"Thyrsis!" she panted, swiftly. "Don"t say that!"
"How could I have done it?" he rushed on. "What a monster I am!"
"No! no!" she cried. "You don"t understand, I love you! Don"t you know that I love you?"
And she tightened her clasp about him, she stole into his arms again.
"Forgive me!" she whispered. "Please, please--forgive me, Thyrsis!"
He stared at her, dazed. "Forgive _you_?"
"I had no right to behave like that!" she cried. "I was afraid--I couldn"t control myself. But oh, Thyrsis, I love you!"
And she pressed herself upon him convulsively; she was troubled no longer. "Yes!" she panted. "Yes! I don"t mind it any more! I am yours! I am yours! You may do whatever you please to me, Thyrsis--I love you!"
She covered him with kisses--his face, his neck, his body. She drew him down to her again, whispering in ecstasy, "_My husband!_"
He was lost in amazement. Could this be Corydon, the gentle and shrinking? No, she was gone; and in her stead this creature of desire--tumultuous and abandoned! She was like some pa.s.sion-G.o.ddess out of the East, shameless and terrible and destroying! She was like a tigress of the jungle, calling in the night for its mate. She locked him fast in her arms--she was swept away in a whirlwind of emotion, as he had been swept before. And all her being rose up in one song of exultation--"Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!"
"Ah, Thyrsis!" she cried. "My Thyrsis! I belong to you now! You can never escape me now! You can never leave me--my love, my love!"
And as Thyrsis listened to this song, his pa.s.sion died. Reason awoke again, and a cold fear struck into his heart! What was the meaning of _this?_
Long hours afterward, as she lay, half-asleep, in his arms, she felt him give a sudden start and shudder.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Nothing," he said--"I just happened to think of something. Something that frightened me."
"What was it?"
"I was thinking, dear--_suppose I should become domestic!_"
BOOK VI
THE CORDS ARE TIGHTENED
_She had been reading in the little cabin, and a hush had fallen upon them.
"Yes, thou art gone! And round me too the night In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade."
"Gone!" she said, and smiled sadly. "Where is he gone?"
And she turned the page and read again--
"But Thyrsis nevermore we swains shall see; See him come back, and cut a smoother reed, And blow a strain the world at last shall heed-- For Time, not Corydon, hath conquer"d thee!"
Then, after a pause, she added, "How often I have remembered those words! And how pitiful they are, when I remember them!"_
Section 1. It was a tiny cupboard of a room in a tenement. They sat upon their bed to eat, and they hid their soiled dishes beneath it. Dirty children screamed upon the avenue in front, and frowsy-headed women and wolfish men caroused in the saloon below. Yet here there came to them the angel with the flame-tipped wings, and here they dreamed their dream of wonder.
In the glory of their new-found pa.s.sion all life became transfigured to them; they discovered new meaning in the most trivial actions. There was no corner so obscure that they might not come upon the young G.o.d hidden; they might touch his warm, tender flesh, and hear his silvery laughter, and thrill with the wonder of his presence. They spoke a new language, full of fire and color; they read new meanings in each other"s eyes.
The slightest touch of hand upon hand, or of lips to lips, was enough to dissolve them in tenderness and delight.
They rejoiced in the marvel of each other"s being--in the glory of their bodies, newly revealed. To Thyrsis especially this was life"s last miracle, a discovery so fraught with bliss as to be a continual torment.
The incitements that were hidden in the softness and the odor of unbound and tumbled hair; the exquisiteness of maiden b.r.e.a.s.t.s, moulded of marble, rosy-tipped; the soft contour of snowy limbs, the rhythmic play of moving muscles--to dwell amid these things, to possess them, was suddenly to discover in reality what before had only existed in the realm of painting and sculpture.
Corydon also, in the glow of his delight, of his rapture and his ravening desire, discovered anew the wonder of herself, and came to a new consciousness of her beauty. She would stand and gaze before her, with her hands upon her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and her head flung back and her eyes closed in ecstasy, so that he might come to her and kiss her--might kiss her again and again, might touch her with his lover"s hands and clasp her with his lover"s arms.
In most of these things she was his teacher. For Corydon was one person, in body, mind and soul; in her there were no disharmonies, no warring elements. His friend the doctor had set forth his idea of "a good woman"; but Corydon"s goodness proved to be after no such pattern. Now that she was his, she was his; she belonged to him, she was a part of him, and there could be no thought of a secret shame, of any reserves or hesitations. Her body was herself, and it was joy to her; it was joy the more, because she could give it for love; and she sought for new ways to utter the completeness of her giving.
