They sat in the little cabin, where she had been reading some lines from the poem again—    “O easy access to the hearer’s grace
    When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine!”
 
“Ah, yes!” he said. “But our lot was cast in a different time.”
She put her hand upon his. “Even so,” she said; and then turned the page, and read once more—
   “What though the music of thy rustic flute
        Kept not for long its happy, country tone;
            Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note
        Of men contention-tost, of men who groan,
            Which task’d thy pipe too sore, and tired thy
                    throat—
                It failed, and thou wast mute!
        Yet hadst thou always visions of our light!”
 
Section 1. The mise-en-scéne of their new adventure in domesticity was a tent eighteen feet by twelve; but as the side-walls were low, they could walk only in the centre, and must range their belongings at the sides. To the left, as one entered the tent, there stood a soapbox with a tiny oil-stove upon it; and then a stand, made out of a packing-box, to hold their dishes, their cooking-utensils and their limited supply of provisions. Next down the line came a trunk, and in the corner the baby’s crib—which had been outgrown by the farmer’s children, and purchased by Thyrsis for a dollar. At the rear was a folding-table, and above it a board from which Corydon hung her clothing; along the other wall were her canvas cot, and a little stand with some books, and a wash-stand and another trunk.
Some distance off in the woods stood a second tent, seven feet square, in which Thyrsis had a cot for himself, and also a canvas-chair in which he sat to receive the visits of his muse. They got their drinking water from a spring near by; there was a tiny stream beside the tent which provided their washing-water. In this stream Thyrsis hollowed out a flat basin, in which they might set their butter-crock, and a pail of milk, and a larger pail that held their meat. Below that was a deeper pool from which they dipped water, and lower yet a third pool, with a board on which Corydon might sit and wash diapers, to her heart’s content and her back’s exhaustion.
The tent had been old when Thyrsis got it, and as this was the third season he had used it, it was dark and dun of hue. They had not noticed this at the outset as they had put it up on a bright, sunshiny day, and also before the trees had put out all their foliage. But now, when rain came, they found that they had to light a lamp in order to read in the tent; and, of course, it was on rainy days that they had to be inside. Thyrsis did not realize the influence which this tent had upon his wife’s spirits; it was only after he saw her made physically ill by having to live in a room with yellow wall-paper, that he came to understand the power which her surroundings had over Corydon.
If they’so much as touched a finger to the roof of the tent while it was raining, a steady dripping would come through at that point. Then, as the rains grew heavier, water took to running down the pole that stood in the centre of the tent, and formed a pool in the middle of the floor, so that Thyrsis had to get the axe and cut a hole there. And, of course, there was no way to dry anything; the woods, which were low, were turned into a swamp, and one’s shoes became caked with mud, and there was no keeping the tent-floor clean.
In this place they had to keep an able-bodied, year-and-a-half-old baby! There was no other place to keep him. He could not be allowed on the damp floor, nor where he could touch the top of the tent; so Thyrsis set up sticks at all four corners of his crib, and tied strong twine about them, making a little pen; and therein they put the baby, and therein he had to stay. He had his rattle and his rubber-doll and his blocks and the rest of his gim-cracks; and after he had howled long enough to satisfy himself that there was no deliverance from his prison, he settled back and accepted his tragic fate. There came occasions when Corydon was sick, and unable to move; then Thyrsis would put up his umbrella and take Cedric to his own tent, where he would draw a chalk-line across the floor. One-half of the forty-nine square feet of space was his, and in it he would sit and read and study; in the other half the baby would play. After long experience he came to realize that at such times Papa would not pay any attention to him, and that crossing the chalk-line involved getting one’s “mungies” spanked.
There were other troubles that fell upon them. At first, it being April, it was cold at night; and they had no stove, and no room for a stove. Later on the ceaseless rains brought a plague of mosquitoes; and so Thyrsis had to rig up a triangular door and cover the entrance to the tent with netting; and when the weather grew better, he had to get more netting and construct a little house, in which the baby could play outdoors. And then there had to be more spankings of “mungies”, to teach the infant that this mysterious mosquito-bar must not be walked through, nor pulled at, nor poked with sticks, nor even eaten.
They prayed for fair days, and a little sunshine; and it seemed as if the weather-demons had discovered this, and were playing with them. There would come a bright morning, and they would spread a rug in the baby’s cage, and hang out all their damp belongings to dry; and then would come a sudden shower, and baby and rug and belongings would all have to pile back into the tent. And then it would clear again, and everything would go out once more; and they would prepare dinner, and be comfortably settled to eat, when it would begin to sprinkle again. They would move in the clothing and the baby, and when it began to rain harder, they would move in the table and the food; and forthwith the rain would cease. Because it was poor fun eating in a dark tent by lamp-light, amid the odor of gas-stove and cooking, they might move out once more—but only to repeat the same experience over again.
