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 pass from the “higher regions”, and he took the night-train once more, and came to the little town upon the shores 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 glass 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 title 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 asset 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 début 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 “élite” 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. von Arne, of the University of Berlin, a world-renowned psychiatrist, author of “The Neurosis of Inspiration”. The Herr Professor had come to America to make some studies for his forthcoming masterpiece on the religious mania; and he was glad to see his old friend Reminitsky, whose seventeen-year-old musical prodigy was most interesting material for study.
Prof. Reminitsky was the world’s greatest authority in the art of tearing the human soul to pieces by means of horse-hair rubbed with resin and scraped over the intestines of a pig. There were no tricks of finger-gymnastics and of tone-production that he had not mastered. As for the emotions produced thereby, he felt them, but in a purely professional way; that is, the convictions he had concerning them related to their effects upon audiences, and more especially upon the score or two of critical experts whose psychology had been his life-study. But having studied also the psychology of youth, he knew that his protégé must needs have other convictions concerning his performances. This was his supreme greatness—that he understood the paranoia of enthusiasm, and used this understanding to tempt his pupils to new heights of achievement.
In all of which, of course, his friend von Arne was a great help to him. Von Arne had dug through a score of great libraries, and had travelled all the world over, frequenting cafes and salons, monasteries and prayer-cells, prisons and hospitals and asylums—wherever one might get new glimpses of the extraordinarily intricate phenomena of the aberration called “Genius”. He had several thousand cases of it at his finger-tips—he had measured its reaction-times and calculated its cephalic index, and analyzed its secretions and tested it for indecan. He knew trance and clairvoyance, auto-suggestion and telepathic hallucination, epilepsy and hysteria and ecstasy; and over the head of any disputatious person he would swing the steam-shovel of his erudition, and bury the unfortunate beneath a wagon-load of Latin and Greek derivatives.
Also, there was Moses Rosen, the business-manager. Moses was short, and wore a large diamond ring, and he also was a specialist in the phenomena of “Genius”. He studied them from the point of view of the box-office, and his tests were quite as definite as those of the psychological laboratory. There came to Moses an endless stream of prodigies, all of them having long hair and picturesque aspects, and talking rapidly and rolling their eyes; the problem was to determine which of them had the faculty of true Genius, which not only talked rapidly and rolled its eyes, but also had the power of causing money to flow in through a box-office window.
In this case Moses felt that the prospects were good; the only trouble being that the prodigy intended to render a concerto by a strange composer—a stormy and unconventional thing which would annoy the critics. Moses suggested something that was “classic”; and agreed with Mrs. Hartman that there ought to be something corresponding to “good form” in music.
Section 3. So all these strange creatures were poking and peering and smelling about the “Genius”; and meanwhile, there came at intervals faint strains of music from a distant room. At last Lloyd Hartman entered; beautiful, pale and sensitive—a haunted boy, and the most haunting figure that had yet come to Thyrsis’ imagination. Also, it was the hardest piece of work he had ever undertaken; for the character had come to him, not as a formula or a collection of phrases, but as an intuition, a part of his own soul; and he would work out a scene a score of times, finding words to phrase it, and then rejecting them. By what speeches could he give his sense of the gulf that lay between Lloyd and the people about him? For this boy could not cope with them in argument, he would have no mastery of the world of facts. He must be without any touch of sophistication, of cynicism; and yet, when he spoke to them, it must be clear that he knew them for different beings from himself. He would go with them meekly; but one would feel that it was because his path lay in their direction. When the point came that their ways parted, he would go his own way; and just there lay the seed of the tragi-comedy.
The family gathers about him, and he answers their questions. He will wear the kind of tie that his sister prefers, and they may set any date they please for the musicales at home. He hears the “copy” which Moses has prepared for his advertisements; and then he sits, absent-minded, while they talk about him. Music is in his thoughts, and gradually it steals into his aspect and the gestures of his hand. They watch him, and a pall comes over them: until at last the mother exclaims that he makes her nervous, and leads the family off.
Then Miss Arnold is announced—Helena Arnold, who has been recommended as accompanist at the great concert. She is young and beautiful; and the two go into the next room to play, while the professors remain to talk over this new complication.
Prof. von Arne, of course, lays especial emphasis upon the sex-element in psychopathology; he and Reminitsky have talked the subject out many years ago, and adopted a definite course of action. The abnormalities incidental to sex-repression were innumerable, and for the most part destructive; but there could be no question that all the more striking phenomena of the neurosis called “Genius” were greatly increased in their intensity by this means. So, in dealing with his pupils, and especially with a prodigy like young Hartman, Prof. Reminitsky would call into service all the paraphernalia of religious mysticism; teaching his pupil to regard woman as the object of exalted adoration, a being too holy to be attained to even in thought. And now, of course, when the proposed accompanist turns out to be a decidedly alluring young female, it is necessary to take careful heed.
