Upton Sinclair - Love's pilgrimage

Meanwhile from the distance come bursts of wild music; and at last Helena returns—pale, and deeply agitated. "It is that concerto!" she says, and then asks to be excused from talking. Lloyd comes, and stands by the door watching her. When his teacher begins to open business negotiations, he asks him abruptly to leave them alone.

Helena asks, "Who wrote that music?" He tells

her a ghastly story of a titan soul who starved in a garret and shot himself, crushed by the mockery of the world.

"I might have saved him!" the boy exclaims. "I was so busy with the music I forgot the man!"

They talk about this epoch-making concerto, and how Lloyd means to force it upon the public. "And you shall play it with me!" he exclaims. "You are the first that has ever understood it!"

"I cannot play it!" she protests ; to which he answers, "It was like his voice come back from the grave!" And so we see these two souls cast into the crucible together.

§ 4. THE second act showed the aftermath of the great concert, and took place in the drawing-room of the Hartman family's apartment, at four o'clock in the morning. We see Moses and the two professors, who have not been able to tear themselves away; dishevelled, distrait, wild with vexation, they pace about and lament. Failure, utter ruin confronts them—the structure of their hopes lies in the dust! They blame it all on "that woman"—and members of the family concur in this. It was she who kept Lloyd to his resolve to play that mad concerto; and then, to cast aside all the master had taught them, all the results of weeks of drilling—and to play it in that frantic, demonic fashion. Now the men await the morning papers, which will bring them the verdict of "the world"; and they shudder with the foreknowledge of what that verdict will be.

Lloyd and Helena enter. They have been walking for hours, and have not been thinking of "the world". They listen, half-heeding, to the protests and laments;

they could not help it, they explain—the music took hold of them.

The two professors go off to get the papers, and Moses goes into the next room to rest; after which it becomes clear to the audience that Lloyd and Helena are fight; ing the sex-duel.

"You do not care about people," she is saying, sombrely.

To which his reply is, "It is not to be found in people."

"And yet from people it must come!" she insists.

He answers, "They do not even know what I mean; and they have no humility."

"It is a problem," Lloyd continues, after a pause. "Shall one go on alone, or wait and bring others with him?—You have brought that problem into my life."

She answers to this, "I cannot see how my love will hinder you."

He replies, "If you love me, who will love my art?"

So it goes—until the professors return with their freight of the world's Philistinism. And here came a scene, over which Thyrsis shook for many a day with merriment. The accounts of the concert are read; Moses awakens and comes in; and as the agony increases, the members of the family appear, one by one, clad in their dressing-gowns, and adding their lamentations to the chorus. Gone is all the prestige of the two professors, gone all the profits of Moses, gone all the visions of social triumphs in the city of the middle West!

To all of which uproar the two listen patiently; until at last the mother, in a transport of vexation, turns upon Helena, and accuses her of ensnaring the boy. And then—the climax of the scene—Lloyd springs up;

all that Genius in him, which has so far gone into music, turns now into rage and scorn. He pictures these people—pawing over his inspiration with their unclean hands—peering at it, weighing it, chaffering over it— taking it into the market-place to be hawked about. He shows them what they are, and what that "world" is, to which they would offer his muse as a whore. And then at the climax of his speech, as he is waving his violin in the air, the Herr Prof, von Arne ventures to put in a word; and the boy whirls upon him, and brings down the three thousand-dollar treasure upon the eminent psychiatrist's head!

§ 5. THE third act, which was the hardest of all to write, was to take place in a garret. Lloyd has gone away alone, and three years have passed, and now he lies dying of a wasting disease. Helena has come to him again—and still they are fighting the duel. "A woman will do anything for a man but renounce him," says Lloyd; and she cannot understand this fierce instinct of his.

She has come and found him; and he lies gasping for breath, and speaking in broken sentences. Yet he will not have her bring grief into his chamber; he has fought his way through grief, and through hatred and contempt, and now he lies at peace upon the bosom of nature. No longer is he wrapped up in his own vision; he has learned from the million suns in the sky and the million trees of the forest. He tells her that the thing called "Genius" springs ceaselessly from the heart of life.

He has cast out fear; and with it he has cast out love. "What are you?" he asks. "What am I?" And he sets forth in blazing words his vision of the soul,

which is as a flash of light in a raindrop, and yet one with the eternal process. As the fruit of his life he leaves one symphony in manuscript, and some pages of writing in which he has summed up his faith. That is enough, he says—that is victory; for that he fled away, and killed his love.

The two professors come, having learned that Lloyd is dying. But even they cannot divert him. He tells von Arne that his learning will submit itself, and that scientists will be as gardeners, tending the young flowers of faith. His mother and father come, and he whispers that even for them there is hope—that in the deepest mire of respectability the spark of the soul still glows. His mother bursts into weeping by his bed, and he tells her that even from the dungeon of pride there may be deliverance. So he sends them all away to pray.

Then Helena sits at the piano and plays a few bars of that sonata of Beethoven's which is an utterance of most poignant grief, and which some publisher has cruelly misnamed the "Moonlight". And after long silence, the dying man communes with his muse. A light suffuses the room, and he whispers, "Take thine own time; for the seeds of thy glories are planted in the hearts of men!"

§ 6. OVER these things Thyrsis would work for six hours at a stretch, sitting without moving a muscle; for days and nights he would wander about at random in the woods. He ate irregularly, of such things as he could put his hands upon; and sleep fled from him like a mistress spurned. When, after a couple of months, he had finished the task, there was an incessant throbbing in his forehead, and—alas for the sudden

tumble from the heights of Parnassus!—he had lost almost entirely the power of digesting food.

But the play was done. He sent it off to be copied, and wrote paeans of thanksgiving to Corydon. Once more he had a weapon, newly-forged and sharpened, wherewith to pierce that tough hide of the world!

There remained the practical question: What did one do when he had a play completed? What was the first step to be taken? Thyrsis pondered the problem for several days; and then, as chance would have it, his eye was caught by a newspaper paragraph to the effect that "Ethelynda Lewis, the popular comedienne, is to be starred in a serious drama next season, under the management of Robertson Jones. Miss Lewis's play has not yet been selected." Now, as it happened, "Ethelynda Lewis" had been on the play-bill of "The Princess of Prague", that tragic "musical comedy" to which Thyrsis had been taken; but he never noticed the names of actors and actresses, and had no suspicions. He sent his manuscript to this future star; and a week later came a note, written on scented monogram paper in a tall and distinguished chirography, acknowledging the receipt of his play and promising to read it.