Читать книгу Love's Pilgrimage - Upton Sinclair - Страница 7

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The streamlet tinkled on. She sat, gazing about her at each familiar tree and rock. And meanwhile he was reading again from the book—

“Here, too, our shepherd-pipes we first assay’d!”

“Is that from ‘Thyrsis’?” she asked. “Read me those lines that we used, to love so much.”

And so he turned the page, and read again—

“A fugitive and gracious light he seeks,

Shy to illumine; and I seek it, too.

This does not come with houses or with gold,

With place, with honor, and a flattering crew:

’Tis not in the world’s market bought and sold—

But the smooth-slipping weeks

Drop by, and leave its seeker still untired;

Out of the heed of mortals he is gone,

He wends unfollow’d, he must house alone;

Yet on he fares, by his own heart inspired.”

Section 1. On the train Corydon was writing a letter to a friend, to say where she was going, and that Thyrsis was there. “I don’t expect to see anything of him,” she wrote. “He grows more egotistical and more contemptuous every day, and I cordially dislike him.”

But when a man has spent three or four weeks with no company save the squirrels and the owls, there comes over him a mood of sociability, when the sight of a friendly face is an event. Thyrsis had now written several chapters of his book, and the first fury of his creative impulse had spent itself. So when Corydon stepped from the train, she found him waiting there to greet her; and he told her that he was laying in supplies for a feast, and that on the morrow she and her mother were to come out and see his fairy-palace and have a picnic dinner.

They came; and the May put on her finest raiment for their greeting. The sun shone warm and bright, and there was a humming and stirring in grass and thicket; one could feel the surge of the spring-time growth as a living flood. There was a glory of young green over the hill-sides, and a quivering sheen of white in the aspens and birches. Corydon clasped her hands and cried out in rapture when she saw it.

And Thyrsis, picturesque in his old corduroy trousers and his grey flannel shirt, played the host. He showed them his domestic establishment—wherein things were set in order for the first time since he had come. He told all his adventures: how the cold had crept in at night, and he had to fiddle to keep his courage up; how he had slept in a canvas-cot for the first time, and piled all the bedding on top, and wondered that he was cold; how he had left the pail with the freshly-roasted beef on the piazza, and a wild cat had carried off pail and all. He made fun of his amateur house-keeping—he would forget things and let them burn, or let the fire go out; and he had tried living altogether on cold food, to the great perplexity of his stomach.

Then he gave a demonstration of his hard-won culinary skill. He boiled rice and raisins, and fried bacon and eggs; and they had fresh bread and butter, and jam and pickles, and a festive cake. And after they had feasted, Thyrsis stretched himself and leaned back against the trunk of a tree, and gazed up at the sky, quoting the words of a certain one-eyed Kalandar, son of a king, “Verily, this indeed is life! ’Tis pity ’tis fleeting!”

Afterwards he took Corydon for a walk. They climbed the hill where he came to battle with the stormwinds, and to watch the sunsets and the moon rising over the lake. And then they went down into the glen, where the mountain streamlet tumbled. Here had been wood-sorrel, and a carpet of the white trillium; and now there was adder’s tongue, quaint and saucy, and columbine, and the pale dusty corydalis. There was soft new moss underfoot, and one walked as if in a temple.

Thyrsis pointed out a seat beside a deep bubbling pool. “Here’s where I sit and write,” he said.

“And how comes the book?” asked Corydon.

“Oh, I’m hammering at it—that’s the best I can say.”

“What is it?”

“Why—it’s a story. I suppose it’ll be called a romance, though I don’t like the word.”

Corydon pondered for a moment. “I wouldn’t expect you to be writing anything romantic,” she said.

Thyrsis, occupied with his own thoughts, observed, “I might call it a revolutionary romance.”

“What is it about?”

He hesitated. “It happens in the middle ages,” he said. “There’s a minstrel and a princess.”

“That sounds interesting,” said Corydon.

Now in the period of pregnancy the artist’s mood is one of secretiveness. But afterwards there comes a time for promulgation and rejoicing; and already there had been hints of this in the mind of Thyrsis. The great secret that he was cherishing—what would be the world’s reception of it? And now suddenly a wild idea came to him. He had heard somewhere that it is the women who read fiction. And was not Corydon a perfect specimen of the average middle-class young lady, and therefore of that mysterious potentiality, “the public”, to which he must appeal? Why not see what she would think of it?

He took the plunge. “Would you like me to read it to you?” he asked.

“Why, certainly,” she replied, and then added, gently, “If it wouldn’t be a desecration.”

“Oh, no,” said Thyrsis. “You see, when it’s been printed, all sorts of people will read it.”

So he went back to the house and brought the precious manuscript; and he placed Corydon in the seat of inspiration, and sat beside her and read.

In many ways this was a revolutionary romance. Thyrsis had not spent any of his time delving into other people’s books for “local color”; he was not relying for his effects upon gabardines and hauberks, and a sprinkling of “Yea, sires,” and “prithees.” His castle was but the vaguely outlined background of a stage upon which living hearts wrought out their passions. One saw the banquet-hall, with its tapestries and splendor, and the master of it, the man of force; there were swift scenes that gave one a glimpse of the age-long state of things—

“Right forever on the scaffold,

Wrong forever on the throne.”

There was a quarrel, and a cruel sentence about to be executed; and then the minstrel came. His fame had come before him, and so the despot, in half-drunken playfulness, left the deciding of the quarrel to him. He was brought to the head of the table, and the princess was led in; and so these two met face to face.

Here Thyrsis paused, and asked, “Are you interested?”

“Go on, go on,” said Corydon.

So he read about his princess, who was the embodiment of all the virtues of the unknown goddess of his fancy. She was proud yet humble, aloof yet compassionate, and above all ineffably beautiful. And as for the minstrel—

“The minstrel was fair and young.

