The scarlet flush of morning was in the sky; and they stood upon the hill again, and watched the color spreading. “We must go,” she was saying. “But it was worthwhile to come.”
“It was all worth-while,” he said—“all!”
And she smiled, and quoted some lines from the poem—
   “Thou too, O Thyrsis, on like quest wast bound;
        Thou wanderedst with me for a little hour!
            Men gave thee nothing; but this happy quest,
        If men esteem’d thee feeble, gave thee power,
            If men procured thee trouble, gave thee rest!”
 
Section 1. This illness of the baby’s had been a fearful drain upon their strength; and Thyrsis perceived that they had now got to a point where they could no longer stand alone. There must be a servant in the house, to help Corydon, and do for the baby what had to be done. It was a hard decision for him to face, for his money was almost gone, and the book loomed larger than ever. But there was no escaping the necessity.
They would get a married couple, they decided—the man could pay for himself by working the farm. So they put an advertisement in a city paper, and perused the scores of mis-spelled replies. After due correspondence, and much consultation, they decided upon Patrick and Mary Flanagan; and Thyrsis hired a two-seated carriage and drove in to meet them at the depot.
It was all very funny; years afterwards, when the clouds of tragedy were dispersed, they were able to laugh over the situation. Thyrsis had been used to servants in boyhood, but that was before he had acquired any ideas as to universal brotherhood and the rights of man. Now he hated all the symbols and symptoms of mastership; he shrunk from any sort of clash with unlovely personalities—he would be courteous and deprecating to the very tramp who came to his door to beg. And here were Patrick and Mary, very Irish, enormously stout, and devotedly Roman Catholic, having spent all their lives as caretakers of “gentlemen’s country-places”. They had most precise ideas as to what gentlemen’s country-places should be, and how they should be equipped, and how the gentlemen of the country-places should treat their servants. And needless to say, they found nothing in this new situation which met with their approval. There were signs of humiliating poverty everywhere, and the farm-outfit was inadequate. As to the master and mistress, they must have been puzzling phenomena for Patrick and Mary to make up their minds about—possessing so many of the attributes of the lady and gentleman, and yet being lacking in so many others!
Patrick was a precise and particular person; he wanted his work laid out just so, and then he would do it without interference. As for Mary—he stood in awe of Mary himself, and so he accepted the idea that Corydon and Thyrsis should stand in awe of her too. Mary it was who announced that their dietary was inadequate; she took no stock at all in Fletcher and Chittenden—she knew that working-people must have meat at least four times a week. Also Mary maintained that their room was not large enough for so stout a couple. Also she arranged it that Corydon and Thyrsis should get the dinner on Sundays—the Roman Catholic church being five miles away, and the hour of mass being late, and the horse very old and slow.
For two months Corydon and Thyrsis struggled along under the dark and terrible shadow of the disapproval of the Flanagan family. Then one day there came a violent crisis between Corydon and Mary—occasioned by a discussion of the effect of an excess of grease upon the digestibility of potato-starch. Corydon fled in tears to her husband, who started for the kitchen forthwith, meaning to dispose of the Flanagans; when, to his vast astonishment, Corydon experienced one of her surges of energy, and thrust him to one side, and striding out upon the field of combat, proceeded to deliver herself of her pent-up sentiments. It was a discourse in the grandest style of tragedy, and Mary Flanagan was quite dumbfounded—apparently this was a “lady” after all! So the Flanagan family packed its belongings and departed in a chastened frame of mind; and Corydon turned to her spouse, her eyes still flashing, and remarked, “If only I had talked to her that way from the beginning!”
Section 2. Then once more there was answering of advertisements, and another couple was spewed forth from the maw of the metropolis—“Henery and Bessie Dobbs”, as they subscribed themselves. “Henery” proved to be the adult stage of the East Side “gamin”; lean and cynical, full of slang and humor and the odor of cigarettes. He was fresh from a “ticket-chopper’s” job in the subway, and he knew no more about farming than Thyrsis did; but he put up a clever “bluff”, and was so prompt with his wits that it was hard to find fault with him successfully. As for his wife, she had come out of a paper-box factory, and was as skilled at housekeeping as her husband was at agriculture; she was frail and consumptive, and told Corydon the story of her pitiful life, with the result that she was able to impose upon her even more than her predecessor had done.
