Section 8. However, this disappointment did not trouble them for long; there were too many luxuries in their own home. Not very long after it was finished, there fell a deluge of rain; and what a delight it was to listen to it, and know that they were safe from it! That not only did they have a dry roof over their head--but they were able to move about, and to reach up their hands without peril, and to sit down and read without a lamp! They would stand by the window with their arms about each other, watching the rain beating upon the fields, and dripping from the elm tree, and flowing in torrents past the house; they would listen to it pounding overhead and streaming off the roof before their faces.
They were dry, quite dry! All their belongings were dry--their shoes were not mildewing, their books were not getting soft and shapeless, their bed-clothing would be all right when night came!
The down-pour lasted for three whole days, yet they enjoyed it all. It proved to be a memorable rain to Corydon, for it brought to her a great occasion--the beginning of her poetical career. It happened late one night, when, as usual, the cry of "hoodaloo mungie" awakened her from a sound slumber. The day had been a particularly hard one, and the heaviness of exhaustion was upon her. For a moment she stared up into the darkness, listening to the rain close above her, and trying to nerve herself to put out her arm in the cold. She shuddered at the thought; there came to her a perfectly definite impulse of hatred--hatred of the child, of its noise and its demands. She had felt it before--sometimes as a dull, cold dislike, sometimes as something pa.s.sionate. Why should she have to sacrifice herself to this insatiable creature, whom she did not love? What did it matter to her if other women loved their children?
She had wanted life--and was this life? At that moment the cry of "hoodaloo-mungie" symbolized for her all the sordid cares and nervous agony of her existence.
And suddenly, unexpectedly, a daring impulse seized her. "No!" she thought, and set her teeth--"I"ll let him cry! I"ll cure him of this--and I"ll do it to-night!" So she turned and told Cedric to go to sleep; at which, of course, the child began to scream.
Corydon lay very still in the dark, her eyes wide and every nerve tense.
She could not feel, she could not think; it seemed as though she were deprived of every sense except that of hearing; and in her, through her, and around her rang a senseless din, piercing, intense, increasing in volume every minute, and completely drowning out the beating of the rain.
"Can I stand it?" she thought. "Or will his lungs burst? And yet, I must, I must--this can"t go on forever!" And so she clenched her hands and waited. But the sounds did not diminish in the slightest; ten minutes twenty minutes must have pa.s.sed, and the baby only seemed to gain increased power with each crescendo.
It seemed to Corydon at last as though she had always lain like this, and as though she must for endless time. She found herself getting used to it even; her muscles relaxed. There came to her a sense of the ludicrous side of it. "He means to conquer me!" she thought. "Can I hold out? If I only had something to think about, then I"d be a match for him." And suddenly the inspiration came to her. "I"ll write a poem!"
What should it be about? The rain had been increasing in violence, and she became conscious of the steady downpour; it fascinated her, and she concentrated her attention upon it, and began---
"I am the rain, that comes in spring!"
So, after a while, she found herself in the throes of composition; she was eager, excited--and marvel of marvels, utterly forgetful of the baby! She had never tried to write verses before; but it did not seem at all difficult to her now.
The poem was simple and optimistic--it told of the beneficent qualities of rain, as it would appear to one whose roof did not leak. Somewhere in the course of it there was this stanza:
"I am the rain that comes at night, When all in slumber is folded light-- Save one by weary vigils worn Who counteth the drops unto the morn."
This seemed to her an impressive bit, and she wondered what Thyrsis would think of it.
There were eight stanzas altogether, and when she finished the last of them the dawn was breaking, and it seemed hours since she had begun.
As for the baby, he was still crying. She turned and peered at him; his eyelids drooped, and the crying came in spasms and gasps--it sounded very feeble, and a trifle perfunctory. Obviously he could not hold out much longer; Corydon would win, yes, she had won already. She lay still, and thrills of happiness went through her. Was it the poem, or the thought of her release, and the nights of quiet sleep in the future?
When Thyrsis came in, an hour or two later, he found her huddled up in blankets on the floor of the living-room, her cheeks bright, her hair dishevelled. How fascinating she looked in such a guise! She was eagerly pondering her poem; and the baby was sleeping quietly, save for a few convulsive gasps, the last stragglers of his routed forces.
"And oh, Thyrsis," she exclaimed, "to-morrow night he will only cry half as long, and still less the next night. And soon he will go to sleep quietly like any well brought-up, civilized baby. And, my dear, I believe I"m going to be a poetess--I think that to-night I was really inspired!"
