Chapter CLXIX: Section 6: Delia Gordon went away to take up her work in the city; but

for many months thereafter that missionary impulse stayed with them. They would find themselves seized with the longing to throw aside everything else, and to go out and preach Socialism with the living voice. They were still immersed in its literature; they read Bellamy’s “Looking Backward”, and Blatchford’s “Merrie England”, and Kropotkin’s “Appeal to the Young”. They read another book about England that moved them even more--a volume of sketches called “The People of the Abyss”, by a young writer who was then just forging to the front--Jack London. He was the most vital among the younger writers of the time, and Thyrsis watched his career with eager interest. There was also not a little of wistful hunger in his attitude--he had visions of being the next to be caught up and transported to those far-off heights of popularity and power.

Also, they were kept in a state of excitement by the Socialist papers and magazines that came to them. There was a great strike that summer, and they followed the progress of it, reading accounts of the distress of the people. Every now and then the pain of these things would prove more than Thyrsis could bear, and he would blaze out in some fiery protest, which, of course, the Socialist papers published gladly. So little by little Thyrsis was coming to be known in “the movement”. Some of his friends among the editors and publishers made strenuous protests against this course, but little dreaming how deeply the new faith had impressed him.

In truth it was all that Thyrsis could do to hold himself in; it seemed to him that he no longer cared about anything save this fight of the working-class for justice. He was frightened by the prospect, when he stopped to realize it; for he could not write anything but what he believed, and one could not live by writing about Socialism. He thought of his war-book, for instance. It was but two or three months since he had finished it, and it was his one hope for success and freedom; and yet already he had outgrown it utterly. He realized that if he had had to go back and do it over, he could not; he could never believe in any war again, never be interested in any war again. Wars were struggles among ruling-classes, and whoever won them, the people always lost. Thyrsis was now girding up his loins for a war upon war.

So there were times when it seemed that a literary career would no longer be possible to him; that he would have to cast his lot altogether with the people, and find his work as an agitator of the Revolution. One day a marvellous plan flashed over him, and he came to Corydon with it, and for nearly a week they threshed it over, tingling with excitement. They would sell their home, and raise what money they could, and get themselves a travelling van and a team of horses and go out upon the road on a Socialist campaign!

It was a perfectly feasible thing, Thyrsis declared: they would carry a supply of literature, and would get a commission upon subscriptions to Socialist papers. He pictured them drawing up on the main street of some country town, and ringing a dinner-bell to gather the people, and beginning a Socialist meeting. He would make a speech, and Corydon would sell pamphlets and books; they had animated discussions as to whether she might not learn to make a speech also. At least, he argued, she might sing Socialist songs!

Thyrsis was forever evolving plans of this sort; plans for doing something concrete, for coming into contact with the world of every day. The pursuit of literature was something so cold and aloof, so comfortable and conventional; one never pressed the hand of a person in distress, one never saw the light of hope and inspiration kindling in another’s eyes. So he would dream of running a publishing-house or a magazine, of founding a library or staging a play, of starting a colony or a new religion. And then, after he had made himself drunk upon the imagining, he would take himself back to his real job. For that summer his only indiscretions were to buy several thousand copies of the “Appeal to Reason”, and hire the old horse and buggy, and distribute them over some thirty square miles of country; also to help to organize a club for the study of Socialism at the university; and finally, when he was in the city, to make a fiery speech at a meeting of some “Christian Socialists.” Because of this the newspaper reporters dug out the accounts of his earlier adventures, and “wrote him up” with malicious bantering. And this, alas--as the publisher pointed out--was a poor sort of preparation for the launching of the war-novel.

Needless to add, the two did not fail to wrestle with those individuals whom they met. Thyrsis got a collection of pamphlets, judiciously selected, and gave them to the butcher and the grocer, the store-clerks and the hack-drivers in the town. But a college-town was a poor place for Socialist propaganda, as he realized with sinking heart; its population was made up of masters and servants, and there was even more snobbery among the servants than among the masters. The main architectural features of the place were fraternity-houses and “eating-clubs”, where the sons of the idle rich disported themselves; once or twice Thyrsis passed through the town after midnight, and saw these young fellows reeling home, singing and screaming in various stages of intoxication. Then he would think of little children shut up in cotton-mills and coal-mines, of women dying in pottery-works and lead-factories; and on his way home he would compose a screed for the “Appeal to Reason”.