“Henery” was slow at pitching hay and loading stone, but when the season came, he developed a genius for peddling fruit; he was always hungry for any sort of chance to bargain, and was forever coming upon things which Thyrsis ought to buy. Very quickly the neighborhood discovered this propensity of his, and there was a constant stream of farmers who came to offer second-hand buggies, and wind-broken horses, and dried-up cows, and patent hay-rakes and churns and corn-shellers at reduced values; all of which rather tended to reveal to Thyrsis the unlovely aspects of his neighbors, and to weaken his faith in the perfectibility of the race.
Among Henery’s discoveries was a pair of aged and emaciated mules. He became eloquent as to how he could fatten up these mules and what crops he could raise in the spring. So Thyrsis bought the mules, and also a supply of feed; but the fattening process failed to take effect-for the reason, as Thyrsis finally discovered, that the mules were in need of new teeth. When the plowing season began, Henery at first expended a vast amount of energy in beating the creatures with a stick, but finally he put his inventive genius to work, and devised a way to drive them without beating. It was some time before Thyrsis noted the change; when he made inquiries, he learned to his consternation that the ingenious Henery had fixed up the stick with a pin in the end!
At any time of the day one might stand upon the piazza of the house and gaze out across the corn-field, and see a long procession marching through the furrow. First there came the mules, and then came the plow, and then came Henery; and after Henery followed the dog, and after the dog followed the baby, and after the baby followed a train of chickens, foraging for worms. Little Cedric was apparently content to trot back and forth in the field for hours; which to his much-occupied parents seemed a delightful solution of a problem. But it happened one day when they had a visit from Mr. Harding, that Thyrsis and the clergyman came round the side of the house, and discovered the child engaged in trying to drag a heavy arm-chair through a door that was too small for it. He was wrestling like a young titan, purple in the face with rage; and shouting, in a perfect reproduction of Henery’s voice and accent, “Come round here, God damn you, come round here!”
There were many such drawbacks to be balanced against the joys of “life on a farm”. Thyrsis reflected with a bitter smile that his experiences and Corydon’s had been calculated to destroy their illusions as to several kinds of romance. They had tried “Grub Street”, and the poet’s garret, and the cultivating of literature upon a little oatmeal; they had not found that a joyful adventure. They had tried the gypsy style of existence; they had gone back “to the bosom of nature”—and had found it a cold and stony bosom. They had tried out “love in a cottage”, and the story-writer’s dream of domestic raptures. And now they were chasing another will o’ the wisp—that of “amateur farming”! When Thyrsis had purchased half the old junk in the township, and had seen the mules go lame, and the cows break into the pear-orchard and “founder” themselves; when he had expended two hundred dollars’ worth of money and two thousand dollars’ worth of energy to raise one hundred dollars’ worth of vegetables and fruit, he framed for himself the conclusion that a farm is an excellent place for a literary man, provided that he can be kept from farming it.
Section 3. As the result of such extravagances, when they had got as far as the month of February, Thyrsis’ bank-account had sunk to almost nothing. However, he had been getting ready for this emergency; he had prepared a scenario of his new book, setting forth the ideas it would contain and the form which it would take. This he sent to his publisher, with a letter saying that he wanted the same contract and the same advance as before.
And again he waited in breathless suspense. He knew that he had here a work of vital import, one that would be certain to make a sensation, even if it did not sell like a novel. It was, to be sure, a radical book—perhaps the most radical ever published in America; but on the other hand, it dealt with questions of literature and philosophy, where occasionally even respectable and conservative reviews permitted themselves to dally with ideas. Thyrsis was hoping that the publisher might see prestige and publicity in the adventure, and decide to take a chance; when this proved to be the case, he sank back with a vast sigh of relief. He had now money enough to last until midsummer, and by that time the book would be more than half done—and also the farm would be paying.
