"You must not mind my lamentations, dear Delia," she wrote in another letter. "You can"t imagine how lonely my life is--no, for it is different when you are here. Oh, I am so weary! so weary! It didn"t use to be like this. Every moment of leisure I had I would run and try to study; I would read something--I was always eager and hungry. But now I am dull--I do not follow my inspirations. If only Thyrsis and I might sometimes read together! I love to be read to, but he cannot bear it--he reads three times as fast to himself, he says. He will do it if I am sick; but even then it makes him nervous, and I cannot help but know that, however he tries to hide it. It is one of our troubles, but we know each other"s states of mind intuitively.
"Oh, Delia, was there ever a tragedy in the world like that of our love?
(Almost everything in our lives is pain, and so we are coming to stand for pain to each other!) I ask myself sometimes if any two people who love could stand what we have to stand. Sometimes I think they could, if their love was different; but then that thought breaks my heart! Why cannot our love be different, I ask!
"I had one of my frightful fits of unhappiness to-day. It was nothing--it was my fault, I guess. I am very sensitive. But I think it is a tendency of Thyrsis" temperament to try instinctively to overcome mine. Apparently the only thing that will conquer him is seeing me suffer; then he will give way--he will promise anything I want, blame himself for his rigidity, scourge himself for his blindness, do anything at all I ask. So I tell myself, everything will be different now; the last problem is solved! I see how good and kind he is, how n.o.ble his impulses are; he has never failed me in the big things of life.
"I suppose Mr. Harding writes you about us. He was up here this afternoon. He was very gentle and kind to me; he talked about his religion. Did you tell him much about me? It is a singular thing, how he seems to understand without being told. I realized to-day that whenever we talk about my life, we take everything for granted. Also, it seems strange that he does not blame me; generally people who are conventional think that I am selfish, that I ought to be loving my baby, instead of struggling with my pitiful soul.
"I wrote a little stanza the other night, dear Delia. Doesn"t it seem strange, that when I am at the last gasp with agony, I should find myself thinking of lines of poetry? I called it "Life"; you will say that it is too sombre--
""A lonely journey in a night of storm, Lighted by flashes of inconstant faith, Goaded by mult.i.tudes of vague desires, And mocked by phantoms of remote delight!""
Section 5. Just at this time Corydon found herself the victim of backaches and fits of exhaustion, for which there was no cause to be discovered. Each attack meant that Thyrsis would have to drop his work, and come and be housekeeper and nurse; he would have to repress every slightest sign of the impatience, which, was burning him up--knowing that if he gave vent to it, he would drive Corydon half-wild with suffering. After two or three such crises, he made up his mind that it was impossible for him to go on, until there was some one to help her in these emergencies.
As a result of their farm-hunting expeditions, they had in mind a place which was a compromise between their different requirements. It had a good barn and plenty of fruit, and at the same time a view, and a house with comfortable rooms, and wall-paper that was not altogether unendurable. It was offered for four thousand dollars, of which nearly three-quarters might remain upon mortgage; so they had agreed that their future happiness would depend upon the war-book"s bringing them in a thousand dollars. Since this hope had failed, he had applied to Darrell, and to Paret, but neither of them had the money to spare. It now fell out, that just as he was at the point of desperation, he received a letter from the clergyman who had married them, Dr. Hamilton. This worthy man had been reading Thyrsis" ma.n.u.scripts and following his career; and he now wrote to tell how greatly he had been impressed by the new novel. Whereupon the author was seized by a sudden resolve, and packed up a hand-satchel and set out for the city, with all the forces of his being nerved for an a.s.sault upon this ill-fated clergyman.
Dr. Hamilton sat in his little office, looking pale and worn, his face deeply seamed with lines of care. As the poet thought of it in later years, he realized that this man"s function in life was to be a clearing-house for human misery--the wrecks of the compet.i.tive system in all cla.s.ses and grades of society came to him to pour out their troubles and beg for help. It was not so very long afterwards that he went to pieces from overwork and nervous strain; and Thyrsis wondered with a guilty feeling how much his own a.s.sault had contributed to this result.
a.s.suredly it could not happen often that a clergyman had to listen to a more harrowing tale than this "murdered artist" had to tell.
