note
        Of men contention-tost, of men who groan,
            Which task'd thy pipe too sore, and tired thy
                    throat--
                It failed, and thou wast mute!
        Yet hadst thou always visions of our light!_"

Section 1. The _mise-en-scГ©ne_ of their new adventure in domesticity
was a tent eighteen feet by twelve; but as the side-walls were low,
they could walk only in the centre, and must range their belongings
at the sides. To the left, as one entered the tent, there stood a
soapbox with a tiny oil-stove upon it; and then a stand, made out of
a packing-box, to hold their dishes, their cooking-utensils and
their limited supply of provisions. Next down the line came a trunk,
and in the corner the baby's crib--which had been outgrown by the
farmer's children, and purchased by Thyrsis for a dollar. At the
rear was a folding-table, and above it a board from which Corydon
hung her clothing; along the other wall were her canvas cot, and a
little stand with some books, and a wash-stand and another trunk.

Some distance off in the woods stood a second tent, seven feet
square, in which Thyrsis had a cot for himself, and also a
canvas-chair in which he sat to receive the visits of his muse. They
got their drinking water from a spring near by; there was a tiny
stream beside the tent which provided their washing-water. In this
stream Thyrsis hollowed out a flat basin, in which they might set
their butter-crock, and a pail of milk, and a larger pail that held
their meat. Below that was a deeper pool from which they dipped
water, and lower yet a third pool, with a board on which Corydon
might sit and wash diapers, to her heart's content and her back's
exhaustion.

The tent had been old when Thyrsis got it, and as this was the third
season he had used it, it was dark and dun of hue. They had not
noticed this at the outset as they had put it up on a bright,
sunshiny day, and also before the trees had put out all their
foliage. But now, when rain came, they found that they had to light
a lamp in order to read in the tent; and, of course, it was on rainy
days that they had to be inside. Thyrsis did not realize the
influence which this tent had upon his wife's spirits; it was only
after he saw her made physically ill by having to live in a room
with yellow wall-paper, that he came to understand the power which
her surroundings had over Corydon.

If they'so much as touched a finger to the roof of the tent while it
was raining, a steady dripping would come through at that point.
Then, as the rains grew heavier, water took to running down the pole
that stood in the centre of the tent, and formed a pool in the
middle of the floor, so that Thyrsis had to get the axe and cut a
hole there. And, of course, there was no way to dry anything; the
woods, which were low, were turned into a swamp, and one's shoes
became caked with mud, and there was no keeping the tent-floor
clean.

In this place they had to keep an able-bodied, year-and-a-half-old
baby! There was no other place to keep him. He could not be allowed
on the damp floor, nor where he could touch the top of the tent; so
Thyrsis set up sticks at all four corners of his crib, and tied
strong twine about them, making a little pen; and therein they put
the baby, and therein he had to stay. He had his rattle and his
rubber-doll and his blocks and the rest of his gim-cracks; and after
he had howled long enough to satisfy himself that there was no
deliverance from his prison, he settled back and accepted his tragic
fate. There came occasions when Corydon was sick, and unable to
move; then Thyrsis would put up his umbrella and take Cedric to his
own tent, where he would draw a chalk-line across the floor.
One-half of the forty-nine square feet of space was his, and in it
he would sit and read and study; in the other half the baby would
play. After long experience he came to realize that at such times
Papa would not pay any attention to him, and that crossing the
chalk-line involved getting one's "mungies" spanked.

There were other troubles that fell upon them. At first, it being
April, it was cold at night; and they had no stove, and no room for
a stove. Later on the ceaseless rains brought a plague of
mosquitoes; and so Thyrsis had to rig up a triangular door and cover
the entrance to the tent with netting; and when the weather grew
better, he had to get more netting and construct a little house, in
which the baby could play outdoors. And then there had to be more
spankings of "mungies", to teach the infant that this mysterious
mosquito-bar must not be walked through, nor pulled at, nor poked
with sticks, nor even eaten.

They prayed for fair days, and a little sunshine; and it seemed as
if the weather-demons had discovered this, and were playing with
them. There would come a bright morning, and they would spread a rug
in the baby's cage, and hang out all their damp belongings to dry;
and then would come a sudden shower, and baby and rug and belongings
would all have to pile back into the tent. And then it would clear
again, and everything would go out once more; and they would prepare
dinner, and be comfortably settled to eat, when it would begin to
sprinkle again. They would move in the clothing and the baby, and
when it began to rain harder, they would move in the table and the
food; and forthwith the rain would cease. Because it was poor fun
eating in a dark tent by lamp-light, amid the odor of gas-stove and
cooking, they might move out once more--but only to repeat the same
experience over again.

