Chapter LXXXVIII: Section 9: Another editor was reading “The Hearer of Truth,” and

a publisher was hovering on the brink of venturing “The Higher Cannibalism”; and so the two had new hopes to lure them on. When the spring-time had come, they would once more escape from the city, and would put up their tent on the lake-shore! They spent long afternoons picturing just how they would live--what they would eat, and what they would wear, and what they would study. As for Cedric--so they had called the baby--they saw him playing beneath the big tree in front of the tent. And what fun they would have giving him his bath on the little beach inside the point!

“I’ll fix up a clothes-basket for him to sleep in!” declared Thyrsis.

“Nonsense, dear!” said Corydon. “I’ve told you many times before--we’ll _have_ to have a crib for him!”

“But why?” cried he; and there would follow an argument which gave pain to his economical soul.

Corydon declared herself willing to do her share in the matter of saving money; but it seemed to him that whenever he suggested a concrete idea, there would be objections. “We can get up at dawn,” he would say, “and save the cost of oil.”

“Yes,” she would answer.

“And we can do our own laundry,” he would continue. But immediately another argument would begin; it was impossible to persuade Corydon that diapers could be washed in cold water, even when one had the whole of the Great Lakes for a washtub.

They would go on to contemplate the glorious time when they would have money enough to build a home of their own, that could be inhabited in winter as well as in summer; Corydon always referred to it with the line from “Caradrion”--“the little cot, fringed round with tender green.” It would be fine for the baby, they agreed--he should never have to go back to the city again. Thyrsis had a vision of him as he would be in that home: a brown and freckled country boy, with what were known, in the dialect of “dam-fool talk”, as “yagged panties and bare feets”.

But Corydon would protest at that picture. “It’s all right,” she said, “to put up with ugliness if you have to. But what’s the use of making a fetish of it?”

“It wouldn’t be ugliness,” replied he. “It would be Nature! ‘Blessings on thee, little man!’”

“That’s all very well. But I want Cedric to have curls--”

“Curls!” he cried. “And then a Fauntleroy suit, I suppose!”

“No--at least not while we’re poor. But I want him to look decent----”

“If you have curls, then you’ll want a nurse-maid to brush them!”

“Nonsense, Thyrsis! Can’t a mother take care of her child’s own hair?”

“_Some_ mothers can--they have nothing better to do. But if you were going in for the hair-dresser’s art, why did you cut off your own?”

And so would come yet new discussions. “You’ll be wanting me to maintain an establishment!” Thyrsis would cry, whenever these aesthetic impulses manifested themselves. He seemed to be haunted by that image of an establishment. All married men came to it in the end--there seemed to be something in matrimony that predisposed to it; and far better adopt at once the ideals and habits of the gypsies, than to settle into respectability with a nurse-maid and a cook!

Thyrsis was under the necessity of sweeping clean his soul, because of all the luxury and wantonness he saw in this metropolis, and the madness to which it goaded his soul. Some day fame would come to him, he knew--wealth also, perhaps; and oh, there must be one man in all the city who was not corrupted, who did not learn extravagance and self-indulgence, who practiced as well as preached the life of faith! And so, again and again, he and Corydon would renew the pledges of their courtship-days--pledges to a discipline of Spartan sternness.

Poor as he was, Thyrsis still found time to figure over the things he meant to do when he got money: the publishing-house that was to bring out his books at cost, and the free reading-rooms and the circulating libraries. Also, he wanted to edit a magazine; for there was a great truth which he wished to teach the world. “We must make these things that we have suffered count for something!” he would say to Corydon, again and again. “We must use them to open people’s eyes!” He was thinking how, when at last he had escaped from the pit, he would be in a position to speak for those others who were left behind. Men would heed him then, and he could show them how impossible it was for the creative artist to do his work, and at the same time carry on the struggle for bread. He would induce some rich man to set aside a fund for the endowment of young writers; and so the man who had a real message might no longer have to starve.

Thyrsis had by this time tried all the world, and he knew that there was no one to understand. Just about now he was utterly stranded, and had to borrow money for even his next day’s food. And oh, the humiliations and insults that came with these loans! And worse yet, the humiliations and insults that came without any loans! There was one rich man who advanced him ten dollars; Thyrsis, when he returned it, sent a check he had received from some out-of-town magazine--and in return was rebuked by the rich man for failing to include the “exchange” on the check. Thyrsis wrote humbly to inquire what manner of thing the “exchange” on a check might be; and learned that he was still in the rich man’s debt to the sum of ten cents!

His case was the more hopeless, he found, because he was a married man. The world might have pardoned a young free-lance who was willing to “rough it” and take his chances for a while; but a man who had a wife and child--and was still prating about poetry! To the world the possession of a wife and child meant self-indulgence; and when a man had fallen into that trap, he simply had to settle down and take the consequence. How could Thyrsis explain that his marriage had not been as other men’s? How could he hint at such a thing, without proving himself a cad?