The doctor heard it out, and then began to argue: like the philanthropist in Boston, he was greatly troubled by the fear of "weakening the springs of character". Being an "advanced" clergyman, he was familiar with the pat phrases of evolutionary science--his mind was a queer jumble of the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and that of Thomas a Kempis. But Thyrsis just now was in a mood which might have moved even Spencer himself; he was almost frantic because of Corydon, whom he had left half-ill at home. He was not pleading for himself, he said--he could always get along; but oh, the horror of having to kill his wife for the sake of his books! To have to sit by day by day and watch her dying! He told about that night when Corydon had tried to kill herself; and now another winter was upon them, and he knew that unless something were done, the spring-time would not find her alive.
The suicide story turned the balance with the clergyman; Herbert Spencer was put back upon the shelf, and Thomas a Kempis ruled the day. Dr.
Hamilton said that he would see one of his rich parishioners, and persuade him to take a second mortgage on the farm. And so Thyrsis went back, a messenger of wondrous tidings.
A few days later came the check. The deed had been got ready; and Thyrsis drove to the farm, and carried off the farmer and his wife to the nearest notary-public. The old man pleaded to stay in his home until the new year, but Thyrsis was obdurate, allowing him only a week in which to get himself and his belongings to another place. And meantime he and Corydon were packing up. They drove to another "vandew", and purchased more odds and ends of household stuff; and Thyrsis had his little study loaded upon a wagon, and taken to the new place.
A wonderful adventure was this moving! To enter a real house, with two stories, and two pairs of stairs, and eight rooms, and a cellar, and regular plastered walls, and no end of closets and shelves and such-like domestic luxuries! To be able to set apart a whole room in which the baby might spread himself with his toys and marbles and dolls and picture-books--and without any one"s having to stumble over them, and break their owner"s heart! To have a real parlor, with a stove to sit by, and a table for a lamp, and shelves for books; and yet another room to eat in, and another to cook in! To be able to have a woman come to wash the dishes without making a bosom friend of her, and having her hear all the conversation! To be able to walk through fields and orchards and woodland, and know that they belonged to one"s self, and would some day shed their coat of snow and blossom into new life!
Thyrsis wished that he could have the book out of his mind for a month, so that he might be properly thrilled by this experience.
It was at the Christmas season, and therefore an appropriate times for celebrating. He went down into the "wood-lot"--their own "wood-lot"--and cut a spruce tree, and set it up in the dining-room; they hung thereon all the contrivances which the a.s.sociated grandparents had sent down to commemorate an occasion which was not only Christmas and house-warming, but the baby"s third birthday as well. Because of the triple conjunction, they invested in a fat goose, to be roasted in the new kitchen-range; and besides this there were some spare-ribs and home-made sausages with which a neighbor had tempted them. It was a regular storybook Christmas, with a snow-storm raging outside, and the wind howling down the chimney, and an odor of mola.s.ses-taffy pervading the house.
Section 6. After which festivities Thyrsis bid farewell to his family once more, and went away to wrestle with his angel. Weeks of failure and struggle it cost him before he could get back what he had lost--before he could recall those phrases that had once blazed white-hot in his brain, and could see again the whole gigantic form and figure of his undertaking. Many an hour he spent pacing his little eight-foot piazza--four steps and a half each way, back and forth; many a night he would sit before his little fourteen-inch stove, so lost in his meditations that the stove would lose its red-hot glow, and the icy gale which raged outside and rattled the door would steal in through the cracks and set him to shivering.
Other times he would trudge through the snow and mud to the town, spending the day in the library, and then bringing out an armful of books to last him through the night. Thyrsis had read pretty thoroughly the literature of the six languages he knew; but now--this was the appalling nature of his task--he had to go back and read it over again.
