Section 1. Thyrsis came home beaten and crushed, worn out with overwork and worry, his heart black with rage and bitterness and despair. He met Corydon in the park, and she listened to his story, white and terrified.
She had swallowed all her disappointment, had stayed at home with the baby while he went with the play; and now the outcome of it all was this!
"What are you going to do?" she whispered; and he answered, "I don"t know. I don"t know."
She saw the terrible state he was in, and she dared not utter a single word of her own grief. She bit her lip, and choked back her tears. "This is my life," she thought to herself; "I must endure, endure--that is all!"
He could not afford even to sit and talk with her very long; there was no time to indulge in the luxury of despair. His money was gone, and he was in debt for some that he had borrowed. Since irregular eating had been telling upon him again, he had been getting his meals with an acquaintance of the family, who kept a boarding-house uptown. On the strength of his prospects, she had trusted him for four dollars a week; and now the play had failed, and he had to go and tell her, and listen to new protests as to his folly in refusing to "get a position". But in the end she bade him stay on; and so he was divided between his shame, and the need of something to eat day by day.
Time dragged on, and still there was no gleam of light. There were shameful hours in these weeks--he touched the lowest point yet in his life. This was a typical cheap boarding-house, a place where the drudges of trade were herded; it was a home of sordidness and ugliness--to Thyrsis its people seemed like carefully selected types of all things that he hated in the world. There was a young broker"s clerk, whose patter was of prices, and of fortunes made without service. There was a grey-haired bookkeeper for a giant "trust", a man who could not have had more pride in that great engine of exploitation, or more contempt for its victims, had he been the president and chief owner thereof.
There was a young divinity-student, who made greedy reaches for the cake-plate, and who summed up for Thyrsis all the cant and commonness of the church. There was a dry-goods clerk, who wore flaring ties, and who played the role of a "masher" upon the avenue every evening. And finally there was a red-faced Irish-man who wore large shiny cuffs and a false diamond, and who held some political job, and was voluble in behalf of "the organization".
Among these people Thyrsis sat three times a day, silent and tortured, paying a high price for each morsel of food he ate. But also he was lonely, and craving any sort of respite; and in the course of time he became acquainted with several of the younger men. One of the diversions in their pitiful and narrow lives was to gather in some room and indulge in petty gambling; sitting for hours upon hours with their faculties alert upon the attempt to get from each other some small fraction of that weekly stipend which kept them alive. Sometimes they played "penny-ante", and sometimes _vingt_ _et_ _un_; once, as it chanced, they needed another player, and they urged Thyrsis to join them.
And so, for the first time in his life, Thyrsis learned what it meant to lay his soul upon the lap of the G.o.ddess of chance. From eight o"clock that evening until two the next morning, he sat in a suffocating room full of cigarette-smoke, trying in vain to win back the dollar or two he had lost at the outset; flushed and trembling with excitement, and hating himself with a bitter and tormenting hatred. And so he discovered his vice; he discovered that he had in him the soul of the gambler! And all the rest of the winter he had to wrestle with that shame. He would go to his dinner, tired and heartsick; and they would ask him to play again; and he--the man who carried a message for humanity in his heart--he would yield! Three times during that winter he fell into the mire; on Washington"s birthday he began to play in the morning, and stopping only for meals, he played until long after midnight.
Forever afterwards he was a humbler and a gentler man because of that experience; understanding how squalor abases one, and how swiftly and stealthily an evil pa.s.sion closes its grasp about the soul.
Section 2. Of this shameful thing he said not a word to Corydon. But he avoided meeting her, because of the depths of his despair. And so at last there came a letter from her--a long and unusual one. Corydon, too, was having her troubles, it appeared.
"I am writing in haste," she said; "I shall mail the letter at once, before my resolution fails me. At least a dozen times I have made up my mind to tell you or to write you what is here, and each time I have turned back. But now I have got to a stage where I must have your help.
"I enclose a long letter which I wrote you years ago, before we were married. I was looking over some old papers the other day and came upon it. Generally when I wrote you letters that I did not send, I tore them up; but something led me to keep this one--I had a feeling that some day it would be interesting as a curiosity. You see, I am always persuading myself that I can get over this trouble, and learn to laugh at it; and I am always succeeding--but only to have it crop up in some different form. I have told you a little of it now and then--but stop and read the enclosed, and you will see."
So Thyrsis read the old letter--a missive of anguish and terror, and beginning with elaborate preludings and hesitations:
"I implore you to be patient with me this once; and when I have gotten through, I want you still to love me, if possible. I have been trying to get the courage to write you something that is so mean and low, childish and almost imbecile, that there have been moments in which my horror of it was absolutely unspeakable; when I have imagined myself as a soul d.a.m.ned, when I thought that if you knew, you would think I had a diseased brain. I only ask you to read patiently what I am going to write; but know that every word is a horrible effort, that it is torture and humiliation to me to write it. I have a feeling now as though I were psychologically dissecting something.
