It was a bitter and cruel disappointment--the more so because it had taken six weeks of his precious time. But there was nothing to be done about it save to send off the ma.n.u.script to another magazine. And when it had come back from there he sent it to another, and to yet another--paying each time a total of eighty cents to the express-company, a sum which was very hard for him to spare. To make an ending at once to the painful episode, he continued to send it from one place to another, until "The Hearer of Truth" had had the honor of being declined by a total of fifteen magazines and twenty-two publishing-houses. The pilgrimage occupied a period of nineteen months--after which, to Thyrsis" great surprise, the thirty-eighth concern offered to publish it. And so the book was brought out, with something of a flourish, and met with its thirty-eighth rejection--at the hands of the public!
BOOK VII
THE CAPTURE IS COMPLETED
_The shadow of a dark cloud had fallen upon the woods, and the voices of the birds were strangely hushed.
"There is a spell about this place for me," she said, and quoted--
"Here came I often, often in old days-- Thyrsis and I, we still had Thyrsis then!"
"Where is Thyrsis now?" she asked; and he smiled sadly, and responded:
"Ah me! this many a year My pipe is lost, my shepherd"s holiday!
Needs must I lose them, needs with heavy heart Into the world and wave of men depart!"_
Section 1. They returned to the city early in October--not so much because they minded the cold in the tent, as because their money was gone, and it was not easy to do hack-work at a distance. One had to be on the spot, to interview the editors, to study their whims and keep one"s self in their minds; otherwise some one else got the work.
So Thyrsis came back to his "world"; and he found this world up in arms against him. All the opposition that he had ever had to face was nothing to what he faced now. Society seemed to have made up its collective mind that he should give in; and every force it could use was brought to bear upon him--every person he knew joined in the a.s.sault upon him.
He was bound to admit that they had all the arguments on their side.
He had gone his own obstinate way, in defiance of all advice and of all precedent; and now he saw what had come of it--exactly what every common-sense person had foreseen. He and Corydon had tried their "living as brother and sister"--and here she was with child! And that was all right, no one proposed to blame him for it; it was what people had predicted, and they were rather pleased to have their predictions come true--to see the bubble of his pretenses burst, and to be able to point out to him that he was like all other men. What they wanted now was simply that he should recognize his responsibility, and look out for Corydon"s welfare. Living in tenement-rooms and in tents, like gypsies and savages, was all right by way of a lark; it was all very picturesque and romantic in a novel; but it would not do for a woman who was about to become a mother. Corydon had been delicately reared. She was used to the comforts and decencies of life; and to get her in her present plight and then not provide these things for her would be the act of a scoundrel.
All through his life the world had had but one message for Thyrsis: "Go to work!" From the world"s point of view his languages and literatures, his music and writing were all play; to "work" was to get a "position".
And now this word was dinned into his ears day and night, the very stones in the street seemed to cry it at him--"Get a position! Get a position!"
As chance would have it, the position was all ready. In the higher regions they were preparing to open a branch of a great family establishment abroad, and Thyrsis was invited to take charge of it. He would be paid three thousand dollars a year at the start, and two or three times as much ultimately; and what more could he want? He knew nothing about the work, but they knew his abilities--that if he would undertake it, and give his attention to it, he would succeed. He would meet people of culture, they argued, and be broadened by contact with men; as for Corydon, it would make her whole life over. Surely, for her sake, he could not refuse!
Thyrsis had foreseen just such things. He had braced himself to meet the shock, and the world found him with his hands clenched and his jaws set.
There was no use in arguing with him, he had but one answer--"No! No!
No!" He would not take that position, and he would not take any other position--neither now, nor at any future time. He was not a business-man, he was an artist; and an artist he would remain to the end. It might as well be understood at the outset; there was nothing that the world could do or say to him that would move him one inch. They might starve him, they might kill him, they might do what they could or would--but never would he give in.
"But--what are you going to do?" they cried.
He answered, "I am going to write my books."
"But you have already written two books, and nothing has come of them!"
"Something may come of them yet," he said. "And if it doesn"t, I shall simply go on and write another, and another, and another. I shall continue to write so long as I have the strength left in me; I shall be trying to write when I die."
And so, while they argued and pleaded and scolded and wept, he stood in silence. They could not understand him--he smiled bitterly as he realized how impossible it was for them to understand even the simplest thing about him. There was the dapper corporation lawyer and his exquisite young wife, who came to argue about it; and Thyrsis asked them not to tell Corydon why they had come. He saw them look at each other significantly, and he could read their thought--that he was afraid of his wife"s importunities. And how could he explain to them what he had really meant--that if they had told Corydon they had come to persuade him to give up his art, Corydon would probably have found it impossible to be even decently polite to them!
Section 2. So Thyrsis went away, carrying the burden of the scorn and contempt of every human soul he knew. It was in truth a dark hour in his life. He was at his wit"s end for the bare necessities. He had reached the city with less money in his pocket than he had had the year before; and all the ways by which he had got money seemed to have failed him at once. All the editors who published book-reviews seemed to have a stock on hand; or else to know of people whose style of writing pleased their readers better. And none of them seemed to fancy any ideas for articles that Thyrsis had to suggest.