For six weeks after their arrival there was not a day without rain, and it would rain sometimes for half a week without ceasing. So everything they owned became damp and mouldy—all their clothing, their food, the very beds upon which they slept. One of their miseries was the lack of place to keep things; all their odds and ends had to be stowed away under the cots—where one might find clothing, and books, and manuscripts, and a hammock, and an umbrella, and some shoes, and a box of prunes, and a sack of potatoes, and half a ham. When water got in at the sides of the tent and wet all these objects, and the bedclothing hung over the floor and got into them, it was trying to the temper to have to rummage there.
Section 2. Before she left the city Corydon had taken the baby to consult a famous “child-specialist”—at five dollars per consultation; she had received the dreadful tidings that Cedric was threatened with the “rickets”. So she had come out to the country with one mighty purpose in her soul. “Under-nourishment”, the doctor had said; and he had laid out a regular schedule. Six times daily the unhappy infant was to be fed; and each time some elaborate concoction had to be got ready—practically nothing could be eaten in a state of nature. The first meal would consist of, say a poached egg on a piece of toast, and the juice of an orange, with the seeds carefully excluded; the next of some chicken broth with a cracker or two, and the pulp of prunes with the skins removed; the next of some beef chopped up and pounded to a pulp and broiled, together with a bit of mashed potato or some other cooked vegetable; the next of some gruel, with cream and sugar, and some more prunes.
And these operations, of course, took the greater part of Corydon’s day; she would struggle at them until she was ready to drop, and when she had to give up they would fall to Thyrsis. Some of them fell to him quite frequently—for instance, the pounding of the meat. It had to have all the fat and gristle carefully cut out; and there had to be a clean board, and a clean hammer, both of which must be scraped and washed afterwards; and whenever by any chance Corydon let the meat stay on the fire a second too long, so that it got hard, the whole elaborate operation had to be gone over again—was not the baby’s life at stake?
It was quite vain for him to protest as to the pains that Corydon took to remove every tiniest fragment of the skin of a stewed prune. “Surely, dearest,” he would argue, “the internal arrangements of a baby are not so delicate as to be torn by a tiny bit of prune-skin!”
But to Corydon the internal arrangements of babies were mysterious things—to be understood only by a child-specialist at five dollars per visit. “He told me what to do,” she would say; “and I am going to do it.”
So she would prepare the concoctions, and would sit and feed them to the baby, spoonful by spoonful; and long after the little one had been stuffed to the bursting-point, she would hold the spoon poised in front of its mouth, making tentative passes, and seeking by some device to cajole the mouth into opening and admitting one last morsel of the precious nutriment. The child had a word of its own inventing, wherewith it denoted things that were good to eat. “Hee, gubum, gubum!” he would exclaim; and Corydon would hold the spoon and repeat “Gubum, gubum,”—long after the baby had begun to sputter and gasp and make plain that it was no longer “gubum”.
Also, under the instructions of the specialist, they made an attempt to break the child of the “hoodaloo mungie” habit. A baby should lie down and go to sleep without handling, the authority had declared; and now that there was all outdoors for him to cry in, they resolved that he should be taught. So they built up the fence about the crib, and laid the baby in for his afternoon nap, and started to go away. And the baby gave one look of perplexity and dismay, and then began to cry. By the time they had got out of the tent he was screaming like a creature possessed; and Corydon and Thyrsis sat outside and stared at each other in wonder and alarm. When she could stand it no more, they went away to a distance; but still the uproar went on. Now and then they would creep back and peep in at the purple and choking infant; and then steal away again, and discuss the phenomenon, and wish that the “child-specialist” were there to advise them. Finally, when the crying had gone on for two hours without a moment’s pause, they gave up, because they were afraid the baby might cry itself into convulsions. And so the “hoodaloo mungie” habit went on for some time yet.
Under the “stuffing regime” the infant at first thrived amazingly; he became fat and rosy, and Corydon’s heart beat high with joy and pride. But then came midsummer, and the hot season; and first of all a rash broke out upon the precious body, and in spite of powders and ointments, refused to go away. Later on came the “hives”, with which the baby was spotted like the top of a pepper-crust. And then, as fate willed it, the family of a woman who did some laundry for Corydon developed the measles; and Corydon found it out too late—and so they were in for the first of a long program of “children’s diseases”.
It was a siege that lasted for a month and more—a nightmare experience. The child had to be kept in a dark place, under pain of losing its eyesight; and when it was very hot in the tent, some one had to sit and fan it. It could not sleep, but writhed and moaned, now screaming in torment, now whimpering like a frightened cur—a sound that wrung Thyrsis’ very heart. And oh, the sight of the little body—purple, a mass of eruptions, and with beads of perspiration upon it! Corydon’s mother came to help her through this ordeal, and would sit for hours upon hours, rocking the wailing infant in her arms.