But alas, it seemed with them that strokes of calamity always followed upon strokes of good fortune. At this time Corydon’s ailments became acute, and her nervous crises were no longer to be borne. There were anxious consultations on the subject, and finally it was decided that she should consult another “specialist”. This was an uncle of Mr. Harding’s, a man of most unusual character, the clergyman declared; the latter was going to the city, and would be glad to introduce Corydon.
So, a couple of days later came to Thyrsis a letter, conveying the tidings that she was discovered to be suffering from an abdominal tumor, and should undergo an immediate operation. It would cost a hundred dollars, and the hospital expenses would be at least as much; which meant that, with the bill-paying that had already taken place, their money would all be gone at the outset!
But Thyrsis did not waste any time in lamenting the inevitable. He was rather glad of the tidings, on the whole—at least there was a definite cause for Corydon’s suffering, and a prospect of an end to it. Both of them had still their touching faith in doctors and surgeons, as speaking with final and godlike authority upon matters beyond the comprehension of the ordinary mind. The operation would not be dangerous, Corydon wrote, and it would make a new woman of her.
“If I could only have Delia Gordon with me,” she added, “then my happiness would be complete. Only think of it, she left for Africa last week! I know she would have waited, if she’d known about this.
“However, I shall make out. Mr. Harding is going to be in town for more than a week—he is attending a conference of some sort, and he has promised to come and see me in the hospital. I think he likes to do such things—he has the queerest professional air about it, so that you feel you are being sympathized with for the glory of God. But really he is very beautiful and good, and I think you have never appreciated him. I am happy to-day, almost exhilarated; I feel as if I were about to escape from a dungeon.”
Section 4. Such was the mood in which she went to her strange experience. She liked the hospital-room, tiny, but immaculately clean; she liked the nurses, who seemed to her to be altogether superior and exemplary beings—moving with such silence and assurance about their various tasks. She slept soundly, and in the morning they combed and plaited her hair and prepared her for the ceremony. There came a bunch of roses to her room, with a card from Mr. Harding; and these were exquisite, and made her happy, so that, when the doctor arrived, she went almost gaily to the operating-room.
Everything there aroused her curiosity; the pure white walls and ceiling, shining with matchless cleanness, the glittering instruments arranged carefully on glass tables, the attentive and pleasant-faced nurses, standing also in pure white, and the doctor in his vestments, smiling reassuringly. In the centre of the room was a large glass table, long enough for a reclining body, and through the sky-light the sun poured a pleasing radiance over all. “How beautiful!” exclaimed Corydon; and the nurses exchanged glances, and the old doctor failed to hide an expression of surprise.
“I wish all my patients felt like that,” said he. “Now climb up on the table.”
Corydon promptly did so, and another doctor who was to administer the anaesthetic came to her side. “Take a very deep breath, please,” he said, as he placed over her mouth a white, cone-shaped thing that had a rather suffocating odor. Corydon was obedience itself, and breathed.
In a moment her body seemed to be falling from her. “Oh, I don’t like it!” she gasped.
“Breathe deeply, and count as far as you can,” came a voice from far above her.
“Stop!” whispered Corydon. “Oh, I don’t want—I want to come back!”
Then she began to count—or rather some strange voice, not hers, seemed to count for her; as the first numbness passed, farther and farther away she seemed to dissolve, to become a disembodied consciousness poised in a misty ether. And at that moment—so she told Thyrsis afterwards—the face of Mr. Harding seemed to appear just above her, and to look at her with a pained and startled expression. It was a beautiful face, she thought; and she knew that everything she felt was being immediately registered in Mr. Harding’s mind. They were two affinitized beings, suspended in the centre of a cosmos; “their soul intelligences were all that had been left of the sentient world after some cataclysm.
“I always knew that about us,” thought Corydon, and she realized that the face before her understood, even though at the moment it, too, was dissolving. “I wonder why”—she mused—“why—” And then the little spark went out.
Two hours later the doctor was bending over her, anxiously scrutinizing her passive face. “Nurse, bring me some ice-water,” he was saying. “She takes her time coming to.” And sharply he struck her cheek and forehead with his finger-tips; but she showed no sign.
