Loves Pilgrimage | Page 3

like some of
those who preyed upon him, there might have been hope. But he was
generous and free-hearted, a slave to his impulses of friendship. And
this was what made the struggle such a cruel one to Thyrsis; it was like
the sight of some noble animal basely snared.

From his earliest days the boy had watched these forces working
themselves out. The gentleman and the "drummer" fought for
supremacy, and step by step the soul of the man was fashioned to the
work he did. To succeed with his customers he must share their ideas
and their tastes; and so he was bitter against reformers, who interfered
with the gaieties of the city, with no consideration for the tastes of
"buyers." But then, on the other hand, would come a time of
renunciation, when he would be all enthusiasm for temperance.
He was full of old-fashioned ideas, which would take the quaintest
turns of reactionism; his politics were summed up in the phrase that he
"would rather vote for a nigger than a Republican"; but then, in the
same breath, he would announce some fine and noble sentiment, out of
the traditions of a forgotten past. He was the soul of courtesy to women,
and of loyalty to friends. He worshipped General Lee and the old time
"Virginia gentleman"; and those with whom he lived, and for whose
unclean profits he sold himself, never guessed the depths of his
contempt for all they stood for. They had the dollars, they were on top;
but some day the nemesis of Good-breeding would smite them--the
army of the ghosts of Gentility would rise, and with "Marse Robert"
and "Jeb" Stuart at their head, would sweep away the hordes of
commercialdom.
Thyrsis saw a great deal of this forgotten chivalry. His nursery had
been haunted by such musty phantoms; and when he first came to the
Northern city, he stayed at a hotel which was frequented by people who
lived in this past--old ladies who were proud and prim, and old
gentlemen who were quixotic and humorous, young ladies who were
"belles," and young gentlemen who aspired to be "blades". It was a
world that would have made happy the soul of any writer of romances;
but to Thyrsis in earliest childhood the fates had given the gift of seeing
beneath the shams of things, and to him this dead Aristocracy cried out
loudly for burial. There was an incredible amount of drunkenness, and
of debauchery scarcely hidden; there was pretense strutting like a
peacock, and avarice skulking like a hound; there were jealousy, and
base snobbery, and raging spite, and a breath of suspicion and scandal
hanging like a poisonous cloud over everything. These people came

and went, an endless procession of them; they laughed and danced and
gossiped and drank their way through the boy's life, and unconsciously
he judged them, and hated them and feared them. It was not by such
that his destiny was to be shaped.
Most of them were poor; not an honest poverty, but a sham and
artificial poverty--the inability to dress as others did, and to lose money
at "bridge" and "poker", and to pay the costs of their self-indulgences.
As for Thyrsis and his parents, they always paid what they owed; but
they were not always able to pay it when they owed it, and they
suffered all the agonies and humiliations of those who did not pay at all.
There was scarcely ever a week when this canker of want did not gnaw
at them; their life was one endless and sordid struggle to make last
year's clothing look like new, and to find some boarding-house that was
cheaper and yet respectable. There was endless wrangling and strife
and worry over money; and every year the task was harder, the
standards lower, the case more hopeless.
There were rich relatives, a world of real luxury up above--the thing
that called itself "Society". And Thyrsis was a student and a bright lad,
and he was welcome there; he might have spread his wings and flown
away from this sordidness. But duty held him, and love and memory
held him still tighter. For his father worshipped him, and craved his
help; to the last hour of his dreadful battle, he fought to keep his son's
regard--he prayed for it, with tears in his eyes and anguish in his voice.
And so the boy had to stand by. And that meant that he grew up in a
torture-house, he drank a cup of poison to its bitter dregs. To others his
father was merely a gross little man, with sordid ideas and low tastes;
but to Thyrsis he was a man with the terror of the hunted creatures in
his soul, and the furies of madness