"It must have been eight years ago, when I was sick in bed; in a fever or delirium I conceived the idea that there was a coffin under my bed.
The thought took hold of me, somehow, like an octopus, and I used to writhe under it, and get into fearful perspirations. I never went near a bed that I didn"t think of this thing with the same horror.
"And so I seemed to have created a nervousness, a sense of dread, before which I was absolutely helpless. I cannot tell you how hopelessly or fearfully I suffered, or what depths of despondency and despair and blackness I was cast into. I cannot understand how a creature could so manufacture torments for itself. But this is not all, just for once have mercy--and yet even now I am laughing at myself!
"The winter I was sixteen I was much disappointed that I could not go to college, and almost the whole winter, when I was not diverted, I would brood over this habit. As I grew older, it would come to me in spasms, and it seemed to my dawning sense so monstrously child-like, so insane, that I was aghast that it had power to affect me. I can find no words to tell you of the unspeakable horror with which I saw, in my older days, that a thought could so torment me; the mere fact of its being able to torment I could never forget. I know it was silly, unreasonable; and yet every time it came to me I would be plunged into a hopelessness and melancholy, than which I can honestly conceive nothing more fearful upon earth.
"Well, I continued to pursue myself with this morbidity (I would almost, rather kill myself than write this). As I got older my terror was less, but my melancholy greater, until I would be only half conscious of what I was allowing myself to do. I seemed to have engendered within myself a hob-goblin. Once--it was only last winter--I saw a nasty word written on a fence, and it sent a shudder through me, for I knew it would follow me and make me think of other things like it. I felt, since thoughts have such power to terrorize me, how can I ever get away from them?
"Oh, how I have struggled--tried to say it was not true--that I was just as sane as other people! And this made my thirst for beauty all the more maddening, and my melancholy all the more complete! So I have lived, at intervals, and words cannot describe the h.e.l.l that I have endured, the more horrible because it seemed to me so unreasonable, so insane. It occurred to me more or less this summer, though in a milder form; but it often frightened me more than ever, as I felt how beautiful you were, and what you would think of me, if you knew I was capable of being the prey of such thoughts. So they were always more dreadful to me.
"Can you possibly understand how the thought of a word could make me shudder? The mere idea of my being capable of thinking of anything that was not beautiful! When I longed to be only the embodiment of beauty--and sometimes I _am_ beautiful! I look into the gla.s.s, and I seem to have something in my face that is a promise of a glory to come--a light, a something,--I love to imagine it. And then, that a thought should knock me p.r.o.ne, and make me cringe--from the mere fact of its lowness and meanness!
"For the last two or three days I have again victimized myself; and when I was not studying I was asking myself in anguish what was the matter with me, and if there was no hope for me on earth. I dodged around and tried to laugh it off, then I went to the piano and lost myself in the dissatisfaction of my playing; but when I stopped, I was conscious of a great depression, as though I were chained in a dungeon. I jumped up, and said I could stand it no longer. I will tell Thyrsis, I said; but no, I will die first! I added. He could not tolerate me afterwards, he would think me only fit for the insane-asylum. Oh, why should I be so cursed? And then, somehow, I imagined that I told you, and that you laughed at me, that you pitied me--and that you held out your hand, and said, "Come, you _shall_ find beauty--poor, deluded, wretched, little creature!" I really imagined that this had happened, and I was relieved as with a draught of fresh air.
"Oh, G.o.d in Heaven, to think that I could ever have been so degraded! My head hurts, and I absolutely am dazed, to think that I have been able to write you of something for which (though it has not been my making) I am so ashamed and humiliated I can hardly hold my head up. I think in my short life I have atoned for the sins of many souls."
Section 3. Such was the old-time letter. "And now," wrote Corydon, "I don"t want you to think that if I did not send you this, it was because I was afraid to do it, or unwilling to trust to your love. It was simply because I felt that I could conquer these things--that it would be weak and contemptible of me not to do so. Nor is the reason I write you now that I have not been able to conquer them, that I am still at the mercy of such habits. I am a grown woman, and I am not afraid of words; I tell myself this a hundred times; and it is true--and yet there is a way in which it is not true. The thing is so intricate--I never get to the end of it; I rid myself of the fear of a hateful idea, but there remains the fact that I should have been afraid; there is the fear of fear. And then comes a flood of shame--that I should have it in me to be afraid of fear!
