Upton Sinclair - Love's pilgrimage

"I am speaking!" he would say.

"But, Thyrsis "

"I am speaking!" He would not be interrupted.

But then would come a time when they sat down together and talked all this out, perceiving it as one more aspect of the disharmony of their temperaments. It was no fault of either of them, they would agree; it

was just that they were different. Thyrsis had a simile that he used—"It's a marriage between a butterfly and a hippopotamus. You don't blame the butterfly because it can't get down into the water and snort; and on the other hand, when the hippopotamus tries to flap his wings and flit about among the flowers, he doesn't make a success of it."

There would be times when he took Corydon's point of view entirely. She was beautiful and good; her naivete and guilelessness were the essence of her charm; and how preposterous it was to expect her to think about newspapers, or to be familiar with the price of beefsteaks ! As for him—he was a blundering creature, dull and pragmatical; he was a great spiny monster that she had drawn up from the ocean-depths. She would cut off his spines, but at once they grew out again; she could do nothing with him at all!

But then she would protest. "It's not so bad as that, Thyrsis. You have your work."

"Yes, that's it," he would answer. "My work! I'm just a thinking-machine. I'm fit for nothing else. And here I am—married!"

He would say that, and he would mean it; he would try to act upon the conviction. Of course Corydon's nature was a thing more lovely than his ; and, of course, it ought to have its way, to grow in freedom and joy. But alas—there was "the economic screw"! His qualities—hateful though they might be—were the product of stern conditions; they were the qualities which had to dominate in their lives, if they were to survive in the grim struggle for life.

§ 14. IT was, as always, their tragedy that they had no means of communicating, except through suffering;

they had no work, and they had no art, and they had no religion. To Thyrsis it seemed that this last was the supreme need of their lives; but it was quite in vain that he tried to supply it. He had no theologies to offer, but he had a rough working faith that served his needs. He had a way of prayer—informal prayers, to the undiscovered gods—"Oh infinite Holiness of life, I seek to be reminded of Thee!" He would contemplate their failures and agonies and despairs, and floods of pity would well up in him; and then he would come back to Corydon, seeking to make these things real to her. But this he could never do—he could never carry her with him, he could never find anything with her but failure and disappointment.

This was, in part, the outrage that the creed-mongers had done to her; with their dead formulas and their grotesque legends and their stupid bigotries they had sullied and defaced all the symbols of religion—they had made a noble temple into a sepulchre of dead bones. They had taken her by force, when she was a child, and dragged her into it, and filled her with terror and loathing. To abandon the language of metaphor, they had sent her to a Protestant-Episcopal Sunday-school, where a vinegary spinster had taught her the catechism and the ten commandments. And so forever after the whole content of Christianity was a thing alien and hateful to her.

But also, in their disharmony was something even more fundamental. Corydon's emotions did not come in the same way as her husband's. With her a joy had to be a spontaneous thing; there could be no reasoning about it, and it was not the product nor the occasion of any act of will. In fact, if anyone were to say to Corvdon, "Come, let us experience a certain emotion"

then straightway it would become certain that she might experience any emotion in the world, save only that one.

Thyrsis told himself that he was to blame for this, having destroyed her spontaneity in the very beginning. But how was he to have known that, understanding as he did no temperament but his own, being powerless to handle any tools but his own? The process of his soul's life was to tell himself all his vices over; and so he would become filled with hatred of himself, and would forthwith evolve into something different. But with Corydon, this method produced, not rage and resolution, but only black despair. The process of Corydon's soul-life was that some one else should come to her, and tell her that she was radiant and exquisite; and straightway she would become these things, and yet more of them; and until such a person came to her, all her soul's life stood still.

This was illustrated whenever there was any misunderstanding between them, any crisis of unhappiness or fit of melancholia. It was quite in vain at such times that Thyrsis would ask her to sweep these things aside and forget them; it was disastrous to suggest that she put any blame upon herself, or scold herself into a different attitude. He might take days to make up his mind to do what he had to do—yet that fit of misery would last until he had come and done it. He had to put his arms about her, and make her realize that she was precious to him, that she was necessary to him, that he loved her and appreciated her and believed in her; so, and so only, would the current of her life begin once more to flow.

And why could he not do this more quickly? Why did he have to wait until she had suffered agonies ? Why did he have to be dragged to it by the hair of his head, as

it were—as a means of keeping her from going insane from misery? Was it that he did not really love her? Mocking voices in his soul told him that was it—but he knew it was not so. He loved her; but he loved her in his way, and that was not her way. And how shall one explain that strange impulse in the heart of man, that makes it impossible for him to be content with anything that is upon the earth—that makes him restless in the presence of beauty and love and joy, and all those things with which he so obviously ought to be content?

It is so clearly irrational and unjustifiable; and yet that impulse continues to drive him forth, as it drove him to destroy the statues in the Athenian temples, and to burn the silken robes and the jewelled treasures in the public-squares of Venice. One contemplates the thing in its most unlovely aspects—in the form of Simeon Stylites upon his pillar, devoured by worms, or of Bernard Gui, with his racks and his thumb-screws and his "secular arm"—and it seems the very culmination of all human madness and horror. And yet, it does not cease to come; and he upon whom it seizes may not free himself by any power of his will, by any cunning of his wit; and no agony of yearning and grief may be sufficient to enable him to love a woman as a woman desires to be loved.

§ 15. THYRSIS would work over the book until he was utterly exhausted; and then, limp as a rag, he would come back to the world of reality and face these complications. He needed to rest, he needed to be soothed and comforted and sung to sleep; he needed to receive—and instead he had to give. Sometimes he wondered vaguely if this might not have been otherwise;

he knew nothing about women—but surely there might have been, somewhere in the world, some woman who would have understood, and would have asked nothing from him. But he dwelt on that thought but seldom, for it seemed a kind of treason; he was not married to any such hypothetical woman—he was married to Cory-don, and it was Corydon he had to save from the wolves.

So, time after time, he would come back to her, and take the cup of her pain in his trembling hands, and put it to his lips and drain it to the dregs. He would sit with her, and hear the tale of her struggles, he would fan the sparks of his exhausted emotions into flame, so that she might warm herself by the glow. And when the burden became too great for him, when the black floods of anguish and despair which she poured out upon him threatened to engulf him altogether— then he would tramp away into the forest, or out upon the snow-encrusted hills, and call up the demons of his soul once more, and proclaim himself unconquered and unconquerable. He would spread his wings to the glory of his vision; he would feel again the surge and sweep of it, he would sing aloud with the power of it, and pledge himself anew to live for it—if need be even to die for it.