Meanwhile from the distance come bursts of wild music; and at last Helena returns—pale, and deeply agitated. “It is that concerto!” she says, and then asks to be excused from talking. Lloyd comes, and stands by the door watching her. When his teacher begins to open business negotiations, he asks him abruptly to leave them alone.
Helena asks, “Who wrote that music?” He tells her a ghastly story of a titan soul who starved in a garret and shot himself, crushed by the mockery of the world.
“I might have saved him!” the boy exclaims. “I was so busy with the music I forgot the man!”
They talk about this epoch-making concerto, and how Lloyd means to force it upon the public. “And you shall play it with me!” he exclaims. “You are the first that has ever understood it!”
“I cannot play it!” she protests; to which he answers, “It was like his voice come back from the grave!” And so we see these two souls cast into the crucible together.
Section 4. The second act showed the aftermath of the great concert, and took place in the drawing-room of the Hartman family’s apartment, at four o’clock in the morning. We see Moses and the two professors, who have not been able to tear themselves away; dishevelled, distrait, wild with vexation, they pace about and lament. Failure, utter ruin confronts them—the structure of their hopes lies in the dust! They blame it all on “that woman”—and members of the family concur in this. It was she who kept Lloyd to his resolve to play that mad concerto; and then, to cast aside all the master had taught them, all the results of weeks of drilling—and to play it in that frantic, demonic fashion. Now the men await the morning papers, which will bring them the verdict of “the world”; and they shudder with the foreknowledge of what that verdict will be.
Lloyd and Helena enter. They have been walking for hours, and have not been thinking of “the world”. They listen, half-heeding, to the protests and laments; they could not help it, they explain—the music took hold of them.
The two professors go off to get the papers, and Moses goes into the next room to rest; after which it becomes clear to the audience that Lloyd and Helena are fighting the sex-duel.
“You do not care about people,” she is saying, sombrely.
To which his reply is, “It is not to be found in people.”
“And yet from people it must come!” she insists.
He answers, “They do not even know what I mean; and they have no humility.”
“It is a problem,” Lloyd continues, after a pause. “Shall one go on alone, or wait and bring others with him?—You have brought that problem into my life.”
She answers to this, “I cannot see how my love will hinder you.”
He replies, “If you love me, who will love my art?”
So it goes—until the professors return with their freight of the world’s Philistinism. And here came a scene, over which Thyrsis shook for many a day with merriment. The accounts of the concert are read; Moses awakens and comes in; and as the agony increases, the members of the family appear, one by one, clad in their dressing-gowns, and adding their lamentations to the chorus. Gone is all the prestige of the two professors, gone all the profits of Moses, gone all the visions of social triumphs in the city of the middle West!
To all of which uproar the two listen patiently; until at last the mother, in a transport of vexation, turns upon Helena, and accuses her of ensnaring the boy. And then—the climax of the scene—Lloyd springs up; all that Genius in him, which has so far gone into music, turns now into rage and scorn. He pictures these people—pawing over his inspiration with their unclean hands—peering at it, weighing it, chaffering over it—taking it into the market-place to be hawked about. He shows them what they are, and what that “world” is, to which they would offer his muse as a whore. And then at the climax of his speech, as he is waving his violin in the air, the Herr Prof. von Arne ventures to put in a word; and the boy whirls upon him, and brings down the three thousand-dollar treasure upon the eminent psychiatrist’s head!
The third act, which was the hardest of all to write, was to take place in a garret. Lloyd has gone away alone, and three years have passed, and now he lies dying of a wasting disease. Helena has come to him again—and still they are fighting the duel. “A woman will do anything for a man but renounce him,” says Lloyd; and she cannot understand this fierce instinct of his.
She has come and found him; and he lies gasping for breath, and speaking in broken sentences. Yet he will not have her bring grief into his chamber; he has fought his way through grief, and through hatred and contempt, and now he lies at peace upon the bosom of nature. No longer is he wrapped up in his own vision; he has learned from the million suns in the sky and the million trees of the forest. He tells her that the thing called “Genius” springs ceaselessly from the heart of life.
He has cast out fear; and with it he has cast out love. “What are you?” he asks. “What am I?” And he sets forth in blazing words his vision of the soul, which is as a flash of light in a raindrop, and yet one with the eternal process. As the fruit of his life he leaves one symphony in manuscript, and some pages of writing in which he has summed up his faith. That is enough, he says—that is victory; for that he fled away, and killed his love.
The two professors come, having learned that Lloyd is dying. But even they cannot divert him. He tells von Arne that his learning will submit itself, and that scientists will be as gardeners, tending the young flowers of faith. His mother and father come, and he whispers that even for them there is hope—that in the deepest mire of respectability the spark of the soul still glows. His mother bursts into weeping by his bed, and he tells her that even from the dungeon of pride there may be deliverance. So he sends them all away to pray.