Deep down in some mysterious inner chamber, beneath the calm face, there was being enacted a grim spirit-drama. Corydon’s soul was making a monstrous effort to return to its habitation; Corydon felt herself hanging, a tortured speck of being, in a dark and illimitable void. “This may be Hell,” she thought. “I have neither hands nor feet, and I cannot fight; but I can will to get back!” This effort cost her inexpressible agony.
A strange incessant throbbing was going on in the black pit over which she seemed suspended. It had a kind of rhythm—metallic, and yet with a human resonance. It began way down somewhere, and proceeded with maddening accuracy to ascend through the semi-tones of a gigantic scale. Each beat was agony to her; it ascended to a certain pitch in merciless crescendo, then fell to the bottom again, and began anew its swift, maddeningly accurate ascent. Each time it ascended a little higher, and always straining her endurance to the uttermost, and bringing a more vivid realization of agony. “Will you stop here,” it seemed to pulsate. “No, no, I will go on,” willed Corydon. “You shall not keep me, I must escape, I must get out.” But it kept up incessantly, ruthlessly, its strange, formless, soundless din, until the spirit writhed in its grasp.
Finally it seemed to Corydon that she was getting nearer—nearer to something, she knew not what. The blackness about her seemed to condense, and she found herself in what was apparently the middle of a lake, and some dark bodies with arms were trying to drag her down. “No, no,” she willed to these forms, “you shall not. I do not belong here, I belong up—up!” And by a violent effort she escaped—into sensations yet more agonizing, more acute. The vibrations were getting faster and faster, whirling her along, stretching her consciousness to pieces. “Will it never end?” she thought. “Have mercy!” But after an eternity of such repetition, she found a bright light staring at her, and a frightful sense of heaviness, like mountains piled upon her. Also, eating her up from head to foot, was a strange, unusual pain; yes, it must be pain, though she had never felt anything like it before. She moaned; and there came a spasm of nausea, that seemed to tear her asunder.
The doctor was standing by her. “She gave me quite a fright,” he was saying. “There, that’s it, nurse. She’ll be sleeping sweetly in a minute.” The nurse hurried forward, and Corydon felt a stinging sensation in her side, and then a delightful numbness crept over her. “Oh, thank you, doctor,” she whispered.
Section 5. The next week held for Corydon continuous suffering, which she bore with a rebellious defiance—feeling that she had been betrayed in some way. “If you had only told me,” she wailed, to the doctor. “I would rather have stayed as I was before!” For answer he would pat her cheek and tell her to go to sleep.
The days dragged on. Every afternoon her mother came and read to her for several hours; and in the afternoons Mr. Harding would come, and sit by her bedside in his kind way and talk to her. Sometimes he only stayed a few minutes, but often he would spend an hour or so, trying to dispel the clouds of gloom and despondency that were hanging over her. Corydon told him of her vision in the operating-room, and strange to say he declared that he had known it all; also he said that he had helped her to fight her way back to life.
He seemed to understand her every need, and from his sympathy gave her all the comfort he could. But he little realized all that it meant to her—how deeply it stirred her gratitude and her liking for him. During the day she would find herself counting the hours until the time he had named; and when the expected knock would come, and his tall figure appear at the door, her heart would give a sudden jump and send the blood rushing to her head. Her lips would tremble slightly as she held out her hand to him; and as he sat and looked at her, she would become uncomfortably conscious of the beating of her heart; in fact at times it would almost suffocate her, and her cheeks would become as fire.
She wondered if he noticed it. But he seemed concerned only for her welfare, and anxiously inquired how she felt. She was not doing well, it seemed, and the doctor was greatly troubled; her temperature had not become normal since the operation, and they could not account for it, as she was suffering no more than the usual amount of pain. To Corydon this was a matter of no importance; she was willing to lie there all day, if only the hour of Mr. Harding’s visit would come more quickly. She was beginning to be alarmed because she had such difficulty in controlling her excitement.
