Love's Pilgrimage Part 9

"Sometimes," he said, "I fail and have to give up; and then I have nothing but a memory without words--or perhaps a few broken phrases that seem mere nonsense. Then I am like a man who has seen some loved one drowned or burned to death before his eyes. It is a thing so ineffable, so precious; and some power seeks to tear it away from me, to bear it into oblivion forever. I can't know, of course--it might come to some one else--or it might never come again. The feeling I have is like that of a mother for an unborn child; if I do not give it life, no one ever will. And don't you see--compared with that, what does anything else count? I would lie down and be crushed to pieces, if that would help; truly, I would suffer less than I suffer in what I try to do. And so, the things that other men care for--they simply don't exist for me. I must have a little money, because I have to have something to eat, and a place to work in. But I don't want position or fame--I don't shrink from any ridicule or humiliation. It seems like a mad thing to say, but I have nothing to do either with men's evil or with their good. I am not bound by any of their duties; I can't have any country or any home, I can't have wife or children--I can hardly even have any friends. Don't you see?"

"Yes," whispered Corydon, deeply moved, "I see."

"Look," he went on--"see all the vice and misery in the world--the cruelty and greed and hate. And see all the stupid and petty things, the narrow motives, the vanities and the jealousies! And all that is because people haven't this thing that has come to me; they don't know the possibilities of life, they lack the sense of its preciousness and sacredness. And they seek and seek--and go astray! Take drunkenness, for instance; that brings them joy, but it's a false scent, it leads them over a precipice. I've been down at the bottom of it--you know why I have to go there, and what I've seen. And that is where the best of men's faculties go--yes, it's literally true! The men who are dull and plodding, they are contented; it's the men who are adventurous and aspiring who come to that precipice. I walk down an avenue and see the lines of saloons with their gleaming lights, and that thought is like a scream of anguish in my soul; there came a phrase to me once, that I wanted to cry out to people--'the graveyards of your genius! the graveyards of your genius!'"

Corydon was gazing at his uplifted face. She said, "That is how Jesus must have felt, when he wept over Jerusalem."

"Yes," said Thyrsis. "It is a new religion trying to be born. Only nowadays they don't persecute you, they just ignore you. They don't hang you up on a cross and make you conspicuous and picturesque--they ridicule you and let you starve. And that is what I face, you see. I've saved a hundred dollars--just barely enough to buy me food until I've written the book!"

"And other people have so much!" cried Corydon.

"So much--and no idea what to do with it. They just fling it away, in a drunken frenzy. And down below are the poor, who slave to make civilization possible. Such lives as they have to live--I can't ever get the thought out of my mind, not in any happiest moment! I feel as if I were a man who had escaped from a beleaguered city, and it all depended upon me to carry the tidings and bring relief. I'm their one hope, and if I fail them I'm a traitor, an accursed being! They are ignorant and helpless, and their cry comes to me like some great storm-wind of grief and despair. Oh, some day I mean to utter words that will reach them--I can't fail! I can't fail!"

"No!" whispered Corydon. "You must not fail!"

They sat in silence for a while.

"How I wish that I could help you!" she said.

"Who can tell?" he answered. "Perhaps you may. A true friend is a rare thing to find."

"I would do anything in the world to share in such a work."

"You really mean that? As hard as it is?"

"I would bear anything," she said. "I would go to the ends of the earth for it. I would fling away the whole world--just as you have done."

"Ah, but are you strong enough? Could you stand it?"

"I don't know that--I'm only a child. But I wouldn't mind dying."

And so it came. It came as the dawn comes, unheralded, unheeded--spreading wider, till the day is there. Months afterwards they talked about it, and Thyrsis asked, "When did I propose to you?"

"I don't think you ever proposed to me," she answered. "It just came. It had to come--there was no other way."

"But when did I first kiss you?" he asked.

"I don't know even that," she said, and pondered.

"Did I kiss you that night when we sat on the hill?" he asked.

"I wouldn't have known it if you had," said Corydon. "It was as natural for you to kiss me as it was for me to draw my breath."

Section 7. The moon was high when they went down the hill, and he rowed her home. They were silent with the awe that was upon them. They found the people at home in a panic, but they scarcely knew this--and they scarcely troubled to explain.

Then Thyrsis went home, and spent half the night roaming about in excitement. And early in the morning he was sitting on the edge of his canvas-cot, whispering to himself again, "Corydon! Little Corydon!"

He could not think of work that day, but set out to walk to the village by the lonely mountain-road; and half-way there he met the girl, coming in the other direction. There was a light of wonder in her eyes; and also there was perplexity. For all that morning she had been whispering to herself, "Thyrsis! Thyrsis!"

They sat by the roadside to talk it over.

"Corydon," he began, "I've been thinking about what we said last night, and it frightens me horribly. And I want to ask you please not to think about it any more. I could not take anyone else into my life--before G.o.d, I couldn't be so cruel. I have been shuddering at the thought of it. Oh please, please, run away from me--before it is too late!"

"Is that the way it seems?" she asked.

