effected in their lives; it broke down the barriers they had been at
such pains to build up between them. It was all very well for them to
agree that they were “brother and sister,” and that it was impossible
for them ever to think of anything else. But now came a time when night
after night the thermometer went to ten or fifteen degrees below zero;
and first Thyrsis gave more bedding to Corydon--because she was able
to suffer more than he; and he would go over to his cold hut alone, and
crawl into a cold bed, and lie there the whole night through without
a wink of sleep. But then, as the cold held on for a week or more, the
resistance of both of them was broken down--they were like two animals
which crawl into the same hole to keep each other from freezing. They
piled all their bedding upon one narrow cot; and sleeping thus, they
could be warm. Even then, they tried to keep to the resolution they had
made; but this, it seemed, was not within the power of flesh and blood;
and so, once more, the sex-factor was introduced into the complications
of their lives.
To Thyrsis this thing was like some bird of prey that circled in the sky
just above him--its shadow filling him with a continual fear, the swish
of its wings making him cringe. He was never happy about it; there
was no time in his life when he was not in a state of inward war. His
intellect rebelled; and on the other hand, there was a part of his
nature that craved this sex-experience and welcomed it--and this part,
it seemed, was favored by all the circumstances of life. There was no
chance to settle the matter in the light of reason, to test it by any
moral or aesthetic law; blind fate decreed that one part of him should
have the shaping of his character, the determining of his needs.
He tried to make clear to himself the basis of his distrust. Sexual
intercourse as a habit--this was the formula by which he summed it up
to himself. To be right, to win the sanction of the intellect and
the conscience, the sex-act must be the result of a supreme creative
impulse. Its purpose was the making of a new soul--and this could
never be right until those who took that responsibility had used their
reasons, and determined that circumstances were such that the new
soul might be a sound and free and happy and beautiful soul. And how
different was this from the customs which prevailed under the sanction
of the “holy bonds of matrimony”! When sexual intercourse became a
self-indulgence, like the eating of candy, or the drinking of liquor;
a thing of the body, and the body alone; a thing determined by physical
propinquity, by the sight and contact of the flesh, the dressing and
undressing in the same room!
Then again, the means which they had to use to prevent conception--which
destroyed all spontaneity in their relationship, and dragged the thing
out into the cold light of day! And the continual fear that they might
have made another blunder! Something of this sort was always happening,
or seeming to have happened, or threatening to have happened, so that
they waited each month in suspense and dread. It was this which made the
terror of the whole matter to Thyrsis, and had so much to do with his
repugnance. They were like people drawing lots for a death-sentence;
like people who ate from dishes, one of which they knew to contain
poison. What was the tragic destiny that hung over them--the Nemesis
that gripped them, and forced them to take such a chance?
But the barriers were down, and there was no building them up again;
Thyrsis never even tried, because of the revelation which came to him
from Corydon’s side. Corydon was craving, reaching out hungrily for
something which she had not in herself, and which life did not give her
in sufficiency. She called this thing “love”; and she had no hesitations
and no limits to her demand for it. To Thyrsis this “love” was something
quite else--it was sustenance and support. To demand it was an act of
weakness, and to yield it was a kind of spiritual blood-transfusion. It
was the first law of his life-code that every soul must stand upon its
own feet and walk its own way; and to surrender that spiritual autonomy
was the one blunder for which there could be no pardon.
But then--he would argue with himself--what folly it was to talk of such
things in their position! They not souls at all--the life of the soul
was not for them, the laws of the soul had nothing to do with them. They
were two bodies--two miserable and cold and sick and tormented bodies;
and with yet a third body, utterly helpless and dependent upon them--in
defiance of all the most high-sounding pronouncements about “the soul”!
So Thyrsis would mock himself into subjection once more, and go on to
play his part as husband and father and head of a household of bodies.
He would play the game of “love” as Corydon wanted it played; he would
yield to her demands, he would gratify her cravings, he would force
himself to take her point of view. But then the other mood would come
upon him--the mood that he knew to be the real expression of himself.
He would begin the battle of his genius again; he would “hear the echoes
afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting”. If one gave
one’s self up to the body, and accepted the regimen and the laws of
the body, how should the soul ever come to be free? To make such a
concession was to pass upon it a sentence of life-imprisonment!
So would come to Thyrsis again that sense of the awful tragedy that was
impending in their lives. Some day, he knew, he would break out of this
prison. Some day, he knew, he would have to be himself, and live his own
life!
And meanwhile, how pitiful were Corydon’s attempts to shape him to her
needs, and to persuade herself that she was succeeding in doing it! She
would set forth to him elaborately how much he had improved; how much
gentler and more human he was--in contrast with that blind and stupid
and egotistical and impossible person she had first known. And with
what bitterness Thyrsis would hear this--and how he had to struggle to
suppress his feeling! For he knew that those qualities which were so
hateful to her, were but the foam cast up to the surface of his soul by
the seething of his genius within. When it had ceased altogether, how
placid and still would be the pool-and what a beautiful mirror it would
make for Corydon to behold her own features in!