"Thyrsis, as I write to you now I see clearly how perfectly preposterous and unreal all this is; and again there comes to me the impulse to tear up this letter, and banish the troop of hob-goblins from my mind. But no, this time I am determined to make a clean breast of the thing--for I see that secrecy and solitude are what it feeds on. If I were happy and busy with you such ideas would have no power over me. But think how it is, with my loneliness and despair! I don"t want to say anything to make your task harder--but oh, Thyrsis, it is frightful to have nothing to do but wait, and wait, and wait! The baby wakes me up in the night and I lie for hours--it is at such times that these phantoms take hold of me.
Do you realize that I literally never know what it is to have more than three or four consecutive hours of sleep?
"No, I am not insane, I tell myself; I am not insane! It is the circ.u.mstances of my life that cause this melancholia and misery. It has been my life, from the very beginning--for what a hopeful and joyous creature I would have been, had I only had a chance as a girl! I know that; and you must tell it to me, and help me to believe it."
Thyrsis read this with less surprise than Corydon had imagined; for she had been wont to drop hints about her trouble from time to time. He was shocked, however, to find what a hold it had taken upon her; the thing sent a chill of fear to his heart. Could it be after all that she had some taint? But he saw at once that he must not let her see any such feeling; the least hint of it would have driven her to distraction. On the contrary, he must minimize the trouble, must help her to laugh it away, as she asked.
He went to meet her in the park, and found her in an agony of distress; she had mailed the letter, and then she had wished to recall it, and had been struggling ever since with the idea that he would be disgusted with her. Now, when she found that such was not the case, that he still loved her and trusted her, she was transported with grat.i.tude.
"But dearest," he said, "how absurd it is to be ashamed of an idea! If ugly things exist, don"t we have to hear of them and know of them? And so why frighten ourselves because they are in our minds?"
"But Thyrsis," cried she, "they are so hateful!"
"Yes," he said. "But then the more you hate them, the more they haunt you!"
"That"s just it!" she exclaimed.
"But what harm can they do? Can they have any effect upon your character? You must say to yourself that all this is a consequence of the structure of your brain-cells. What could be more futile than trying to forget? As if the very essence of the trying was not remembering!"
So Thyrsis went on to argue with her. He made her promise him that in future she would tell him of all her obsessions, permitting no fear or shame to deter her; and so thereafter he would have to listen periodically to long accounts of her psychological agonies, and help her to hunt out the "hob-goblins" from the tangled thickets of her mind.
They were forever settling the matter, positively and finally--but alas, only to have something unsettle it again. So Thyrsis had to add to his other accomplishments the equipment of a psycho-pathologist; he brushed up his French, and read learned treatises upon the researches in the _Salpetriere_, and the theories of the "Nancy School".
Section 4. Another month pa.s.sed by, and still there was no rift in the clouds. Once more Corydon was forbidden to see him, and so her pain grew day by day. At last there came another letter, voicing utter despertion.
Something must be done, she declared, she was slowly going out of her mind. Thyrsis could have no idea of the shamefulness of her position, the humiliations she had to face. "I tell you the thing is putting a brand upon my soul," she wrote. "It is something I shall never get over all my life. It is withering me up--it is destroying my self-respect, my very decency; it is depriving me of my power to act, or even to think.
People come in, relatives or friends--even strangers to me--and peer at me and pry into my affairs; I hear them whispering in the parlor--"Hasn"t he got a position yet?" or "How can she have anything to do with him?" The servants gossip about me--the woman I have for a nurse despises me and insults me, and I have not the courage to rebuke her.
To-day I went almost wild with fury--I rushed into the bathroom and locked the door and flung myself upon the floor. I found myself gnawing at the rug in my rage--I mean that literally. That is what life has left for me!
"I tell you you must take me away, we must get out of this fiendish city. Let us go into the wilderness as you said, and live as we can--I would rather starve to death than face these things. Let us get into the country, Thyrsis. You can work as a farm-hand, and earn a few dollars a week--surely that could not be a greater strain upon us than the way things are now."
When Thyrsis received this, he racked his brains once more; and then he sat down and wrote a letter to Barry Creston. He told how he had worked over the play, and how it had gone to ruin; he told of his present plight. He knew, he said, that Mr. Creston had been interested in the play, and that he was a man understood the needs of the artist-life.
Would he lend two hundred dollars, which would suffice until Thyrsis could get another work completed?
He waited a week for a reply to this; and when it arrived he opened it with trembling fingers. He half expected a check to fall fluttering to the floor; but alas, there was not a single flutter. "I have read your letter," wrote the young prince, "and I have considered the matter carefully. I would do what you ask, were it not for my conviction that it would not be a good thing for you. It seems to me the testimony of all experience, that artists do their great work under the spur of necessity. I do not believe that real art can ever be subsidized. It is for men that you are writing; and you must find out how to make men hear you. You may not thank me for this now, but some day you will, I believe."