For six weeks after their arrival there was not a day without rain,
and it would rain sometimes for half a week without ceasing. So
everything they owned became damp and mouldy--all their clothing,
their food, the very beds upon which they slept. One of their
miseries was the lack of place to keep things; all their odds and
ends had to be stowed away under the cots--where one might find
clothing, and books, and manuscripts, and a hammock, and an
umbrella, and some shoes, and a box of prunes, and a sack of
potatoes, and half a ham. When water got in at the sides of the tent
and wet all these objects, and the bedclothing hung over the floor
and got into them, it was trying to the temper to have to rummage
there.

Section 2. Before she left the city Corydon had taken the baby to
consult a famous "child-specialist"--at five dollars per
consultation; she had received the dreadful tidings that Cedric was
threatened with the "rickets". So she had come out to the country
with one mighty purpose in her soul. "Under-nourishment", the doctor
had said; and he had laid out a regular schedule. Six times daily
the unhappy infant was to be fed; and each time some elaborate
concoction had to be got ready--practically nothing could be eaten
in a state of nature. The first meal would consist of, say a poached
egg on a piece of toast, and the juice of an orange, with the seeds
carefully excluded; the next of some chicken broth with a cracker or
two, and the pulp of prunes with the skins removed; the next of some
beef chopped up and pounded to a pulp and broiled, together with a
bit of mashed potato or some other cooked vegetable; the next of
some gruel, with cream and sugar, and some more prunes.

And these operations, of course, took the greater part of Corydon's
day; she would struggle at them until she was ready to drop, and
when she had to give up they would fall to Thyrsis. Some of them
fell to him quite frequently--for instance, the pounding of the
meat. It had to have all the fat and gristle carefully cut out; and
there had to be a clean board, and a clean hammer, both of which
must be scraped and washed afterwards; and whenever by any chance
Corydon let the meat stay on the fire a second too long, so that it
got hard, the whole elaborate operation had to be gone over
again--was not the baby's life at stake?

It was quite vain for him to protest as to the pains that Corydon
took to remove every tiniest fragment of the skin of a stewed prune.
"Surely, dearest," he would argue, "the internal arrangements of a
baby are not so delicate as to be torn by a tiny bit of prune-skin!"

But to Corydon the internal arrangements of babies were mysterious
things--to be understood only by a child-specialist at five dollars
per visit. "He told me what to do," she would say; "and I am going
to do it."

So she would prepare the concoctions, and would sit and feed them to
the baby, spoonful by spoonful; and long after the little one had
been stuffed to the bursting-point, she would hold the spoon poised
in front of its mouth, making tentative passes, and seeking by some
device to cajole the mouth into opening and admitting one last
morsel of the precious nutriment. The child had a word of its own
inventing, wherewith it denoted things that were good to eat. "Hee,
gubum, gubum!" he would exclaim; and Corydon would hold the spoon
and repeat "Gubum, gubum,"--long after the baby had begun to sputter
and gasp and make plain that it was no longer "gubum".

Also, under the instructions of the specialist, they made an attempt
to break the child of the "hoodaloo mungie" habit. A baby should lie
down and go to sleep without handling, the authority had declared;
and now that there was all outdoors for him to cry in, they resolved
that he should be taught. So they built up the fence about the crib,
and laid the baby in for his afternoon nap, and started to go away.
And the baby gave one look of perplexity and dismay, and then began
to cry. By the time they had got out of the tent he was screaming
like a creature possessed; and Corydon and Thyrsis sat outside and
stared at each other in wonder and alarm. When she could stand it no
more, they went away to a distance; but still the uproar went on.
Now and then they would creep back and peep in at the purple and
choking infant; and then steal away again, and discuss the
phenomenon, and wish that the "child-specialist" were there to
advise them. Finally, when the crying had gone on for two hours
without a moment's pause, they gave up, because they were afraid the
baby might cry itself into convulsions. And so the "hoodaloo mungie"
habit went on for some time yet.

