"Ah!" said the other.
"I want to write a novel that you can publish. I believe that I can do it."
Mr. Ardsley warmed immediately. "I have always been certain that you could," said he. He went on to expound to Thyrsis the ethics of opportunism--how it would not be necessary to be false to his convictions, to write anything that he did not believe--but simply to put his convictions into a popular form, and to impart no more than the public could swallow at the first mouthful.
Thyrsis told him the outline of a plot. He would write a story of the struggles of a young author in the metropolis--not such a young author as himself, a rebel and a frenzied egotist, but a plain, everyday young author whom other people could care about. He had the "local color"
for such a tale, and he could do it without too much waste of time. Mr.
Ardsley thought it an excellent idea.
After which Thyrsis came, very cautiously, to the meat of the matter.
"I want to get away into the country to write it," he said; "and so I wanted to ask you about the ma.n.u.scripts you are sending me. Have you found my work satisfactory?"
"Why, yes," said the other.
"And do you think you can send them through the summer?"
"I presume so. It depends upon how many come to us."
"You--you couldn"t arrange to let me have any more of them?"
"Not at present," said Mr. Ardsley. "You see, I have regular readers, whose work I know. I"ll send you what I have to spare."
"Thank you," said Thyrsis. "I"ll be glad to have all you can give me."
So he went away; and in the little room he and Corydon had an anxious consultation. He had been getting about twenty dollars a month; which was not enough for the family to exist upon. "Our only hope is a new book," he declared; and Corydon saw that was the truth. "Each week that I stay here is a loss," he added. "I have to pay room-rent."
"But can you stand tenting out in April?" asked she.
"I"ll chance it," he replied--"if you"ll say the word."
She saw that her duty was before her; she must nerve herself and face it, though it tore her heartstrings. She must stay and take care of the baby, while he went away to work!
He sat and held her hands, and saw her bite her lips and fight to keep back the tears in her eyes. Their hearts had grown together, so that it was like tearing their flesh to separate them. They had never imagined that such a thing could come into their lives.
"Thyrsis," she whispered--"you"ll forget me!"
He pressed her hands more tightly. "No, dear! No!" he said.
"But you"ll get used to living without me!" she cried. "And it"s the time in my life when I need you most!"
"I will stay, dearest, if you say so."
She exclaimed, "No, no! I must stand it!"
And seeing her grief, his heart breaking with pity, a strange impulse came to Thyrsis. He took her hands in his, and knelt down before her, and began to pray. It had been years since he had thought of prayer, and Corydon had never thought of it in her life. It came from the deeps of him--a few stammering words, simple, almost childish, yet exquisite as music. He prayed that they might have courage to keep up the fight, that they might be able to hold their love before them, that nothing might ever dim their vision of each other. It was a prayer without theology or metaphysics--a prayer to the unknown G.o.ds; but it set free the well-spring of tenderness and pity within them; and when he finished Corydon was sobbing upon his shoulder.
BOOK IX
THE CAPTIVE IN LEASH
_They were standing on the hill-top, watching the last glimmer of the sinking moon. As the faint perfume of the clover came to them upon the warm evening wind, she sighed, and whispered--
"Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here!
"Mid city noise, not as with thee of yore, Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home!"
She paused.
"Go on," he said, and she quoted--
"Then through the great town"s harsh, heart-wearying roar, Let in thy voice a whisper always come, To chase fatigue and fear: Why faintest thou? I wandered till I died.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still."_
Section 1. Thyrsis made his plans and packed his few belongings. There came another pa.s.s from the "higher regions", and he took the night-train once more, and came to the little town upon the sh.o.r.es of Lake Ontario.
Once more the sun shone on the crystal-green water, and the cold breeze blew from off the lake. There was still snow in the ravines of the deep woods, but Thyrsis got his tent out of the farmer"s barn, and patched up the holes the mice had gnawed, and put it up on the old familiar spot.
It was strange to him to be there without Corydon. There were so many things to remind him of her--a sudden memory would catch him unawares, and stab him like a knife. There was the rocky headland where they had swam, and there was the pine-tree that the lightning had splintered, one day while they were standing near. When darkness came, and he was unpacking a few old things that they had left up in the country, his loneliness seemed to him almost more than he could bear; he sat by the little stove, holding a pair of her old faded slippers in his hands, and felt his tears trickling down upon them.
But it took him only a day or two to drive such things out of his mind.
There was no time for sentiment now--it was "Clear ship for action!" For once in his life he was free, and had a chance to work. He was full of his talk with Mr. Ardsley, and meant to do his best to be "practical."