The magic hour would strike, and the door of hope open, and there upon the threshold he would appear, in all his superb manhood. Corydon thought she had never before met a man who gave her such an impression of vitality. He was splendid; he was like a young Viking, who brought into the room with him the pure air of the Northern mountains. When he looked at her, his eyes assumed a wonderful expression, a “golden” expression, as Corydon described it to herself. And day after day she clothed this Viking in more lustrous garments, woven from the threads of her imagination, her innermost desires and her dreams. And always at sight of him, her heart beat faster, her head became hotter; until the bed she lay upon became a bed of burning coals. She realized at last what had happened to her, that she loved—yes, that she loved! But she must not let her Viking see it; that would be unpardonable, it would damn her forever in his sight. And so she struggled with her secret. At night she slept in fitful starts, and in the morning she lay pale and sombre. But when he came she was all brilliancy and animation.
Section 6. Each night the doctor would look anxiously at his thermometer; it was a source of great worry to him and to Corydon’s parents that the fever did not abate. Also, needless to say, the news worried Thyrsis; all the more, because it meant a long stay in the hospital, and more of their money gone. At last he came up to town to see about it; and Corydon thought to herself, “This is very wrong of me. It is Thyrsis I ought to be interested in, it is his sympathy I ought to be craving.”
She brought the image of Thyrsis before her; it seemed vague and unreal. She found that she remembered mostly the unattractive aspects of him. And this brought a pang to her. “He is good and noble,” she told herself; she forced herself to think of generous things that he had done.
He came; and then she felt still more ashamed. He had been working very hard, and was pale and haggard; it was becoming to him to be that way. Recollections came back to her in floods; yes, he was truly good and noble!
He sat by her bedside, and she told him about the operation, and poured out the hunger of her soul to him. He stayed all the morning with her, and he came again and spent the afternoon with her. He read to her and kissed her and soothed her—his influence was very calming, she found. After he had gone for the night, Corydon lay thinking, “I still love him!”
How strange it was that she could love two men at once! It was surely very wrong! She would never have dreamed that she, Corydon, could do such a thing. She thought of Harry Stuart, and of the unacknowledged thrill of excitement which his presence had brought to her. “And now here it is again,” she mused—“only this time it is worse! What can—be the matter with me?”
Then she wondered, “Do I really love Mr. Harding? Haven’t I got over it now?” But the least thinking of him sufficed to set her heart to thumping again; and so she shrunk from that train of thought. She wanted to love her husband.
He came again the next morning, and Corydon found that she was very happy in his presence. Her fever was slightly lower, and she thought, “I will get well quickly now.”
But alas, she had reckoned in this without Thyrsis! To sit in the hospital all day was a cruel strain upon him; the more so as he had been entirely unprepared for it. Corydon had assured him that the operation would be nothing, and that she would not need him; and so he had just finished a harrowing piece of labor on the book. Now to stay all day and witness her struggle, to satisfy her craving for sympathy and to meet and wrestle with her despair—it was like having the last drops of his soul-energy squeezed out of him. He did not know what was troubling Corydon, but the rapport between them was so close, that he knew she was in some distress of mind.
He stood the ordeal as long as he could, and then he had to beg for respite. Cedric was down on the farm, with no one but the servants to care for him; so he would go back, and see that everything was all right, and after he had rested up for two or three days, he would come again. Corydon smiled faintly and assented—for that morning she had received a note from Mr. Harding, saying that he would be in town the next day, and would call.
So Thyrsis went away, and Corydon lay and thought the problem over again. “Yes, I love my husband; but it’s such an effort for him to love me! And why should that be? I don’t believe it would be such an effort for Mr. Harding to love me!”
So again she was seized by the thought of the young clergyman. And she was astonished at the difference in her feelings—the flood of emotion that swept over her. Her heart began to beat fast and her cheeks once more to burn. He was coming up to the city on purpose, this time; it must be that he wanted to see her very much!
That night was an especially hard one for her; she felt as though the frail shell that held her were breaking, as though her endurance were failing altogether. The fever had risen, and her bed had seemed like the burning arms of Moloch. Once she imagined that the room was stifling her, and in a sudden frenzy of impatience she struggled upon one elbow and flung her pillow across the room. In that instant she had noticed a new and sharp pain in her side; it did not leave her, though at the time she thought little about it.
She was all absorbed in the coming of Mr. Harding; by the time morning had come she had made up her mind that her one hope of deliverance was in confession. She must tell him, she must make known to him her love; and he would forgive her, and then her heart would not beat so violently at sight of him, her fever would abate and she might rest.