Then Helena sits at the piano and plays a few bars of that sonata of Beethoven’s which is an utterance of most poignant grief, and which some publisher has cruelly misnamed the “Moonlight”. And after long silence, the dying man communes with his muse. A light suffuses the room, and he whispers, “Take thine own time; for the seeds of thy glories are planted in the hearts of men!”
Section 6. Over these things Thyrsis would work for six hours at a stretch, sitting without moving a muscle; for days and nights he would wander about at random in the woods. He ate irregularly, of such things as he could put his hands upon; and sleep fled from him like a mistress spurned. When, after a couple of months, he had finished the task, there was an incessant throbbing in his forehead, and—alas for the sudden tumble from the heights of Parnassus!—he had lost almost entirely the power of digesting food.
But the play was done. He sent it off to be copied, and wrote paeans of thanksgiving to Corydon. Once more he had a weapon, newly-forged and sharpened, wherewith to pierce that tough hide of the world!
There remained the practical question: What did one do when he had a play completed? What was the first step to be taken? Thyrsis pondered the problem for several days; and then, as chance would have it, his eye was caught by a newspaper paragraph to the effect that “Ethelynda Lewis, the popular comédienne, is to be starred in a serious drama next season, under the management of Robertson Jones. Miss Lewis’s play has not yet been selected.” Now, as it happened, “Ethelynda Lewis” had been on the play-bill of “The Princess of Prague”, that tragic “musical comedy” to which Thyrsis had been taken; but he never noticed the names of actors and actresses, and had no suspicions. He sent his manuscript to this future star; and a week later came a note, written on scented monogram paper in a tall and distinguished chirography, acknowledging the receipt of his play and promising to read it.
Then Thyrsis turned to attack the manuscripts which had been accumulating while he was writing. They were coming more frequently now—apparently Mr. Ardsley liked his work. To Corydon, who had gone to the country with her parents, he wrote that he was getting some money ahead, and so she might join him before long.
This brought him a deluge of letters; and it forced him to another swift descent into the world of reality. “I have told you nothing of my sufferings,” wrote Corydon. “At least a score of times I have written you long letters and then torn them up, saying that your work must not be disturbed. But oh, Thyrsis, I do not think I can stand it much longer! Can you imagine what it means to be shut up in a boarding-house, without one living soul to understand about me?”
She would go on to tell of her griefs and humiliations, her longings and rages and despairs. Then, too, Cedric was not growing as he should. “He is beautiful,” she wrote, “and every one loves him. But he makes not the least attempt to sit up, and I am very much worried. I fear that I ought not to go on nursing him—I am too nervous to eat as I should. And then I think of the winter, and that we may still be separated, and I do not see how I am to stand it. It is as if I were in a prison. I think of you, and I cannot make you real to me.”
To all of which Thyrsis could only reply with vague hopes—and then go away for a tramp in the forest, and call to his soul for new courage. He had still troubles enough of his own. For one thing, the fiend in his stomach was not to be exorcised by any spell he knew. It was all very picturesque to portray one’s hero as dying of disease; but in reality it was not at all satisfactory. Thyrsis did not die, he merely ate a bowl of bread and milk, and then went about for several hours, feeling as if there were a football blown up inside of him.
He had a touching faith in the medical profession in those days, and whenever there was anything wrong with him, he would turn the problem over to a doctor and his soul would be at rest. In this case the doctor told him that he had dyspepsia—not a very difficult diagnosis—and gave him a bottle full of a red liquid to be taken after meals. To Thyrsis this seemed an example of the marvels of science, of the adjustment of means to ends; for behold, when he had taken the red liquid, the bread and milk disappeared as if by magic! And he might go on and eat anything else—if there was trouble, he had only to take more of the red liquid! So he plunged into work on a pot-boiler, and wrote Corydon to be of cheer, that the dawn was breaking.
Section 7. Corydon, in the meantime, had received a copy of his play; and he was surprised at the effect it had upon her. “It is marvellous,” she wrote; “it is like a blaze of lightning from one end to the other. And yet, much as I rejoice in its power, the main feeling it brought me was of anguish; for it seemed to me as if in this play you had spoken out of your inmost soul. Can it be that you are really chafing against the bond of our love? That you feel that I have hold of you and cling to you; and that you resent it, and shrink from me? Oh Thyrsis, what can I do? Shall I bid you go, and blot the thought of you from my mind? Is that what you truly want? ‘A woman will do anything for a man but renounce him!’ Did you not shudder for me when you wrote those words?
“It is two o’clock in the morning, and so far I have not been able to sleep. I have lain awake with torturing thoughts; and then the baby wakened up, and I had to put him to sleep again—any indisposition of mine always affects him. I am sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, writing with a candle; and hoping to get myself sufficiently exhausted, so that I shall no longer lie awake.
“Go and find your vision over my corpse, a............