"I shall write it," he said, "if I have to die when I get through". So he shut himself up in his room once more.
Section 7. A famous scientist began the story--reasoning along the lines of Dr. Holland"s argument. The gra.s.s took the inorganic matter, and made it into food; the steer ate the gra.s.s, and carried it to the next stage; and beyond that was one stage more. So the scientist began making experiments--in a quiet way, of course. He reported the results before a learned scientific body, but his colleagues were so scandalized that the matter was hushed up.
The seed had been sown, however. A younger man took up the idea, and made researches in the South Seas--substantiating the claim that those races which took to anthropophagy had invariably supplanted the others.
The new investigator printed his findings in a book which was circulated privately; and pretty soon he was called into consultation by the master-mind of the country"s finance--the richest man in the world. This man was old and bald and feeble; and now suddenly there came to him a new lease of life--new health and new enthusiasm. It was given out that he had got it by wandering about bare-footed in the gra.s.s, and playing golf all day--an explanation which the public accepted without question.
No one remarked the fact that the old man began devoting his wealth to the establishing of foundling asylums; nor did any one think it suspicious that the younger generation of this multi-millionaire should rise so suddenly to power and fame.
But there began to be strange rumors and suspicions. There were young writers, who had developed a new technique, and had carried poetic utterance to undreamed of heights; and in this poetry were cryptic allusions, hints of diabolic things. A Socialist paper printed the menu of a banquet given by these "Neo-Nietzscheans", and demanded to know what one was to understand by _filet de mouton blanc_, and wherein lay the subtle humor of _pate de pet.i.t bete_. And at last the storm broke--a youth scarcely in his teens published a book of poems in which the dread secret was blazoned forth to the world with mocking defiance. There were frantic attempts to suppress this book, but they failed; and then a prosecuting officer, eager for notoriety, placed the youth upon trial for his life. And so the issue was drawn.
The public at large awakened to a dazed realization of the head-way which the new idea had made. It had become a cult of the ruling-cla.s.s, the esoteric religion of the state; everywhere its defenders sprang up--it seemed as if all the intellectual as well as the material power of the community was under its spell. To oppose it was not merely bad form--it was to incur a stigma of moral inferiority, to be the victim of a "slave-ethic".
With the scientific world, of course, its victory was speedy; the new doctrine was in line with recognized evolutionary teaching. The great names of Darwin and Spencer were invoked in its support; and, of course, when it came to economic science, there could be no two opinions. Had _laissez-faire_ ever meant anything, if _laissez-faire_ did not mean this?
At the very outset, the country was startled by the publication of a book by a college professor, famed as a leading sociologist, in which the case was presented without any attempt at sophistication. It was a fact, needing no attestation, that the ma.s.s of mankind had always lived in a state of slavery. At the present hour, under the forms of democracy, there were a quarter of a million men killed every year in industry, and half a million women living by prost.i.tution, and two million children earning wages, and ten million people in want; and in comparison with these things, how humane was the new cult, how honest and above-board, how clean and economical! For the first time there could be offered to the submerged tenth a real social function to be performed. Once let the new teaching be applied upon a world-wide scale, and the proletariat might follow its natural impulse to multiply without limit; there would be no more "race-suicide" to trouble the souls of eminent statesmen.
And this at the time when the attention of the community was focussed upon the new _cause celebre_! When the public prints were filled with an acrimonious discussion as to the meaning of the instructions given to the jury. If anyone chose to will his body to a purchaser, said the judge, and then go and commit suicide, there was no law to prevent him; and, of course, the subsequent purposes of the purchaser had nothing to do with the point at issue. This was a matter of taste--here the learned justice rapped for order--a matter of prejudice, largely, and the question at issue was one of law. There was no law controlling a man"s dietetic idiosyncrasies, and it was to be doubted if const.i.tutionally any such law would stand--certainly not in a federal court, unless it chanced to be a matter of interstate commerce.
In their bewilderment and dismay, the people turned to the Church.
