and if he did not do it frequently, it was because he had so many other
matters on his mind. There is a story having to do with this period,
which ought to be told because of the satisfaction it will bring to the
lovers of love, and to those who dislike the puritanical Thyrsis and
will be pleased to see him “get his.”
It was the winter of 1910-11, when Corydon had gone south, having once
more decided upon a divorce. Thyrsis was a free man, so he thought--and,
incidentally, a lonely and restless one. He was thirty-two at this time,
and went up to New York to attend a gathering in Carnegie Hall, where
the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was acting as host to Victor
Berger, socialist Congressman-elect. Thyrsis came early, and in one of
the aisles came face to face with a lovely young woman of twenty-one or
two, wearing the red badge of an usher. In those observant eyes and that
frank open countenance was revealed something he had been seeking for a
long time; there was a mental flash, and the two moved automatically
toward each other. Said she, without hesitation: “You are Thyrsis?” Said
he: “You are Inez Milholland?”
A Vassar girl, with a wealthy father, Inez had joined the Socialist
Party and had become an active suffragette--all of which, of course,
made a sensation in the newspapers. That evening, after the meeting,
Thyrsis went with her to her hotel, and they sat in the lobby conversing
until three o’clock in the morning, when the place was deserted by all
but the night watchman. What did they not talk about, in the vast range
of the socialist and suffrage movements in America, and in England,
where Inez had been to school; the people they knew, the books they had
read, the events that the future held behind its veil!
“I never met anyone I could talk to so easily,” said Thyrsis; and Inez
returned the compliment. “But don’t fall in love with me,” she added.
When he asked, “Why not?” she answered, “I am already in love, and you
would only make yourself unhappy.” Later, she told him that she too was
unhappy; it was a married man, and she would not break up another
woman’s home but would only eat her heart out. Again that old, old
story that Heine sings, and for which neither socialists nor suffragists
have any remedy!
_Es ist eine alte Geschichte_
_Doch klingt sie immer neu._
Inez desired to meet Berger, and he came next morning. The three of us
went for a drive and had lunch at the Claremont. We spent the afternoon
walking in the park, then had dinner at the hotel, and spent the evening
together, solving all the problems of human society. It was another
intellectual explosion, this time _à trois_. Said the socialist
Congressman: “Thyrsis, if it wouldn’t be that I am a family man, I would
run away with that girl so quick you would never see her once again.”
Thyrsis repeated that to Inez, who smiled and said, “He is mistaken; it
is not like that.”
Thyrsis disregarded the sisterly advice that had been given to him. He
fell in love--with such desperate and terrifying violence as he had
never conceived possible in his hard-working, sober life. He understood
for the first time the meaning of that ancient symbol of the little
archer with the bow and arrow. Commonplace as the metaphor seemed, there
was no other to be used; it was like being shot--a convulsive pain, a
sense of complete collapse, an anguish repeated, day after day, without
any respite or hope of it.
He could not give up. It seemed to him that here was the woman who had
been made for him, and the thought that he had to lose her was not to be
borne. He would go back to Arden and write letters--such mad, wild,
pain-distracted letters as would satisfy the most exacting intellectual,
the most implacable hater of Puritans! Inez afterward assured him that
she had destroyed these letters, which was kind of her. She was always
kind, and straightforward, saying what she meant, as men and women will
do in utopia.
The storm passed, as storms do, and new life came to Thyrsis. Four years
afterward he met Inez Milholland again. She was now married, and it
seemed to Thyrsis that the world had laid its paralyzing hand upon her;
she was no longer simple, in the manner of the early gods. Was it that
the spell was broken? Or was it that Thyrsis had an abnormal dislike
for fashionable costumes, large picture hats, and long jade earrings?
Another two years, and Inez, a suffrage politician, came out to
California and broke her heart trying to carry the state for Hughes, on
the theory that he would be more generous to the cause than Woodrow
Wilson. This was supposed to be strategy, but to Thyrsis it seemed
insanity. In any case, what a melancholy descent from the young ardors
of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society! She died of exhaustion.
II
The story of Corydon and Thyrsis comes to an end in the year 1911.
