But instead of this, what awful humiliations! In a summer-resort where he found himself, there was a girl of not very gentle breeding, somewhat pudgy and with a languishing air. She liked to have boys snuggle down by her; and so Thyrsis spent the whole of one evening, sitting in a summer-house with an arm about her waist, dissolved in a sort of moon-calf sentimentalism. And then he pa.s.sed the rest of the night wandering about in the forest cursing himself, with tears of shame and vexation in his eyes.
He was so ignorant about these matters that he did not even know if the changes that had taken place in him were normal, or whether they were doing him harm. He made up his mind that he must have advice; as it was unthinkable that he should speak about such shameful things with any grown person, he bethought himself of a cla.s.smate in college who was an earnest and sober man. This friend, much older than Thyrsis, was the son of an evangelical clergyman, and was headed for the ministry himself.
His name was Warner, and Thyrsis had helped him in arranging for some religious meetings at the college. Warner had been shocked by his theological irregularities; but they were still friends, and now Thyrsis sought a chance to exchange confidences with him.
The opportunity came while they were strolling down an avenue near the college, and a woman pa.s.sed them, a woman with bold and hard features, and obviously-painted cheeks. She smiled at a group of students just ahead, and one of them turned and walked off arm in arm with her.
"Good heavens!" exclaimed Warner. "Did you see that?"
"Yes," said Thyrsis. "Who is she?"
"She comes from a house just around the corner."
"But who is she?"
"Why--she"s a street-walker."
"A street-walker!"
This brought to Thyrsis" mind a problem that had been haunting him for a year or two. Always when he walked about the streets at night there were women who smiled at him and whispered. And he knew that these were bad women, and shrunk from them. But just what did they mean?
"What does she do?" he asked again.
"Why, don"t you know what a street-walker is?"
"Not very well," said Thyrsis.
It took some time for him to get the desired information, because the other could not realize the depths of his ignorance. "They sell themselves to men," he said.
"But what for?" asked Thyrsis. "You don"t mean that they--they let them---"
"They have intercourse together. Of course."
Thyrsis was almost dumb with dismay. "But I should think they would have children!" he exclaimed.
"Good Lord, man!" laughed the other. "Where do you keep yourself, anyway?"
But Thyrsis was too much shaken to think of being ashamed. This was a most appalling revelation to him--it opened quite a new vista of life"s possibilities.
"But why should they do such things?" he cried.
"They earn their living that way," said the other.
"But why _that_ way?"
"I don"t know. They are that kind of women, I suppose."
And so Warner went on to expound to him the facts of prost.i.tution, and all the abysses of human depravity that lie thereabouts. And incidentally the boy got a chance to ask his questions, and to get a common-sense view of his perplexities. Also he got some understanding of human nature, and of the world in which he lived.
Here was Warner, a man of twenty-four, and of a devout, if somewhat dull and plodding conscientiousness; and the last eight or nine years of his"
life had been one torment because of the cravings of l.u.s.t. He had never committed an act of unchast.i.ty--or at least he told Thyrsis that he had not. But he was never free from the impulse, and he had no conception of the possibility of being free. His desire was a purely brute one--untouched by any intellectual or spiritual, or even any sentimental color. He desired woman, as woman--it mattered not what woman. How low his impulses took him Thyrsis realized with a shudder from one remark that he made--that his poverty did not help him to live virtuously, for about the docks and in the workingmen"s quarters there were women who would sell themselves for fifty cents a night.
This man"s whole life was determined by that craving; in fact it seemed to Thyrsis that his G.o.d had made the universe with relation to it--a heaven to reward him if he abstained, and a h.e.l.l to punish him if he yielded. It was because of this that he clung to the church, and shrunk from any dallying with "rationalism". He disapproved of the theatre, because it appealed to these cravings; he disapproved of all pictures and statues of the nude human form, because the sight of them overmastered him. For the same reason he shrunk from all impa.s.sioned poetry, and from dancing, and even from non-religious music. He was rigid in his conformance to all the social conventions, because they served the purpose of saving him and his young women-friends from temptation; and he looked forward to the completion of a divinity-course as his goal, because then he would be able to settle down and marry, and so at last to gratify his desires. He stated this quite baldly, quoting the authority of St. Paul, that it was "better to marry than to burn."