He did not realize, until he got actually at the work, what an utter overturning there would be in all his ideas. How strange it was to return and read the "cla.s.sics" of one"s youth! What oceans of futility one discovered, what mountains of pretense--and with what forests of scholarship grown over them! It seemed to Thyrsis that everywhere he turned the search-light of his new truth, the structure of his opinions would topple like a house of cards. Truly, here was a _"Gotzendammerung"_, an _"Umwertung aller Werthe"!_
The worst of it was that he had to read, not only literature, but also history--often his own kind of history, that had not yet been written.
If he wished to know the Shakespearean dramas as a product of the aristocratic and imperialist ideal in the glory and intoxication of its youth, he had to study, not only Shakespeare"s poetry, but the cultural and social life of the Elizabethan people. And he could not take any man"s word for the truth; he had to know for himself. The thing that would avail him in this battle was not eloquence and fervor, not the flashes of his irony and the white-hot shafts of his scorn. What he must have were facts, and more facts--and then again facts!
The facts were there, to be had for the gathering. Thyrsis again could only compare himself to Aladdin in his palace. Could it be believed that so many ideas had been left for one man to discover? It seemed to him, that the kingdoms of literature lay at his mercy; he was like a magician who has discovered a new spell, which places his rivals in his power. He knew that this book, if he could ever finish it, would alter the aspect of literary criticism, as a blow changes the pattern in a kaleidoscope.
Thyrsis had failed many times before, but this time he felt that success was in his hands; he knew the bookworld now, he was master of the game.
This would set them to thinking, this would stir them up! He had got under the armor of his enemy at last, and he could feel him wince and writhe at each thrust that he drove home. So he wrought at his task, in a state of tense excitement, living always in imagination in the midst of the battle, following stroke with stroke and driving a rout before him.--So he would be for weeks; and then would come the reaction, when he fell back exhausted, and realized that his victory was mere phantasy, that nothing of it really counted until he had completed his labor. And that would take two years! Two years!
Section 7. From visions such as this Thyrsis came back to wrestle with all the problems of a household; with pumps that froze and drains that clogged, with stoves that went out and ashes that spilled, with milk-boys that were late and kitchen-maids that were snow-bound. He would leave his work at one or two o"clock in the morning, and make his way through the snow and the storm to the house, and crawl into bed, and then take his chances of being awakened by the baby, or by some spell of agony with Corydon.
He might not sleep alone; that supreme symbol of domesticity Corydon could not give up, and he soon ceased to ask for it. It seemed such a little thing to yield; and yet it meant so much to him! The room where he slept came to seem to him a chamber of terror, a place to which he went "like the galley-slave at night, scourged to his dungeon". It was a place where a crime was enacted; where the vital forces of his being were squandered, and the body and soul of him were wrung and squeezed dry like a sponge. This was marriage--it was the essence of marriage; it was the slavery into which he had delivered himself, the duty to which he was bound. And in how many millions of homes was this same thing going on--this licensed preying of one personality upon another? And the nightmare thing was upheld and b.u.t.tressed by all the forces of society--priests were saying blessings over it and moralists were singing the praises of it--"the holy bonds of matrimony", it was called!
It was all the worse to Thyrsis because there was that in him which welcomed this animal intimacy. So he saw that day by day their lives were slipping to a lower plane; day by day they were discovering new weaknesses and developing new vices in themselves. Corydon was now a good part of the time in pain of some sort; and the doctors had accustomed her to stave off these crises with various kinds of drugs, so that she had a set of shelves crowded with pills and powders and bottles. She had learned to rely upon them in emergencies, to plead for them when she was helpless; and so Thyrsis saw her declining into an inferno. He would argue with her and plead with her and fight with her; he would spend days trying to open her eyes to the peril, to show her that it was better to suffer pain than to resort to these treacherous aids.
Section 8. They still had their hours of enthusiasm, of course, their illuminations and their resolutions. During the summer, while browsing among the English magazines in the library, Thyrsis had stumbled upon an astonishing article dealing with the subject of health. He read it in a state of great excitement, and then took it home and read it to Corydon.