But when he sat there, talking to her, and looking so beautiful and so strange, she trembled, and made half a dozen vain efforts to begin. Finally she asked, “Have you ever read that poem of Heine’s—‘Ein Jüngling liebt ein M?dchen, Die hat einen Andern erw?hlt?’”
“Oh, yes,” he answered; then they were silent again. Finally Corydon nerved herself to yet another effort. “Mr. Harding,” she said, “will you come a little nearer, please. I have something very important to say to you.” And then, waveringly and brokenly, now in agonized abashment, now rushing ahead as she felt his encouragement and sympathy, she gave him the whole story of her suffering and its cause. When she came to the words “because I love you”, she closed her eyes and her spirit sank back with a great gasp of relief.
When she opened them again, his head was bowed in his hands and he did not move. “Mr. Harding,” she whispered, “Mr. Harding, you forgive me, do you not? You do not hate me?”
He roused himself with an effort. “Dear child,” said he, and as he looked at her she thought she had never seen a face so sad, so exquisite—“it is I who ask forgiveness.”
He rose and came to her bedside, and took her hand in both of his. “It would not be right for me to say to you what you have said to me. We must not speak of this any more. You will promise me this, and then you will rest, and to-morrow you will be better. Soon you will be well; and how glad your husband will be—and all of us.”
With that he pressed her hand firmly, and left the room; and Corydon turned her face to the wall, and whispered happily to herself, “Yes, he loves me, he loves me! And now I shall rest!”
Section 7. For a while she slept the sleep of exhaustion, nor did there fall across her dreams the shadow of the angel of fate who was even then placing his mark upon her forehead. Toward morning she was awakened suddenly with the sharp pain in her side; but it abated presently, and Corydon thought blissfully of the afternoon before. He would come again to her, she would see him that very day; and so what did pain matter? She was really happy at last. But as the day advanced, she became uneasy; her fever had not diminished, and the pain was becoming more persistent.
The nurse was anxious, too. Her mother came and regarded her in alarm. But she was thinking of Mr. Harding. He was coming; he might arrive at any moment.
There was a knock upon the door. Corydon’s pulse fluttered, and she whispered, “Here he is!” She could scarcely speak the words, “Come in”. But when the door opened, she saw that it was the doctor. Her heart sank, and she closed her eyes with a moan of pain. Could it be that he was not coming? Could it be that she had been mistaken—that he did not love her after all? She must see him—she must! She could not endure this suspense; she could not endure these interruptions by other people.
The doctor came and sat by her. “I must see what is the matter here,” he said. “Why do you not get well, Corydon?”
He questioned her carefully and looked grave. “I must have a consultation at once,” he said.
Corydon’s hand caught at his sleeve. “No, no!” she whispered.
“Don’t be afraid,” said the doctor. “It won’t hurt.”
“It isn’t that,” said Corydon. She all but added, “I must see Mr. Harding!”
She was wheeled into the operating-room, but this time there was no interest in her eyes as she regarded the smooth table and the shining instruments. As they lifted her upon it, she shuddered. “Oh I cannot, I cannot!” she wailed.
“There, there,” said the doctor. “Be brave. We wish simply to see what the matter is. It won’t take long.”
And they put the cone to her mouth. Corydon struggled and gasped, but it was no use, she was in the clutches of the fiend again; only this time there was no ecstasy, and no vision of Mr. Harding. Instead there was instant and sickening suffocation. Again she descended into the uttermost depths of the inferno; and it seemed as though this time the brave will was not equal to the battle before it.
The surgeons made their examination, and they discovered more diseased tissue, and a slowly spreading infection. So there was nothing for it but to operate again—they held a quick consultation, and then went ahead. And afterwards they labored and sweated, and by dint of persistent effort, and every device at their command, they fanned into life once more the faint spark in the ashen-grey form that lay before them. But it was a feeble flame they got; as Corydon’s eyelids fluttered, the only sign of recognition that came from her lips was a moan, and from her eyes a look of dazed stupidity. But there was hope for her life, the doctors said; and they sent a telegram which Thyrsis got three days later, when he had fought his way to the town through five miles of heavy snow-drifts.