George Sterling was coming from California, Harry Kemp from Kansas; Mary
Craig Kimbrough was in New York to consult with a publisher, and Corydon
had come with her.
George Sterling, the day of his arrival, came to call upon Corydon in
her father’s home. There he met the young lady from Mississippi and
promptly fell upon his knees before her, after the fashion of romantic
poets, even after they are forty. She was pale from a winter’s labor
over manuscript, and George called her a “star in alabaster” and other
extravagant things that moved her to merry laughter. Later on, Thyrsis
met the couple walking on the street and stopped to greet them. Said
Thyrsis matter-of-factly: “You don’t look well, Craig. Really, you look
like a skull!” George raged, “I am going to kill that man some day!” But
Craig replied, “There is the first man in the world who ever told me the
truth.”
George Sterling, an unhappily married man, wanted to marry Craig. She
told him, “I can never love any man.” When he demanded to know the
reason, she told him that her heart had been broken by an early love
affair at home; she knew she would never love again. But the poet could
not accept that statement; he began writing sonnets to her--more than a
hundred in the course of the next year. Eighteen years later it was my
sad duty to edit these _Sonnets to Craig_ for publication, and they were
received by the high-brow literary world with some uncertainty. They
have a fatal defect--it is possible to understand what they mean.
Literary tastes move in cycles, and just now poetry lovers are
impressed by eccentricities of language and punctuation. But the day
will come when they care about real feelings, expressed in musical
language, and then they will thrill to such lines as these:
All gracious things, and delicate and sweet,
Within the spaces of thy beauty meet
And again:
Sweet in this love are terrors that beguile
And joys that make a hazard of my breath.
And again:
Stand back from me! Have mercy for a space,
Lest madness break thine image in my mind!
In connection with this unhappy love affair, there was another curious
tangle of circumstances. The girlhood sweetheart of Craig in the Far
South had brought to her a poem so sad that it had moved her to tears,
and she had carried it ever since in her memory. “The Man I Might Have
Been” was its title--the grief-stricken cry of those who fall into the
trap of John Barleycorn. Now here was the author of that poem, in love
with the same woman; and both the unhappy suitors--the Southern boy and
the crowned poet of California--were fated to end their lives by their
own hands, and those of John Barleycorn.
Thyrsis was invited up to New York to give advice about the life of
Winnie Davis. It was April and happened to be warm, so he wore tennis
shoes because they were comfortable; to make up for this informality he
added kid gloves--which seemed to Mary Craig Kimbrough of Mississippi
the funniest combination ever heard of. She said nothing, being the soul
of politeness; but her lively red-brown eyes took in everything. She was
learning about these strange new creatures called radicals, and their
ideas, some of which appeared sensible and others crazy. Watching
Thyrsis, she thought, “The funny, funny man!” She watched him, thinking
the same thought for a matter of half a century; but she did not always
have to be polite about it.
Corydon, Thyrsis, and Craig settled themselves in the little cottage on
the edge of the Forest of Arden. Springtime had come, and the Arden
folk were giving _Midsummer Night’s Dream_; Corydon was Titania, in
yellow tights and a golden crown. At this juncture came Harry Kemp,
having completed another year at the University of Kansas; he was
lugging two suitcases full of books and manuscripts, plus an extra blue
shirt and a pair of socks. There was a girl at Arden who was a lover of
poetry, and Thyrsis, fond matchmaker, had the idea that the poet might
become interested in this girl. But the fates had other plans, and were
not slow to reveal them. Corydon was interested in the poet.
It was during this time that Harry Kemp wrote a sonnet to Thyrsis and
handed it to him with the words, “You may publish this some day.” It
will not be ranked as a great sonnet, but it is curious as a part of the
story; so, after Harry’s death, his permission is accepted.
Child, wandering down the great world for a day
And with a child’s soul seeing thru and thru
The passing prejudice to Truth’s own view.
Immortal spirit robed in mortal day,
Striving to find and follow the one way
That is your way, none other’s--to be true
To that which makes a sincere man of you!
Still be yourself, and let tongues say their say!
Still fling the seed with daring hand abroad,
And, then, mayhap, the Race to come will be
Gladdened, with ripened fruit and bursting pod
Of Love, and Brotherhood, and Liberty--
Open to Nature and Her Laws from God
As spreading gulfs lie open to the Sea!
