Loves Pilgrimage | Page 4

cracking their whips about his ears.
There was only one ending possible--it worked itself out with the
remorseless precision of a machine. The soul that fought was
smothered and stifled, its voice grew fainter and feebler; the agony and
the shame grew hotter, the suffering more cruel, the despair more black.
Until at last they found him in a delirium, and took him to a private
hospital; and thither went Thyrsis, now grown to be a man, and sat in a

dingy reception-room, and a dingy doctor came to him and said, "Do
you wish to see the body?" And Thyrsis answered, in a low voice,
"No."
Section 3. So it was that the soul of this lad had grown sombre, and
taken to brooding upon the mysteries of fate. Life was no jest and no
holiday, it was no place for shams and self-deceptions. It was a place
where cruel enemies set traps for the unwary; a field where blind and
merciless forces ranged, unhindered by man or God.
Thyrsis could not have told how soon in life this sense had come to him.
In his earliest childhood he had known that his father was preyed upon,
just as certainly as any wild thing in the forest. At first the enemies had
been saloon-keepers, and wicked men who tempted him to drink with
them. The names of these men were household words to him, portents
of terror; they peopled his imagination as epic figures, such as Black
Douglas must have been to the children of the Northern Border.
But then, with widening intelligence, it became certain social forces, at
first dimly apprehended. It was the god of "business"--before which all
things fair and noble went down. It was "business" that kept vice
triumphant in the city; it was because of "business" that the saloons
could not be closed even on Sunday, so that the father might be at
home one day in seven. And was it not in search of "business" that he
was driven forth to loaf in hotel-lobbies and bar-rooms?
Who was to blame for this, Thyrsis did not know; but certain men made
profit of it--and these, too, were ignoble men. He knew this; for now
and then his father's employers would honor the little family with some
kind of an invitation, and they would have to swallow their pride and
go. So Thyrsis grew up, with the sense of a great evil loose in the world;
a wrong, of which the world did not know. And within him grew a
passionate longing to cry aloud to others, to open their eyes to this
truth!
Outwardly he was like other boys, eager and cheerful, even boisterous;
but within was this hidden thing, which brooded and questioned. Life
had made him into an ascetic. He must be stern, even merciless, with

himself--because of the fear that was in him, and in his mother as well.
The fear that self-indulgence might lay its grisly paws upon him! The
fear that he, too, might fall into the trap!
It was not merely that he never touched stimulants; he had an instinct
against all things that were softening and enervating, all things that
tempted and enslaved. For him was the morning-air, and the shock of
cold water, and the hardness of the wild things of the open. Other
people did not feel this way; other people pampered themselves and
defiled themselves--and so Thyrsis went apart. He lived quite alone
with his thoughts, he had never a chum, scarcely even any friends.
Where in the long procession of lodging and boarding-houses and
summer-resorts should he meet people who knew what he knew about
life? Where in all the world should he meet them, save in the books of
great men in times past?
There was not much of what is called "culture" in his family; no music
at all, and no poetry. But there were novels, and there were libraries
where one could get more of these, so Thyrsis became a devourer of
stories; he would disappear, and they would find him at meal-times,
hidden in a clump of bushes, or in a corner behind a sofa--anywhere out
of the world. He read whole libraries of adventure: Mayne-Reid and
Henty, and then Cooper and Stevenson and Scott. And then came more
serious novels--"Don Quixote" and "Les Misérables," George Eliot,
whom he loved, and Dickens, whose social protest thrilled him; and
chiefest of all Thackeray, who moulded his thought. Thackeray knew
the world that he knew, Thackeray saw to the heart of it; and no
high-souled lad who had read him and worshipped him was ever after
to be lured by the glamor of the "great" world--a world whose greatness
was based upon selfishness and greed.
Thyrsis knew no foreign language, and fate or