Upton Sinclair - Love's pilgrimage

§ 1. IT was a tiny cupboard of a room in a tenement. They sat upon their bed to eat, and they hid their soiled dishes beneath it. Dirty children screamed upon the avenue in front, and frowsy-headed women and wolfish men caroused in the saloon below. Yet here there came to them the angel with the flame-tipped wings, and here they dreamed their dream of wonder.

In the glory of their new-found passion all life became transfigured to them; they discovered new meaning in the most trivial actions. There was no corner so obscure that they might not come upon the young god hidden; they might touch his warm, tender flesh, and hear his silvery laughter, and thrill with the wonder of his presence. They spoke a new language, full of fire and color; they read new meanings in each other's eyes. The slightest touch of hand upon hand, or of lips to lips, was enough to dissolve them in tenderness and delight.

They rejoiced in the marvel of each other's being— in the glory of their bodies, newly revealed. To Thyrsis especially this was life's last miracle, a discovery so fraught with bliss as to be a continual torment. The incitements that were hidden in the softness and the odor of unbound and tumbled hair; the exquisiteness of maiden breasts, moulded of marble., rosy-tipped; the soft contour of snowy limbs, the rhythmic play of moving muscles—to dwell amid these things, to possess them, was suddenly to discover in reality what before had only existed in the realm of painting and sculpture.

Corydon also, in the glow of his delight, of his rapture and his ravening desire, discovered anew the wonder of herself, and came to a new consciousness of her beauty. She would stand and gaze before her, with her hands upon her breasts, and her head flung back, and her eyes closed in ecstasy, so that he might come to her and kiss her—might kiss her again and again, might touch her with his lover's hands and clasp her with his lover's arms.

In most of these things she was his teacher. For Corydon was one person, in body, mind and soul; in her there were no disharmonies, no warring elements. His friend the doctor had set forth his idea of "a good woman"; but Corydon's goodness proved to be after no such pattern. Now that she was his, she was his; she belonged to him, she was a part of him, and there could be no thought of a secret shame, of any reserves or hesitations. Her body was herself, and it was joy to her; it was joy the more, because she could give it for love; and she sought for new ways to utter the completeness of her giving.

She was like a little child about it—so free, so spontaneous, so genuine; Thyrsis marvelled at her utter naturalness. For himself, in the midst of these things, there was always a sense of the strange and the terrible, a sense of penetrating to forbidden mysteries; but Corydon laughed in the sunlight of utter bliss—and she laughed most at him, when she found that her simple language had startled him.

For the maiden* out of ancient Greece was now become a lover! And so she was revealed to Thyrsis—> she who might have marched in the Panathenaic processions, with one of the sacred vessels in her hands, or run in the Attic games, bare-limbed and fearless. So he

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learned to think of her, smging in the myrtle groves of Mount Hymettus, or walking naked in the moonlight in Arcadian meadows.

So he thought of her all through her life, whenever a moment of joy came to her—whenever, for instance, she found her way to the water. They had dressed her in long skirts and put her in a drawing-room—but Corydon had got to the water in spite of them; and all that any Nereid had ever known, that she had known from the time the waves first kissed her feet.

And so it was also with love; she was born to be a priestess of love's religion. She had waited for this hour—that she might take his hand, and lead him into the temple, and teach him the ritual. It was a ministry that she entered upon with the joy of all her being. "Ah, let me teach you how to love!" she would cry. "Ah, let me teach you how to love!"

Love was to her an utter blending of two selves, the losing of one's personality in another's; it meant the forgetting of one's self, and all the ends of self. And Thyrsis marvelled at the glory that came upon her, at each new rapture she discovered. All the language of lovers was known to her, all the songs of lovers were upon her lips:

"Du bist mir ewig, Bist mir immer— Erb und Eigen Ein und All!"

Such was her woman's gift: precious beyond all treasures of earth, and given without price or question. And Thyrsis trembled as he realized it; he lived upon his knees before her, and floods of tenderness welled up in

his heart. How utterly she trusted him, how completely she belonged to him! And what could he do to show himself worthy of it—this most wonderful dream of his life come true

"If someone should give me a heart to keep, With love for the golden key!"

Yet, amid all these raptures, Thyrsis was haunted by ghosts of doubt. Would he be able to do what his heart } 7 earned to do? Love meant so much to her— and could it mean that much to him? Why could it not be to him the complete thing it was to her—why must he argue and wonder and fear?

For Thyrsis' ancestors had not dallied in Arcadian meadows. They had come from the wilds of Palestine and the deserts of Northern Africa; they had argued and wondered and feared in Gothic cloisters, in New England meeting-houses; and the shadow of their souls hung over him still. He could not love love as Corydon loved it, he could not trust it as she trusted it. It could never seem to him the utterly natural thing—there was always a fear of pollution, a hint of satiety, a thrill of shame. Directly the first fires of passion had spent themselves, these anxieties came to him; he remembered how in his virgin youth he had thought of passion—as of something strange and uncomfortable, even grotesque, suggesting too closely a kinship with the animals. So he noticed that his feelings always waned before Corydon's. She wished him to linger—love meant so much to her!

Then too, the code of passion was all unknown to him. What was right and what was wrong? When should one yield to desire, and when should one re-

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strain it? To Corydon such questions never came—to her there was no such possibility as excess; she was complete and perfect, and nature told her. If there were temptations and restraints and regrets, they were for Thyrsis; and he had to keep them for his own secret, he could ask no help from her. For he discovered immediately that with his proud imperiousness, he could not endure to have Corydon refuse herself to him. So this laid a new burden upon him, an appalling one. For were they not always together—her lips always calling him, the impulse towards her always with him?

There was another circumstance—the means they had to take to prevent the consequences of their love. From the very first, Thyrsis had shrunk from the thought of this; but it was only later that he realized how much it repelled him. It offended all his sense of economy and purpose; it was something done, and at the same time undone—and so it had in it the essence of all futility and wrongness. It took from passion its meaning and its excuse; and yet he could not say this to Corydon ; and he knew also that he could no longer do without her. He was bound—bound fast! And every hour his chains would become tighter; what was now spontaneous joy would become a habit—a thing like eating and sleeping, a new and humiliating necessity of the flesh!

§ 2. SUCH were their problems. They might have solved them all, perhaps—had they only had time. But others came crowding upon them, others still more insistent and perplexing. The world was pressing them, jealous of their dream of delight.