Under the "stuffing regime" the infant at first thrived amazingly;
he became fat and rosy, and Corydon's heart beat high with joy and
pride. But then came midsummer, and the hot season; and first of all
a rash broke out upon the precious body, and in spite of powders and
ointments, refused to go away. Later on came the "hives", with which
the baby was spotted like the top of a pepper-crust. And then, as
fate willed it, the family of a woman who did some laundry for
Corydon developed the measles; and Corydon found it out too
late--and so they were in for the first of a long program of
"children's diseases".

It was a siege that lasted for a month and more--a nightmare
experience. The child had to be kept in a dark place, under pain of
losing its eyesight; and when it was very hot in the tent, some one
had to sit and fan it. It could not sleep, but writhed and moaned,
now screaming in torment, now whimpering like a frightened cur--a
sound that wrung Thyrsis' very heart. And oh, the sight of the
little body--purple, a mass of eruptions, and with beads of
perspiration upon it! Corydon's mother came to help her through this
ordeal, and would sit for hours upon hours, rocking the wailing
infant in her arms.

Section 3. But there were ups as well as downs in this tenting
adventure. There came glorious days, when they took long tramps over
the hills; or when Thyrsis would carry the child upon his shoulder,
and they would wander about the meadows, picking daisies and clover,
and making garlands for Corydon. Once Cedric sat down upon a
bumble-bee, and that was hard upon him, and perhaps upon the bee.
But for the most part the little one was enraptured during these
excursions. He was fascinated with the flowers, and continually
seeking for an opportunity to devour some of them; while he was
doing it he would wear such a roguish smile--it was impossible not
to believe that he understood the agitation which these abnormal
appetites occasioned in his parents. Corydon would be seized with a
sudden access of affection, and she would clutch him in her arms and
squeeze him, and fairly smother him with kisses. Of course the
youngster would protest wildly at this, and so not infrequently the
demonstration would end tragically.

"I can't have any joy in my baby at all!" she would lament; and
Thyrsis would have to soothe the child, and plead with her to find
more practical ways of demonstrating her maternal devotion.

Cedric was beginning to make determined efforts to talk now, and he
had the most original names for things. His parents would adopt
these into their own speech, which thus departed rapidly from
established usage. They had to bring themselves to realize that if
they went on in that fashion, the child would never learn to speak
so that any one else could understand him. The grandmothers were
most strenuous upon this point, and would laboriously explain to the
infant that chickens and pigeons and sparrows were not all known as
"ducky-ducks"; they would plead with it to say "bottle of milk",
while its reckless parents were delighting themselves with such
perversions as "bobbu mookie-mook."

Two or three times each week the farmer would bring their mail; and
once a week they would hire an old scare-crow of a horse, and a
buggy which might have passed for the one-horse shay in its
ninety-ninth year, and drive to a town for provisions. It was
amazing what loads of provisions a family of three could consume in
the course of a week--especially when one of them was following the
"stuffing regime". There had to be a lot of figuring done to get it
for the sum of thirty dollars a month; and this put another grievous
burden upon Thyrsis. Corydon, alas, had no talents for figuring, and
was cursed with a weakness for such superfluities as clean laundry
and coffee with cream. This was one more aspect of the difference
between the Hebrew and the Greek temperament; and sometimes the
Hebrew temperament would lose its temper, and the Greek temperament
would take to tears. The situation was all the more complicated
because of their pitiful ignorance. They really did not know what
was necessity and what was luxury. For instance, Thyrsis had read
somewhere that people could live without meat; but Corydon had never
heard of such an idea, and insisted with vehemence that it was an
absurdity.

However, there was no evading the issue of poverty; for the thirty
dollars was all they had. "The Hearer of Truth" had been out several
months now, and had not sold a thousand copies; and so it was to be
doubted if Thyrsis would ever get another dollar from that. Also, he
had heard from the translator of "The Genius", and had agreed to
accept twenty-five dollars as an "honorarium" for the production of
his play in Germany--this princely sum to be paid when the play
came out during the following winter.