Section 3. But there were ups as well as downs in this tenting adventure. There came glorious days, when they took long tramps over the hills; or when Thyrsis would carry the child upon his shoulder, and they would wander about the meadows, picking daisies and clover, and making garlands for Corydon. Once Cedric sat down upon a bumble-bee, and that was hard upon him, and perhaps upon the bee. But for the most part the little one was enraptured during these excursions. He was fascinated with the flowers, and continually seeking for an opportunity to devour some of them; while he was doing it he would wear such a roguish smile—it was impossible not to believe that he understood the agitation which these abnormal appetites occasioned in his parents. Corydon would be seized with a sudden access of affection, and she would clutch him in her arms and squeeze him, and fairly smother him with kisses. Of course the youngster would protest wildly at this, and so not infrequently the demonstration would end tragically.
“I can’t have any joy in my baby at all!” she would lament; and Thyrsis would have to soothe the child, and plead with her to find more practical ways of demonstrating her maternal devotion.
Cedric was beginning to make determined efforts to talk now, and he had the most original names for things. His parents would adopt these into their own speech, which thus departed rapidly from established usage. They had to bring themselves to realize that if they went on in that fashion, the child would never learn to speak so that any one else could understand him. The grandmothers were most strenuous upon this point, and would laboriously explain to the infant that chickens and pigeons and sparrows were not all known as “ducky-ducks”; they would plead with it to say “bottle of milk”, while its reckless parents were delighting themselves with such perversions as “bobbu mookie-mook.”
Two or three times each week the farmer would bring their mail; and once a week they would hire an old scare-crow of a horse, and a buggy which might have passed for the one-horse shay in its ninety-ninth year, and drive to a town for provisions. It was amazing what loads of provisions a family of three could consume in the course of a week—especially when one of them was following the “stuffing regime”. There had to be a lot of figuring done to get it for the sum of thirty dollars a month; and this put another grievous burden upon Thyrsis. Corydon, alas, had no talents for figuring, and was cursed with a weakness for such superfluities as clean laundry and coffee with cream. This was one more aspect of the difference between the Hebrew and the Greek temperament; and sometimes the Hebrew temperament would lose its temper, and the Greek temperament would take to tears. The situation was all the more complicated because of their pitiful ignorance. They really did not know what was necessity and what was luxury. For instance, Thyrsis had read somewhere that people could live without meat; but Corydon had never heard of such an idea, and insisted with vehemence that it was an absurdity.
However, there was no evading the issue of poverty; for the thirty dollars was all they had. “The Hearer of Truth” had been out several months now, and had not sold a thousand copies; and so it was to be doubted if Thyrsis would ever get another dollar from that. Also, he had heard from the translator of “The Genius”, and had agreed to accept twenty-five dollars as an “honorarium” for the production of his play in Germany—this princely sum to be paid when the play came out during the following winter.
Meantime, of course, he was driving away at his new work. Domestic duties took up most of his morning; but he would get away into the woods in the afternoons, and in the evenings, when the family was asleep, he would work until far after midnight. He was bringing out basketfuls of books from the library of the university; and he lived another life in these—sharing, in a hundred different forms, the agony of the War. He was not writing yet; he was filling up his soul with the thing, making it a reservoir of impressions. Some times it would seem that the reservoir was nearly full, and he would be seized with a hunger to be at work; he would go about possessed by it—absent-minded, restless, nervous when he was spoken to. It was hard for a man who listened all night to the death-groans of the thousands piled up before “Bloody Angle”, to get up in the morning and be satisfactory in the r?le of “mother’s assistant”.
Here, again was the torment of this matrimonial bond to a man who wished to be an artist. He had to live two lives, when one was more than he could attend to; he had to be always aware of another soul yearning for him, reaching out to him and craving his attention. To be sure, Corydon was interested in what he was doing; she even made heroic efforts to read the books that he was reading. But she had so many duties, and so many headaches; and when night came she was so tired! She would ask him to tell her about his vision; and was not the thing untellable? Why else did he have to labor day and night, like a man possessed? He would explain this to her, and she would bid him go on and do his work and not mind her. But when he would take her at her word, and there would follow a week or two of indifference and preoccupation—then he would discover that she was again unhappy.