"Corydon!" he cried. "I am a tormented man! There can't be any happiness in the world for me. And you are so beautiful and so pure and so good--I simply dare not think of it! You must be happy, Corydon!"

"I have never yet been happy," she said.

"Listen," he went on--"there is a stanza of Walter Scott's that came to me this morning--an outlaw song. It seemed to sum up all my feeling about it:

"'Maiden! a nameless life I lead, A nameless death I'll die; The fiend whose lantern lights the mead Were better mate than I!'"

Corydon sat staring ahead. "You can't frighten me away from you," she said, in a low voice. "It isn't worth your while to try. But let me tell you what I came to say. I'm so ignorant and so helpless--I didn't see how I could be of any use to you. And so I wanted to tell you that you must do whatever seemed best to you--just don't count me at all. You see what I mean--I'm not afraid for myself, but just for you. I couldn't bear the thought that I might be in your way. I felt I had to come and tell you that, before you went back to your work."

Now Thyrsis had set out with mighty battlements reared about him; and not all the houris and the courtesans of all the ages could have found a way to breach them. But before those simple sentences of Corydon's, uttered in her gentle voice, and with her maiden's gaze of wonder--the battlements crumbled and rocked.

And that was always the way of it. There were endless new explanations and new att.i.tudes, new excursions and discoveries. They would part with a certain understanding, but they never knew with what view they would meet in the morning. They were swung from one extreme to the other, from cert.i.tude to doubt, from joy to dismay and despair. And so, day after day they would sit and talk, for uncounted hours. Corydon would come to the little cabin, or Thyrsis would come to the village, and they would wander about the roads or the woods, forgetting their meals, forgetting all the world. Once they wandered away into the mountains, and they sat until the dusk closed round them; they were almost lost that night.

"Of course," Thyrsis had been saying, "we should not be married like other men and women."

"No," said Corydon, "of course not."

"We should be brother and sister," he said.

"Yes," she a.s.sented.

"And it would not be real marriage--I mean, it would be just for the world's eyes."

"So I don't see how it could hinder you," Corydon added. "Whatever I did that was wrong, you would tell me. And then too, about money. I shouldn't be any burden; for I have twenty-five dollars a month of my own."

"I had no idea of that," said Thyrsis.

"I've only had it for a year," said Corydon. "An aunt left me nearly four thousand dollars. I can't touch the princ.i.p.al until I'm thirty, but I have the income, and that will buy me everything I need. And so it would be just as if you didn't have me to think of."

"I don't think the money side matters so much," was his reply. "It's only this summer, you see--until I've finished the book."

Section 8. The key to all the future was the book; but alas, the book was not coming on. How could one write amid such excitement? This was a new kind of wine in Thyrsis' blood. This was reality! And before it his dream-phantoms seemed to have dissolved into nothingness.

They would make a compact for so many days, and he would start to work; but he would find himself thinking of Corydon, and new problems would arise, and he would take to writing her notes--and finally realize in despair that he might as well go and see her.

Meantime Corydon would be wrestling with tasks of her own. They had talked over her development, and agreed that what she needed was discipline. And because Thyrsis had read her some of Goethe's lyrics, she had decided to begin with German. Thyrsis had wasted a great deal of time with German courses in college, and so he was able to tell her everything not to do. He got her a little primer of grammar, just enough to make clear the language-structure; and then he set her to acquiring a vocabulary. He had little books full of words that he had prepared for himself, and these she drilled into her brain, all day and nearly all night. She stopped for nothing but to eat--in the woods when the weather was fair and in her room when it rained, she studied words, words, words! And she made amazing progress--while Thyrsis was wrestling with his angels she read Grimm's fairy tales, and some of Heyse's "Novellen,"

and "Hermann and Dorothea," and "Wilhelm Tell."

But these were children's tasks, and her pilgrimage was one of despair.

Above were the heights where Thyrsis dwelt, inaccessible, almost invisible; and how many years must she toil to reach them! She would come to him with tears in her eyes--tears of shame for her ignorance and her stupidity. And then Thyrsis would kiss the tears away, and tell her how many brilliant and clever women he had met, who had the souls of dolls behind all their display of culture.

So Corydon would escape that unhappiness--but alas, only to fall into another kind. For she was a maiden, beautiful and tender, and ineffably precious to Thyrsis; and when they met, their hands would come together--it was as natural for them to embrace as for the flowers to grow. And this would lead to moods of weakness and satisfaction--not to that divine discontent, that rage of impatience which Thyrsis craved. It seemed to him that Corydon grew more and more in love with him, and more willing to cling to him; and he was savage because of his own complaisance. They would spend hours, exchanging endearments and whispering youthful absurdities; and then, the next day, he would write a note of protest, and Corydon would be wild with misery, and would tear up his love-notes, and vow in tears that he should never touch her hand again. Now and then he would try to suggest to her that what she needed for the fulfillment of her life was not a madman like himself, but a husband who would love her and cherish her, as other women were loved and cherished; and there was nothing in all the world that galled her quite so much as this.