Meantime, of course, he was driving away at his new work. Domestic
duties took up most of his morning; but he would get away into the
woods in the afternoons, and in the evenings, when the family was
asleep, he would work until far after midnight. He was bringing out
basketfuls of books from the library of the university; and he lived
another life in these--sharing, in a hundred different forms, the
agony of the War. He was not writing yet; he was filling up his soul
with the thing, making it a reservoir of impressions. Some times it
would seem that the reservoir was nearly full, and he would be
seized with a hunger to be at work; he would go about possessed by
it--absent-minded, restless, nervous when he was spoken to. It was
hard for a man who listened all night to the death-groans of the
thousands piled up before "Bloody Angle", to get up in the morning
and be satisfactory in the rГґle of "mother's assistant".

Here, again was the torment of this matrimonial bond to a man who
wished to be an artist. He had to live two lives, when one was more
than he could attend to; he had to be always aware of another soul
yearning for him, reaching out to him and craving his attention. To
be sure, Corydon was interested in what he was doing; she even made
heroic efforts to read the books that he was reading. But she had so
many duties, and so many headaches; and when night came she was so
tired! She would ask him to tell her about his vision; and was not
the thing untellable? Why else did he have to labor day and night,
like a man possessed? He would explain this to her, and she would
bid him go on and do his work and not mind her. But when he would
take her at her word, and there would follow a week or two of
indifference and preoccupation--then he would discover that she was
again unhappy.

Section 4. This never ceased to be the case between them; but
perhaps it was intensified at this time by the fact that their
sex-life had to be suppressed. This was a problem which they had
talked out between them before they came away. Thyrsis, who was
groping for the truth about these matters, had come to the
conclusion that the factor which gave dignity and meaning to
intercourse between a man and woman was the desire, or at any rate
the willingness, to create a child. Corydon was not sure that she
agreed with him in this; but so far as their own case was concerned,
it was quite clear that they could take no remotest chance of any
accident--another child would mean certain destruction for all three
of them. And so they had gone back to the "brother and sister"
arrangement with which they had begun life. This was a simple matter
for Thyrsis, who was utterly wrapped up in his book; it was not so
simple for Corydon, though neither of them realized it, nor could
have been brought to admit it. As usual, Corydon desired to be what
he was, and to feel what he felt; and so Thyrsis did not realize how
another side of her was being blighted. Hers was predominantly a
love-nature; it was intolerable to her that any one she loved should
not love her in return, and love her in the same way, and to the
same extent; and now, when her entire being went out to him, she
found herself obliged to suppress her emotions.

Sometimes the thing would break out in spite of her.

"Thyrsis," she would cry, "aren't you going to kiss me good-night?"

"Didn't I kiss you, dearest?" he would answer.

"Oh, but such a cold and perfunctory kiss!"

And so he would come and put his arms about her; but even while she
held him thus, she would feel the life go out of his caresses, and
see his eyes with a far-off expression. She would know that his
thoughts were away upon some battle-field.

"Tell me, Thyrsis," she would exclaim. "Do you really love me?"

"Yes, dear," he would reply. "I love you."

"But how _much_ do you love me?"

And then he would be dumb. What a question to ask him! As if he had
the time and the energy to climb to those heights, to speak again
that difficult language! Had he not told her a thousand times how
much he loved her! and could she not believe it and understand it?

"But why should it be so hard to tell me?" she would protest.

And he would answer that to him it was a denial of love to explain
or to make promises. He was as unchangeable as the laws of
nature--he could no more be faithless to her soul than he could to
his own.

"I want you to take that for granted," he would say; "to know it as
you know that the sun will rise to-morrow morning."

"But, Thyrsis," she would answer, when he used this metaphor, "don't
people sometimes like to go out and see the sun rise?"

Section 5. The summer passed; and Thyrsis found to his dismay that
his relentless muse had not yet permitted him to write a word. He
had not a sufficient grasp upon his mighty subject--nor for that
matter had he freedom to get by himself and wrestle it out. He
shrunk from that death-grapple, while they were in this unsettled
state. They could not stay in tents through the winter-time; and
where were they to go?

Thyrsis was consumed with the desire to build a tiny house in these
woods. He had roamed the country over, without finding any place
that was habitable; and besides, he did not want to pay rent--he
wanted a home of his own, however humble. He had meant to build one
with the money from "The Hearer of Truth"; but now there came a
statement from the publisher, showing that there would be due him on
the book a trifle over eleven dollars!