After duly pondering which communication, Thyrsis racked his wits, and bethought him of yet another person to try. He sat himself down and addressed Mr. Robertson Jones. He explained that he was in this cruel plight, owing to his having devoted so many months to "The Genius." Even the actors had received something for the performances of the play they had given; but the author had received nothing at all. He asked Mr.
Jones for a personal loan to help him in a great emergency; and he promised to repay it at the earliest possible moment. To which Mr. Jones made this reply--"Inasmuch as the failure of the play was due solely to your own obstinacy, it seems to me that your present experiences are affording exactly the discipline you need."
Section 5. However, there are many ups and downs in the trade of free-lance writer. The very day after he had received this letter, there came, in quick succession two bursts of sunlight through the clouds of Thyrsis" despair. The first was a letter, written in a quaint script, from a man who explained that he was interested in a "Free People"s Theatre" in one of the cities of Germany. "You will please to accept my congratulations," he wrote; "I had never known such a play as yours in America to be written. I should greatly be pleased to translate the play, so that it might be known in Germany. Our compensation would have to be little, as you will understand; but of appreciation I think you may receive much in the Fatherland."
To which Thyrsis sent a cordial response, saying that he would be glad of any remuneration, and enclosing a copy of the ma.n.u.script of "The Genius". And then--only two days later--came the other event, a still more notable one; a letter from the publisher who had been number thirty-seven on the list of "The Hearer of Truth". Thyrsis had got so discouraged about this work that he now sent it about as a matter of routine, and without thinking of it at all. Great, therefore, was his amazement when he opened the letter and read that this publisher was disposed to undertake it, and would be glad to see him and talk over terms.
Thyrsis went, speculating on the way as to what strange manner of being this publisher might be. The solution of the mystery he found was that the publisher was new at the business, and had entrusted his "literary department" to a very young man who had enthusiasms. The young man held his position for only a month or two; but in that month or two Thyrsis got in his "innings".
The publisher wished to bring the book out that spring. He offered a ten per cent royalty, and the trembling author summoned the courage to ask for one hundred dollars advance; when he got it, he was divided between his delight, and a sneaking regret that he had not tried for a hundred and fifty!
The very next day came the contracts and the money; Thyrsis marvelled at the fact that there were people who could sign checks for a hundred dollars, and apparently not mind it in the least. With the money he was able to pay all his debts, and also a bill which Corydon had received from a "specialist" who had been treating her. This was a new habit that Corydon was developing, as a result of headaches and backaches and other obscure miseries. These amiable "specialists" permitted one to run up a bill with them; and so, whenever Thyrsis made a new "strike", there were always debts to eat up the greater part of it.
They had now another hope to lure them; new proofs to read, and in due time, new reviews. But it would be fall before they could expect more money from the book, and meantime there was still the problem of the summer. So, as usual, Thyrsis was plotting and planning, groping about him and trying one desperate scheme after another; his head was like a busy workshop, from which came every hour new plans, new expedients, new experiments. And meanwhile, of course, deep down in his soul there was forming the new work, that some day would emerge and take possession of him, driving everything else from his consciousness.
People would repeat to him, over and over, their dreary formula--"Get a position! Get a position!" And patiently, unwearyingly, Thyrsis would set himself to explain to them what it was like to be inspired. It was not perversity upon his part, it was not conceit; it was no more these than it was laziness. It was something that was in him--something that he had not put there himself, something that he could not take out of himself; a thing that took possession of him, without any intention upon his part, without any permission; a thing that required him to do certain acts, and that tore him to pieces if he did not do them. And how should he be blamed because he could not do as other men--because he could not take care of himself, nor even of his wife and child? Because he could not have any rights, because he could not possess the luxuries of manhood and self-respect? Because, in short, he was cast out into the gutter for every dog to snarl at and for every loafer to spurn? Could it be that in this whole civilization, with its wealth and power, its culture and learning, its sciences and arts and religions--there was not to be found one single man or woman who could recognize such a state of affairs, and realize what it meant?
Section 6. About this time Thyrsis thought of another plan. Perhaps he might get some one to publish the play in book form--that would bring him a little money, and possibly also it might help him to interest some other manager or actor. So he took the ma.n.u.script to his friend Mr. Ardsley, who told him it would not sell, and then gave him another lecture upon his folly in not having written the "practical" novel; and then he took it to the publisher for whom Prof. Osborne acted as reader.
So he had another conference with that representative of authority.