Surely the doctrines of Christianity would stand like a barricade against this monstrous cult. But already within the Church there had been rumors and disturbances; and now suddenly a bishop arose and voiced his protest against this attempt "to drag the Church into the mire of political controversy." It must be made perfectly clear, said the bishop, that Christianity was a religion, and not a dietetic dogma. Its purpose was to save the souls of men, and not to concern itself with their bodies. It had been stated that we should have the poor always with us; which made clear the futility of attempting to change the facts of Nature. Also it was certain that the founder of Christianity had been a meat-eater; and though there might be more than one interpretation placed upon his command concerning little children---
There we might leave Thyrsis with the established Church. He had it just where he wanted it, and he shook it until its smoothly-shaven pink and white cheeks turned purple, and the _demi-ta.s.se_ went flying out of its beautifully manicured fingers! And while he did it he laughed aloud in hideous glee, and in his soul was a cry like the hunting-call of the lone gray wolf, that he had heard at midnight in his wilderness camp. So far a journey had come the little boy who had been dressed up in scarlet and purple robes, and had carried the bishop"s train at the confirmation service! And so heavy a penalty did the church pay for its alliance with "good society"!
Section 8. Thyrsis paid a week"s living expenses to have this ma.n.u.script copied; and then he took it about to the publishers. First came his friend Mr. Ardsley, who had become his chief adviser. When Thyrsis went to see him, Mr. Ardsley drew out an envelope from his desk, and took from it the opinion of his reader. ""What in the world is the matter with this boy?"" he read. "That"s the opening sentence."
And then he fixed his eyes upon the boy. "What in the world _is_ the matter?" he asked.
Thyrsis sat silent; there was no reply he could make. He was strongly tempted to say to the man, "The matter is that I am not getting enough to eat!"
But already Thyrsis himself had judged "The Higher Cannibalism" and repudiated it. It was born of his pain and weakness, and it was not the work he had come into the world to do. So at the end he had placed a poem, which told of a visit from his muse, after the fashion of Musset"s "Nuits"; the muse had been sad and silent, and in the end the poet had torn up the product of his hours of despair, and had renewed his faith with the gracious one.
Meantime the long winter months dragged by, and still there was no gleam of hope. For Corydon it was even harder than for her husband. He at least was expressing his feelings, while she could only pine and chafe, without any sort of vent. Her life was a matter of colorless routine, in which each day was like the last, except in increased monotony. She tried hard not to let him see how she suffered; but sometimes the tears would come. And her unhappiness was bad for the child, which in the beginning had been robust and magnificent, but now was not growing properly. Thyrsis would have ridiculed the idea that nervousness could affect her milk; but the time came when, in later life, he saw the poisons of fatigue and fear in test-tubes, and so he understood why the child had not been able to lift its head until it was a year old, and had then been well on the way to having "rickets."
All their life was so different from the way they had dreamed it! The dream still lured them; but its voice grew fainter and more remote. How were they to keep it real to themselves, how were they to hold it? Their existence was made up of endless sordidness, of dreary commonplace, that opposed them with its pa.s.sive inertia where it did not actively attack them. "Ah, Thyrsis!" Corydon would cry to him, "this will kill us if it lasts too long!"
For one thing, they no longer heard any music at all--She was not strong enough to practice the piano; and his violin was gone. Here in the great city an endless stream of concerts and operas and recitals flowed past; and here were they, like starving children who press their faces against a pastry-cook"s window and devour the sweets with their eyes. Thyrsis kept up with musical and dramatic progress by reading the accounts in the papers and magazines; but this was a good deal like slaking one"s thirst with a mirage. He used to wonder sometimes if he were to write to these great artists--would they invite him to hear them, or would they too despise him? He never had the courage to try.
Once in the course of the long winter some one presented Corydon with two tickets to the opera, and they went together, in a state of utter bliss. It was an unusual experience for Thyrsis, for their seats were in the orchestra, and hitherto he had always heard his operas from the upper rows in the fifth balcony, where the air was hot and stifling, and the singers appeared as a pair of tiny arms that waved, and a head (frequently a bald head) that emitted a thin, far-distant voice. This had become to him one of the conventions of the opera; and now to discover the singers as full-sized human beings, with faces and legs and loud voices, was very disturbing to his sense of illusion.
