Corydon, in spite of all her anti-clericalism, believed in immortality; she laid claim to intuitions and illuminations concerning it. And to Thyrsis, on the other hand, the idea of immortality was the consummation of all unfaith. To him life was a bubble upon the stream of time, a shadow of clouds upon the mountains; there was nothing about it that could be or should be immortal.
“The act of faith,” he cried, “is to give ourselves into the arms of life, to take it as it comes, to rejoice in its infinite unfoldment, the ‘plastic dance of circumstance’; to behold the budding flower and the new-born suns as equal expressions of the joy of becoming. But people are weak, they love themselves, and they set themselves up as the centre of existence!”
But Corydon was personal, and loved life; and she stood out that death was unthinkable—that she had the sense of infinity within her. Thyrsis strove to make her see that one was to wreak one’s hunger for infinity at each moment, and not put it off to any future age; that life was a thing for itself, and needed no sequel to justify it. “It is a free gift, and we have no claim upon it; we must take it on the terms of the giver.”
From that they came to religion. Thyrsis loved the forms of the old faiths, because of the poetry there was in them; and so he wrestled with Corydon’s paganism. He tried to show her how one could read “Paradise Lost” and the English prayer-book, precisely as one read Virgil and Homer; to which Corydon answered that she had been to Sunday-school.
“But you once believed in Santa Claus!” he retorted. “And does that make you quarrel with him now? Every time you read a novel, don’t you pretend to believe in people who never existed?”
He went on to show her how much she lost of the sublime and inspiring things of the past. He took the story of Jesus. It mattered not in the least if it was fiction or fact—it was there, as an achievement of the human spirit. He showed her the man of the gospels—not the stained-glass god with royal robes and shining crown, but the humble workingman, with his dream of a heaven nearby, and a father who loved his children without distinction. He went about among the poor and humble, the world’s first revolutionist; teaching the supremacy of the soul—a doctrine which was to be as dynamite beneath the pillars of all established institutions. He lived as a tramp and an outcast, and he died the death of a criminal; and now those who had murdered him were using his doctrines to enslave the world!—All this was a new idea to Corydon, and she resolved forthwith that she would begin her readings with the New Testament.
Section 6. So it went, until Thyrsis looked up with a start, and saw that the shadows were falling. It was five o’clock, and they had not stopped to eat! Even so, they had no time to cook, but made a cold meal—and talked all the time they were eating.
Then Corydon said, “I must start for home.”
“You won’t want any supper,” said Thyrsis. “Let’s see the sunset first.”
“But mother will be expecting me,” she objected.
“She’ll know you’re all right,” he replied.
So they climbed the hill, and sat and watched the sunset and the rising full moon. The air was clear, and the sky like opal, and the pale, pearly tints of the clouds were ravishing to behold. To Thyrsis it seemed that these colors were an image of the soul that was disclosed to him. He would have been at a loss for words to describe the extraordinary sense of purity that Corydon gave to him; it was not simply her maidenhood—it was something far more rare than that. Here was an utterly perfect human soul; a soul without speck or blemish—without a base idea, with no trace of a vanity, unaware what a pretense might be. The joy and wonder of life welled spontaneously in her, she moved to a noble impulse as a cloud moves before the wind. She was like a creature from the skies they were watching.
And here, in the silver moonlight, a memorable hour came to them. Thyrsis told her of his consecration, and why he lived his hermit-life. He had known for years that he was not as other men; and now every hour it was becoming clearer to him. He shrunk from the word, because it had been desecrated by the world; but it was Genius. More and more frequently there was coming to him this strange ecstasy, the source of which he could not guess; it was like the giving way of flood-gates within him—the pouring in of a tide of wonder and joy. It made him tremble like a leaf, it made him cry aloud and fall down upon the ground exhausted. And yet, whatever the strain might be, he never lost his grip upon himself; rather, all the powers of his mind seemed to be multiplied—it seemed as if all existence became one with his soul.
Never before had he uttered a word of this to anyone. No one could understand the burden it had laid upon him. For this was the thing that all the world was seeking, for the lack of which the world was dying; and it was his to give or to withhold, to lose or to save. He had to forge it and shape it, he had to embody it, to set it forth in images and symbols. And that meant a terrific labor, a feat of mental and emotional endurance quite indescribable. He must hold it, though it burned like fire; he must clutch it to his bosom, though it tore at his heart-strings.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I fail and have to give up; and then I have nothing but a memory without words—or perhaps a few broken phrases that seem mere nonsense. Then I am like a man who has seen some loved one drowned or burned to death before his eyes. It is a thing so ineffable, so precious; and some power seeks to tear it away from me, to bear it into oblivion forever. I can’t know, of course—it might come to some one else—or it might never come again. The feeling I have is like that of a mother for an unborn child; if I do not give it life, no one ever will. And don’t you see—compared with that, what does anything else count? I would lie down and be crushed to pieces, if that would help; truly, I would suffer less than I suffer in what I try to do. And so, the things that other men care for—they simply don’t exist for me. I must have a little money, because I have to have something to eat, and a place to work in. But I don’t want position or fame—I don’t shrink from any ridicule or humiliation. It seems like a mad thing to say, but I have nothing to do either with men’s evil or with their good. I am not bound by any of their duties; I can’t have any country or any home, I can’t have wife or children—I can hardly even have any friends. Don’t you see?”
“Yes,” whispered Corydon, deeply moved, “I see.”
“Look,” he went on—“see all the vice and misery in the world—the cruelty and greed and hate. And see all the stupid and petty things, the narrow motives, the vanities and the jealousies! And all that is because people haven’t this thing that has come to me; they don’t know the possibilities of life, they lack the sense of its preciousness and sacredness. And they seek and seek—and go astray! Take drunkenness, for instance; that brings them joy, but it’s a false scent, it leads them over a precipice. I’ve been down at the bottom of it—you know why I have to go there, and what I’ve seen. And that is where the best of men’s faculties go—yes, it’s literally true! The men who are dull and plodding, they are contented; it’s the men who are adventurous and aspiring who come to that precipice. I walk down an avenue and see the lines of saloons with their gleaming lights, and that thought is like a scream of anguish in my soul; there came a phrase to me once, that I wanted to cry out to people—‘the graveyards of your genius! the graveyards of your genius!’ ”
Corydon was gazing at his uplifted face. She said, “That is how Jesus must have felt, when he wept over Jerusalem.”
“Yes,” said Thyrsis. “It is a new religion trying to be born. Only nowadays they don’t persecute you, they just ignore you. They don’t hang you up on a cross and make you conspicuous and picturesque—they ridicule you and let you starve. And that is what I face, you see. I’ve saved a hundred dollars—just barely enough to buy me food until I’ve written the book!”
“And other people have so much!” cried Corydon.
“So much—and no idea what to do with it. They just fling it away, in a drunken frenzy. And down below are the