Worst of all, the editor of the ""Treasure Chest" turned down the pot-boiler which he had been writing up in the country. He would not say anything very definite about it--he just didn"t like the story--it had not come up to the promise of the scenario. He hinted that perhaps Thyrsis was not as much interested in his work as he had been before. It seemed to be lacking in vitality, and the style was not so good. Thyrsis offered to rewrite parts of the story; but no, said the editor, he did not care for the story at all. He would be willing to have Thyrsis try another, but he was pretty well supplied with serials just then, and could not give much encouragement.
Corydon had yielded to her parents and gone to stay with them for a while; and Thyrsis had got his own expenses down to less than five dollars a week--including such items as stationery and postage on his ma.n.u.scripts. And still, he could not get this five dollars. In his desperation he followed the cheap food idea to extremes, and there were times when an invitation to an honest meal was something he looked forward to for a week. And day after day he wandered about the streets, racking his brains for new ideas, for new plans to try, for new hopes of deliverance.
In later years he looked back upon it all--knowing then the depth of the pit into which he had fallen, knowing the full power of the forces that were ranged against him--and he marvelled that he had ever had the courage to hold out. But in truth the idea of surrender did not occur to him; the possibility of it did not lie in his character. He had his message to deliver. That was what he was in the world for, and for nothing else; and he must deliver what he could of it.
He would go alone, and his vision would come to him. It would come to him, radiant, marvellous, overwhelming; there had never been anything like it in the world, there might never be anything like it in the world again. And if only he could get the world to realize it--if only he could force some hint of it into the mind of one living person! It was impossible not to think that some day that person would be discovered--to believe otherwise would be to give the whole world up for d.a.m.ned. He would imagine that chance person reading his first book; he would imagine the publishers and their advisers reading "The Hearer of Truth"--might it not be that at this very hour some living soul was in the act of finding him out? At any rate, all that he could do was to try, and to keep on trying; to embody his vision in just as many forms as possible, and to scatter them just as widely as possible. It was like shooting arrows into the air; but he would go on to shoot while there was one arrow left in his quiver.
Section 3. Thyrsis reasoned the problem out for himself; he saw what he wanted, and that it was a rational and honest thing for him to want.
He was a creative artist, engaged in learning his trade. When he had completed his training, he would not work for himself, he would work to bring joy and faith to millions of human beings, perhaps for ages after.
And meantime, while he was in the practice-stage, he asked for the bare necessities of existence.
Nor was it as if he were an utter tyro; he had given proof of his power.
He had written two books, which some of the best critics in the country had praised. To this people made answer that it was no one"s business to look out for genius and give it a chance to live. But with Thyrsis it was never any argument to show that a thing did not exist, if it was a thing which he knew _ought_ to exist. He looked back over the history of art, and saw the old hideous state of affairs--saw genius perishing of starvation and misery, and men erecting monuments to it when it was dead. He saw empty-headed rich people paying fortunes for the ma.n.u.scripts of poems which all the world had once rejected; he saw the seven towns contending for Homer dead, through which the living Homer begged his bread. And Thyrsis could not bring himself to believe that a thing so monstrous could continue to exist forever.
There was no other department of human activity of which it was true.
If a man wanted to be a preacher, he would find that people had set up divinity-schools and established scholarships for which he could contend. And the same was true if he wished to be an engineer, or an architect, or a historian, or a biologist; it was only the creative artist of whom no one had a thought--the creative artist, who needed it most of all! For his was the most exacting work, his was the longest and severest apprenticeship.
Brooding over this, Thyrsis. .h.i.t upon another plan. He drew up a letter, in which he set forth what he wanted, and stated what he had so far done; he quoted the opinions of his work that had been written by men-of-letters, and offered to submit the books and ma.n.u.scripts about which these opinions had been written. He sent a copy of this letter to the president of each of the leading universities in the country, to find out if there was in a single one of them any fellowship or scholarship or prize of any sort, which could be won by such creative literary work. Of those who replied to him, many admitted that his point was well taken, that there should have been such provision; but one and all they agreed that none existed. There were rewards for studying the work of the past, but never for producing new work, no matter how good it might be.
Then another plan occurred to him. He wrote an anonymous article, setting forth some of his amusing experiences, and contrasting the credit side of the "pot-boiling" ledger with the debit side of the "real art" ledger. This article was picturesque, and a magazine published it, paying twenty-five dollars for it, and so giving him another month"s lease of life. But that was all that came of it--there was no rich man who wrote to the magazine to ask who this tormented genius might be.
