Thyrsis would sit now and then and watch him at play, and think
thoughts that went deep into the meaning of things. Here was, in its
very living presence, that blind will-to-be which had seized them
and flung them together. And it seemed to Thyrsis that somehow
Nature, with her strange secret chemistry, had reproduced all the
elements they had brought to that union. This child was immense,
volcanic, as their impulse had been; he was intense, highly-strung,
and exacting--and these qualities too they had furnished. Curious
also it was to observe how Nature, having accomplished her purpose,
now flung aside her concealments and devices. From now on they
existed to minister to this new life-phenomenon, to keep it happy
and prosperous and she cared not how plain this might become to them
--she feared not to taunt and humiliate them. And they accepted her
sentence meekly, they no longer tried to oppose her. Her will was
become an axiom which they never disputed, which they never even
discussed. No matter what might happen to them in future, the Child
must go on!

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

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

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

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

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

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

In economic classes in college there had, of course, been some
mention of Socialism; but this had been of the utopian variety, the
dreams of Plato and St. Simon and Fourier. There had been some
account of the innumerable communities which had sprung up in
America--with careful explanation, however, that they had all
proven failures. Also one heard vaguely of Marx and Lassalle, two
violent men, whose ideas were still popular among the ignorant
masses of Europe, but could be of no concern to the fortunate
inhabitants of a free Republic.

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

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

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

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

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

And step by step, as the processes of capitalism culminated, this
war increased in bitterness and intensity. For, of course, as
capital heaped up and its control became concentrated, the ratio of
exploitation increased. The great mass of labor was unorganized and
helpless; whereas the masters had combined and fixed their prices;
and so day by day the cost of living increased, and misery and
discontent increased with it. As capital expanded, and new machines
of production were added, there were more and more goods to sell,
and more and more difficulty in finding markets; and so came
overproduction and unemployment, panics and crises; so came wars for
foreign markets--with new opportunities of plunder for the
exploiters and new hardships and new taxes for the producers. And so
was fulfilled the prophecy of Marx and Engels; under the pressure of
bitter necessity the proletariat was organizing and disciplining
itself, training its own leaders and thinkers forming itself into a
world-wide political party, whose destiny it was to conquer the
powers of government in every land, and use them to turn out the
exploiters, and to put an end to the rule of privilege.

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

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

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

And how smoothly and automatically the system worked! How these
dignitaries stood together, and held up each other's hands,
maintaining the august tradition, the atmosphere of authority and
power! The bishops praising the editors, and the editors praising
the professors, and the professors praising the bishops! And when
the circle was completed, what _lГ©se_ _majestГ©_ it seemed for an
ordinary mortal to oppose their conclusions!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later on came those stages when he no longer had to gain his wealth
by physical prowess; when cunning took the place of force, and he
ruled by laws and religions and moral codes, and handed down his
power through long lines of descendants. Then ostentation became a
highly specialized and conventionalized thing--its criterion
changing gradually to "conspicuous waste of time". Those
characteristics were cultivated which served to advertise to the
world that their possessor had never had to earn wealth, nor to do
anything for himself; the aristocrat became a special type of being,
with small feet and hands and a feeble body, with special ways of
walking and talking, of dressing and eating and playing. He
developed a separate religion, a separate language, separate
literatures and arts, separate vices and virtues. And fantastic and
preposterous as some of these might seem, they were real things,
they were the means whereby the leisure-class individual took part
in the competition of his own world, and secured his own prestige
and the survival of his line. Some philosopher had said that virtue
is a product like vinegar; and it was a pleasant thing to discover
that French heels and "picture-hats" and course-dinners were
products also.

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

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






BOOK XIV

THE PRICE OF RANSOM





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

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

So she whispered; and he answered her--

   "He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep,
    Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.
            Some life of men unblest
    He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head.
        He went; his piping took a troubled sound
        Of storms that rage outside our happy ground._"

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

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

It might be a burst of passionate interest, or on the other hand, of
repugnance and fear. And long years of practice taught Thyrsis that
this instinct of hers was never to be disregarded. Not once in all
her life did he know her to give her affection to a base person; and
if ever he disregarded her antipathies, he did it to his cost. Once
they were sitting in a restaurant, and a man was brought up to be
introduced by a friend; he was a person of not unpleasant aspect,
courteous and apparently a gentleman, and yet Corydon flushed, and
could scarcely keep her seat at the table, and would not give the
man her hand. Years after Thyrsis came upon the discovery about this
man, that he made a practice of unnatural vices.

