"True?" cried Darrell. "True? How can you ask me?"
"But--the colony! What is it to be?"
"There is not going to be any colony. I never dreamed of such a thing!"
"And haven"t you bought any farm?"
"My wife bought a farm, over a year ago--because we wanted to live in the country!"
"But then," gasped Thyrsis--"how dare they?"
"They dare anything with me!" cried the other. "_Anything!_"
"And have you no redress?"
"Redress? What redress?"
He went on to tell Thyrsis what had happened. He and Mrs. Darrell had gone down to the farm to see about getting it ready, and a woman had come, representing that she wished to write a magazine article about "the country-homes of literary Americans". Upon this pretext she had secured a photograph of the place, and of Darrell, and of his wife and child. She had even attempted to secure a photograph of his wife"s aged mother, who lived with her, and who was involved in the affair because the money belonged to her. Then the woman had gone away--and a couple of weeks later had come this!
"And I thought they were through with us!" Darrell whispered, with a shudder. "I thought it was all over!"
He sat in a chair, with his face hid in his arms. Thyrsis put his hand upon his shoulder, and the man caught it. "Listen," he exclaimed. "You can see this thing from the outside, you know the literary world. Do you think that I can ever rise above this? Is there any use in trying?"
"How do you mean?" Thyrsis asked, perplexed.
"I mean--is it worth while for me to go on writing? Can I ever have any influence?"
Thyrsis was shocked at the question--as he had been at the way Darrell took the whole thing. He knew that his friend had money enough to live comfortably; and why should any sort of criticism matter to a man who was economically free?
"Brother," he said, "you have forgotten your Dante."
"How do you mean?" asked the other.
"_Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le gente!_" quoted Thyrsis; and then he added, "You don"t seem to realize that these are newspapers, and n.o.body really credits them."
"Ah, but they do!" cried Darrell. "You don"t know what I have been through with! My oldest friends have cut me! Clergymen have refused to sit at table with me! The organization that I gave ten years of my life to founding has gone all to pieces. I have been utterly ruined--I have been wiped out, destroyed!"
"But, my dear man," Thyrsis argued, "you are setting out to teach a new doctrine, one that is abhorrent to people. And how can you expect to avoid being attacked? It seems to me that either you ought not to have done it, or else been prepared for some of this uproar."
"But because a man becomes a Socialist, are they to libel him in these foul ways?"
"I don"t mean that. It"s not only that you are a Socialist, but that you have defied their marriage-laws."
"But I haven"t!" exclaimed Darrel.
"What do you mean?" asked Thyrsis, perplexed.
"I have defied no law--nor even any convention. I have done everything that the world requires."
Thyrsis stared at him, amazed. "Why, surely," he gasped, "you and--and Mrs. Darrell--you are not _married?_"
"Married!" exclaimed the other. "We were married here in New York, by a regularly-ordained clergyman!"
Thyrsis could not find words to express his dismay. "I--I had no idea of that!" he gasped. "I thought--"
"You see the lies!" cried the other. "Even _you_ had swallowed them!"
It took Thyrsis some time to adjust himself to this new point of view. He had thought of his friend as a man who had boldly defied the convention of marriage; and instead of that he was apparently a man cowering under the lash of the world"s undeserved rage. But if so--what an amazing and incredible thing was the mesh of slander and falsehood in which he had been entangled!
Section 12. Little by little Thyrsis drew from Darrell the story of his marital experience. Before he had been of age, as a poor student, he had boarded with a woman many years his senior, who had set out to lure him into marrying her. "I don"t believe that she ever loved me one hour," he said. "She had made up her mind that I was a man of brilliant parts, and that I would have worldly success. To me the thing was like an evil dream--I couldn"t realize it. And I can"t tell you about it now--it was too horrible. She was older than I, and so different--she was more like a man. And for twenty years she held me; I had to stay--I was utterly at her mercy!"
The man"s voice fell to a whisper, and he pressed Thyrsis" hand convulsively; there were tears upon his cheeks. "I could not tell it all to anyone," he said. "It makes me cry like a child to think of it. I"m only getting over it little by little--realizing how I was tortured.
This woman had no interest in me, intellectual or spiritual; she brought up my children to despise me. I would stay upstairs in my study, writing sermons--that was all my life! For twenty years I waded through my own blood!"