Section 4. This never ceased to be the case between them; but perhaps it was intensified at this time by the fact that their sex-life had to be suppressed. This was a problem which they had talked out between them before they came away. Thyrsis, who was groping for the truth about these matters, had come to the conclusion that the factor which gave dignity and meaning to intercourse between a man and woman was the desire, or at any rate the willingness, to create a child. Corydon was not sure that she agreed with him in this; but so far as their own case was concerned, it was quite clear that they could take no remotest chance of any accident—another child would mean certain destruction for all three of them. And so they had gone back to the “brother and sister” arrangement with which they had begun life. This was a simple matter for Thyrsis, who was utterly wrapped up in his book; it was not so simple for Corydon, though neither of them realized it, nor could have been brought to admit it. As usual, Corydon desired to be what he was, and to feel what he felt; and so Thyrsis did not realize how another side of her was being blighted. Hers was predominantly a love-nature; it was intolerable to her that any one she loved should not love her in return, and love her in the same way, and to the same extent; and now, when her entire being went out to him, she found herself obliged to suppress her emotions.
Sometimes the thing would break out in spite of her.
“Thyrsis,” she would cry, “aren’t you going to kiss me good-night?”
“Didn’t I kiss you, dearest?” he would answer.
“Oh, but such a cold and perfunctory kiss!”
And so he would come and put his arms about her; but even while she held him thus, she would feel the life go out of his caresses, and see his eyes with a far-off expression. She would know that his thoughts were away upon some battle-field.
“Tell me, Thyrsis,” she would exclaim. “Do you really love me?”
“Yes, dear,” he would reply. “I love you.”
“But how much do you love me?”
And then he would be dumb. What a question to ask him! As if he had the time and the energy to climb to those heights, to speak again that difficult language! Had he not told her a thousand times how much he loved her! and could she not believe it and understand it?
“But why should it be so hard to tell me?” she would protest.
And he would answer that to him it was a denial of love to explain or to make promises. He was as unchangeable as the laws of nature—he could no more be faithless to her soul than he could to his own.
“I want you to take that for granted,” he would say; “to know it as you know that the sun will rise to-morrow morning.”
“But, Thyrsis,” she would answer, when he used this metaphor, “don’t people sometimes like to go out and see the sun rise?”
Section 5. The summer passed; and Thyrsis found to his dismay that his relentless muse had not yet permitted him to write a word. He had not a sufficient grasp upon his mighty subject—nor for that matter had he freedom to get by himself and wrestle it out. He shrunk from that death-grapple, while they were in this unsettled state. They could not stay in tents through the winter-time; and where were they to go?
Thyrsis was consumed with the desire to build a tiny house in these woods. He had roamed the country over, without finding any place that was habitable; and besides, he did not want to pay rent—he wanted a home of his own, however humble. He had meant to build one with the money from “The Hearer of Truth”; but now there came a statement from the publisher, showing that there would be due him on the book a trifle over eleven dollars!
He tried a new plan. He wrote out a “scenario” of his projected novel, and sent this to his publisher, to see if he could get a contract in advance. He asked for five hundred dollars—with that he could build the house he wanted, and live for another six months, until the book was done. The publisher wrote him to come to the city, where, after some parleying, he submitted a proposition; he would advance the money and publish the book, paying ten per cent. royalty; but he must also have the option to publish the author’s future writings for ten years upon the same basis.
This rather staggered Thyrsis. He was business-man enough by this time to realize that if he ever had a real success he could get fifteen or twenty per cent. upon his future work—there were even some authors who got twenty-five per cent. And moreover, he did not like to tie himself to this publisher, who was of the hard and grasping type. He went home to think it over, and in the end he wrote to Henry Darrell. He set forth the situation, and showed how much money it might mean to him—money which he would otherwise be able to devote to some useful purpose. It all depended upon what Darrell could do in the emergency.
He waited three weeks, and then came Darrell’s reply, saying that he could not possibly do what Thyrsis wished. There were so many calls upon him—the Socialist paper was in trouble, and so on. Thereupon Thyrsis wrote to the publisher to say that he accepted the offer and would sign the contract; but in a couple of days he received a curt reply, to the effect that the publisher had changed his mind, and no longer cared to consider the arrangement. He had, as Thyrsis found afterwards, got rid of the enthusiastic young man who had inveigled him into “The Hearer of Truth”; and perhaps also he had been reading the ridicule which the critics were pouring out upon that unhappy book.
So once more Thyrsis wrote to Darrell—a letter of agonized entreaty. He was at the most critical moment of his life; and now, at the very culmination of his effort, to have to give up would be a calamity he could simply not contemplate. If only he could finish the task, he would be saved; for this was a book that would grip men and shake them—that it should fail was simply unthinkable. He could make out with two hundred dollars; and he besought his friend at any sacrifice to stand by him. He asked him to cable; and when, a couple of weeks later, the message came—“all right”—to Thyrsis it was like waking up and escaping from the grip of some terrible dream.