So he made haste to build a fire, and then came and sat and listened to the poem. How eagerly she waited for his verdict! How she hung upon his words! And what should a man do in such a case--should he be a husband or a critic? Should he be an amateur or a professional?
But even as he hesitated, the damage was done. "Oh, you don"t like it!"
she cried. "You don"t think it"s good at all!"
"My dear," he argued, "poetry is such a difficult thing to write. And there are so many standards--a thing can be good, and yet not good! The heights are so far away--"
"But oh, how can I ever get there," wailed Corydon, "if n.o.body gives me any encouragement?"
Section 9. The time had now come for Thyrsis to put his job through.
There was no longer any excuse for hesitation or delay. The book had come to ripeness in him; the birth-hour was at hand, and he must go and have it out with himself. He explained these things to Corydon, sitting beside her and holding her hands; they ascended once more to the heights of consecration; they renewed their vows of fort.i.tude and faith, and then he went away.
For weeks thereafter he would be like the ghost of a man in the house, haggard and silent and preoccupied. All the work that he had ever done in his life seemed but child"s play in comparison. Before this he had portrayed the struggles of men and women; but now he was to portray the agony of a whole nation--his heart must beat with the pulse of millions of suffering people. And the task was like a fiend that came upon him in the night-time and laid hold of him, dragging him away to sights of terror and madness. He was never safe from the thing for a moment--he could never tell when it might a.s.sail him. He might be washing the dishes, or wrestling with the refractory pump; but the vision would come to him, and he would wander off into the forest--perhaps to sit, crouching in the snow, trembling, and staring at the pageant in his soul.
He lived in the midst of battles; the smoke of powder always in his nostrils, the crash of musketry and the thunder of cannon in his ears.
He saw the cavalry sweeping over the plains, the infantry crouching behind intrenchments; he heard the yells of the combatants, the shrieks of the wounded and dying; he saw the mangled bodies, and the ground slippery with blood. New aspects of the thing kept coming to him--new glimpses into meanings yet untold. They would come to him in great bursts of emotion, like tempests that swept him away; and these things he had to wrestle with and master. It meant toil, the like of which he had never faced before, a tension of all his faculties, that would last for hours and hours, and leave him bathed in perspiration, and utterly exhausted.
A scene would come to him, in some moment of insight; and he would drop everything else, and follow it. He would go over it, at the same time both creating and beholding it, at the same time both overwhelmed by it and controlling it--but above all things else, remembering it! He would be like Aladdin in the palace, stuffing his pockets with priceless jewels; coming away so loaded down that he could hardly stagger, and spilling them on every side. Then, scarcely pausing to rest, he would go back after what he had lost; he would grope about, gathering diamonds and rubies that he had all but forgotten--or perhaps coming upon new vaults and new treasure-chests.
So he would labor over a description, going over it and over it, not so much working it out, as letting it work itself out and stamp itself upon his memory. It made no difference how long the scene might be, he would not write a word of it; it might be some battle-picture, that would fill thirty or forty pages--he would know it all by heart, as Demosthenes or Webster might have known an oration. And only at the end would he write it down.
Over some of the scenes in this new book he labored thus for two or three weeks at a stretch; there would be literally not a moment of the day, nor perhaps of the night, when the thing was not working in some part of his mind. He would think about it for hours before he fell asleep; and when he opened his eyes it would be waiting at his bedside to pounce upon him. If he tried for even a few minutes to rest, or to divert his mind to some other work, he would find himself ill at ease and troubled, with a sense as of something pulling at him, calling to him. And if anything came to interrupt him, then he would be like a baker whose oven grows cold before the bread is half done--it would be a sad labor making anything out of that batch of bread.
Section 10. And this work he had to do as a married man, the father of a family and the head of a household; living with a child who was one incessant and irrepressible demand for attention, and a wife who was wrestling with weakness and sickness--eating out her heart in cruel loneliness, and cowering in the grip of fiends of melancholia and despair!
He had thought that when they moved into the new home, their domestic trials would be at an end. But now the cruel winter fell upon them. They had never known what a winter in the country was like; they came to see why the farmer had protested against their building in such a remote place. There were many days when they could not get to town, and some when they could not even get to the farm-house. Also there was the pump, which was continually freezing, and necessitating long and troublesome operations before they could get any water.
It was, as fate would have it, the worst winter in the oldest inhabitant"s memory. The farmer"s well froze over on three occasions, and it had never frozen before, so he declared. For such weather as this they were altogether unprepared; they had only a wood-stove, and could not keep a fire all night; and the cheap blankets they had bought were made all of cotton, and gave them almost no protection. They would not sleep with the windows down; and so, for weeks at a time, they would go to bed with their clothing, even their overcoats on; and would pile curtains and rugs upon these--and even so, they would waken at two or three o"clock in the morning, shivering and chilled to the bone.