Darrell paused to get control of himself, and then went on.
"One of my parishioners was my present wife"s mother. She was one of the old-time abolitionists, and she was wealthy; and now, in her old age, she saw the new light, and became a Socialist. This, of course, was like gall to her family; they were powers in the state--the railroad people, who control the legislature and run the government. And so their newspapers denounced me, and denounced the university where I taught.
"Then came her daughter--a young girl out of college. I was at their home often, and we became friends. She saw how unhappy I was, and she tried to open my wife"s eyes, and to win her over to me. But, of course, she failed in that; and then, little by little we found that we loved each other. You know me--you know that I am not a base man, nor a careless man; and you will believe me when I tell you that there was nothing between us that the world could have called wrong. We knew that we loved, and we knew that there was no hope. And that went on for eight years; for eight years I renounced--and strove with every power of my heart and soul to make something out of that renunciation, to trans.m.u.te it into spiritual power. And I failed--I could not do it; and in the end I knew the reason. It was not beauty and n.o.bility--it was madness and horror; it was not life--it was death! The time came when I knew that our renunciation was simply a crime against the soul. Can you see what I mean?"
"Yes," said Thyrsis, "I can see."
"And see what that meant to me--the situation I faced! I was a clergyman--and preaching a new crusade to the world. It was like being in a cage, with bars of red-hot metal. A hundred times I would go towards them--and a hundred times I would shrink back. But I had to grasp them in the end."
"I see!" whispered the other.
"The thing was becoming a scandal anyway; the world was bound to make a scandal of it, whether we would or no. It was a scandal that I visited in another woman"s home, it was a scandal that I spent her money in my propaganda. The very children on the streets would taunt my children about it. And then, my health broke down from overwork; and the mother was going abroad, and she invited me to go with her and her daughter; and, of course, that made it worse. So at last the old lady came to me.
"You love my daughter," she said, "and the world has thrown her into your arms. You must let a divorce be arranged, and then marry my daughter.""
"And you got the divorce yourself?" asked Thyrsis.
"No," said Darrell. "There were grounds enough; but it would have meant to attack my wife in the public prints, and I would not do it. I had to let her charge me with desertion, and say nothing."
"And, of course, they distorted that," said Thyrsis.
"They distorted everything!" cried the other. "My present wife gave my first wife all her patrimony; and I thought that was generous--I thought it was a proof of love. But the newspapers made it that she had bought me!"
"And they distorted your second marriage?" asked Thyrsis.
"They lied about it deliberately," was Darrell"s reply--"Some of our friends gave little addresses of greeting; and so the newspapers called it a new kind of wedding--a "Socialist wedding", which we had designed for our new kind of unions! And now, when we buy a farm, so that we can live quietly in the country, they turn that into a "free love colony"!"
Section 13. Thyrsis went away from this interview with some new problems to ponder upon. He had seen a little of this power of the newspapers to defile and torment a man; but he had never dreamed of anything as bad as this. This was murderous, this was monstrous. He saw these papers now as gigantic engines of exploitation and oppression--irresponsible, unscrupulous, wanton--turned loose in society to crush and destroy whom they would.
They had taken this man Darrell and they had poured out their poisons upon him; they had tortured him hideously, they had burned him up as with vitriol. As a public force he was no longer a human being at all--he was a deformity, a spectre conjured up to bring fright to the beholder. And through it all he was utterly helpless--as much at their mercy as an infant in the hands of savages. And what had he done? Why had the torture been visited upon him?
Thyrsis pictured the men who had led in this soul-hunt. They were supposed to be enlightened Americans at the dawn of the twentieth century; and did they truly hold to the superst.i.tion of marriage as a religious sacrament, not to be dissolved by mortal power? Did they really believe that a man who had once been drawn into matrimony was obligated for life--no matter how unhappy he might be, no matter to what indignities he might be subjected? Or, if they did recognize the permissibility of divorce--then why this hue and cry after Darrell, who had borne his punishment for twenty years, and had waited for eight or ten years to test the depths of his new love?
The question answered itself; and the answer fanned Thyrsis" soul into a blaze of indignation. All this patter about the deserted wife, sitting at home with her children and weeping her eyes out--all that was so much hocus-pocus for the ears of the mob. The chiefs of this Inquisition and their torturers and slaves wrote it with their tongues in their cheeks.