It told of the achievements of a gentleman by the name of Horace Fletcher, who had once possessed robust health, and lost it through careless living, and had then restored it by a new system of eating. To Thyrsis this came as one of the great discoveries of his life. For years every instinct of his nature had been whispering to him that his ways of eating were vicious; but he had been ignorant and helpless--and with all the world that he knew in opposition to him. As he read the article, he recalled a talk he had had with his "family doctor", way back before his marriage, when he had first begun to notice symptoms of stomach-trouble.
He had suggested timidly that there might be something wrong with his diet, and that if the doctor would tell him exactly what he ought to eat, and how much and how often, he would be glad to adopt the regimen.
But the doctor had only laughed and answered, "Nonsense, boy--don"t you get to thinking about your food!" And so Thyrsis had gone away, to follow the old plan of eating what he liked. Health, it would seem, must be a spontaneous and accidental thing, it could not be a deliberate and reasoned thing.
But now he and Corydon became smitten with a pa.s.sion of shame for all their stupidity and their gluttony; they invested in Fletcher"s books, and set out upon this new adventure. They would help themselves to a very small saucerful of food; and they would take of this a very small spoonful--and chew--and chew--and chew. Mr. Fletcher said that half an hour a day was enough for the eating of the food one needed; but they, apparently, could have chewed for hours, and still been hungry.
They labored religiously to stop as soon as they could pretend to be satisfied; the result of which was that Thyrsis lost fourteen pounds in as many days--and it was many a long year before he got those fourteen pounds back! He became still more "spiritual" in his aspect; until finally he and Corydon set out for a walk one day, and coming up a hill to their home they gave out altogether, and first Thyrsis had to crawl up the hill and get something to eat, and then take something down to Corydon!
However, in spite of all their blunders, this new idea was of genuine benefit to them; at least it put them upon the right track--it taught them the relationship between diet and disease. They saw the two as cause and consequence--they watched the food they ate affecting their bodies as one might watch a match affecting a thermometer. They were no longer victims of the idea that health must be a spontaneous and accidental thing--they were set definitely to thinking about it, as something that could be achieved by will and intelligence.
But the right knowledge lay far in the future; and meantime they were groping in ignorance, and disease was still a mysterious visitation that came upon them out of the night. "Thus saith the Lord, About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt; and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die. And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there hath been none like it, nor shall be like it any more."
Their own firstborn had low been on the _regime_ of the "child specialist" for a year and a half. He was big and fat and rosy, and according to all the standards they knew, a picture of health. He was the pride of his parents" hearts--the one success they had achieved, and to which they could turn their eyes. He was a frightful burden to them--the most noisy and irrepressible of children. But they struggled and worried along with him, and were proud of him--and even, in a stormy sort of way, were happy with him. But now a calamity fell upon him, bringing them the most terrible distress they had yet had to face in their lives.
Section 9. It was all the worse because they laid the blame upon themselves. They were accustomed to attribute sickness to this or that trivial cause--if Corydon caught a cold, it was because she had sat in a draught, and if Thyrsis was laid up with tonsilitis, it was because he had gone out for kindling-wood without his hat. It had been their wont to bundle the child up and turn him out to play; and one very cold day he had stood a long time under the woodshed, and had got chilled. So that night his head was hot, and he was fretful; and in the morning he would not eat, and apparently had a fever. They sent off in haste for the doctor; and the doctor came and examined him, and shook his head and looked very grave. It was pneumonia, he said, and a serious case.
So Corydon and Thyrsis had to put all things else aside, and gird themselves for a siege. There were medicines to be administered every hour, and minute precautions to be taken to keep the patient from the slightest chill; he must be in a warm room, and yet with some ventilation. All these things they attended to, and then they would sit and gaze at the sufferer, dumb with grief and fear. Through the night Thyrsis sat by the bedside, while Cedric babbled and raved in delirium; and no suffering that he had ever experienced was equal to this.
How he loved this baby, how pa.s.sionately, how cruelly! How he clung to him, blindly and desperately--the thought of losing him simply tore his heart to pieces! He would hold the hot hands, he would touch the little body; how he loved that body, that was so beautiful and soft and white!