And in this icy room they would have to get up and build a fire; and it might be half an hour before they could get the house warm. Also, they had no facilities for bathing; and so little by little they began to lose their habits of decency--there were days when Corydon left her face unwashed, and forgot to brush her hair. Everyday, it seemed, they slipped yet further down the grade. Thyrsis would work until he was faint and exhausted, and then he would come over, and find there was nothing ready to eat. By the time that he and Corydon had cooked a meal, they would both of them be ravenous, and they would sit and devour their food like a couple of savages. Then, because they had over-eaten, they would have to rest before they cleared things away; and like as not Thyrsis would get to thinking about his work, and go off and leave everything--and the dishes and the food might stay up on the table until the next meal. There was nearly always a piled-up ma.s.s of dishes and skillets and sauce-pans in the house--to Thyrsis these soiled dishes were the original source of the myth of Sisyphus and his labor.
And then there was the garbage-pail that he had forgotten to empty, and the lamps he had neglected to fill, and the slop-pails and the other utensils of domesticity. There were the diapers that somebody had to wash--and outside was always the bitter, merciless cold, that drove them in and shut them up with all this horror. The time came, as the winter dragged on, when the house which they had built with so many sacrifices, and into which they had moved with such eager antic.i.p.ations, came to seem to them like a cave in which a couple of wild beasts cowered for shelter.
Section 11. There was another great change which this cold weather effected in their lives; it broke down the barriers they had been at such pains to build up between them. It was all very well for them to agree that they were "brother and sister," and that it was impossible for them ever to think of anything else. But now came a time when night after night the thermometer went to ten or fifteen degrees below zero; and first Thyrsis gave more bedding to Corydon--because she was able to suffer more than he; and he would go over to his cold hut alone, and crawl into a cold bed, and lie there the whole night through without a wink of sleep. But then, as the cold held on for a week or more, the resistance of both of them was broken down--they were like two animals which crawl into the same hole to keep each other from freezing. They piled all their bedding upon one narrow cot; and sleeping thus, they could be warm. Even then, they tried to keep to the resolution they had made; but this, it seemed, was not within the power of flesh and blood; and so, once more, the s.e.x-factor was introduced into the complications of their lives.
To Thyrsis this thing was like some bird of prey that circled in the sky just above him--its shadow filling him with a continual fear, the swish of its wings making him cringe. He was never happy about it; there was no time in his life when he was not in a state of inward war. His intellect rebelled; and on the other hand, there was a part of his nature that craved this s.e.x-experience and welcomed it--and this part, it seemed, was favored by all the circ.u.mstances of life. There was no chance to settle the matter in the light of reason, to test it by any moral or aesthetic law; blind fate decreed that one part of him should have the shaping of his character, the determining of his needs.
He tried to make clear to himself the basis of his distrust. s.e.xual intercourse as a habit--this was the formula by which he summed it up to himself. To be right, to win the sanction of the intellect and the conscience, the s.e.x-act must be the result of a supreme creative impulse. Its purpose was the making of a new soul--and this could never be right until those who took that responsibility had used their reasons, and determined that circ.u.mstances were such that the new soul might be a sound and free and happy and beautiful soul. And how different was this from the customs which prevailed under the sanction of the "holy bonds of matrimony"! When s.e.xual intercourse became a self-indulgence, like the eating of candy, or the drinking of liquor; a thing of the body, and the body alone; a thing determined by physical propinquity, by the sight and contact of the flesh, the dressing and undressing in the same room!
Then again, the means which they had to use to prevent conception--which destroyed all spontaneity in their relationship, and dragged the thing out into the cold light of day! And the continual fear that they might have made another blunder! Something of this sort was always happening, or seeming to have happened, or threatening to have happened, so that they waited each month in suspense and dread. It was this which made the terror of the whole matter to Thyrsis, and had so much to do with his repugnance. They were like people drawing lots for a death-sentence; like people who ate from dishes, one of which they knew to contain poison. What was the tragic destiny that hung over them--the Nemesis that gripped them, and forced them to take such a chance?