He tried a new plan. He wrote out a "scenario" of his projected
novel, and sent this to his publisher, to see if he could get a
contract in advance. He asked for five hundred dollars--with that he
could build the house he wanted, and live for another six months,
until the book was done. The publisher wrote him to come to the
city, where, after some parleying, he submitted a proposition; he
would advance the money and publish the book, paying ten per cent.
royalty; but he must also have the option to publish the author's
future writings for ten years upon the same basis.

This rather staggered Thyrsis. He was business-man enough by this
time to realize that if he ever had a real success he could get
fifteen or twenty per cent. upon his future work--there were even
some authors who got twenty-five per cent. And moreover, he did not
like to tie himself to this publisher, who was of the hard and
grasping type. He went home to think it over, and in the end he
wrote to Henry Darrell. He set forth the situation, and showed how
much money it might mean to him--money which he would otherwise be
able to devote to some useful purpose. It all depended upon what
Darrell could do in the emergency.

He waited three weeks, and then came Darrell's reply, saying that he
could not possibly do what Thyrsis wished. There were so many calls
upon him--the Socialist paper was in trouble, and so on. Thereupon
Thyrsis wrote to the publisher to say that he accepted the offer and
would sign the contract; but in a couple of days he received a curt
reply, to the effect that the publisher had changed his mind, and no
longer cared to consider the arrangement. He had, as Thyrsis found
afterwards, got rid of the enthusiastic young man who had inveigled
him into "The Hearer of Truth"; and perhaps also he had been reading
the ridicule which the critics were pouring out upon that unhappy
book.

So once more Thyrsis wrote to Darrell--a letter of agonized
entreaty. He was at the most critical moment of his life; and now,
at the very culmination of his effort, to have to give up would be a
calamity he could simply not contemplate. If only he could finish
the task, he would be saved; for this was a book that would grip men
and shake them--that it should fail was simply unthinkable. He could
make out with two hundred dollars; and he besought his friend at any
sacrifice to stand by him. He asked him to cable; and when, a couple
of weeks later, the message came--"all right"--to Thyrsis it was
like waking up and escaping from the grip of some terrible dream.

Section 6. And so began the house-building. It was high time,
too--the latter part of September, and the nights were growing
chill. He sought out a carpenter to help him, and had an interview
with his friend the farmer, who agreed to rent a bit of land, in a
corner of his orchard, by the edge of the wood. It was under the
shade of a great elm-tree, and sufficiently remote from all the
world to satisfy the taste of any literary hermit.

For months before this he and Corydon had discussed the plans of
their future home; every square inch of it had been a subject of
debate. In its architectural style it was a compromise between
Corydon's aesthetic yearnings, and the rigid standards of economy
which circumstance imposed. It was to be eighteen feet long and
sixteen feet wide--six feet high at the sides and nine in the
centre. It was to be "weather-boarded", and roofed with paper,
instead of shingles--this being so much cheaper. Corydon heard with
dismay that it would be necessary to paint this roofing-paper
black; and Thyrsis, by way of compensation, agreed that the
weather-boards should have some "natural finish", instead of common
paint. There was to be a six-foot piazza in front, and a little
platform in back, with steps descending to the spring.

There had been long discussions about the method of heating the
mansion. Corydon had been observing the customs of her neighbors in
this typical "small-farming" district, and declared that they had
two leading characteristics: first, they were not happy until they
had had all their own teeth extracted, and a complete set of
"store-teeth" substituted; and second, as soon as they moved into a
house, they boarded over the open fire-place and covered the boards
with wall-paper. But Thyrsis, making investigations along practical
lines, found that the open fire-place had a bad reputation as a
consumer of fuel; and also, it would take a mason to build a
chimney, and the wages of masons were high. So Corydon had to
reconcile herself to a house with a stove, and a stove-pipe that
went through a hole in the wall!

Nevertheless this house-building time was one of the happiest
periods of their lives. For here was something constructive, in
which they could both be occupied. Thyrsis would be up and at work
early in the morning, before the carpenter came; and in between the
baby's various meals, Corydon would come also, and take part in the
operations. A miraculous thing it was to see the house of their
dreams coming into being, with every feature just as they had
planned it. And what a palatial structure it was--with so much space
and air! One could actually move about in it without danger of
striking one's head; coming into it from the tent, one felt as if he
were entering a cathedral!