Section 6. And so began the house-building. It was high time, too—the latter part of September, and the nights were growing chill. He sought out a carpenter to help him, and had an interview with his friend the farmer, who agreed to rent a bit of land, in a corner of his orchard, by the edge of the wood. It was under the shade of a great elm-tree, and sufficiently remote from all the world to satisfy the taste of any literary hermit.
For months before this he and Corydon had discussed the plans of their future home; every square inch of it had been a subject of debate. In its architectural style it was a compromise between Corydon’s aesthetic yearnings, and the rigid standards of economy which circumstance imposed. It was to be eighteen feet long and sixteen feet wide—six feet high at the sides and nine in the centre. It was to be “weather-boarded”, and roofed with paper, instead of shingles—this being so much cheaper. Corydon heard with dismay that it would be necessary to paint this roofing-paper black; and Thyrsis, by way of compensation, agreed that the weather-boards should have some “natural finish”, instead of common paint. There was to be a six-foot piazza in front, and a little platform in back, with steps descending to the spring.
There had been long discussions about the method of heating the mansion. Corydon had been observing the customs of her neighbors in this typical “small-farming” district, and declared that they had two leading characteristics: first, they were not happy until they had had all their own teeth extracted, and a complete set of “store-teeth” substituted; and second, as soon as they moved into a house, they boarded over the open fire-place and covered the boards with wall-paper. But Thyrsis, making investigations along practical lines, found that the open fire-place had a bad reputation as a consumer of fuel; and also, it would take a mason to build a chimney, and the wages of masons were high. So Corydon had to reconcile herself to a house with a stove, and a stove-pipe that went through a hole in the wall!
Nevertheless this house-building time was one of the happiest periods of their lives. For here was something constructive, in which they could both be occupied. Thyrsis would be up and at work early in the morning, before the carpenter came; and in between the baby’s various meals, Corydon would come also, and take part in the operations. A miraculous thing it was to see the house of their dreams coming into being, with every feature just as they had planned it. And what a palatial structure it was—with so much space and air! One could actually move about in it without danger of striking one’s head; coming into it from the tent, one felt as if he were entering a cathedral!
They were so consumed with a desire to see it finished, that Thyrsis would stay at the work until darkness came upon him, and sometimes even worked by moon-light, or with a lantern. And how proud they would be when the carpenter came next morning, and found the last roof-boards laid, or the flooring all completed! Thyrsis learned the mysteries of window-sills and door-frames, the excitements of “weather-boarding,” and the perils of roof-painting. He realized with wonder how many achievements of civilization the privileged classes take as a matter of course. What a remarkable thing it was, when one came to think of it, that a door should swing true upon its hinges, and fit exactly into its frame, and latch with a precise and soul-satisfying snap! And that windows should slide up and down in their frames, and stop at certain places with a spring-catch!
Corydon too was interested in these discoveries, and became skilled at holding weather-boards while her husband nailed them, and at helping to unroll and measure roofing-paper, and climbing up the ladder and holding it in place. Even the baby became fired with the spirit of achievement, and would get himself a hammer and a board, and plague his parents until they started a dozen or so of nails for him—after which he would sit and blissfully pound them into the board, and all but pound them through the board in his enthusiasm. Before long he even learned to start them himself; and a most diverting sight it was to see this twenty-two-months old youngster driving nails like an infant Hercules. For the fastening of the roofing-paper they used little circular plates of tin called “cotterels”; and these also Cedric must learn to use. So a new phrase was added to the vocabulary of “dam-fool talk”. “Bongie cowtoos” was the name of the operation; for a couple Of years thereafter, whenever Corydon and Thyrsis wished to be let alone to discuss the problems of the universe, they would get the baby a hammer and some nails and a board, and repeat that magic formula, and the problem was solved.
Unfortunately, however, it was not all smooth sailing in the carpentry-business. There were mashed thumbs and sawed fingers; and then, in an evil hour, Thyrsis came upon an advertisement which told of a wonderful new kind of wall-paper which could be applied directly to laths—thus enabling one to dispense with plaster. He sent for ten or twelve dollars’ worth of this material, and he and Corydon spent a whole morning making a mixture of glue and flour-paste and water, and boiling it in an iron preserving-kettle. But alas, the paper would not paste; and then they had a painful time. Corydon gave up in disgust, and went away; but Thyrsis, to whom economy was a kind of disease, would not give up, and was angry with the other for urging him to give up. He spent a whole day wrestling with the concoction, and gave himself a headache with the ghastly odor. But in the end he had to dump it out, and clean the kettle, and fasten the paper to the lathes with “bongie cowtoos”. As the strips of paper did not correspond with the studding, he found himself driving nails into springy laths, an operation most trying to the temper of any man of letters. One of the trials of this house forever after was that upon the least jar a corner of the ceiling was liable to fall loose; and then one would have to get a ladder, and climb up into a hot region, and pound nails into a broken lath, with dust sifting down into one’s eyes, and the hammer hitting one’s sore thumb, and occasioning exclamations not at all suitable for the ears of a two-year-old intelligence.