Then Thyrsis, in his desperation, joined the ranks of the begging letter-writers. He would send long accounts of his plight to eminent philanthropists--having no idea that the secretaries of eminent philanthropists throw out basketsful of such letters every day. He would read in the papers of some public-spirited enterprise--he would hear of this man or that woman who was famous for his or her interest in helpful things--and he would sit down and write these people that he was starving, and implore them to read his book. In later years, when he came to know of some of these newspaper idols, it was a comfort to him to feel certain that his letters had been thrown away unread.
Also he begged from everybody he met, under whatever circ.u.mstances he met them. If by any chance the person might be imagined to possess money, sooner or later would come some hour of distress, when Thyrsis would be driven to try to borrow. On one occasion he counted it up, and there were forty-three individuals to whom he had made himself a nuisance. With half a dozen of them he had actually succeeded; but always promising to return the money when his next check came in--and always scrupulously doing this. There was never anyone who rose to the understanding of what he really wanted--a free gift, for the sake of his art. There was never anyone who could understand his utter shamelessness about it; that fervor of consecration which made it impossible for a man to humiliate him, or to insult him--to do anything save to write himself down a dead soul.
People were quite clear in their views upon this question; a man must earn his own way in the world. And that was all right, if a man were in the world for himself. But what if he were working for humanity, and had no time to think about himself? Was that truly a disgraceful thing? Take Jesus, for instance; ought he to have kept at his carpenter"s trade, instead of preaching the Sermon on the Mount? Or was it that his right to preach the Sermon was determined by the size of the collection he could take among the audience?
And then, while he pondered this problem of "earning one"s own way,"
Thyrsis was noting the lives of the people who were preaching it. What were _they_ doing to earn the luxuries they enjoyed? Even granting that one recognized their futile benevolence as justifying them personally--what about the tens of thousands of others who lived in utter idleness, squandering in self-indulgence and ostentation huge fortunes of which they had never earned a penny? The boy could not go upon the streets of the city without having this monstrous fact flaunted in his face in a thousand forms. So many millions for folly and vice, and not one cent for his art! This was the thing upon which he was brooding day and night--and filling his soul with an awful bitterness which was to horrify the world in later years.
Section 4. He might not come to see Corydon in her home; but she would meet him in the street, and they would walk in the park, a pitiful and mournful pair. They had to walk slowly, and often he would have to help her, for her burden had now become great. She had altered all her dresses, and she wore a long cape, and even then was not able to hide the disfigurement of her person. They would sit upon a bench in the cold, and talk about the latest aspects of his struggle, what he was doing and what he hoped to do. Corydon would bring him the opinions of a few more members of the bourgeois world, and they would curse this world and these people together. For there was no more thought of giving up on Corydon"s side than there was on his; it was not for nothing that he had talked to her upon the hill-top in the moonlight.
Meanwhile, however, time was pa.s.sing, and the prospect of her approaching confinement hung over them like a black thunder-cloud. It came on remorselessly, menacingly. The event was due about Christmas time, and there must be some money then--there must be some money then!
But where was it to be found?
Thyrsis had tried another story for the "Treasure Chest," but the editor had not liked his plot. Also he was taking "The Hearer of Truth" from one place to another; but with less and less hope, as he learned from various editors and publishers how radical and subversive they considered it. He took it now mechanically, as a matter of form--making it his rule always to count upon rejection, so that he might never be disappointed.
One of Corydon"s rich friends had told her of a certain famous surgeon, and Corydon had gone to see him. He had a beautiful private hospital, and his prices were unthinkable; but he had seemed to be interested in her, and when she told him her circ.u.mstances, he had said that he would try to "meet her halfway." But even with the reductions he quoted, it would cost them nearly a hundred and fifty dollars; and how could Thyrsis get such a sum? Even if the surgeon were willing to wait--what prospect was there that he could ever get it?
This again was the curse of their leisure-cla.s.s upbringing. They did not know how poor women had their babies, and they shrunk from the thought of finding it out. Corydon had met this man, and had been impressed by him; and Thyrsis realized, even if she did not, that she had got her heart set upon the plan. And if he did not make it possible, and then anything were to go wrong with her, how would he ever be able to forgive himself? This event would come but once, and might mean so much to them.
So he said to himself that he would "raise the money". But the days pa.s.sed and became weeks, and the weeks became months, and there was no sign of the raising. And then suddenly came one of those shafts of sunlight through the clouds--one of those will-o"-the-wisps that were forever luring Thyrsis into the swamps. Another editor liked "The Hearer of Truth"; another editor said that it was a great piece of literature, and that he would surely use it! So Thyrsis went to the great surgeon and told him that he would be able to pay him in a little while; and the arrangement was made for Corydon to come. And then the editor put the "great piece of literature" away in his desk, and forgot all about it for a month--while Thyrsis waited, day by day, in an agony of suspense.
The appointed time had come--the day when Corydon must go to the hospital; and still the editor had not reported, and there was only fifteen or twenty dollars, earned by weeks of verse-writing and reviewing. So in desperation Thyrsis made up his mind to give up his violin. He had paid ninety dollars for it three years before; and now, after taking it round among the dealers, he sold it for thirty-five dollars.