And so behold him wandering about in the water-soaked forests, or tramping the muddy roads, or sitting by his little stove while the cold storms beat upon the tent--wrestling with his unruly Pegasus, and dragging it back a hundred times a day to what was proper, and human, and interesting!
The neighbors had warned him that it was too early for tenting, but Thyrsis had vowed he would stand it. And now, as if to punish him for his defiance, there was emptied out upon him the cave of all the winds; for four weeks there were such storms of rain and sleet and snow as the region had never known in April. There were nights when he sat wrapped in overcoats and blankets, with a fire in the stove; and still shivering for the gale that drove through the canvas. There came one calm, starlit night when he lay for hours almost frozen, and sat up in the morning to find a gla.s.s of water at his bedside frozen solid. Thirteen degrees the thermometer showed, according to the farmer; and oh, the agony of getting out of bed, and starting a fire with green wood! In the end Thyrsis poured in half a can of kerosene, and got the stove red-hot; and then he turned round to warm his back, and smelled smoke, and whirled about to find his tent in a blaze!
With a bucket of water and a broomstick he beat out the fire, and went for a run to warm up. But when he came back there was more wind, so that he could not keep warm in the tent, and more rain, so that he could not find shelter in the woods. In the end he discovered a ruined barn, in a corner of which he would sit, wrapped in his blankets and writing with cold fingers.
Perhaps all these mishaps had something to do with the refusal of his ideas to flow. But apparently it was in vain that Thyrsis tried at any time to work at things that were interesting to other people. Perhaps he could have worked better at them, if there had not been so many things that were interesting to _him_. He would find himself confronted with the image of the society clergyman, or of the sleek editor in his club, or some other memory out of the world of luxury and pride. And each day came the newspaper, with its burden of callousness and scorn; and perhaps also a letter from Corydon, with something to goad him to new tilts with the enemies of his soul.
So, before long, almost without realizing it, he was putting the "interesting" things aside, and girding himself for another battle. His message was still undelivered; and in vain he sought to content himself by blaming the world for this. Until he had forced the world to hear him, he had simply not yet done his work. He must take his thought and shape it anew--into some art-work finer, stronger, truer than he had yet achieved.
Day after day he pondered this idea--eating with it and walking with it and sleeping with it; until at last, of a sudden, the vision came to him. It came late at night, while he was undressing; and he sat for five or ten minutes, with his shirt half off, as if in a trance. Then he put the shirt on again, and went out to wander about the woods, laughing and talking to himself.
"Genius surrounded by Commercialism"--that was his theme; and it would have to be a play. Its hero would be a young musician, a mere boy, a master of the demon-voices of the violin; he would be rapt in his vision, and around him a group of people who would be embodiments of the world and all its forces of evil. One by one they came trooping before Thyrsis" fancy, with all their trappings of pomp and power, their greatness and their greed--sinister and cruel figures, but also humorous, very creatures of the spirit of comedy! Yes, he had a comedy this time--a real comedy!
Section 2. In this hour, of course, Thyrsis forgot all about the "plot" he had outlined to Mr. Ardsley, and about his promises to be "practical." Something arose within him, imperious and majestic, and swept all this out of the way with one gesture of the hand. He dropped everything else and plunged into the play. Never yet in his life had anything taken hold of him to such an extent; it drove him so that he forgot to eat, he forgot to sleep. He would work over some part of it until he was exhausted--and then, without warning, some other part would open out in a vista before him, and he would spring up in pursuit of that. Characters and episodes and dialogue, wild humor, scalding satire, grim tragedy--they thronged and jostled and crowded one another in his imagination.
"The Genius" was the t.i.tle of the play. Its protagonist had come home after completing his education in Vienna; and there was the family gathered to greet him. Mr. Hartman, the father, was a wholesale grocer--a business large enough to have brought wealth, but painfully tainted with "commonness". Then there was Mrs. Hartman, stout and tightly-laced, who had studied the science of elegance while her husband studied sugar. There was the elder son, who under his mother"s guidance had married well; and Miss Violet Hartman, who was looking up to the perilous heights of a foreign alliance.
Only of late had the family come to realize what an a.s.set to their career this "Genius" might be. They had humored him in his strange whim to devote his life to fiddling; money had been spent on him freely--he brought home with him a famous Cremona instrument for which three thousand dollars had been paid. But now it was dawning upon them that this was an "ugly duckling"; he was to make his _debut_ in the metropolis, where an overwhelming triumph was expected; and then he would return to the home city in the middle West, and would play at _musicales_, which even the most exclusive of the "_elite_" must attend.
There was also the great Prof. Reminitsky, the teacher who had made Lloyd, and had come to New York with him; and there was the Herr Prof.