How many times he had bathed it and dressed it and hugged it to him! He would sit and listen to the fevered prattle, full of childish phrases which brought before him the childish soul--the wonderful, lovable thing, so merry and eager, so full of mischief and curiosity; with strange impulses of tenderness, and flashes of intelligence that thrilled one, and opened long vistas to the imagination. He was all they had, this baby--he was all they had saved out of the ruin of their lives, out of the shipwreck of their love. What sacrifices they had made for him--what agonies he represented! And now, the idea that they might never see him, nor touch him, nor hear his voice again!
Also would come agonies of remorse. Thyrsis would face the blunder they had made--it might have been avoided so easily, and now it was irrevocable! His whole body would shake with silent sobbing. Ah, this curse of their lives, this hideous shame--that they had not even been able to take proper care of their child! This wrong, too, the world meant to inflict upon them--this supreme vengeance, this cruel punishment!
Section 10. The doctor came next morning, and found the patient worse.
This was the crisis, he said; if the little one lived through the night--And there he paused, seeing the agony in the eyes of the mother and father. They would do all they could, he said; they must hope for the best.
So the siege went on. Thyrsis sat through the night again--and Corydon, who could not rest either, would come into the room every little while, and listen and watch. They would hold each other"s hand for hours, dumb with suffering; ghostly presences seemed to haunt the sick-chamber and set them to trembling. Thyrsis found himself thinking of that most terrible of all ballads, "The Erl-King". How he had shuddered once, hearing it sung!--
"Dem Vater grauset"s, er reitet geschwind!"
All through the night he seemed to hear the hammer-strokes of the horse"s hoofs echoing through his soul.
The child lived through the night, but the crisis was not yet over.
The fever held on; the issue of life and death seemed to hang upon the flutter of an eyelid. There was one more night to be sat through and Thyrsis, whose restless intellect must needs be dealing with all issues, had by then fought his way through this terror also. They must get control of themselves at all hazards, he said; they must face the facts.
If so the child should die--
He tried to say something of the sort to Corydon, seeking to steady her.
But Corydon became almost frantic at his words. "You must not say such a thing, you must not think such a thing!" she cried.
Corydon had been reading about "new thought", and she insisted that would be "holding the idea" of death over the child. "The thing for us to do," she said, "is to make up our minds--he must live, we must _know_ that he will live!"--It was no time to argue about metaphysics, but Thyrsis found this proposition a source of great perplexity. How could a man make himself know what he did not know?
The crisis pa.s.sed, and the child lived. But the illness continued for a couple of weeks--and how pitiful it was to see their baby, that had been so big and rosy, and was now pale and thin and weak! And when at last he got up and went outdoors again, he caught a cold, and there was a relapse, and another siege of the dread disease; the doctor had not warned them sufficiently, it seemed. So there was a week or two more of watching and worrying; and then they had to face the fact that little Cedric would be delicate for a long while--would need to be guarded with care all through the spring.
Thyrsis blamed himself for all that had happened; the weight of it rested upon him forever afterwards, as if it were some crime he had committed. Sometimes when he was overwrought and overdriven, he would lie awake in the small hours of the morning, and this spectre would come and sit by him. He had made a martyr of the child he loved, he had sacrificed it to what he called his art; and how had he dared to do it?
It was hard to think of a more cruel question to put to a man. Himself, no doubt, he might scourge and drive and wreck; but this child--what were the child"s rights? Thyrsis would try to weigh them against the claims of posterity. What his own work might be, he knew; and to what extent should he sacrifice it to the unknown possibilities of his son? Some sacrifice there had to be--such was the stern decree of the "economic screw."
So Thyrsis once more was a field of warring motives; once more he faced the curse of his life--that he could not be as other men, he could not have other men"s virtues. It was the latest aspect, and the most tragic, of that impulse in him which had made him fight so hard against marriage; which had made him quote to Corydon the lines of the outlaw"s song--