Upton Sinclair - Love's pilgrimage

§ 13. THYRSIS went away from this interview with some new problems to ponder upon. He had seen a little of this power of the newspapers to defile and torment a man; but he had never dreamed of anything as bad as this. This was murderous, this was monstrous. He saw these papers now as gigantic engines of exploitation and oppression—irresponsible, unscrupulous, wanton—turned loose in society to crush and destroy whom they would.

They had taken this man Darrell and they had poured out their poisons upon him; they had tortured him hideously, they had burned him up as with vitriol. As a public force he was no longer a human being at all— he was a deformity, a spectre conjured up to bring fright to the beholder. And through it all he was utterly helpless—as much at their mercy as an infant in the hands of savages. And what had he done? Why had the torture been visited upon him?

Thyrsis pictured the men who had led in this soul-hunt. They were supposed to be enlightened Americans at the dawn of the twentieth century; and did they truly hold to the superstition of marriage as a religious sacrament, not to be dissolved by mortal power? Did they really believe that a man who had once been drawn into matrimony was obligated for life—no matter how unhappy he might be, no matter to what indignities he might be subjected? Or, if they did recognize the permissibility of divorce—then why this hue and cry

after Darrell, who had borne his punishment for twenty years, and had waited for eight or ten years to test the depths of his new love?

The question answered itself; and the answer fanned Thyrsis' soul into a blaze of indignation. All this patter about the deserted wife, pitting at home with her children and weeping her eyes out—all that was so much hocus-pocus for the ears of the mob. The chiefs of this Inquisition and their torturers and slaves wrote it with their tongues in their cheeks. What they saw was that they had got securely strapped upon their rack the man who had threatened their power, who had laid bare its sources and exposed its iniquity. And they meant that if ever he came out of their torture-chamber, it should be so mangled and crippled that never again would he lift a finger against them!

The gist of the "Darrell case", when you got right down to it, was a quarrel over property; it was the snarling of wolves who had been disturbed at their feeding. Darrell had denounced wealth and the exploiters of wealth, and now he had married a woman of wealth ; and was he to get away with his prize ? That was the meaning of all the loud halloo—for that the hounds were unleashed and the hunting-horns sounded.

Thyrsis pictured the men who "wrote up" the Darrell story. He had known them in the newspaper-world —the servants of the giant publicity-machine; living and working in the roar and rush of it, in a stifling atmosphere where the finer qualities of the soul were poisoned and withered over night. They lived their lives, almost without exception, by means of alcohol and coffee and tobacco; they were scornful, disillusioned, cynical beyond all telling and all belief. Their only god in heaven or earth or the waters under the earth

was "copy". To such men there were two possible bonds of interest in a woman—the first being lust, and the second money. In the case of Henry Darrell they found both these motives; and so how clear the story was to them!

Thyrsis thought, also, of the men who owned and managed the papers; those who had turned loose the hunt and directed it. Rich men were they, who had built these publicity machines for their own purposes. And what were they in their private lives? Some of them were notoriously dissolute; and still others hid their ways under a veil of hypocrisy—just as in their editorials they hid their class-interests under pretenses of principle. And how easy it would have been for Darrell to get what he wanted without losing his reputation—if only he had been willing to follow the example of these eminent citizens! Thyrsis knew one man, the editor of an appallingly respectable journal, who had invited a young girl to his wife's home and there attempted to seduce her. He knew the proprietor of another, whose cheerful custom it was to go about among his newly-married women-friends and suggest that, inasmuch as he was a "superman," and their husbands were weaklings, they should let him become in secret the father of their children. This amateur eugenist was accustomed to maintain that the great men in history had for the most part been bastards; and Thyrsis, knowing this fact about him, would read editorials in his papers, in which Henry Darrell was denounced as an enemy of the home!

Meantime Thyrsis was reading Darrell's books and pamphlets, and coming to realize what a mind was here being destroyed. For this man, it seemed to him, was master of the noblest prose utterance that had been

heard in America since Emerson died. He went again to hear him speak, in another ill-lighted and stuffy hall, before less than a hundred people ; .and the pain of this was more than he could bear. He went home that night with his friend, and labored with him with all the force of his being. "You stay here," he declared, "and put yourself at the mercy of your enemies ! You waste your faculties contending with them—even knowing about them is enough to destroy you. And all the while you might escape from them altogether—might do your real work, that the world knows nothing of. No one can hinder you. And when you have written the book of your soul, then your tormentors will be—they will be like the tormentors of Dante! Go away ! Go away to Europe, where you can be free!"

And so before long, he stood upon a steamer-pier and waved Henry Darrell and his wife farewell. And every now and then would come letters, telling of long, long agonies; for Darrell had to fight for those few rare days when ill health would permit him to think. So year by year he labored at what Thyrsis knew, if it was ever finished, would be America's first world-poem; and in the meantime eminent statesmen and moralists who were alarmed at the progress of "Socialist agitation", would continue to conjure up before the public mind the nightmare spectre of the once-respected clergyman, who had deserted his weeping wife and children, and run away with a rich woman to found a "free-love colony"!

§ 14. A COUPLE of days after the Darrells sailed, Thyrsis set out himself to find a home. On account of the new book, he would have to be near a library, and so he had selected a college-town not far from New

York. He went there now, and put up for a week at a students' boarding-house, while prosecuting his search.

A strange experience it was to him, after the years of struggle and contact with the world, to come back to that academic atmosphere; to find men who were still peacefully counting up the "feminine endings" in Shakespeare's verse, and writing elaborate theses upon the sources of the Spenserian legends. Upon his excursions into the country some of these young men would tramp with him—threshing out, student-fashion, the problems of the universe; and how staggering it was to meet a man who was about to receive a master's degree in literature—and who regarded Arthur Hugh Clough as a "dangerous" poet, and Tennyson's "Two Voices" as containing vital thought, and T. H. Green as the world's leading philosopher! And this was the "education" that was dispensed at America's most aristocratic university—for this many millions of dollars had been contributed, and scores of magnificent buildings erected!

Thyrsis saw that a partial explanation lay in the fact that-in connection with the university there existed a great theological seminary. Some of these future ministers came also to the boarding-house, and Thyrsis listened to their shop-talk—about the difference between "transubstantiation" and "consubstantiation", and the status of the controversy over the St. John Gospel. He heard one man cite arguments from Paley's "Moral Philosophy"; and another making bold to state that he was uncertain about the verbal inspiration of the Pentateuch!