III
Corydon went to New York, to the apartment of her mother and father,
which was vacant in the summer. Harry followed her; and then came
Thyrsis, and the great divorce scandal burst upon the world. It was made
by the newspapers, so the story had to be told in _The Brass Check_.
There seems no good reason to repeat it here; suffice it to say that
Thyrsis found himself presented in the capitalist press as having
taught his wife free love and then repudiated her when she took him at
his word. The newspapers invented statements, they set traps, and
betrayed confidences--and when they got through with their victim, they
had turned his hair gray.
Corydon and Harry fled from the storm. But after a few days they came
back; and then there were interviews of many columns, and
Sunday-supplement pages with many pictures, in the course of which the
great American public learned all about Thyrsis’ dietetic eccentricities
and his objections to coffee and cigarettes. Corydon caused vast glee to
the New York smart set by describing her life partner as “an essential
monogamist”; those who read and laughed did not remember that only last
week they had read that he was a “free lover.” As a matter of fact,
neither the writers nor the readers knew what was meant by either term,
so the incongruity did not trouble them.
Thyrsis filed suit for divorce in New York state, which is ruled by
Catholic laws, administered by Catholic judges. If in his writings you
find a certain acerbity toward the Catholic political machine, bear in
mind these experiences, which seared into a writer’s soul scars never to
be effaced. The Catholic judge appointed a “referee” to hear testimony
in the case, and this referee, moved by stupidity plus idle curiosity,
asked Thyrsis questions concerning his wife’s actions that under the New
York law the husband was not permitted to answer. But the referee
demanded that they be answered, and what was Thyrsis to do? He answered;
so the Catholic judge had a pretext upon which to reject the
recommendation of his referee.
The court and the referee had between them several hundred dollars of
Thyrsis’ hard-earned money, which, under the law, they were permitted to
keep--even though Thyrsis got no divorce. He filed another suit and paid
more money, and waited another three or four months, in the midst of
journalistic excursions and alarms. Another referee took testimony, and
this time was careful to ask only the exactly prescribed questions; in
due course another decision was handed down by another Catholic judge,
who had also been “seen” by parties interested. This time the decision
was that Thyrsis had failed to beat up his wife, or to choke or stab or
poison her, or otherwise manifest masculine resentment at her
unfaithfulness; therefore he was suspected of “collusion,” and the
application was again denied. Of course the judge did not literally say
that Thyrsis should have behaved in those violent ways; but that was the
only possible implication of his decision. When a husband was fair and
decent, desiring his dissatisfied wife to find happiness if she
could--that was a dangerous and unorthodox kind of behavior, suggestive
of “radical” ideas. Men and women suspected of harboring such ideas
should be punished by being tied together in the holy bonds of matrimony
and left to tear each other to pieces like the Kilkenny cats.
In February 1912 Thyrsis took his son and departed for Europe, traveling
second-class in a third-class Italian steamer; sick in body and soul,
and not sure whether he was going to live or die, nor caring very much.
He had managed to borrow a little money for the trip, and he had a job,
writing monthly articles for _Physical Culture Magazine_ for a hundred
and fifty dollars each. As a writer of books he was destroyed, and
nobody thought he would ever have a public again. Mitchell Kennerley,
publisher of _Love’s Pilgrimage_, remarked, “If people can read about
you for two cents, they are not going to pay a dollar and a half to do
it.” _Love’s Pilgrimage_ had been published a month or two before the
divorce scandal broke and had started as a whirlwind success--selling a
thousand copies a week. The week after the scandal broke, it dropped
dead, and the publisher did not sell a hundred copies in a year.
IV
Springtime in Florence! “_Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehn?_”
Could any man walk under Tuscan skies in March and fail to be happy?
George D. Herron had a villa on the slopes towards Fiesole, where he
lived in what peace he could find; Thyrsis spent a couple of weeks with
him, and talked over old times and the state of the world, with the
great cataclysm of World War I only two years and a half in the future.
Carrie Rand Herron played Schumann’s _Widmung_ in the twilight--and for
her a death by cancer was even nearer than the war.