This conversation brought Thyrsis to a realization that there was a great deal in the world that was not found in the poetry of Tennyson and Longfellow; and so he began to pry into the souls of others of his fellow-students.
Section 8. Warner had given him the religious att.i.tude; and now he went after the scientific. There was a tall, eager-faced young man, who proclaimed himself a disciple of Haeckel and Herbert Spencer, and even went so far as to quote Schopenhauer in cla.s.s. Walking home together one day, these two fell to arguing the freedom of the will, and the nature of motives and desires, and what power one has over them; and so Thyrsis made the startling discovery that this young man, having accepted the doctrine of "determinism," had drawn therefrom the corollary that he had to do what he wanted to do, and so was powerless to resist his s.e.x-impulses. For the past year this youth, a fine, intellectual and honest student, had gone at regular intervals to visit a prost.i.tute; and with entirely scientific and cold-blooded precision he outlined to Thyrsis the means he took to avoid contracting disease. Thyrsis listened, feeling as he might have felt in a slaughter-house; and when, returning to the deterministic hypothesis, he asked how it was that he had managed to escape this "necessity", he was told that it must be because he was of a weaker and less manly const.i.tution.
And there was yet another type: a man with whom there was no difficulty in bringing up the subject, for the reason that he was always bringing it up himself. Thyrsis sat next to him in a cla.s.s in Latin, and noticed that whenever the text contained any hint at matters of s.e.x--which was not infrequent in Juvenal and Horace--this man would look at him with a grin and a sly wink. And sometimes Thyrsis would make a casual remark in conversation, and the man would twist it out of its meaning, or make a pun out of it--to find some excuse for his satyr"s leer. So at last Thyrsis was moved to say to him--"Don"t you ever realize what a state you"ve got your mind into?"
"How do you mean?" asked the man.
"Why, everything in the world seems to suggest obscenity to you. You"re always looking for it and always finding it--you don"t seem to care about anything else."
The other was interested in that view of it, and he acknowledged with mild amus.e.m.e.nt that it was true; apparently it was a novelty to him to discuss such matters seriously. He told Thyrsis that he could not remember having ever restrained a s.e.xual impulse in his life. He thought of l.u.s.t in connection with every woman he met, and his mind was a storehouse of s.m.u.t. And yet he was not a bad fellow, in other ways; he handsome, and a good deal of an athlete, and was planning to be a physician. "You"ll find most all the fellows are the same," he said.
Not long after this, Thyrsis was selected to represent his college on a debating-team, and he went away to another city and was invited to a fraternity-house; and here, suddenly, he discovered how much of "college-life" he had been missing. This was a fashionable university, and he met the sons of wealthy parents. About a score of them lived in this fraternity-house, without any sort of supervision or restraint.
They ate in a beautiful oak-panelled dining-room adorned with drinking-steins; and throughout the meal they treated their visitor to such an orgy of obscenity as he had never dreamed of in his life before.
Thyrsis was trapped and could not get away; and it seemed to him when he rose from the table that there was nothing left clean in all G.o.d"s universe. These boys appeared to vie with each other in blasphemous abandonment; and it was not simply wantonness--it was sprawling and disgusting filthiness.
One of this group took Thyrsis driving, and was led to talk.
Here was a youth whose father was the president of a great manufacturing-enterprise, and supplied him with unlimited funds; which money the boy used to divert himself in the pursuit of young women.
