Love's Pilgrimage. Upton Sinclair
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