Meantime the grim fight for life was going on. In the morning Corydon opened her eyes to a burning torture, the racked and twisted nerves quivering in rebellion. It did not come in twinges of pain, it was a slow, deadening, persistent agony, that pervaded every inch of her body. She wondered how she could bear it, how she could live. And yet, strangely, inexplicably, she wanted to live. She did not know why—she had been outraged, she had been deserted by all, she was but a feeble atom of determination in the centre of a hostile universe. And yet she would pit her will against them all, God, man, and devil; they should not conquer her, she would win out.
So she would clench her teeth together and fight. For hours she would stare at the wall, the blank, unresponsive, formless wall before her; and then, when the shadows of the evening fell, and they saw she was fainting from exhaustion, they would come with the needle of oblivion, and the dauntless soul would die for the night, and return in the morning to its pitiless task.
Section 8. Thyrsis received a couple of letters at the same time as the telegram, and he took the next train for the city. It is said that a drowning man sees before him in a few moments the panorama of his whole life; but to Thyrsis were given three hours in which to recall the events of his love for Corydon. He had every reason to believe that he would find her dying; and such pangs of suffering as came to him he had never known before. He was in a crowded car, and he would not shed a tear; but he sat, crouched in a heap and staring before him, fairly quivering with pent-up and concentrated grief. God, how he loved her! What a spirit of pure flame she was—what a creature from another sky! What martyrdom she had dared for him, and how cruelly she had been punished for her daring! And now, this was the end; she was dying—perhaps dead! How was he to live without her—in the bare and barren future that he saw stretching out before him?
Flashes of memory would come to him, waves of torment roll over him. He would recall her gestures, the curves of her face, the tones of her voice, the songs that she had sung; and then would come a choking in his throat, and he would clench his hands, as a runner in the last moments of a desperate race. He thought of her as he had seen her last. He had gone away, careless and unthinking—how blind he had been! The things that he had not said to her, and that he might have said so easily! The love he had not uttered, the pardons he had not procured! The yearnings and consecrations that had remained unspoken all through their lives—ah God, what a tragedy of impotence and failure their lives had been!
Then before his soul came troops of memories, each one a fiend with a whip of fire; the words of anger that he had spoken, the acts of cruelty that he had done! The times when he had made her weep, and had not comforted her! Oh, what a fool he had been—what a blind and wanton fool! And now—if he were to find her dead, and never be able to tell her of his shame and sorrow—he knew that he would carry the memories with him all his days, they would be like blazing scars upon his soul.
She was still alive, however; and so he took a deep breath, and went at his task. There was no question now of what he could bear to do, but of what he must do; she must be saved, and who could do it but himself? Who else could take her hands and whisper to her, and fill her with new courage and hope; who else could bid her to live—to live; could rouse the fainting spirit, and bid it rise up and set forth upon the agonizing journey?
So out of the very abyss they came together. But when at last the fight was won, when the doctors an-nounced that she was out of danger, Thyrsis was fairly reeling with exhaustion. When he left her in the afternoon, he would go to his hotel-room and lie down, utterly prostrated; he would lie awake the whole night through, wrestling with the demons of horror that he had brought with him from her bedside.
So he realized that he was on the verge of collapse, and that cost what it would, he must get away. Corydon’s mother was with her, and when she was strong enough to be moved, she would be taken back to the farm. He mentioned this to Corydon, and she replied that she would be satisfied. There would be Mr. Harding also, she said; Mr. Harding wrote that he would come up to the city, and do what he could to help her in her dire distress.
Section 9. There came from the higher regions a pass upon a steamer to Florida; and so Thyrsis sailed away. With a determined effort he took all his cares, and locked them back in a far chamber of his mind. He would not think about Corydon, nor about what he would do for money when he came home; more important yet, he would clear the book out of his thoughts—he would not permit it to gnaw at him all day and all night.