She was like a little child about it--so free, so spontaneous, so genuine; Thyrsis marvelled at her utter naturalness. For himself, in the midst of these things, there was always a sense of the strange and the terrible, a sense of penetrating to forbidden mysteries; but Corydon laughed in the sunlight of utter bliss--and she laughed most at him, when she found that her simple language had startled him.
For the maiden out of ancient Greece was now become a lover! And so she was revealed to Thyrsis--she who might have marched in the Panathenaic processions, with one of the sacred vessels in her hands, or run in the Attic games, bare-limbed and fearless. So he learned to think of her, singing in the myrtle groves Of Mount Hymettus, or walking naked in the moonlight in Arcadian meadows.
So he thought of her all through her life, whenever a moment of joy came to her--whenever, for instance, she found her way to the water. They had dressed her in long skirts and put her in a drawing-room--but Corydon had got to the water in spite of them; and all that any Nereid had ever known, that she had known from the time the waves first kissed her feet.
And so it was also with love; she was born to be a priestess of love"s religion. She had waited for this hour--that she might take his hand, and lead him into the temple, and teach him the ritual. It was a ministry that she entered upon with the joy of all her being. "Ah, let me teach you how to love!" she would cry. "Ah, let me teach you how to love!"
Love was to her an utter blending of two selves, the losing of one"s personality in another"s; it meant the forgetting of one"s self, and all the ends of self. And Thyrsis marvelled at the glory that came upon her, at each new rapture she discovered. All the language of lovers was known to her, all the songs of lovers were upon her lips:
"Du bist mir ewig, Bist mir immer-- Erb und Eigen Ein und All!"
Such was her woman"s gift: precious beyond all treasures of earth, and given without price or question. And Thyrsis trembled as he realized it; he lived upon his knees before her, and floods of tenderness welled up in his heart. How utterly she trusted him, how completely she belonged to him! And what could he do to show himself worthy of it--this most wonderful dream of his life come true--
"If someone should give me a heart to keep, With love for the golden key!"
Yet, amid all these raptures, Thyrsis was haunted by ghosts of doubt.
Would he be able to do what his heart yearned to do? Love meant so much to her--and could it mean that much to him? Why could it not be to him the complete thing it was to her--why must he argue and wonder and fear?
For Thyrsis" ancestors had not dallied in Arcadian meadows. They had come from the wilds of Palestine and the deserts of Northern Africa; they had argued and wondered and feared in Gothic cloisters, in New England meeting-houses; and the shadow of their souls hung over him still. He could not love love as Corydon loved it, he could not trust it as she trusted it. It could never seem to him the utterly natural thing--there was always a fear of pollution, a hint of satiety, a thrill of shame. Directly the first fires of pa.s.sion had spent themselves, these anxieties came to him; he remembered how in his virgin youth he had thought of pa.s.sion--as of something strange and uncomfortable, even grotesque, suggesting too closely a kinship with the animals. So he noticed that his feelings always waned before Corydon"s. She wished him to linger--love meant so much to her!
Then too, the code of pa.s.sion was all unknown to him. What was right and what was wrong? When should one yield to desire, and when should one restrain it? To Corydon such questions never came--to her there was no such possibility as excess; she was complete and perfect, and nature told her. If there were temptations and restraints and regrets, they were for Thyrsis; and he had to keep them for his own secret, he could ask no help from her. For he discovered immediately that with his proud imperiousness, he could not endure to have Corydon refuse herself to him. So this laid a new burden upon him, an appalling one. For were they not always together--her lips always calling him, the impulse towards her always with him?
There was another circ.u.mstance--the means they had to take to prevent the consequences of their love. From the very first, Thyrsis had shrunk from the thought of this; but it was only later that he realized how much it repelled him. It offended all his sense of economy and purpose; it was something done, and at the same time undone--and so it had in it the essence of all futility and wrongness. It took from pa.s.sion its meaning and its excuse; and yet he could not say this to Corydon; and he knew also that he could no longer do without her. He was bound--bound fast! And every hour his chains would become tighter; what was now spontaneous joy would become a habit--a thing like eating and sleeping, a new and humiliating necessity of the flesh!
Section 2. Such were their problems. They might have solved them all, perhaps--had they only had time. But others came crowding upon them, others still more insistent and perplexing. The world was pressing them, jealous of their dream of delight.
Their little fund of money was gone, and so Thyrsis went back to his hack-work. All day he sat by the window and slaved at it, while Corydon lay upon the bed and read, or wandered about the park by herself.
Thyrsis" burden was twice as heavy now, for he had to earn for two; and when in the ecstasies of love she cried out to him that she was his forever, the cruel mockery of circ.u.mstance translated this to mean that he would forever have to earn for two!