Loves Pilgrimage | Page 5

instinct kept him from
those writers who jested with uncleanness; so he was virginal, and pure
in all his imaginings. Other lads exchanged confidences in forbidden
things, they broke down the barriers and tore away the veils; but
Thyrsis had never breathed a word about matters of sex to any living
creature. He pondered and guessed, but no one knew his thoughts; and

this was a crucial thing, the secret of much of his aloofness.
Section 4. In one of the early boarding-houses there had been a little
girl, and the families had become intimate. But the two children
disliked each other, and kept apart all they could. Thyrsis was
domineering and imperious, and things must always be his way. He
was given to rebellion, whereas Corydon was gentle and meek, and
submitted to confinements and prohibitions in a quite disgraceful
manner. She was a pretty little girl, with great black eyes; and because
she was silent and shy, he set her down as "stupid", and went his way.
They spent a summer in the country together, where Thyrsis possessed
himself of a sling-shot, and took to collecting the skins of squirrels and
chipmunks. Corydon was horrified at this; and by way of helping her to
overcome her squeamishness he would make her carry home the
bleeding corpses. He took to raising, young birds, also, and soon had
quite an aviary--two robins, and a crow, and a survivor from a brood of
"cherry-birds." The feeding of these nestlings was no small task, but
Thyrsis went fishing when the spirit moved him, secure in the certainty
that the calls of the hungry creatures would keep Corydon at home.
This was the way of it, until Corydon began to blossom into a young
lady, beautiful and tenderly-fashioned. Thyrsis still saw her now and
then, and he made attempts to share his higher joys with her. He had
become a lover of poetry; once they walked by the seashore, and he
read her "Alexander's Feast", thrilling with delight in its resounding
phrases:
"Break his bands of sleep asunder, And rouse him like a rattling peal of
thunder!"
But Corydon had never heard of Timotheus, and she had not been
taught to exploit her emotions. She could only say that she did not
understand it very well.
And then, on another occasion, Thyrsis endeavored to tell her about
Berkeley, whom he had been reading. But Corydon did not take to the
sensational philosophy either; she would come back again and again to

the evasion of old Dr. Johnson--"When I kick a stone, I know the stone
is there!"
This girl was like a beautiful flower, Thyrsis told himself--like all the
flowers that had gone before her, and all those that would come after,
from generation to generation. She fitted so perfectly into her
environment, she grew so calmly and serenely; she wore pretty dresses,
and helped to serve tea, and was graceful and sweet--and with never an
idea that there was anything in life beyond these things. So Thyrsis
pondered as he went his way, complacent over his own perspicacity;
and got not even a whiff of smoke from the volcano of rebellion and
misery that was seething deep down in her soul!
The choosers of the unborn souls had played a strange fantasy here;
they had stolen one of the daughters of ancient Greece, and set her
down in this metropolis of commercialdom. For Corydon might have
been Nausikaa herself; she might have marched in the Panathenaic
procession, with one of the sacred vessels in her hands; she might have
run in the Attic games, bare-limbed and fearless. Hers was a soul that
leaped to the call of joy, that thrilled at the faintest touch of beauty.
Above all else, she was born for music--she could have sung so that the
world would have remembered it. And she was pent in a dingy
boarding-house, with no point of contact with anything about her--with
no human soul to whom she could whisper her despair!
They sent her to a public-school, where the sad-eyed drudges of the
traders came to be drilled for their tasks. They harrowed her with
arithmetic and grammar, which she abhorred; they taught her patriotic
songs, about a country to which she did not belong. And also, they sent
her to Sunday-school, which was worse yet. She had the strangest,
instinctive hatred of their religion, with all that it stood for. The sight of
a clergyman with his vestments and his benedictions would make her
fairly bristle with hostility. They talked to her about her sins, and she
did not know what they meant; they pried into the state of her soul, and
she shrunk from them as if they had been hairy spiders. Here, too, they
taught her to sing--droning hymns that