And by these resolves he stood grimly. He walked the deck for hours every day; he watched the foaming green waters, and the gulls wheeling in the sky, and the sun setting over the sea, and the new moon showering its fire upon the waves. Gradually the air grew warm, and ice and snow became as an evil dream. A land of magic it seemed to which Thyrsis came—the beauty of it enfolded him like a clasp of love. He saw pine-forests, and swamps with alligators in them, and live oaks draped with trailing grey moss. The clumps of palmettos fascinated him—he had seen pictures of such trees in the tropics, and would hardly have been astonished to see a herd of elephants in their shadows.
He found a beach, snow-white and hard, upon which he walked for uncounted miles. He gathered strange shells and crabs, and watched the turkey-buzzards on the shore, and the slow procession of the pelicans, sailing past above the tops of the breakers. He saw the black fins of the grampuses cutting the water, and thought that they were sharks. He stood for hours at a time up to his waist in the surf, casting for sea-bass; he got few fish, but joy and excitement he got in abundance.
Then, back upon the hammocks—to walk upon the hard shell roads, and see orange and lemon-groves, and gardens filled with roses and magnolias, and orchards of mulberry and fig-trees. Truly this must have been the land which the poet had described—
   “Where every prospect pleases,
    And only man is vile.”
 
Thyrsis stayed in a humble boarding-house, but nearby was one of the famous winter-resorts of the Florida East Coast, and he was free to go there, and wander about the lobbies and piazzas of the palatial hotels, and watch the idle rich at their diversions. A strange society they were—it seemed as if the scum of the civilization of forty-five states had been blown into this bit of back-water. Here were society women, jaded with dissipation; stock-brokers and financiers, fleeing from the strain of the “Street”; here were parasites of every species, who, having nothing to do at home—or perhaps not even having any home—had come to this land of warmth to prolong their orgies. They raced over the roads and beaches in autos, and over the water in swift motor-boats; they dressed themselves half a dozen times a day, they fed themselves upon rich and costly foods, they gambled and gossiped and drank and wantoned their time away. As he watched them it was all that Thyrsis could do to keep himself from beginning another manifesto for the “Appeal to Reason”. Oh, if only the toilers of the nation could be brought here, and shown what became of the wealth they produced!
As if to complete his study of winter-resort manners and morals, Thyrsis encountered a college acquaintance whose father had become enormously rich through a mining speculation, and was here with a party of friends in a private-train. So he was whirled off in one of half a dozen automobiles, and rode for a hundred miles or so to an inland lake, and sat down to an al fresco luncheon of such delicacies as paté de fois gras and jellied grouse and champagne. Afterwards the young people wandered about and amused themselves, and the elders played “bridge”, in the face of all the raptures of this wonderland of nature.
A strange and sombre figure Thyrsis must have seemed to these people, with his brooding air and his worn clothing; he rode home in an auto with half a dozen youths and maidens, and while they flashed by lakes and rivers that gleamed in the golden moon-light, and by orchards and gardens from which the mingled scents of millions of blossoms were wafted to them, these voung people jested together and laughed and sang.
And Thyrsis lay back and watched them and studied them. Their music was what is called “rag-time”—they had apparently found nothing better to do with their lives than to learn hundreds of verses and melodies, of which the subject-matter was the whims and moods of the half-tamed African race—their vanities and their barbarous impulses, and above all their hot and lustful passions. Song after song they poured forth, the substance of which was summed up in one line that Thyrsis happened to carry away with him—
   “Ah lubs you, mah honey, yes, Ah do!”
 
It seemed to him such a curious and striking commentary upon the stage which leisure-class culture had reached, in the course of its reversion to savagery.
Section 10. Thyesis came home after three weeks, browned and refreshed, and ready to take up the struggle again. He came with the cup of his love and sympathy overflowing; eager to see Corydon, and to tell her his adventures, and to share with her his store of new hope.
He found her reclining on the piazza of the farm-house. The April buds were bursting upon the trees, and the odor of spring was in the air; also, the flush of health was stealing back into Corydon’s cheeks. How beautiful she looked, and how soft and gentle was her caress, and what wistfulness and tenderness were in the smile with which she greeted him!
There was the baby also, tumultuous and excited. Thyrsis took him upon his knee, and while he fondled him and played with hi............