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

"Who is she?" asked Thyrsis.

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

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

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

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

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

Thyrsis merely grunted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good God! And what may that be?"

"Why, she keeps Saturday instead of Sunday. She calls it the
Sabbath. And she thinks that 'evolution' is wicked, and she believes
in some kind of a hell! She's not just sure what kind, apparently."

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

"Would that do any good?" asked Corydon, guilelessly.

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

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

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

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

The Lord had not been quite so generous with the Rev. Mr. Harding,
apparently. Mr. Harding was about thirty years of age, tall and
finely-built, with a slight, fair moustache, and a rather girlish
complexion. He was evidently of a sentimental inclination, very
sensitive, and a lovable person; but the sense of humor Thyrsis
judged was underdeveloped. He was inclined towards social-reform,
and had a club for working-boys in his town, of which he was very
proud; he asked Thyrsis to come and give a literary talk to these
boys, and Thyrsis replied that his views of things were hardly
orthodox. When the clergyman asked for elucidation, Thyrsis added,
with a smile, "I don't believe that Jonah ever swallowed the whale".
Whereupon Mr. Harding proceeded with all gravity to correct his
misapprehension of this legend.

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

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

It was a wonderful thing to Thyrsis to see his wife's happiness just
then; she was like a flower which has been wilting, and suddenly
receives a generous shower of rain. It was just what he had prayed
for; having seen all along that her wretchedness was owing to her
being shut up alone with him. So now he did his best to repress his
own opinions, and to let the two friends work out their problem
undisturbed.

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

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

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

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

"Not until the end of the year."

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

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

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

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

Thyrsis met this by attempting to broaden the girl's social
consciousness. He showed her how the waves of intelligence,
beginning at the top, spread to the lowest strata of society--changing
the character of all human activities, and affecting the humblest
life. He showed her the capitalist system, and explained how it
worked; how it reached to the savage in the remotest corner of the
earth, and seized him and made him over according to its will. It
was true, for instance--and not in any poetic sense, but literally
and demonstrably true--that the fate of the Congo native was
determined in Wall Street, and in the financial centres of London
and Paris and Brussels and Berlin. The essential thing about the
natives was that they represented rubber and ivory. And Delia
might go there, and try to teach them and help them, but she would
find that there were forces engaged in beating them down and
destroying them--forces in comparison with which she was as
helpless as a child. It was true of the Congo blacks, as it was true
of the people of the slums, of the proletariat of the whole earth,
that there was no way to help them save to overthrow the system
which made of them, not human beings, but commodities, to be
purchased and passed through the profit-mill, and then flung into
the scrap-heap.

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

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

Delia put her arms about her. "Don't you see, dear," she
argued--"all that is because you are without a faith! You cast out
Jesus, and deny him; and so how can _I_ help you? If you believed
what I do, you would not be lonely, even if you were in the heart of
Africa."

"But how can I believe what isn't _true?_" cried Corydon; and so the
skeletons of theology came forth and rattled their bones once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He pressed her hand.

"And all thrown away!" she cried.

"You realized that, did you?" he asked.

"I realized many things. Why you set so much store by ideas, for
instance! I see that you are right--one has to think straight!"

"It's like a steam-engine," said Thyrsis. "It doesn't matter how
much power you get up, or how fast you make the wheels go--unless
the switches are set right, you don't reach your destination."

"You only land in the ditch!" added Corydon. "And that's just the
way I felt to-night--she'd take your argument every time, and dump
it into a ditch. And she'd see it there, and not care."

"She doesn't care about facts at all, Corydon. And notice this
also--she doesn't care about succeeding. That's the thing you must
get straight--her religion is a religion of failure! It comes back
to that criticism of Nietzsche's--it's a slave-morality. The world
belongs to the devil; and the idea of taking it away from the devil
seems to be presumptuous. Even if it could be done, the attempt
would be "unspiritual'; for the 'world' is something corrupt--something
that ought not to be saved. So you see, she's perfectly willing for
the Belgians to have the rubber."

