Upton Sinclair - Love's pilgrimage

But then, the laughter died; for he thought of Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee", and shuddered at the fate of the male-creature. He was a mere accident in the scheme of Nature—she wasted all his splendors to accomplish the purpose of an hour. And now it had been accomplished. He had had his moment of ecstasy, his dizzy flight into the empyrean; and now behold him falling, disembowelled and torn, an empty shell!

But no—it was not quite that way, Thyrsis told himself, after further reflection. In the human hive the male creature was not only the bearer of the seed, he was also the worker. And so there was one more function he had to perform. All those fine frenzies of his, his ideals and his enthusiasms—they had served their purpose, and would fade; but before him there was still a future—a drab and dreary future of perpetual pot-boiling!

He recalled their bridal-night. All that had puzzled him in it and startled him—how clear it was now! Cory don had shrunk from him, just enough to lure him; and then, suddenly, her whole being had seemed to change—she had caught him, and held him fast. For he had accomplished her purpose; he had gotten her with child! And so he must stand by her—he must bring her food, that she might give the child life! And for that purpose she would hold him; for that she would use every art of which she was mistress—the whole force of her being would go into it!

She would not know this, of course; she would do it blindly and instinctively, as she had done everything so far. She would do it by those same generous and beautiful qualities that had made him hers! Therein lay the humor of his whole adventure—there lay the deadly nature of this Snare. The cords of it were woven out of love and tenderness, out of ecstasy and aspiration; and they were wound about his very heartstrings, so that it would kill him to pull them loose. And he would never pull them loose—he saw that in a sudden vision of ruin! She would be noble to the uttermost limit of nobleness. She would threaten to destroy herself—and so he would save her! She would bid him cast her away—and so he would stand by her to

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the end ! And the end would be simply the withering and shrivelling of those radiant qualities which he called his genius—qualities which were so precious to him, but about which Nature knew nothing!

So grim an aspect had life come to wear to this boy of twenty-one! He stripped all the flesh of illusion from its fair face, and saw the grinning skull beneath. And he mocked at himself, because of all those virtues by which he had been caught—and which yet he knew were stronger than his will. Through faith and love he had been made a captive; and through faith and love would he waste away and perish!

§ 5. MEANTIME., Corydon was prosecuting an inquiry into these matters upon her own account, and getting at quite other points of view. There were some, it seemed, who took this game less seriously than she and Thyrsis; and these managed to go free—they broke the cords of the Snare, they slipped between the fingers of the hand of Fate. Corydon had heard a certain scientist refer to man as "Nature's insurgent son"; and now came the discovery that Nature had insurgent daughters also.

Being in an "interesting condition," Corydon was entitled to the confidences of the married women acquaintances of the family. They were eager to know all about her, and what she was going to do; and they told her their own experiences. She brought these to Thyrsis, who was thus admitted to a view of the inner workings of the "race-suicide" mill.

It was as the doctor had said; each one of these middle-class ladies considered herself a special case, but their stories all seemed to fit together. Nature's boundless and irrational fecundity was an exceedingly trying

feature of the life of middle-class ladies. In the first place, the having of babies was a tedious and painful matter. One became grotesquely disfigured, and had to hide away and sever all social relationships. One lost one's grace and attractiveness, and hence the power to hold one's husband. And then, there were all the cares and the inconveniences of children. What was one to do with them, in a city where the best hotels and apartment-houses barred them out?

Then, too, even supposing the best of intentions— there was the cost of living. At present prices it was impossible for a man who had only a salary to support more than one or two children; and with prices increasing as they were, one could not be sure of educating even these. And meanwhile, the Nature of Things had apparently planned it that a woman should bear a child once a year for half her life-time!

So all these middle-class ladies used devices to prevent conception. But these were not always successful —husbands were frequently inconsiderate. And so came the abortion-business, which the doctor had described as the curse of the age.

Now and then one could accomplish the thing by some of the innumerable drugs that were advertised for the purpose. But these always made one ill, and seldom did anything else. Corydon met one young person, the wife of a rising stockbroker, who had presented her husband with twins in the first year of their marriage, and who declared that she was apparently designed to populate all the tenements in the city. This airy and vivacious young lady lay back in her automobile and prattled to Corydon, declaring that she was "always in trouble." She had tried to coax her family physician in vain, and had finally gone elsewhere. She had got

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quite used to the experience. All that troubled her nowadays was how to make excuses to her friends. One could not have "appendicitis" forever!

But there was another side to the matter. There was one woman who had had a hemorrhage; and another whose sister had contracted blood-poisoning, and had died in agony. There were even some who pleaded and exhorted like the doctor, and talked about the thing's being murder. All of which arguments and fears Cory-don brought to her husband, to be pondered and discussed.

They spent whole days wandering about in the park in agony of soul. They had one brief month in which to decide the question—the question of life or death to the possible child. Truly here, once more, was an issue to which Thyrsis might apply the words of Carlyle

"Choose well, your choice is Brief and yet endless f"

§6. THIS was also the month in which the fate of the book was decided. Each day, as he went for the mail, Thyrsis' heart would beat high with expectation; and each day he would be chilled with bitter disappointment. He was still hoping for a real review, or for some signs of the book's "catching on". Nor did he finally give up until he chanced to have a talk aboul? it with his friend, Mr. ArdsleyJ who explained to him that here, too, he had fallen into a trap.

His "publishers" were, not really publishers at all. They did not make their profit by selling books—they made it out of authors. There were many vain and foolish people who wrote books which they were

LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

anxious to see in print, so that they might be known as literary lights among their friends. Many of them had money, and would buy a number of copies; and the "publishers" had the expenses guaranteed in advance, and so would make a profit upon the sale of even one or two hundred copies. All this being well known, the reviews never paid any attention to the announcements of this concern, nor did "the trade" handle their books. As for Thyrsis' volume, they had printed it very cheaply—it was to be doubted if it had cost them what he had paid them. And they had even published it as a "net price" book—thereby taking three cents more off the royalty to which he was entitled!

Mr. Ardsley had declared that he would be lucky if his book sold three hundred copies; and so he felt that it was quite a tribute to the merits of his work when, after six months more of waiting, he received a royalty statement from the concern showing a sale of seven hundred and forty-three copies, and enclosing a check for eight-nine dollars and sixteen cents. This check Thyrsis paid over to his rich relative, and a week or two later, when he sold a short story, he sent the balance of the hundred dollars that he owed. And so he figured that the privilege of writing his first book and offering it to the hundred great men of letters of the country, had cost him the sum of one hundred and thirty-five dollars and eighty-four cents!