Also, alas, they had not been free to select the opera. It was "La Traviata"; and there was not much food for their hungry souls in this farrago of artificiality and sham sentiment. They shut their eyes and tried to enjoy the music, forgetting the gallant young men of fashion and their fascinating mistresses. But even the music, it seemed, was tainted; or could it be, Thyrsis wondered, that he could no longer lose himself in the pure joy of melody? Many kinds of corruption he had by this time learned about; the corruption of men, and of women, and of children; the corruption of painting and sculpture, of poetry and the drama. But the corruption of music was something which even yet he could not face; for music was the very voice of the soul--the well-spring from which life itself was derived. Thyrsis thought, as he and Corydon wandered about in the foyers of this palatial opera-house, was there anywhere on earth a place in which heaven and h.e.l.l came so close together. A place where the l.u.s.t and pride of the flesh displayed themselves in all their glory; and in contrast with the purest ecstasies the human spirit had attained! He pointed out one rich dowager who swept past them; her b.r.e.a.s.t.s all but jostling out of her corsage as she walked, her stomach squeezed into a sort of armor-plate of jewels, her cheeks powdered and painted, her head weighted with false hair and a tiara of diamonds, her face like a mask of pride and scorn. And then, in juxtaposition with that, the _Waldweben_ and the _Feuerzauber_, or the grim and awful tragedy of the Siegfried funeral-march! There were people in this opera-house who knew what such music meant; Thyrsis had read it in their faces, in that suffocating top-gallery. He wondered if some day the demons that were evoked by the music might not call to them and lead them in revolt, to drive the money-changers from the temple once again!
Section 9. Another editor was reading "The Hearer of Truth," and a publisher was hovering on the brink of venturing "The Higher Cannibalism"; and so the two had new hopes to lure them on. When the spring-time had come, they would once more escape from the city, and would put up their tent on the lake-sh.o.r.e! They spent long afternoons picturing just how they would live--what they would eat, and what they would wear, and what they would study. As for Cedric--so they had called the baby--they saw him playing beneath the big tree in front of the tent. And what fun they would have giving him his bath on the little beach inside the point!
"I"ll fix up a clothes-basket for him to sleep in!" declared Thyrsis.
"Nonsense, dear!" said Corydon. "I"ve told you many times before--we"ll _have_ to have a crib for him!"
"But why?" cried he; and there would follow an argument which gave pain to his economical soul.
Corydon declared herself willing to do her share in the matter of saving money; but it seemed to him that whenever he suggested a concrete idea, there would be objections. "We can get up at dawn," he would say, "and save the cost of oil."
"Yes," she would answer.
"And we can do our own laundry," he would continue. But immediately another argument would begin; it was impossible to persuade Corydon that diapers could be washed in cold water, even when one had the whole of the Great Lakes for a washtub.
They would go on to contemplate the glorious time when they would have money enough to build a home of their own, that could be inhabited in winter as well as in summer; Corydon always referred to it with the line from "Caradrion"--"the little cot, fringed round with tender green." It would be fine for the baby, they agreed--he should never have to go back to the city again. Thyrsis had a vision of him as he would be in that home: a brown and freckled country boy, with what were known, in the dialect of "dam-fool talk", as "yagged panties and bare feets".
But Corydon would protest at that picture. "It"s all right," she said, "to put up with ugliness if you have to. But what"s the use of making a fetish of it?"
"It wouldn"t be ugliness," replied he. "It would be Nature! "Blessings on thee, little man!""
"That"s all very well. But I want Cedric to have curls--"
"Curls!" he cried. "And then a Fauntleroy suit, I suppose!"
"No--at least not while we"re poor. But I want him to look decent----"
"If you have curls, then you"ll want a nurse-maid to brush them!"
"Nonsense, Thyrsis! Can"t a mother take care of her child"s own hair?"
"_Some_ mothers can--they have nothing better to do. But if you were going in for the hair-dresser"s art, why did you cut off your own?"
And so would come yet new discussions. "You"ll be wanting me to maintain an establishment!" Thyrsis would cry, whenever these aesthetic impulses manifested themselves. He seemed to be haunted by that image of an establishment. All married men came to it in the end--there seemed to be something in matrimony that predisposed to it; and far better adopt at once the ideals and habits of the gypsies, than to settle into respectability with a nurse-maid and a cook!
Thyrsis was under the necessity of sweeping clean his soul, because of all the luxury and wantonness he saw in this metropolis, and the madness to which it goaded his soul. Some day fame would come to him, he knew--wealth also, perhaps; and oh, there must be one man in all the city who was not corrupted, who did not learn extravagance and self-indulgence, who practiced as well as preached the life of faith!
And so, again and again, he and Corydon would renew the pledges of their courtship-days--pledges to a discipline of Spartan sternness.
