"Nonsense! She"s nineteen now, isn"t she? And she couldn"t be in better condition."
"But she"s so undeveloped--mentally, I mean."
"There"s nothing in the world will develop her like maternity. And can"t you see that she wants the baby?"
"Wants it!" shouted Thyrsis.
"Why, of course! She"s dead in love with you, boy. And she wants the baby! Why shouldn"t she have it?"
"If I could only make you understand--" protested Thyrsis, feebly.
"Yes!" exclaimed the doctor. "That"s what they all say! Not a day pa.s.ses that some woman doesn"t sit in this office and say it! Each case is different from any other case that ever was or could be. They tell me how much they suffer, and what a state their nerves are in, and how busy they are, and how poor they are--their social duties, and their artistic duties, and their religious duties, and their philanthropic duties! And they weep and wring their hands, and tell me agonizing stories, and they offer me any sum I could ask--many a time I might earn a thousand dollars by something that wouldn"t take me ten minutes, if only I didn"t have a conscience!--Go away, boy, and get those ideas out of your head!"
Section 4. So Thyrsis went away, with a new realization of the seriousness of his position, with a new sense of the grip in which he was fast. It was a conspiracy of Nature, a conspiracy of all the world!
It was a Snare!
All through this love-adventure, even when most under the sway of his emotions, Thyrsis" busy mind had been groping and reaching for an understanding of it. Little by little this had come to him--and now the picture was complete. He had beheld the last scene of the panorama; he had got to the moral of the tale!
He had been the sport of cosmic forces, of the blind and irresistible reproductive impulse of Nature. Step by step he had been driven, he had played his part according to the plan. He had hesitated and debated and resolved and decided--thinking that he had something to do with it all! But now he looked back, and saw himself as a leaf swept along by a torrent. And all the while the torrent had known its destination! He had had many plans and many purposes, but always Nature had had but one plan and one purpose--which was the Child!
Twelve months ago Thyrsis had been a boy, carefree and happy, rapt in his dream of art; and now here he was, a married man, with the cares of parenthood on his shoulders! If anyone had told him that a trick could be played upon him, he would have laughed at them. How confident he had been--how certain of his mastery of life! And now he was in the Snare!
Dismayed as he was, Thyrsis could not but smile as he realized it.
The artist in him appreciated the technique of the performance. How cunningly it had all been managed--how cleverly the device had been hidden how shrewdly the bait had been selected!
He went back over the adventure. What a fuss he and Corydon had made about it! What a vast amount of posturing and preluding, of backing and filling! And how solemnly they had taken it--how earnestly they had believed in the game! What convictions had weighed upon them, what exaltations had thrilled them--two pitiful little puppets, set here and there by unseen hands! Rehearsing from prologue to curtain the age-long drama, the drama of s.e.x that had been played from the beginning of the world!
He marvelled at the prodigality that Nature had displayed--at the treasures she had squandered to accomplish her purpose! She would create a million eggs to make one salmon; and she had created a million emotions to make one baby! What poems she had written for them--what songs she had composed for them! She had emptied the cornucopiae of her gifts into their lap! She had strewn the pathway with roses before them, she had filled their mouths with honey, and their ears with the sound of sweet music; she had blinded them, she had stunned them, she had sent them drunken and reeling to their fate!
And the elaborate set of pretenses and illusions that she had invented for them! The devices to lull their suspicions--the virtues and renunciations, the humilities and the consecrations! Corydon had been frightened and evasive; Nature had made him suffer, so as to break her down! And he had been proud and defiant; and so Corydon, the meek and gentle, had been turned into a heroine of revolt! Nay, worse than that; those very powers and supremacies that he had thought were his protection--were they not, also, a part of the Snare? His culture and his artistry, his visions and his exaltations--what had they been but a lure for the female? The iris of the burnished dove, the ruff about the grouse"s neck, the gold and purple of the b.u.t.terfly"s wing! Even his genius, his miraculous, ineffable genius--that had been the plume of the partridge, the crowning glory before which his mate had capitulated!
These images came to Thyrsis, until he burst into wild, sardonic laughter. He saw himself in new and grotesque lights; he was the peac.o.c.k, spreading his gorgeousness before a dazzled and wondering world; he was the young rooster, strutting before his mate, and thrilling with the knowledge of his own importance! He was each of the barnyard creatures by turn, and Corydon was each of the fascinated females. And somewhere, perhaps, stood the farmer, smiling complacently--for should there not be somewhere a farmer in this universal barnyard?
