Section 9. There came a time when all these happenings could no longer be hid from parents. This unthinkable "engagement" had to be announced, and the furies of grief and rage and despair unchained. No one could realize the change that had come over Corydon--Cory-don, the meek and long-suffering, who now was turned to granite, and immovable as the everlasting hills. As for Thyrsis, all kinds of madness had come from him, and were expected from him. But even he was appalled at the devastation which this thunderbolt caused.
"You have ruined your career! You have ruined your career!" was the cry that rang in his ears all day. And he knew what the world meant by this. Young men of talent who wished to rise in the world did not burden themselves with wives at the age of twenty; they waited until their careers were safe--and meantime, if they felt the need, they satisfied their pa.s.sions with the daughters of the poor. And it was for some such "eligible man" as this that the world had been preparing Corydon; it was to save her for his coming that her sheltered life had been intended.
Her beauty and tenderness would appeal to him, her innocence would bring a new thrill to his jaded pa.s.sions; and when he offered his hand, there would be no whisper of what his past might have been, there would be no questions asked as to any vices or diseases he might bring with him.
There would be trousseaus and flowers and wedding-cake, rice and white ribbons and a honeymoon-journey; and then an apartment in the city, or perhaps even a whole house, with a butler and a carriage--who could tell? With wealth pouring into the metropolis from North and West and South, such things fell often to beautiful and innocent maidens in sheltered homes.
And here was this one, flinging herself away upon a penniless poet who could not support her, and did not even propose to try! "Does he mean to get some work?" was the question; and gently Corydon explained that they intended "to live as brother and sister." And that capped the climax--that proved stark, raving madness, if it did not prove downright knavery and fraud.
In the end, being utterly baffled and helpless with dismay, the mothers turned upon each other; for to each of them, the virtues of her own offspring being so apparent, it was clear that this hideous tragedy must have come from the machinations of the other. One day Thyrsis and his mother, walking down a road, met Corydon and her mother, upon a high hill where the winds blew wildly; and here they poured out their grief, and hurled their impeachments against the storm. To Thyrsis they a.s.sumed heroic proportions, they towered like queens of tragedy; in after-history this was known as the Meeting of the Mothers, and he likened it to the great contest in the Nibelungenlied between Brunhild and Kriemhild.
Then, on top of it all, there came another calamity. In the boarding-house with Corydon lived some elderly ladies, who had a remarkable faculty for divining the evil deeds of other people. They had divined the evil deeds of Corydon and Thyrsis, and one of them was moved to come to Corydon"s mother one day, and warn her lest others should divine them too. And so there was more agony; the discovery was made that Corydon had become a social outcast to all the maids and matrons of the summer population--a girl who went to visit a poet in his lonely cabin, and stayed until unknown hours of the night. And so there came to Thyrsis a note saying that Corydon must come no more to the cabin; and later in the day came Corydon herself, to bring the tidings that a telegram had come from the city, and that she and her mother were to leave the place the next day.
Thyrsis was aflame with anger, and was for going to the nearest parson and having the matter settled there and then. But Corydon dissuaded him from this.
"I"ve been thinking it over," she said, "and it"s best that I should go. You must finish the book--everything depends upon that, and you know that if I came here now you couldn"t do it. But if I go away, there"ll be nothing to disturb you. I can study meantime; and when we meet in the city in the fall, everything will be clear before us."
She came and put herself in his arms. "You know, dear heart," she said, "it won"t be easy for me to go. But I"m sure it"s for the best!"
And Thyrsis saw that she was right, and so they settled it. She spent that day with him--their last day; and floods of tenderness welled up in their hearts, and the tears ran down their cheeks. It was only now that she was going that Thyrsis realized how precious she had become to him, and what a miracle of gentleness and trust she was.
They agreed that here, and not in the village, was the place for their parting. So they poured out their love and devotion, and made their pledges for the future; and towards sundown he kissed her good-bye, and put her in the boat, and stood watching until it was a mere speck down the lake. Then he went back to the house, with a great cavern of loneliness in his soul.
And in spite of all resolves, he was up with the dawn next day, and walking to the village--he must see her once again! He went to the depot with her, and upon the platform they said another farewell; thereby putting a seal upon Corydon"s d.a.m.nation in the eyes of the maids and matrons of the summer population.
BOOK III
THE VICTIM HESITATES
_They had opened a wooden box which lay beside them.
"Ten years!" she said. "How they have faded!"
"And the creases are tight," said he; "they will be hard to read."
"Letters! letters!" she exclaimed--"some of them sixty pages long! How much would they make?"
"Perhaps a quarter of a million words," he said.
"What is to be done about it?"
"They must be selected, and then cut, and then trimmed and pruned."
"And will that leave any idea of it?"
He answered with a simile. "You wish to convey to a man how it feels to pound stone for twelve hours in the sun. The only way you could really do it would be to take him and let him pound for twelve hours. But he wouldn"t stand for that."
"So you let him pound for one hour," said she, with a smile.
"I will put up a sign," he said--_
"HERE BEGINS THE STONE-POUNDING!"
_And then those who are interested will come in and try it; and the rest will peer through the fence and pa.s.s on."
To which she responded, "I would make the sign read,_
"ADMISSION TO LOVERS ONLY!""
MY THYRSIS!
Oh, if I might only stay in a convent until you are ready to take me! Since I left you I find myself possessed of cravings, which, if I indulged them, might bring me the fate of the Maid of Neidpath!
Truly I have known some miserable moments. But I am trying very hard to cultivate a happy, confident activity. The people here are aggressive, and I am afraid I have been rude, which I never like to be. I just succeeded in getting away from a young man who wanted to walk to the village with me. Do you know, it would drive me absolutely mad to talk to anyone now!