"'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's'!" quoted Corydon.

"Yes, and let Caesar spend them on Cleo de Merode. What she wants is
to save the _souls_ of her savages--to baptize them, and to perish
gloriously at the work, and then be transported to some future life
that is worth while. So you see what the immortality-mongers do with
our morality!"

"Ah!" cried Corydon, swiftly. "But that need not be so!"

"But it _is_ so!" he answered.

"No, no!" she protested. "You must not say that! That is giving
up--and I felt such a different mood in you to-night! I wanted to
tell you--we must do something about it, Thyrsis! It made me ashamed
of my own life. Here I am, failing miserably--and all that work
crying out to be done! I don't think I ever had such a sense of your
power before--the things you might do, if only you could get free,
if only I didn't stand in your way! Oh, can't we cast the old
mistakes behind us, and go out into the world and preach that
message?"

"But, my dear," said Thyrsis, "that wouldn't appeal to you always.
Your temperament--"

"Never mind my temperament!" she cried. "I am sick of it, ashamed of
it; I want the world to hear that trumpet-call! I want you to break
your way into the churches--to make them listen to you, and realize
their blasphemy of life!"

She caught hold of him and clung to him; he could feel, like an
electric shock, the thrill of her excitement. He marvelled at the
effect his words had produced upon her--realizing all the more
keenly, in contrast with Delia, what a power of _mind_ he had here
to deal with. "Dearest," he said, "I must put these things into my
books. You must stand by me and help me to put them into my books!"

Section 6. Delia Gordon went away to take up her work in the city;
but for many months thereafter that missionary impulse stayed with
them. They would find themselves seized with the longing to throw
aside everything else, and to go out and preach Socialism with the
living voice. They were still immersed in its literature; they read
Bellamy's "Looking Backward", and Blatchford's "Merrie England", and
Kropotkin's "Appeal to the Young". They read another book about
England that moved them even more--a volume of sketches called "The
People of the Abyss", by a young writer who was then just forging to
the front--Jack London. He was the most vital among the younger
writers of the time, and Thyrsis watched his career with eager
interest. There was also not a little of wistful hunger in his
attitude--he had visions of being the next to be caught up and
transported to those far-off heights of popularity and power.

Also, they were kept in a state of excitement by the Socialist
papers and magazines that came to them. There was a great strike
that summer, and they followed the progress of it, reading
accounts of the distress of the people. Every now and then the pain
of these things would prove more than Thyrsis could bear, and he
would blaze out in some fiery protest, which, of course, the
Socialist papers published gladly. So little by little Thyrsis was
coming to be known in "the movement". Some of his friends among the
editors and publishers made strenuous protests against this course,
but little dreaming how deeply the new faith had impressed him.

In truth it was all that Thyrsis could do to hold himself in; it
seemed to him that he no longer cared about anything save this fight
of the working-class for justice. He was frightened by the prospect,
when he stopped to realize it; for he could not write anything but
what he believed, and one could not live by writing about Socialism.
He thought of his war-book, for instance. It was but two or three
months since he had finished it, and it was his one hope for success
and freedom; and yet already he had outgrown it utterly. He realized
that if he had had to go back and do it over, he could not; he could
never believe in any war again, never be interested in any war
again. Wars were struggles among ruling-classes, and whoever won
them, the people always lost. Thyrsis was now girding up his loins
for a war upon war.

So there were times when it seemed that a literary career would no
longer be possible to him; that he would have to cast his lot
altogether with the people, and find his work as an agitator of the
Revolution. One day a marvellous plan flashed over him, and he came
to Corydon with it, and for nearly a week they threshed it over,
tingling with excitement. They would sell their home, and raise what
money they could, and get themselves a travelling van and a team of
horses and go out upon the road on a Socialist campaign!

It was a perfectly feasible thing, Thyrsis declared: they would
carry a supply of literature, and would get a commission upon
subscriptions to Socialist papers. He pictured them drawing up on
the main street of some country town, and ringing a dinner-bell to
gather the people, and beginning a Socialist meeting. He would make
a speech, and Corydon would sell pamphlets and books; they had
animated discussions as to whether she might not learn to make a
speech also. At least, he argued, she might sing Socialist songs!