Sometimes he had stooped so low as manicure-girls and shop-clerks and stenographers; but for the most part he sought actresses and chorus-girls--they had more intelligence and spirit, he explained, they were harder to win. He had his way with them, partly because he was handsome and clever, but mainly because he was the keeper of the keys of opportunity. It was his to dispense auto-rides and champagne-suppers, and flowers and jewels, and all things else that were desirable in life.
Thyrsis was appalled at the hardness and the utter ruthlessness of this man--he saw him as a young savage turned loose to prey in a civilized community. He had the most supreme contempt for his victims--that was what they were made for, and he paid them their price. Nor was this just because they were women, it was a matter of cla.s.s; the young man had a mother and sisters, to whom he applied quite other standards. But Thyrsis found himself wondering how long, with this contagion raging among the fathers and the sons, it would be possible to keep the mothers and the daughters sterilized.
Section 9. These discoveries came one by one; but Thyrsis saw enough at the outset to make it clear that the time had come for him to gird up his loins. The choice of Hercules was before him; and he did not intend that the course of his life was to be decided by these cravings of the animal within him.
From the grosser sorts of temptation he was always saved by the fastidiousness of his temperament; the thought of a woman who sold herself for money could never bring him anything but shuddering. But all about his lodging-house lived the daughters of the poor, and these were a snare for his feet. It seemed to him as if this craving came to a man in regular pulses; he could go for weeks, serene and happy in his work--and then suddenly would come the restlessness, and he would go out into the night and wander about the streets for hours, impelled by a futile yearning for he knew not what--the hope of something clean in the midst of uncleanliness, of some adventure that would be not quite shameful to a poet"s fancy. And then, after midnight, he would steal home, baffled and sick at heart, and wet his pillow with hot and bitter tears!
So unbearable to him was the thought of such perils that he was impelled to seek his old friend the clergyman, who had lost him over the ancient Hebrew mythologies, and now won him back by his living moral force. With much embarra.s.sment and stammering Thyrsis managed to give a hint of what troubled him; and the man, whose life was made wholly of love for others, opened his great heart and took Thyrsis in.
He told him of his own youthful struggle--a struggle which had resulted in victory, for he had never known a woman. And he put all the facts before the boy, made clear to him the all-determining importance of the issue:
"Choose well, your choice is Brief and yet endless!"
On the one hand was slavery and degradation and disease; and on the other were all the heights of the human spirit. For if one saved and stored this mighty s.e.x-energy, it became trans.m.u.ted to the gold of intellectual and emotional power. Such was the universal testimony of the masters of the higher life--
"My strength is as the strength of ten Because my heart is pure."
And this was no blind asceticism; it was simply a choosing of the best.
It was not a denial of love, but on the contrary a consecration of love.
Some day Thyrsis would meet the woman he was to cleave to, and he would expect her to come to him a virgin; and he must honor her as much--he must save the fire and fervor of his young desire for his life"s great consummation.
Such was the ideal; and these two men made a compact between them, that once every month Thyrsis would write and tell of his success or failure.
And this amateur confessional was a mighty motive to the lad--he knew that he could never tell a lie, and the thought of telling the truth was like a sword hanging over him. There were hours of trial, when he stood so close to the edge of the precipice that this alone was what kept him clear.
Section 10. The summer had come, and Thyrsis had gone away to live in a country village, and was reading Keats and Sh.e.l.ley, and the narrative poems of Scott. There came a soft warm evening, when all the world seemed a-dream; and he had been working hard, and there came to him a yearning for the stars. He went out, and was strolling through the streets of the village, when he saw a girl come out of one of the houses. She was younger than he, graceful of form, and pretty. The lamp-light flashed on her bright cheeks, and she smiled at him as she pa.s.sed. And Thyrsis" heart gave a great leap, and the blood surged to his face; he turned and looked, and saw that she was gazing over her shoulder at him.
He stopped, and turned to follow, his meditations all gone, and gone his resolutions. A trembling seized him, and every nerve of him tingled. He could feel his heart as if it were underneath his throat.