But then, the laughter died; for he thought of Maeterlinck"s "Life of the Bee", and shuddered at the fate of the male-creature. He was a mere accident in the scheme of Nature--she wasted all his splendors to accomplish the purpose of an hour. And now it had been accomplished. He had had his moment of ecstasy, his dizzy flight into the empyrean; and now behold him falling, disembowelled and torn, an empty sh.e.l.l!
But no--it was not quite that way, Thyrsis told himself, after further reflection. In the human hive the male creature was not only the bearer of the seed he was also the worker. And so there was one more function he had to perform. All those fine frenzies of his, his ideals and his enthusiasms--they had served their purpose, and would fade; but before him there was still a future--a drab and dreary future of perpetual pot-boiling!
He recalled their bridal-night. All that had puzzled him in it and startled him--how clear it was now! Corydon had shrunk from him, just enough to lure him; and then, suddenly, her whole being had seemed to change--she had caught him, and held him fast. For he had accomplished her purpose; he had gotten her with child! And so he must stand by her--he must bring her food, that she might give the child life! And for that purpose she would hold him; for that she would use every art of which she was mistress--the whole force of her being would go into it!
She would not know this, of course; she would do it blindly and instinctively, as she had done everything so far. She would do it by those same generous and beautiful qualities that had made him hers!
Therein lay the humor of his whole adventure--there lay the deadly nature of this Snare. The cords of it were woven out of love and tenderness, out of ecstasy and aspiration; and they were wound about his very heart-strings, so that it would kill him to pull them loose. And he would never pull them loose--he saw that in a sudden vision of ruin! She would be n.o.ble to the uttermost limit of n.o.bleness. She would threaten to destroy herself--and so he would save her! She would bid him cast her away--and so he would stand by her to the end! And the end would be simply the withering and shrivelling of those radiant qualities which he called his genius--qualities which were so precious to him, but about which Nature knew nothing!
So grim an aspect had life come to wear to this boy of twenty-one!
He stripped all the flesh of illusion from its fair face, and saw the grinning skull beneath. And he mocked at himself, because of all those virtues by which he had been caught--and which yet he knew were stronger than his will. Through faith and love he had been made a captive; and through faith and love would he waste away and perish!
Section 5. Meantime, Corydon was prosecuting an inquiry into these matters upon her own account, and getting at quite other points of view.
There were some, it seemed, who took this game less seriously than she and Thyrsis; and these managed to go free--they broke the cords of the Snare, they slipped between the fingers of the hand of Fate. Corydon had heard a certain scientist refer to man as "Nature"s insurgent son"; and now came the discovery that Nature had insurgent daughters also.
Being in an "interesting condition," Corydon was ent.i.tled to the confidences of the married women acquaintances of the family. They were eager to know all about her, and what she was going to do; and they told her their own experiences. She brought these to Thyrsis, who was thus admitted to a view of the inner workings of the "race-suicide" mill.
It was as the doctor had said; each one of these middle-cla.s.s ladies considered herself a special case, but their stories all seemed to fit together. Nature"s boundless and irrational fecundity was an exceedingly trying feature of the life of middle-cla.s.s ladies. In the first place, the having of babies was a tedious and painful matter. One became grotesquely disfigured, and had to hide away and sever all social relationships. One lost one"s grace and attractiveness, and hence the power to hold one"s husband. And then, there were all the cares and the inconveniences of children. What was one to do with them, in a city where the best hotels and apartment-houses barred them out?
Then, too, even supposing the best of intentions--there was the cost of living. At present prices it was impossible for a man who had only a salary to support more than one or two children; and with prices increasing as they were, one could not be sure of educating even these.
And meanwhile, the Nature of Things had apparently planned it that a woman should bear a child once a year for half her life-time!
So all these middle-cla.s.s ladies used devices to prevent conception.
But these were not always successful--husbands were frequently inconsiderate. And so came the abortion-business, which the doctor had described as the curse of the age.
Now and then one could accomplish the thing by some of the innumerable drugs that were advertised for the purpose. But these always made one ill, and seldom did anything else. Corydon met one young person, the wife of a rising stockbroker, who had presented her husband with twins in the first year of their marriage, and who declared that she was apparently designed to populate all the tenements in the city. This airy and vivacious young lady lay back in her automobile and prattled to Corydon, declaring that she was "always in trouble." She had tried to coax her family physician in vain, and had finally gone elsewhere. She had got quite used to the experience. All that troubled her nowadays was how to make excuses to her friends, one could not have "appendicitis"
forever!
But there was another side to the matter. There was one woman who had had a hemorrhage; and another whose sister had contracted blood-poisoning, and had died in agony. There were even some who pleaded and exhorted like the doctor, and talked about the thing"s being murder.