Section 7. When the doors were fitted, and the windows set in, and the piazza laid, and the steps built, they got down to the furniture, which was also to be home-made. Thyrsis was gratified beyond telling by these tables and dressing-stands and shelves and book-cases, which he could build of hemlock boards in an hour or two, and which cost only thirty or forty cents apiece. He would labor with Corydon to induce her to share this joy; but alas, he would only succeed in losing his own joy, without increasing hers. On many occasions he attempted such things as this; it was only after long years that he came to realize that Corydon’s temperament was the one fixed fact in the universe with which he had to deal.
Two hundred and twenty-five dollars was the total cost of this establishment when completed. And while the carpenter was putting the finishing touches, Thyrsis was using up thirty dollars more of lumber in constructing himself a “study” in the woods near by. Eight by ten this cabin was to be; it was to have a door and a window, and a little piazza in front, upon which the inhabitant might sit in fair weather. Also Thyrsis built for it a table and a bookcase; and as he had now eighty square feet instead of forty-nine, there was room for a cot and a chair, and a coal-stove fourteen inches in diameter. As fate would have it, there was some black paint left over; and to Corydon’s horror it was announced that this would be used on the study. However, Thyrsis insisted that it was his study; and besides, there was some red paint left, with which he might decorate the window and the door-frame, and stripe the edges of the roof and the corners. Surely that would be festivity enough for the most exacting of Greek temperaments!
Then came the rapturous experience of moving into these new mansions. The joy of having shelves to put things on, and hooks to hang things from. Of being able to take books and manuscripts out of their trunks, and not pile them under their beds. Of carrying over their belongings, and having everything fit into the place that had been made for it!
Thyrsis purchased an old stove, and also a kitchen-range from a neighbor; he sank a barrel in the spring, and walled it round with cement; he built a stand in the kitchen, and set up a sink and a little pump.
This was the time of year when there were held at various places in the country what the neighbors called “vandews”. He and Corydon found it diverting to get the scarecrow nag and the one-horse shay, and drive to some farm-house, where one might see the history of a family for the last fifty years spread out upon the lawn. They would stand round in the cold and snow while the auctioneer disposed of the horses and cows and hay and machinery, waiting until he came to the household objects upon which they had set their eye. So they would invest in some stove-pipe, and a couple of ghastly chromos (for the sake of the frames), and some odds and ends of crockery, and a spade, and some old rope to make a swing for the baby. They would get these things for five or ten cents each, and get in addition all the excitements of the bargain-hunt.
Once they had a real adventure—they came upon a wonderful old “grandfather’s clock”, about six feet high; and Corydon exclaimed in rapture, “Oh Thyrsis I’d be happy for the rest of my life if we could have that clock!” On such terms it appeared to Thyrsis that the clock might be worth making a sacrifice for, and he got up the courage to declare that he would offer as high as five dollars for it. And so they stood, trembling with excitement, and waiting.
“Don’t lose it, even if it’s as high as six dollars!” whispered Corydon; but alas, the first bid for the clock was twenty-five dollars. They stood staring with dismay, until the treasure was sold to a dealer from the city for the incredible sum of eighty-seven dollars; and then they drove home, quite awe-stricken by this sudden intrusion from the world of luxury outside their ken.
Section 8. However, this disappointment did not trouble them for long; there were too many luxuries in their own home. Not very long after it was finished, there fell a deluge of rain; and what a delight it was to listen to it, and know that they were safe from it! That not only did they have a dry roof over their head—but they were able to move about, and to reach up their hands without peril, and to sit down and read without a lamp! They would stand by the window with their arms about each other, watching the rain beating upon the fields, and dripping from the elm tree, and flowing in torrents past the house; they would listen to it pounding overhead and streaming off the roof before their faces. They were dry, quite dry! All their belongings were dry—their shoes were not mildewing, their books were not getting soft and shapeless, their bed-clothing would be all right when night came!
The down-pour lasted for three whole days, yet they enjoyed it all. It proved to be a memorable rain to Corydon, for it brought to her a great occasion—the beginning of her poetical career. It happened late one night, when, as usual, the cry of “hoodaloo mungie” awakened her from a sound slumber. The day had been a particularly hard one, and the heaviness of exhaustion was upon her. For a moment she stared up into the darkness, listening to the rain close above her, and trying to nerve herself to put out her arm in the cold. She shuddered at the thought; there came to her a perfectly definite impulse of hatred—hatred of the child, of its noise and its demands. She had felt it before—sometimes as a dull, cold dislike, sometimes as something passionate. Why should she have to sacrifice herself to this insatiable creature, whom she did not love? What did it matter to her if other women loved their children? She had wanted life—and was this life? At that moment the cry of “hoodaloo-mungie” symbolized for her all the sordid cares and nervous agony of her existence.
