“Well, you better not do it any more, that’s all,” said she. “I’m sure you needn’t worry about me—I’ll take care of myself.”
Thyrsis looked at her again; she was no longer beautiful. Her face was coarse, and her anger did not make it any better. His humility made no impression.
“It is so wrong—” he began; but she interrupted him.
“Preaching won’t help it any,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it. Good-bye.”
So she turned and walked away; and Thyrsis stood there, white, and shuddering, until at last he started and strode off. Clear through the town he went, and out into the black country beyond, seeing nothing, caring about nothing. He flung himself down by the roadside, and lay there moaning for hours: “My God, my God, what shall I do?”
Section 12. It was nearly morning when he came back and crept upstairs to his room; and here he sat by the bedside, gazing at the haggard face in the glass. At such times as this he discovered a something in his features that filled him with shuddering; he discovered it in his words, and in the very tone of his voice—the sins of the fathers were being visited upon the children! What an old, old story it was to him—this anguish and remorse! These ecstasies of resolution that vanished like a cloud-wrack—these protestations and noble sentiments that counted for naught in conduct! And his was to be the whole heritage of impotence and futility; he, too, was to struggle and agonize—and to finish with his foot in the trap!
This idea was like a white-hot goad to him. After such an experience there would be several months of toil and penance, and of savage self-immolation. It was hard to punish a man who had so little; but Thyrsis managed to find ways. For several months at a time he would go without those kinds of food that he liked; and instead of going to bed at one o’clock he would read the New Testament in Greek for an hour. He would leap out of bed in the morning and plunge into cold water; and at night, when he felt a longing upon him, he would go out and run for hours.
He took to keeping diaries and writing exhortations to himself. Because he could no longer use the theological prayers he had been taught, he fashioned new invocations for himself: prayers to the unknown sources of his vision, to the new powers of his own soul—“the undiscovered gods,” as he called them. Above all he prayed to his vision of the maiden who waited the issue of this battle, and held the crown of victory in her keeping—
“Somewhere beneath the sun,
Those quivering heart-strings prove it,
Somewhere there must be one
Made for this soul to love it—
Some one whom I could court
With no great change of manner,
Still holding reason’s fort,
While waving fancy’s banner!”
All of which things made a subtle change in his attitude to Corydon, whom he still met occasionally. Corydon was now a young lady, beautiful, even stately, with an indescribable atmosphere of gentleness and purity about her. All things unclean shrunk from her presence; and so in times of distress he liked to be with her. He would drop vague hints as to sufferings and temptations, and told her that she seemed like a “goddess” to him.
Corydon received this with some awe, but with more perplexity. She could not understand why anyone should struggle so much, or why a youth should take such a sombre view of things. But she was perfectly willing to seem like a “goddess” to anyone, and she was glad if that helped him. She was touched when he read her a poem of his own, a poem which he held very precious. He called it
“A song of the young-eyed Cherubim
In the days of the making of man.”
And in it he had set forth the view of life that had come to him—
“The quest of the spirit’s gain—
Lured by the graces of pleasure,
And lashed by the furies of pain.
Thy weakness shall sigh for an Eden,
But the sword shall flame at the gate;
For far is the home of thy vision
And strong is the hand of thy fate!”
Section 13. Though Thyrsis had no time to realize it, it was in this long and bitter struggle that he won whatever power he had in his future life. It was here that he learned “to hold his will above him as his law”, and to defy the world for the sake of his ideal. And then, too, this toil was the key that opened to him the treasure-house of a new art—which was music.
Until he was nearly out of college Thyrsis had scarcely heard any music at all. Church-hymns he had learned, and a few songs in school. But now in poetry and other books he met with references to composers, and to the meaning of great music; and the things that were described there were the things he loved, and he began to feel a great eagerness to get at them. As a first step he bought a mandolin, and set to work to teach himself to play, a task at which he wrought with great diligence. At the same time a friend had bought a guitar, and the two set to work to play duets. The first preliminary was the getting of the instruments in tune; and not knowing that the mandolin is an octave higher than the guitar, they spent a great deal of time and broke a great many guitar-strings.
As the next step, Thyrsis went to hear a great pianist, and sat perplexed and wondering. There was a girl next to him who sobbed, and Thyrsis watched her as he might have watched a house on fire. Only once the pianist pleased him—when he played a pretty little piece called somebody’s “impromptu”, in which he got a gleam of a “tune.” Poor Thyrsis went and got that piece, and took it home to study it, with the help of the mandolin; but, alas, in the maze of notes he could not even find the “tune.”
But if he could not understand the music, he could read books about it; he read a whole library—criticism of music, analysis of music, histories of music, composers of music; and so gradually he learned the difference between a sarabande and a symphony, and began to get some idea of what he went out for to hear. At first, at the concerts, all he could think of was to crane his neck and recognize the different instruments; he heard whole symphonies, while doing nothing but watching for the “movements,” and making sure he hadn’t skipped any. One heartless composer ran two movements into one, and so Thyrsis’ concert came out one piece short at the end, and he sat gazing about him in consternation when the audience rose to go. Afterwards he read long dissertations about each symphony before he went, and he would note down the important points and watch for them. The critic would expatiate upon “the long-drawn dissonance forte, that marks the close of the working-out portion”; and Thyrsis would watch for that long-drawn dissonance, and be wondering if it was never coming—when suddenly the whole symphony would come to an end! Or he would read about a “quaint capering measure led off by the bassoons,” or a “frantic sweep of the violins over a trombone melody,” and he would watch for these events with eyes and ears alert, and if he found them—eureka!
But such things could not last forever; for Thyrsis had a heart full of eagerness and love, and of such is the soul of music. And just then was a time when he was sick and worn—when it seemed to him that the burden of his life was more than he could bear. He was haunted by the thought that he would lose his long battle, that he would go under and go down; and then it was that chance took him to a concert which closed with the great “C-Minor Symphony.”
Thyrsis had read a life of Beethoven, and he knew that here was one of the hero-souls—a man who had grappled with the fiends, and passed through the valley of death. And now he read accounts of this titan symphony, and learned that it was a battle of the human spirit with despair. He read Beethoven’s words about the opening theme—“So knocks fate upon the door!” And a fierce and overwhelming longing possessed him to get at the soul of that symphony.
He went to the concert, and heard nothing of the rest of the music, but sat like a man in a dream; and when the time came for the