Loves Pilgrimage | Page 9

religious meetings at the college. Warner had been
shocked by his theological irregularities; but they were still friends, and

now Thyrsis sought a chance to exchange confidences with him.
The opportunity came while they were strolling down an avenue near
the college, and a woman passed them, a woman with bold and hard
features, and obviously-painted cheeks. She smiled at a group of
students just ahead, and one of them turned and walked off arm in arm
with her.
"Good heavens!" exclaimed Warner. "Did you see that?"
"Yes," said Thyrsis. "Who is she?"
"She comes from a house just around the corner."
"But who is she?"
"Why--she's a street-walker."
"A street-walker!"
This brought to Thyrsis' mind a 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