Loves Pilgrimage | Page 9

problem that had been haunting him for a year or two. Always when he walked about the streets at night there were women who smiled at him and whispered. And he knew that these were bad women, and shrunk from them. But just what did they mean?
"What does she do?" he asked again.
"Why, don't you know what a street-walker is?"
"Not very well," said Thyrsis.
It took some time for him to get the desired information, because the other could not realize the depths of his ignorance. "They sell themselves to men," he said.
"But what for?" asked Thyrsis. "You don't mean that they--they let them---"
"They have intercourse together. Of course."
Thyrsis was almost dumb with dismay. "But I should think they would have children!" he exclaimed.
"Good Lord, man!" laughed the other. "Where do you keep yourself, anyway?"
But Thyrsis was too much shaken to think of being ashamed. This was a most appalling revelation to him--it opened quite a new vista of life's possibilities.
"But why should they do such things?" he cried.
"They earn their living that way," said the other.
"But why that way?"
"I don't know. They are that kind of women, I suppose."
And so Warner went on to expound to him the facts of prostitution, and all the abysses of human depravity that lie thereabouts. And incidentally the boy got a chance to ask his questions, and to get a common-sense view of his perplexities. Also he got some understanding of human nature, and of the world in which he lived.
Here was Warner, a man of twenty-four, and of a devout, if somewhat dull and plodding conscientiousness; and the last eight or nine years of his' life had been one torment because of the cravings of lust. He had never committed an act of unchastity--or at least he told Thyrsis that he had not. But he was never free from the impulse, and he had no conception of the possibility of being free. His desire was a purely brute one--untouched by any intellectual or spiritual, or even any sentimental color. He desired woman, as woman--it mattered not what woman. How low his impulses took him Thyrsis realized with a shudder from one remark that he made--that his poverty did not help him to live virtuously, for about the docks and in the workingmen's quarters there were women who would sell themselves for fifty cents a night.
This man's whole life was determined by that craving; in fact it seemed to Thyrsis that his God had made the universe with relation to it--a heaven to reward him if he abstained, and a hell to punish him if he yielded. It was because of this that he clung to the church, and shrunk from any dallying with "rationalism". He disapproved of the theatre, because it appealed to these cravings; he disapproved of all pictures and statues of the nude human form, because the sight of them overmastered him. For the same reason he shrunk from all impassioned poetry, and from dancing, and even from non-religious music. He was rigid in his conformance to all the social conventions, because they served the purpose of saving him and his young women-friends from temptation; and he looked forward to the completion of a divinity-course as his goal, because then he would be able to settle down and marry, and so at last to gratify his desires. He stated this quite baldly, quoting the authority of St. Paul, that it was "better to marry than to burn."
This conversation brought Thyrsis to a realization that there was a great deal in the world that was not found in the poetry of Tennyson and Longfellow; and so he began to pry into the souls of others of his fellow-students.
Section 8. Warner had given him the religious attitude; and now he went after the scientific. There was a tall, eager-faced young man, who proclaimed himself a disciple of Haeckel and Herbert Spencer, and even went so far as to quote Schopenhauer in class. Walking home together one day, these two fell to arguing the freedom of the will, and the nature of motives and desires, and what power one has over them; and so Thyrsis made the startling discovery that this young man, having accepted the doctrine of "determinism," had drawn therefrom the corollary that he had to do what he wanted to do, and so was powerless to resist his sex-impulses. For the past year this youth, a fine, intellectual and honest student, had gone at regular intervals to visit a prostitute; and with entirely scientific and cold-blooded precision he outlined to Thyrsis the means he took to avoid contracting disease. Thyrsis listened, feeling as he might have felt in a slaughter-house; and when, returning to the deterministic hypothesis, he asked how it was that he had managed to escape this "necessity", he