And suddenly, unexpectedly, a daring impulse seized her. “No!” she thought, and set her teeth—“I’ll let him cry! I’ll cure him of this—and I’ll do it to-night!” So she turned and told Cedric to go to sleep; at which, of course, the child began to scream.
Corydon lay very still in the dark, her eyes wide and every nerve tense. She could not feel, she could not think; it seemed as though she were deprived of every sense except that of hearing; and in her, through her, and around her rang a senseless din, piercing, intense, increasing in volume every minute, and completely drowning out the beating of the rain.
“Can I stand it?” she thought. “Or will his lungs burst? And yet, I must, I must—this can’t go on forever!” And so she clenched her hands and waited. But the sounds did not diminish in the slightest; ten minutes twenty minutes must have passed, and the baby only seemed to gain increased power with each crescendo.
It seemed to Corydon at last as though she had always lain like this, and as though she must for endless time. She found herself getting used to it even; her muscles relaxed. There came to her a sense of the ludicrous side of it. “He means to conquer me!” she thought. “Can I hold out? If I only had something to think about, then I’d be a match for him.” And suddenly the inspiration came to her. “I’ll write a poem!”
What should it be about? The rain had been increasing in violence, and she became conscious of the steady downpour; it fascinated her, and she concentrated her attention upon it, and began—-
   “I am the rain, that comes in spring!”
 
So, after a while, she found herself in the throes of composition; she was eager, excited—and marvel of marvels, utterly forgetful of the baby! She had never tried to write verses before; but it did not seem at all difficult to her now.
The poem was simple and optimistic—it told of the beneficent qualities of rain, as it would appear to one whose roof did not leak. Somewhere in the course of it there was this stanza:
   “I am the rain that comes at night,
    When all in slumber is folded light—
    Save one by weary vigils worn
    Who counteth the drops unto the morn.”
 
This seemed to her an impressive bit, and she wondered what Thyrsis would think of it.
There were eight stanzas altogether, and when she finished the last of them the dawn was breaking, and it seemed hours since she had begun. As for the baby, he was still crying. She turned and peered at him; his eyelids drooped, and the crying came in spasms and gasps—it sounded very feeble, and a trifle perfunctory. Obviously he could not hold out much longer; Corydon would win, yes, she had won already. She lay still, and thrills of happiness went through her. Was it the poem, or the thought of her release, and the nights of quiet sleep in the future?
When Thyrsis came in, an hour or two later, he found her huddled up in blankets on the floor of the living-room, her cheeks bright, her hair dishevelled. How fascinating she looked in such a guise! She was eagerly pondering her poem; and the baby was sleeping quietly, save for a few convulsive gasps, the last stragglers of his routed forces.
“And oh, Thyrsis,” she exclaimed, “to-morrow night he will only cry half as long, and still less the next night. And soon he will go to sleep quietly like any well brought-up, civilized baby. And, my dear, I believe I’m going to be a poetess—I think that to-night I was really inspired!”
So he made haste to build a fire, and then came and sat and listened to the poem. How eagerly she waited for his verdict! How she hung upon his words! And what should a man do in such a case—should he be a husband or a critic? Should he be an amateur or a professional?
But even as he hesitated, the damage was done. “Oh, you don’t like it!” she cried. “You don’t think it’s good at all!”
“My dear,” he argued, “poetry is such a difficult thing to write. And there are so many standards—a thing can be good, and yet not good! The heights are so far away—”
“But oh, how can I ever get there,” wailed Corydon, “if nobody gives me any encouragement?”
Section 9. The time had now come for Thyrsis to put his job through. There was no longer any excuse for hesitation or delay. The book had come to ripeness in him; the birth-hour was at hand, and he must go and have it out with himself. He explained these things to Corydon, sitting beside her and holding her hands; they ascended once more to the heights of consecration; they renewed their vows of fortitude and faith, and then he went away.
For weeks thereafter he would be like the ghost of a man in the house, haggard and silent and preoccupied. All the work that he had ever done in his life seemed but child’s play in comparison. Before this he had portrayed the struggles of men and women; but now he was to portray the agony of a whole nation—his heart must beat with the pulse of millions of suffering people. And the task was like a fiend that came upon him in the night-time and laid hold of him, dragging him away to sights of terror and madness. He was never safe from the thing for a moment—he could never tell when it might assail him. He might be washing the dishes, or wrestling with the refractory pump; but the vision would come to him, and he would wander off into the forest—perhaps to sit, crouching in the snow, trembling, and staring at the pageant in his soul.