But the barriers were down, and there was no building them up again; Thyrsis never even tried, because of the revelation which came to him from Corydon"s side. Corydon was craving, reaching out hungrily for something which she had not in herself, and which life did not give her in sufficiency. She called this thing "love"; and she had no hesitations and no limits to her demand for it. To Thyrsis this "love" was something quite else--it was sustenance and support. To demand it was an act of weakness, and to yield it was a kind of spiritual blood-transfusion. It was the first law of his life-code that every soul must stand upon its own feet and walk its own way; and to surrender that spiritual autonomy was the one blunder for which there could be no pardon.
But then--he would argue with himself--what folly it was to talk of such things in their position! They not souls at all--the life of the soul was not for them, the laws of the soul had nothing to do with them. They were two bodies--two miserable and cold and sick and tormented bodies; and with yet a third body, utterly helpless and dependent upon them--in defiance of all the most high-sounding p.r.o.nouncements about "the soul"!
So Thyrsis would mock himself into subjection once more, and go on to play his part as husband and father and head of a household of bodies.
He would play the game of "love" as Corydon wanted it played; he would yield to her demands, he would gratify her cravings, he would force himself to take her point of view. But then the other mood would come upon him--the mood that he knew to be the real expression of himself.
He would begin the battle of his genius again; he would "hear the echoes afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting". If one gave one"s self up to the body, and accepted the regimen and the laws of the body, how should the soul ever come to be free? To make such a concession was to pa.s.s upon it a sentence of life-imprisonment!
So would come to Thyrsis again that sense of the awful tragedy that was impending in their lives. Some day, he knew, he would break out of this prison. Some day, he knew, he would have to be himself, and live his own life!
And meanwhile, how pitiful were Corydon"s attempts to shape him to her needs, and to persuade herself that she was succeeding in doing it! She would set forth to him elaborately how much he had improved; how much gentler and more human he was--in contrast with that blind and stupid and egotistical and impossible person she had first known. And with what bitterness Thyrsis would hear this--and how he had to struggle to suppress his feeling! For he knew that those qualities which were so hateful to her, were but the foam cast up to the surface of his soul by the seething of his genius within. When it had ceased altogether, how placid and still would be the pool-and what a beautiful mirror it would make for Corydon to behold her own features in!
Section 12. In later years they used to discuss this problem, and they could never be sure what would have happened in their lives--what would have been the reaction of their different temperaments--if they had been given any fair chance to live and grow as they wanted to. But here they were, mashed together in this stew-pot of domesticity, with all the most unlovely aspects of things forced continually upon their attention. Each was in some way a handicap and a torment to the other--a means which fate used to limit and crush and destroy the other; and as ever, they had in their hours of anguish no recourse save to sit down and reason it out together, and absolve each other from blame.
Thyrsis invented a phrase whereby he might make this point clear to Corydon, and keep it in her thoughts. The phrase was "the economic screw"; it pressed upon him, and through him it crushed her. All things that he sought to be and could not be, all things that he would not be and was; all that was hard and unloving in him--his irritability and impatience, his narrowness and bitterness--in all this he showed her that cruel force that was destroying them both.
It was a hard role for Thyrsis, to be the judge and the jury and the executioner of the stern will of this "economic screw". There was, for instance, the episode of the "turkey-red table-cover", which became a cla.s.sic in their later lives. Corydon was always chafing at the bareness of their little home; and going into the shops in the town, and discovering things which might have made it lovely. One evil day she went alone; and when she came back, Thyrsis, as usual, pounced upon his mail, and came upon a letter from a magazine-editor whom he had been trying to please with an article, and who now scolded him mercilessly for his obstinacy and his egotism and his didacticism, and all his other unpublishable qualities. Then came the unwrapping of the bundles, and Corydon"s guileless and joyful announcement that she had come upon a wonderful bargain in the dry-goods store, a beautiful piece of "turkey-red" cloth which would serve as the table-cover for which her soul had been pining--and which she had obtained for the incredibly small sum of thirty cents!
Whereupon, of course, Thyrsis began to exclaim in dismay. Thirty cents was a third of all they had to live upon for a day! And to pay it for a fool piece of rag for which they had no earthly need! So Corydon sank down in the middle of the floor and dissolved in floods of tears; and at the next trip into town the "turkey-red table-cover" was returned, and over the bare board table there were new expositions of the theory of the "economic screw"!
To these arguments Corydon would listen and a.s.sent. With her intellect she was at one with him, and she strove to make this intellect supreme.
But always, deep underneath, was the other side of her being, that had nothing to do with intellect, but was pure primitive impulse--and that pushed and drove in her always, and carried her away the moment that intellect loosened its brake. Corydon was ashamed of this primitive self--she was always repudiating it, always shutting her eyes to it.
There was no way to wound her so deeply as to posit its reality and identify it with her.