His heart was of love and fire.”

He took his harp, and first he pacified the quarrel, and then he sang to the lady. He sang of love, and the poet’s vision of beauty; but most of all he sang of the free life of the open. He sang of the dreams and the spirit-companions of the minstrel, and of the wondrous magic that he wields—

“Secrets of all future ages

Hover in mine ecstasy;

Treasures never known to mortals

Hath my fancy hid for thee!”

He sang the spells that he would weave for her, the far journeys she should take—

“For thy soul a river flowing

Swiftly, over golden sands,

With the singing of the steersman

Stealing into wonderlands!”

Section 2. This song was as far as Thyrsis had written, and he paused. Corydon was sitting with her hands clasped, and a look of enthrallment upon her face. “Oh, beautiful! beautiful!” she cried.

A thrill of pleasure went through the poet. “You like it, then?” he said.

“Oh, I like it!” she answered. And then she gazed at him, with wide-open eyes of amazement. “But you! You!” she exclaimed.

“Why not I?” he asked.

“How in the world did you do it? Where did you get it from?”

“It is mine,” said Thyrsis, quickly.

“But I can’t imagine it! I had no idea you were interested in such things!”

“But how could you know what I am interested in?”

“I see how you live—apart from everybody. And you spend all your time in books!”

Thyrsis suddenly recollected something which had amused him very much. Corydon had been reading “Middlemarch,” and had told him that Dr. Casaubon reminded her of him. “And so I’m still just a bookworm to you!” he laughed.

“But isn’t your interest in things always intellectual?” she asked.

“Then you suppose I’m doing this just as an exercise in technique?” he countered.

“It’s taken me quite by surprise,” said Corydon.

“We have three faculties in us,” Thyrsis propounded—“intellect, feeling, and will; and to be a complete human being, we have to develop all of them.”

“But you spend so much time piling up learning!”

“I need to know a great many things,” he said. “I’m not conscious of studying anything I don’t need for my purpose.”

“What is the purpose?” she asked.

He touched the precious manuscript. “This,” he said.

There was a pause.

“But you lose so much when you cut yourself off from the world,” said Corydon. “And there are other people, whom you might help.”

“People don’t need my help; or at least, they don’t want it.”

“But how can you know that—if you never go among them?”

“I can judge by the lives they live.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Corydon, quickly, “but people aren’t to blame for the lives they live!”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because—they can’t help them. They are bound fast.”

“They should break loose.”

“That is easy for you to say,” said Corydon. “You have no ties.”

“I did have them—I might have them still. But I broke them.”

“Ah, but you are a man!”

“What difference does that make?”

“It makes all the difference in the world. You can earn money, you can go away by yourself. But suppose you were a girl—shut up in a home, and told that that was your ‘sphere’?”

“I’d fight,” said Thyrsis—“I’d break my way out somehow, never fear. If one doesn’t break out, it simply means that his desire is not strong enough.”

Thyrsis had been surprised at the depth of Corydon’s interest in his manuscript; he had not supposed that she would be so susceptible to anything of the imagination. And now he was surprised to see that her hands were clenched tightly, and that she sat staring ahead of her intently.

“Are you dissatisfied with your life?” he asked.

“Is there anything in it that I could be satisfied with?” she cried.

“I had no idea of that,” he said.

“No,” she replied; “that only shows how stupid you can be!”

“But—you never showed any signs—”

“Didn’t you know that I was trying to prepare for college last year?”

“Yes; but you gave it up.”

“What could I do? I had no help—no encouragement. I was groping like a blind person. And I told you about it.”

“But I told you what to study,” objected Thyrsis.

“Yes,” said the girl; “but how could I do it? You know how to study—you’ve been taught. But I don’t know anything, and I don’t know how to find anything out. I began on the Latin, but I didn’t even know how the words should be pronounced.”

“Nobody else knows that,” observed Thyrsis, somewhat inconsequently.

“It was all so dull and dreary,” she went on—“everything they would have had me learn. I wanted things that had life in them, things that were beautiful and worth while—like this book of yours, for instance.”

“I am really delighted that you like it,” said Thyrsis, touched by that.

“Tell me the rest of it,” she said.

Section 3. Thyrsis told his story at some length; in the ardor of her sympathy his imagination took fire, and he told it eloquently, he discovered new beauties in it that he had not seen before. And Corydon listened with growing delight and amazement.

“So that is the way you spend your time!” she exclaimed.

“That is the way,” he said.

“And that is why you live like a hermit!”

“Yes, that is why.”

“And you think that you would lose your vision if you went among people?”

“I know that I should.”

“But how do you know?”

“I know because I have tried. You don’t realize how hard I have to work over a thing like this. I have carried it in my mind for a year; I have lived for nothing else—I have literally had no other interest in the world. Every sentence I have read to you has been the product of work added to work—of one impulse piled upon another—of thinking and criticizing and revising. Just the little bit I have done has taken me a whole month, and I have hardly stopped to eat; it’s been my first thought in the morning and my last at night. And when the mood of it comes to me, then I work in a kind of frenzy that lasts for hours and even days; and if I give up in the middle and fall back, then I have to do it all over again. It’s like toiling up a mountain-side.”

“I see,” whispered Corydon. “And then, do you expect to have no human relationships as long as you live?”

Thyrsis pondered for a moment. “Did you ever read Mrs. Browning’s poem, ‘A Musical Instrument’?” he asked.

“No,” she answered.

“It’s a most beautiful poem,” he said; “and it’s hardly ever quoted or read, that I can find. It tells how the great god Pan came down by the river-bank, and cut one of the reeds to make himself a pipe. He sat there and played his music upon it—