Upton Sinclair - Love's pilgrimage

He read her the song, thrilling anew with the joy of its effect upon her". "Oh, Thyrsis!" she cried, in awe. "That is marvellous! Marvellous! How could you do it?"

And yet, for all the delight she expressed, Thyrsis was conscious of a chill of disappointment, of a doubt lurking in the background of his mind. It was inevitable, in the nature of things—how could the book mean to any human creature what it had meant to him? Seven long months he had toiled with it, he had been through the agonies of a child-birth for it. And another person would read it all in one day! —It was the old, old agony of the artist, who can communicate so small a part of what has been in his soul.

§ 2. HE wanted to talk about his book, but Cory-don wanted to talk about him. She had waited so long, and suffered so much—and now at last he was here! "Oh, Thyrsis!" she cried. "There's just no use in my trying—I can't do anything at all without you!"

"You won't have to do it any more," he said. "We shall not part again."

"And you are sure you want me? You have no more doubts?"

"How could I have any doubts—after that letter. Ah, that was a brave letter, Corydon ! It made me think of you as some old Viking's daughter! That is the way to go at the task!"

"And then I may feel certain!" she said.

"You may stop thinking all about it," he replied. "We'll waste no more of our time—we'll put it aside and get to work."

They spent the day wandering about in the park and talking over their plans. "I suppose it'll be all right now that I'm with you," said Thyrsis. "I mean, there's no great hurry about getting married."

"Oh, no !" she answered. "We dare not think of that, until you have money."

"How I wish we didn't have to get married!" he exclaimed.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because—why should we have to get anybody else's permission to live our lives? I've thought about it a good deal, and it's a slave-custom, and it makes me ashamed of myself."

"But don't you believe in marriage, dear?"

"I do, and I don't. I believe that a man who exposes a woman to the possibility of having a child, ought to guarantee to support the woman for a time, and to support the child. That's obvious enough—no one but a scoundrel would want to avoid it. But marriage means so much more than that! You bind yourself to stay together, whether love continues or whether it stops; you can't part, except on some terms that other people set down. You have to make all sorts of promises you don't intend to keep, and to go through forms you don't believe in, and it seems to me a cowardly thing to do."

"But what else can one do?" asked Corydon.

"It's quite obvious what we could do. We don't intend to be husband and wife; and so we could simply go away and go on with our work."

LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

"

'But think of our parents, Thyrsis!"

"Yes, I know—I've thought of them. But if every one thought of his parents, how would the world ever move?"

"But, dearest!" exclaimed Corydon, "if we didn't marry, they'd simply go out of their senses!"

"I know. But then, they might threaten to go out of their senses if we did marry? And would that work also?"

"We must be sensible," said the girl. "It means so much to them, and so little to us."

"Yes, I suppose so," he answered. "But all the same, I hate it; when you once begin conforming, you never know where you'll stop."

" We shall know," declared the other. "Whatever we may have to do to get married, we shall both of us know that neither would ever dream of wishing to holcf the other for a moment after love had ceased. And that is the essential thing, is it not?"

"Yes," assented Thyrsis. "I suppose so."

"Well, then, we'll make that bargain between us; that will be our marriage."

"That suits me better," he replied.

She thought for a moment, and then said, with a laugh, "Let us have a little ceremony of our own."

"Very well," said he.

"Are you ready for it now?" she inquired. "Your mind is quite made up?"

"Quite made up."

She looked about her, to make sure that no one was in sight; and then she put her hand in his. "I have been to weddings," she said. "And so I know how they do it. - -I take thee, Thyrsis, to be the companion of my soul. I give myself to thee freely, for the sake of

love, and I will stay so long as thy soul is better with me than without. But if ever this should cease to be, I will leave thee; for if my soul is weaker than thine, I have no right to be thy mate."

She paused. "Is that right?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, "that is right."

"Very well then," she said; "and now, you say it!"

And she made him repeat the words—"I take thee, Corydon, to be the companion of my soul. I give myself to thee freely, for the sake of love, and I will stay so long as thy soul is better with me than without. But if ever this should cease to be, I will leave thee; for if my soul is weaker than thine, I have no right to be thy mate."

"Now," she exclaimed, with an eager laugh—"now we're married!" And as he looked he caught the glint of a tear in her eyes.

§ 3. BUT the world would not be content to leave it on that basis. When they parted that afternoon, it was with a carefully-arranged program of work-they were to visit each other on alternate days and go on with their German and music. But in less than a week they had run upon an obstruction; there "was no quiet room for them at Corydon's save her bedroom, and one evening when Thyrsis came, she made the announcement that they could no longer study there.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Well," explained Corydon, "they say the maid might think it wasn't nice."

She had expected him to fly into a rage, but he only smiled grimly. "I had come to tell you the same sort of thing," he explained. "It seems you can't visit me

LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

so often, and you're never to stay after ten o'clock at night."

"Why is that?" she inquired.

"It's a question of what the hall-boy might think,"

said he.

They sat gazing at each other in silence. "You see," said Thyrsis, at last, "the thing is impossible—we've got to go and get married. The world will never give us any peace until we do."

"Nobody has any idea of what we mean!" exclaimed Corydon.

"No idea whatever," he said. "They've nothing in them in anyway to correspond with it. You talk to them about souls, and they haven't any. You talk to them about love, and they think you mean obscenity. Everybody is thinking obscenity about us!"

"Everybody but our parents," put in Corydon.

To which he answered, angrily, "They are thinking of what the others are thinking."

But everybody seemed to have to think something, and that was the aspect of the matter that puzzled them most. Why did everybody find it necessary to be thinking about it at all? Why did everybody consider it his business? As Thyrsis phrased it—"Why the hell can't they let us alone?"

"We've got to get married," said she. "That's the only way to get the best of them."

"But is that really getting the best of them?" he objected. "Isn't that their purpose—to make us get married?"

This was a pregnant question, but they did not follow it up just then. They went on to the practical problem of where and when and how to accomplish their purpose.

"We can go to a court," said he.

"Oh, no!" she exclaimed. "We'd have to meet a lot of men, and I couldn't stand it."

"But surely you don't want to go to a church!" he said.

"Couldn't we get some clergyman to marry us quietly?"

"But then, there's a lot of rigmarole!"

"But mightn't he leave it out?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said. "They generally believe in it, you see."

He decided to make an attempt, however.

"Let's go to-morrow morning," he said. "I'm going over to have the sound-post set in my violin, and that'll take an hour or so. Perhaps we can finish it up in the meantime."