Poor as he was, Thyrsis still found time to figure over the things he meant to do when he got money: the publishing-house that was to bring out his books at cost, and the free reading-rooms and the circulating libraries. Also, he wanted to edit a magazine; for there was a great truth which he wished to teach the world. "We must make these things that we have suffered count for something!" he would say to Corydon, again and again. "We must use them to open people"s eyes!" He was thinking how, when at last he had escaped from the pit, he would be in a position to speak for those others who were left behind. Men would heed him then, and he could show them how impossible it was for the creative artist to do his work, and at the same time carry on the struggle for bread. He would induce some rich man to set aside a fund for the endowment of young writers; and so the man who had a real message might no longer have to starve.
Thyrsis had by this time tried all the world, and he knew that there was no one to understand. Just about now he was utterly stranded, and had to borrow money for even his next day"s food. And oh, the humiliations and insults that came with these loans! And worse yet, the humiliations and insults that came without any loans! There was one rich man who advanced him ten dollars; Thyrsis, when he returned it, sent a check he had received from some out-of-town magazine--and in return was rebuked by the rich man for failing to include the "exchange" on the check. Thyrsis wrote humbly to inquire what manner of thing the "exchange" on a check might be; and learned that he was still in the rich man"s debt to the sum of ten cents!
His case was the more hopeless, he found, because he was a married man.
The world might have pardoned a young free-lance who was willing to "rough it" and take his chances for a while; but a man who had a wife and child--and was still prating about poetry! To the world the possession of a wife and child meant self-indulgence; and when a man had fallen into that trap, he simply had to settle down and take the consequence. How could Thyrsis explain that his marriage had not been as other men"s? How could he hint at such a thing, without proving himself a cad?
Section 10. The work of "contemporary biography" had come to an end; there followed weeks of seeking, and then another opening appeared--Mr.
Ardsley offered him a chance to do some ma.n.u.script-reading. This was really a splendid opportunity, for the work would not be difficult, and the payment would be five dollars for each ma.n.u.script. Thyrsis accepted joyfully, and forthwith carried off a couple of embryo books to his room.
It was a new and curious occupation, which opened up to him whole worlds whose existence he had not previously suspected. Through his review-writing he had become acquainted with the books that had seen the light of day; now he made the startling discovery that for every one that was born, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, that died in the womb. He could see how it went--the hordes of half-educated people who read books and were moved to write something like them. Each ma.n.u.script was a separate tragedy; and often there would be a letter or a preface to make certain that one did not miss the sense of it. Here would be a settlement-worker, burning with a message, but unable to draw a character or to write dialogue; here would be a business-man, who had studied up the dialect of the region where he spent his summer vacations, and whose style was so crude that one winced as he turned the pages; here would be a poor bookkeeper, or a type-writer, or other cog in the business machine, who had read of the fortunes made by writers of fiction, and had spent all his hours of leisure for a year in composing a tale of the _grand monde_, or some feeble imitation of the sugar-coated "historical romance" of the hour.
Sometimes as he read these ma.n.u.scripts, a shudder would come over Thyrsis; how they made him realize the odds in the game of life! These thousands and tens of thousands panting and striving for success; and he lost in the throng of them! What madness it seemed to imagine that he might climb over their heads--that he had been chosen to scale the heights of fame! Their letters and prefaces sounded like a satire upon his own att.i.tude, a _reductio ad absurdum_ of his claims to "genius".
Here, for instance, was a man who wrote to introduce himself as America"s first epic poet--stating incidentally that he was an inspector of gas-meters, and had a wife and six children. His poem occupied some six hundred foolscap sheets, finely bound up by hand; it set forth the soul-states of a Byron from Alabama--an aristocratic hero who was refused by the lady of his heart, and voiced his anger and perplexity in a long speech, two lines of which stamped themselves forever upon the mind of the reader---
"But I! he cried. My limbs are straight, My purse well-filled, my veins all F. F. V.!"
As a method of earning one"s living, this was almost too good to be true. The worse the ma.n.u.scripts were the easier was his task; in fact, when he came upon one which showed traces of real power and interest he cursed his fate, for then it might take several days to earn his five dollars. But for the most part the ma.n.u.scripts were bad enough, and he could have earned a year"s income in a week, if only there had been enough of them. So he made a great effort to succeed at the work, and filled his reports with epigrams and keen observations, carefully adapted to what he knew was Mr. Ardsley"s point of view. He allowed time for these devices to be effective, and then paid a visit to find out about the prospects.
"Mr. Ardsley," he began, "I am going to try to meet you half way with a book."