They were so consumed with a desire to see it finished, that Thyrsis
would stay at the work until darkness came upon him, and sometimes
even worked by moon-light, or with a lantern. And how proud they
would be when the carpenter came next morning, and found the last
roof-boards laid, or the flooring all completed! Thyrsis learned the
mysteries of window-sills and door-frames, the excitements of
"weather-boarding," and the perils of roof-painting. He realized
with wonder how many achievements of civilization the privileged
classes take as a matter of course. What a remarkable thing it was,
when one came to think of it, that a door should swing true upon its
hinges, and fit exactly into its frame, and latch with a precise and
soul-satisfying snap! And that windows should slide up and down in
their frames, and stop at certain places with a spring-catch!

Corydon too was interested in these discoveries, and became skilled
at holding weather-boards while her husband nailed them, and at
helping to unroll and measure roofing-paper, and climbing up the
ladder and holding it in place. Even the baby became fired with the
spirit of achievement, and would get himself a hammer and a board,
and plague his parents until they started a dozen or so of nails for
him--after which he would sit and blissfully pound them into the
board, and all but pound them through the board in his enthusiasm.
Before long he even learned to start them himself; and a most
diverting sight it was to see this twenty-two-months old youngster
driving nails like an infant Hercules. For the fastening of the
roofing-paper they used little circular plates of tin called
"cotterels"; and these also Cedric must learn to use. So a new
phrase was added to the vocabulary of "dam-fool talk". "Bongie
cowtoos" was the name of the operation; for a couple Of years
thereafter, whenever Corydon and Thyrsis wished to be let alone to
discuss the problems of the universe, they would get the baby a
hammer and some nails and a board, and repeat that magic formula,
and the problem was solved.

Unfortunately, however, it was not all smooth sailing in the
carpentry-business. There were mashed thumbs and sawed fingers; and
then, in an evil hour, Thyrsis came upon an advertisement which told
of a wonderful new kind of wall-paper which could be applied
directly to laths--thus enabling one to dispense with plaster. He
sent for ten or twelve dollars' worth of this material, and he and
Corydon spent a whole morning making a mixture of glue and
flour-paste and water, and boiling it in an iron preserving-kettle.
But alas, the paper would not paste; and then they had a painful
time. Corydon gave up in disgust, and went away; but Thyrsis, to
whom economy was a kind of disease, would not give up, and was angry
with the other for urging him to give up. He spent a whole day
wrestling with the concoction, and gave himself a headache with the
ghastly odor. But in the end he had to dump it out, and clean the
kettle, and fasten the paper to the lathes with "bongie cowtoos". As
the strips of paper did not correspond with the studding, he found
himself driving nails into springy laths, an operation most trying
to the temper of any man of letters. One of the trials of this house
forever after was that upon the least jar a corner of the ceiling
was liable to fall loose; and then one would have to get a ladder,
and climb up into a hot region, and pound nails into a broken lath,
with dust sifting down into one's eyes, and the hammer hitting one's
sore thumb, and occasioning exclamations not at all suitable for the
ears of a two-year-old intelligence.

Section 7. When the doors were fitted, and the windows set in, and
the piazza laid, and the steps built, they got down to the
furniture, which was also to be home-made. Thyrsis was gratified
beyond telling by these tables and dressing-stands and shelves and
book-cases, which he could build of hemlock boards in an hour or
two, and which cost only thirty or forty cents apiece. He would
labor with Corydon to induce her to share this joy; but alas, he
would only succeed in losing his own joy, without increasing hers.
On many occasions he attempted such things as this; it was only
after long years that he came to realize that Corydon's temperament
was the one fixed fact in the universe with which he had to deal.

Two hundred and twenty-five dollars was the total cost of this
establishment when completed. And while the carpenter was putting
the finishing touches, Thyrsis was using up thirty dollars more of
lumber in constructing himself a "study" in the woods near by. Eight
by ten this cabin was to be; it was to have a door and a window, and
a little piazza in front, upon which the inhabitant might sit in
fair weather. Also Thyrsis built for it a table and a bookcase; and
as he had now eighty square feet instead of forty-nine, there was
room for a cot and a chair, and a coal-stove fourteen inches in
diameter. As fate would have it, there was some black paint left
over; and to Corydon's horror it was announced that this would be
used on the study. However, Thyrsis insisted that it was _his_
study; and besides, there was some red paint left, with which he
might decorate the window and the door-frame, and stripe the edges
of the roof and the corners. Surely that would be festivity enough
for the most exacting of Greek temperaments!