My soul has only one cry, and I could sometimes go out on the mountain-side and scream it aloud to the winds. I fear I shall be a trifle wild, in fact utterly in pieces, until you come, with that wonderful recipe of yours for binding me together, and making me complete. I think of you in your house, and wish to G.o.d I were there, or out in the desert even, if you were with me.
When I pa.s.sed through the city I felt exactly as if I were in Hades.
The glaring lights and the fearful rattle, the lazy, lounging men--I had dinner in a restaurant, in which all the people seemed to be feeding demons! It has been distinctly shown me why so many people have thought you a rude unmannerly boy! I don"t know what people would think, if I had to be amongst them long.
I have begun so many letters to you in my mind, and oh, the times I have told myself how much I loved you! I have read your letters and slept with them under my pillow, like the veriest love-lorn maiden. But all my happy thoughts are gone at present. It is distracting to me to have to come into such close contact with people.
Oh, tell me, dearest one, what I shall have to do to control myself and preserve the peace of my soul, until I go to you forever? I must not long to see you, it prevents me from studying. If you might only come to me at one moment in the day, and give me one kiss, and then go away! You see, I am conducting myself in a very unwise manner--and it is necessary I should study! I should love to have an indomitable capacity for work, and eat only two meals a day, and never have to think about my body.
I want to tell you what I feel, how utterly and absolutely I am yours, and how any image that comes between you and me enrages me. If only you knew how I give myself up to you in thought, word, and deed!--My one reason for acting now, is that I may show you something I have done, my one thought is to be what you would wish me. No one, no one understands, or ever will, what is in your heart and in mine--to be locked there for ages. There I have placed all my power of love and religion and hope of the life that is to be. To you I give all my trust, all my worship, you are the one link that binds me to myself and to G.o.d. Without you I feel now that I should be a poor wanderer.
You give me my feeling of wholeness, of the possibility of completion, that I never had before. In my best and truest moments I know that with you I can be what I have hoped. With you before my eyes I have a grim resolution to conquer or die. The one thing I am sure of always is my love for you. It might be possible for you to stop loving me; but I, now that I have begun, shall continue to love you to the day I die--and after, I hope. I do not love you for what you can give me, I love you because you are you, I must love you now no matter what you are. I believe Shakespeare was right when he said that "love is not love which alters, when it alteration finds." I do not believe that a person can really love more than once.
I must go to my German again and leave you. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?
II
My dearest Corydon:
I received a letter from you before dinner, and as usual had one of my flights of emotion, and thought of many things to write to you. Now I am up on the mountain-side, trying to recall them. Dearest, you are, as always, more precious to me. I am glad to see that you are suffering some, and I think that it is well that you have to be away from me for awhile, to fight some of your own soul"s battles. You see that I am in my stern humor; as convinced as ever that the soul is to be deepened only by effort, and that the great glory of life cannot be bought or stolen, or even given for love, but must be earned.
I will tell you what I have been doing since you left. I spent three whole days in the most unimaginable wretchedness; I had no hindrances like yours--only the most fearful burden of dullness and sloth, that had crept upon me and mastered me, during all the weeks that I had let myself be so upset and delayed. I cannot picture what I go through when I lose my self-command in that way, but it is like one who is tied down upon a railroad track and hears a train coming. He gets just as desperate as he pleases, and suffers anything you can imagine--but he does not get free. And always the book would be hanging before me, a kind of external conscience, to show me what I ought to have been.
Now I have gotten myself out of that, by an effort that has quite worn me out. When I found myself at work again, I felt a kind of savage joy of effort, a greater power than I ever knew before. In the reckless mood that I had got to, it seemed to me that I could keep so forever.
Now dearest, you must get the same unity in your life; you must concentrate all your faculties upon that--get for yourself that precious habit of being "instant in prayer", and "strenuous for the bright reward". As Wordsworth has it, "Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness!" Let it come to you with a pang that hurts you, that for one minute you have been idle, that you have admitted to yourself that life is a thing of no consequence, and that you do not care for it.
I shall have to talk to you that way--perhaps not so often as I do to myself, because I do not think you are really in your heart such a very dull and sodden creature as I am.
I think the greatest trial we shall have will be our fondness for each other, and the possibility of being satisfied simply to hold each other in our arms. But we shall get the better of that, as of everything else; and that is not the problem now. You must learn to strive, learn to master yourself; you must prove your power so. Do not care how rude you have to be to those people; look upon the things about you as a kind of dream-world, and know that your own soul"s life is the one real thing for you. And don"t write any more about how circ.u.mstances hold you back.
When you have got to work you will know that you are given your soul for no purpose but to fight circ.u.mstances; that they are the things to make you fight. When they are removed, as I know to my cost, there is still the same necessity of fighting; only it is like a horse who has to win a race without the spurs.
You must talk to yourself about this, night and day, until this desire is so awake in you that you can"t go idle many moments without its rushing into your mind, and giving you a kind of electric shock. And when that happens you fling aside every thing else, every idea but the work that you ought to be doing, and put all your faculties upon that; and every time that you catch them wandering, you do the same thing again, and again. Some times when I become very keenly aware of myself, and of what a shallow creature I really am, it seems to me that it is only by wearing myself out in that grim and savage way that I can make myself even tolerable.
I _must_ stop. Do you know that for five precious hours by my watch I have sat up here thinking about you and writing to you? Dear me--and I am tired, and frozen, for there is a cold wind. I shall have, I see, to prove some of _my_ powers, by not writing letters to you when I should be at the book.