IV
Springtime in Florence! “Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehn?” Could any man walk under Tuscan skies in March and fail to be happy? George D. Herron had a villa on the slopes towards Fiesole, where he lived in what peace he could find; Thyrsis spent a couple of weeks with him, and talked over old times and the state of the world, with the great cataclysm of World War I only two years and a half in the future. Carrie Rand Herron played Schumann’s Widmung in the twilight—and for her a death by cancer was even nearer than the war.
Was Thyrsis happy? In truth, he hardly knew where he was or what he was doing. Places and events went by as if in a dream, and nothing had meaning unless it spoke of pain and enslavement, in America as in Italy. The grim castle of Strozzi was an incarnation in stone of the Beef Trust or the Steel Trust. Crowds of olive-skinned starving children with sore eyes, peering out of doorways of tenements in the back streets of Florence, were simply Mulberry Row in New York. Galleries full of multiplied madonnas and crucified martyrs spoke of Tammany Hall and its Catholic machine, with Catholic cops twisting the arms of socialist working girls on the picket line; Catholic archbishops striding down the aisle of a hall commanding the police to arrest women lecturers on birth control; Catholic judges sitting on the bench in black silk robes, punishing socialist muckrakers for being too decent to their erring wives.
Milan: a great city, with many sights, but for Thyrsis only one attraction—a socialist paper in an obscure working-class quarter, with an editor who was translating Thyrsis’ books. And then Switzerland, with towering snow-clad mountains and clear blue lakes—and another socialist editor. Then Germany, and one of the Lietz schools, a new experiment in education, where Thyrsis had arranged to leave his son: a lovely spot on the edge of the Harz Mountains, with a troop of merry youngsters living the outdoor life. Nearby were miles of potatoes and sugar beets, with Polish women working in gangs like Negro slaves. There was another school in Schloss Bieberstein, for the older boys, fine strapping fellows, bare-legged and bare-armed, hardened to the cold, and ready for the slaughter pits; in three years most of them would be turned into manure for potatoes and sugar beets.
Then Holland, where Frederik van Eeden had undertaken to help Thyrsis get the freedom that was not to be had in New York. A lawyer was consulted and put the matter up to the startled judges of the Amsterdam courts. Under the Dutch law, the husband was not required to prove that he had beaten or choked or poisoned his wife; he might receive a divorce on the basis of a signed statement by the wife, admitting infidelity. But what about granting this privilege to a wandering author from America? How long would he have to remain a resident of Holland in order to be entitled to the benefit of civilized and enlightened law? The judges finally agreed that they would admit this one American to their clemency—but never again! Amsterdam was not going to be turned into another Reno!