Was Thyrsis happy? In truth, he hardly knew where he was or what he was
doing. Places and events went by as if in a dream, and nothing had
meaning unless it spoke of pain and enslavement, in America as in Italy.
The grim castle of Strozzi was an incarnation in stone of the Beef Trust
or the Steel Trust. Crowds of olive-skinned starving children with sore
eyes, peering out of doorways of tenements in the back streets of
Florence, were simply Mulberry Row in New York. Galleries full of
multiplied madonnas and crucified martyrs spoke of Tammany Hall and its
Catholic machine, with Catholic cops twisting the arms of socialist
working girls on the picket line; Catholic archbishops striding down the
aisle of a hall commanding the police to arrest women lecturers on birth
control; Catholic judges sitting on the bench in black silk robes,
punishing socialist muckrakers for being too decent to their erring
wives.
Milan: a great city, with many sights, but for Thyrsis only one
attraction--a socialist paper in an obscure working-class quarter, with
an editor who was translating Thyrsis’ books. And then Switzerland, with
towering snow-clad mountains and clear blue lakes--and another socialist
editor. Then Germany, and one of the Lietz schools, a new experiment in
education, where Thyrsis had arranged to leave his son: a lovely spot on
the edge of the Harz Mountains, with a troop of merry youngsters living
the outdoor life. Nearby were miles of potatoes and sugar beets, with
Polish women working in gangs like Negro slaves. There was another
school in Schloss Bieberstein, for the older boys, fine strapping
fellows, bare-legged and bare-armed, hardened to the cold, and ready for
the slaughter pits; in three years most of them would be turned into
manure for potatoes and sugar beets.
Then Holland, where Frederik van Eeden had undertaken to help Thyrsis
get the freedom that was not to be had in New York. A lawyer was
consulted and put the matter up to the startled judges of the Amsterdam
courts. Under the Dutch law, the husband was not required to prove that
he had beaten or choked or poisoned his wife; he might receive a divorce
on the basis of a signed statement by the wife, admitting infidelity.
But what about granting this privilege to a wandering author from
America? How long would he have to remain a resident of Holland in order
to be entitled to the benefit of civilized and enlightened law? The
judges finally agreed that they would admit this one American to their
clemency--but never again! Amsterdam was not going to be turned into
another Reno!
V
A visit to England. Gaylord Wilshire was living in Hampstead,
endeavoring to finance his gold mine in London. The great coal strike
was on, and Tom Mann, editor of a syndicalist newspaper, was sent to
jail for six months. Wilshire, who by now had come to despair of
political action for the workers, leaped into the breach, and he and
Thyrsis got out several issues of the paper--the contribution of the
latter consisting of a debate in which he opposed the leading idea of
the editor. Apparently that satisfied the London police, for the
eccentric Americans were allowed to argue without molestation. The
newspaper reporters came swarming, and it was a novel experience for
Thyrsis to give interviews and read next morning what he said, instead
of how he looked and what he ate and how his wife had run away with a
“box-car poet.”
Some things he liked in England, and some not. A ghastly thing to see
the effect upon the human race of slow starvation continued through many
centuries! Here were creatures distorted out of human semblance; swarms
of them turning out on a bank holiday to play, having forgotten how to
run, almost how to walk; shambling like apes, drooping like baboons,
guffawing with loud noises, speaking a jabber hardly to be understood.
They lay around on Hampstead Heath, men and women in each others’ arms,
a sight new to an American. Whether they were drunk or sober was
difficult for a stranger to tell.
The miners’ strike committee held its meetings in the Westminster Hotel;
and just across the way were the Parliament buildings, and labor members
to welcome a socialist author. John Burns took Thyrsis onto the floor of
the House to hear the debate on the settlement of the coal strike, a
full-dress affair reported all over the world; Asquith versus Balfour,
or rather both of them versus the working masses of Britain. This was
what capitalism considered statesmanship--this hodgepodge of cant and
cruelty, bundled in a gray fog of dullness. Thyrsis sat in a sacred
seat, where no visitor was supposed to be, and gazed upon rows of
savages in silk hats, roaring for what little blood was left in the
veins of half-starved miners’ families. He clenched his hands until his
nails made holes in his skin.