He lived in the midst of battles; the smoke of powder always in his nostrils, the crash of musketry and the thunder of cannon in his ears. He saw the cavalry sweeping over the plains, the infantry crouching behind intrenchments; he heard the yells of the combatants, the shrieks of the wounded and dying; he saw the mangled bodies, and the ground slippery with blood. New aspects of the thing kept coming to him—new glimpses into meanings yet untold. They would come to him in great bursts of emotion, like tempests that swept him away; and these things he had to wrestle with and master. It meant toil, the like of which he had never faced before, a tension of all his faculties, that would last for hours and hours, and leave him bathed in perspiration, and utterly exhausted.
A scene would come to him, in some moment of insight; and he would drop everything else, and follow it. He would go over it, at the same time both creating and beholding it, at the same time both overwhelmed by it and controlling it—but above all things else, remembering it! He would be like Aladdin in the palace, stuffing his pockets with priceless jewels; coming away so loaded down that he could hardly stagger, and spilling them on every side. Then, scarcely pausing to rest, he would go back after what he had lost; he would grope about, gathering diamonds and rubies that he had all but forgotten—or perhaps coming upon new vaults and new treasure-chests.
So he would labor over a description, going over it and over it, not so much working it out, as letting it work itself out and stamp itself upon his memory. It made no difference how long the scene might be, he would not write a word of it; it might be some battle-picture, that would fill thirty or forty pages—he would know it all by heart, as Demosthenes or Webster might have known an oration. And only at the end would he write it down.
Over some of the scenes in this new book he labored thus for two or three weeks at a stretch; there would be literally not a moment of the day, nor perhaps of the night, when the thing was not working in some part of his mind. He would think about it for hours before he fell asleep; and when he opened his eyes it would be waiting at his bedside to pounce upon him. If he tried for even a few minutes to rest, or to divert his mind to some other work, he would find himself ill at ease and troubled, with a sense as of something pulling at him, calling to him. And if anything came to interrupt him, then he would be like a baker whose oven grows cold before the bread is half done—it would be a sad labor making anything out of that batch of bread.
Section 10. And this work he had to do as a married man, the father of a family and the head of a household; living with a child who was one incessant and irrepressible demand for attention, and a wife who was wrestling with weakness and sickness—eating out her heart in cruel loneliness, and cowering in the grip of fiends of melancholia and despair!
He had thought that when they moved into the new home, their domestic trials would be at an end. But now the cruel winter fell upon them. They had never known what a winter in the country was like; they came to see why the farmer had protested against their building in such a remote place. There were many days when they could not get to town, and some when they could not even get to the farm-house. Also there was the pump, which was continually freezing, and necessitating long and troublesome operations before they could get any water.
It was, as fate would have it, the worst winter in the oldest inhabitant’s memory. The farmer’s well froze over on three occasions, and it had never frozen before, so he declared. For such weather as this they were altogether unprepared; they had only a wood-stove, and could not keep a fire all night; and the cheap blankets they had bought were made all of cotton, and gave them almost no protection. They would not sleep with the windows down; and so, for weeks at a time, they would go to bed with their clothing, even their overcoats on; and would pile curtains and rugs upon these—and even so, they would waken at two or three o’clock in the morning, shivering and chilled to the bone.
And in this icy room they would have to get up and build a fire; and it might be half an hour before they could get the house warm. Also, they had no facilities for bathing; and so little by little they began to lose their habits of decency—there were days when Corydon left her face unwashed, and forgot to brush her hair. Everyday, it seemed, they slipped yet further down the grade. Thyrsis would work until he was faint and exhausted, and then he would come over, and find there was nothing ready to eat. By the time that he and Corydon had cooked a meal, they would both of them be ravenous, and they would sit and devour their food like a couple of savages. Then, because they had over-eaten, they would have to rest before they cleared things away; and like as not Thyrsis would get to thinking about his work, and go off and leave everything—and the dishes and the food might stay up on the table until the next meal. There was nearly always a piled-up mass of dishes and skillets and sauce-pans in the house—to Thyrsis these soiled dishes were the original source of the myth of Sisyphus and his labor.
And then there was the garbage-pail that he had forgotten to empty, and the lamps he had neglected to fill, and the slop-pails and the other utensils of domesticity. There were the diapers that somebody had to wash—and outside was always the bitter, merciless cold, that drove them in and shut them up with all this horror. The time came, as the winter dragged on, when the house which they had built with so many sacrifices, and into which they had moved with such eager anticipations, came to seem to them like a cave in which a couple of wild beasts cowered for shelter.
Section 11. There was another great change which this cold weather effected in their lives; it broke down the barriers they had been at such pains to build up between them. It was all very well for them to agree that they were “brother and sister,” and that it was impossible for them ever to think of anything else. But now............