All of which arguments and fears Corydon brought to her husband, to be pondered and discussed.
They spent whole days wandering about in the park in agony of soul. They had one brief month in which to decide the question--the question of life or death to the possible child. Truly here, once more, was an issue to which Thyrsis might apply the words af Carlyle--
"Choose well, your choice is Brief and yet endless!"
Section 6. This was also the month in which the fate of the book was decided. Each day, as he went for the mail, Thyrsis" heart would beat high with expectation; and each day he would be chilled with bitter disappointment. He was still hoping for a real review, or for some signs of the book"s "catching on". Nor did he finally give up until he chanced to have a talk about it with his friend, Mr. Ardsley; who explained to him that here, too, he had fallen into a trap.
His "publishers" were not really publishers at all. They did not make their profit by selling books--they made it out of authors. There were many vain and foolish people who wrote books which they were anxious to see in print, so that they might be known as literary lights among their friends. Many of them had money, and would buy a number of copies; and the "publishers" had the expenses guaranteed in advance and so would make a profit upon the sale of even one or two hundred copies. All this being well known, the reviews never paid any attention to the announcements of this concern, nor did "the trade" handle their books.
As for Thyrsis" volume, they had printed it very cheaply--it was to be doubted if it had cost them what he had paid them. And they had even published it as a "net price" book--thereby taking three cents more off the royalty to which he was ent.i.tled!
Mr. Ardsley had declared that he would be lucky if his book sold three hundred copies; and so he felt that it was quite a tribute to the merits of his work when, after six months more of waiting, he received a royalty statement from the concern showing a sale of seven hundred and forty-three copies, and enclosing a check for eight-nine dollars and sixteen cents. This check Thyrsis paid over to his rich relative, and a week or two later, when he sold a short story, he sent the balance of the hundred dollars that he owed. And so he figured that the privilege of writing his first book and offering it to the hundred great men of letters of the country, had cost him the sum of one hundred and thirty-five dollars and eighty-four cents!
Meantime, of course, Thyrsis was hearing from these great men of letters. When he counted up at the end he found that he had received replies from sixteen of them; whether the other eighty-four received his book, or what they did with it, he never knew. Of these sixteen, six wrote formal acknowledgements, and two others said that they found nothing to appeal to them in his book; so there were left eight who gave him comfort, Several of these were among the really vital men of the time, as Thyrsis found out later, when he came to read their books, and to know them as something other than newspaper names. Several of them wrote him long and really helpful criticisms of his work, recognizing the merits he knew it had, and pointing out defects which he was quick to acknowledge. Four of them even told him that he had undoubted genius, and predicted great things for him. But that was as far as any of them went. They wrote their opinions, and there they stopped, as if at a blank wall. No one among them seemed to feel that he could take any action upon his opinion, however favorable; not one comprehended that what the boy was groping for was neither praise nor blame, but a chance for life. Not one had any advice of a practical sort to offer; not one had any personal or human thing to say; not one even asked to see him!
And lest this should be due to oversight, or to false delicacy, Thyrsis wrote, in his desperation, and reminded them that the "genius" they recognized was being killed by starvation. To this, one did not reply, and another advised him to take up newspaper work, as "a means of getting in touch with the public"!
It was a ghastly thing to the boy as he came to realize it--this utter deadness and coldness of "the world". Thyrsis himself was all afire with love--with love, not only for his vision and his art, but for all humanity, and for humanity"s n.o.blest dreams. His friends were poets and sages of past time, men of generous faith and quick sympathies; and in all the world of the living, was there not one such man to be found? Was there nothing left upon earth but critical discernment and epistolary politeness?
The question pursued him still more, after the one interview which resulted from all this correspondence. There was a distinguished Harvard professor who had told him that he had rare powers and must go on; and hearing that the professor was in New York, Thyrsis asked the privilege of calling.
It was in one of the city"s most expensive hotels--for the professor had married a rich wife, and was what people called "socially prominent".
The other did not know this; but it seemed an awful thing to him that anyone should be sitting in a brocaded silk-covered chair in a palace of luxury like this, while possessed of the knowledge that his genius was starving.
"You tell me to go on, professor," he said. "But how _can_ I go on?"
The professor was fingering his gold eyegla.s.ses and studying his visitor.
"You must get some kind of routine work," he declared--"enough to support you. You can"t expect to live by your writing."
"But if I do that, I can"t write!" cried Thyrsis.
"You"ll have to do the best you can," said the other.
"But I can"t do _anything!_ The emotions of it eat me all up. I daren"t even let myself think about my work when I have to do other things."
"I should think," commented the professor, "that you would find you are still more hindered by the uncertainties of hack-work."