When the great lawyer Asquith was in the midst of his sophistries, the
young American could stand no more; he half rose from his seat, with his
mouth open to say what he thought of these starvers of British labor.
Half a dozen times he rose, with words starting from his throat, and
half a dozen times he sank back again. They would have arrested him, no
doubt, and his protest would have been heard. But it would also have
gone to Amsterdam, where the polite judges had still to decide the
problem of the custody of Thyrsis’ son!
Thyrsis went out and visited Westminster Abbey, where he was swept by a
storm of horror and loathing; wandering among marble tombs and statues
of ruling-class killers and the poets and men of genius who had betrayed
the muse to Mammon. High-vaulting arches, lost in dimness; priests in
jeweled robes, and white-clad choirs chanting incessant subjection; a
blaze of candles, a haze of altar smoke, and mental slaves with heads
bowed in their arms--the very living presence of that giant Fear, in the
name of which the organized crimes of the ages have been committed. Here
was the explanation of those swarms on Hampstead Heath, deprived of
human semblance; here was the meaning of pettifogging lawyers and noble
earls and silk-hatted savages shouting for the lifeblood of starving
miners; here was the very body and blood of that Godhead of Capitalism--
Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet
Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!
VI
Miss Mary Craig Kimbrough came traveling. It was natural that a young
lady from Mississippi should desire to see art galleries and meet
celebrities in England; and if she came as the guest of an earl and a
countess, that would surely be respectable according to Mississippi
standards. It so happened that the noble earl was a bit of a radical and
had had his own marital scandal. He had gone to Reno, Nevada, and got
himself divorced from an unsatisfactory marriage; then, upon his
remarriage in England, his peers had haled him before them, convicted
him of bigamy, and sentenced him to six months in jail.
A tremendous uproar in its day, but it had been many days ago; the
English nobility are a numerous family, which Mississippi could hardly
be expected to keep straight. Craig’s father had the general impression,
held by every old-fashioned Southern gentleman, that the English
nobility are a depraved lot; but on the other hand, Craig’s mother knew
that they are socially irresistible. She proved it whenever, at a
gathering of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the
Confederacy, she was asked for news about her daughter who was visiting
the Countess Russell in London.
“Aunt Molly” was a plump little Irish lady, the warmest hearted soul
that ever carried a heavy title. She had had her own divorce tragedy,
and her warm Irish heart was with Thyrsis. She had published two or
three novels, and for writing purposes had a retreat, an ancient cottage
on the edge of a village not far from Eton. It was so low that you had
to stoop to get through the doorway, and its chimney had smoked for at
least three hundred years; but it was newly plastered inside, and
furnished with antiques and bright chintzes. Here Aunt Molly brought her
protegée, and Thyrsis came from Holland to collect local color for the
new novel, _Sylvia_, which he was making out of Craig’s tales of her
girlhood in the Far South. In after years the heroine would stop in the
middle of an anecdote, look puzzled, and say, “Did that really happen to
me? Or is it one of the things we made up for _Sylvia_?”
One glimpse of the British aristocracy at home. The novel Thyrsis was
writing dealt with a splendid young Harvard millionaire, one of whose
friends remarks that he deliberately cultivated the brutal manners of
the British upper classes toward their social inferiors. Craig was
distressed by this, insisting that it couldn’t be true; finally it was
agreed that Aunt Molly should be the arbitrator. The problem was
submitted, and this high authority laughed and said, “Well, look at
Frank!” She went on to tell anecdotes portraying the bad manners of his
lordship, her husband; also of his uncles and his cousins, Lord This and
the Marquis of That and the Duke of Other. Craig subsided, and the
sentence stands as it was written.
Thyrsis, himself, walking along the road in his everyday clothes, saw a
fancy equipage drive up and halt, while the occupants asked him the way
to a certain place; having been politely answered, the lady and
gentleman drove on without so much as a nod of thanks. On another
occasion, while walking, he attempted to ask the way of a gentleman out
for a constitutional, and this person stalked by without a sound or a
glance. Mentioning this experience to a conventional Englishman, Thyrsis
received the following explanation: “But if one entered into talk with
any stranger who hailed him on the road, one might meet all sorts of
undesirable persons!”
VI