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The Dutch divorce was granted, in pleasant fashion, without Thyrsis having to appear in court. Craig, who was back in England under the wing of her earl and countess, now wished to return to Mississippi to persuade her parents to let her marry a divorced man; Thyrsis also wished to go, having a new novel to market. These were the happy days before the passport curse, so it was possible to travel incognito and land in New York without newspaper excitement. In the interest of propriety, the pair traveled on separate steamers. Craig came on the Lusitania, ship of ill fate for her as for others; in a stormy December passage she was thrown and broke the bones at the base of the spine, which caused her suffering for many years, and made a hard task yet harder for her.
The siege of the family began. The father was a judge and knew the law—at least he knew his own kind, and took no stock in a piece of engraved stationery from Amsterdam that he could not read. “Daughter, you cannot marry a married man!” That was all he would say; and the answer, “Papa, I have made up my mind to marry him!” meant nothing. She would spend her nights weeping—an old story in her life. She was his first child, and her portrait, a beautiful oil painting, hung in the drawing room; when she went away to New York again, he put this portrait up in the attic.
Thyrsis, meantime, was interviewing publishers—an old story in his life. Mitchell Kennerley had no use for Sylvia—it was not in the modern manner. Thyrsis’ fate was to wander from one publisher to another—since he would not obey the rules of their game. Literary works were turned out according to pattern, stamped with a trademark, and sold to customers who wanted another exactly like the last. A new publisher came forward, an old-fashioned one; but apparently the buyers of old-fashioned novels distrusted the Thyrsis label. Sylvia sold only moderately, and the sequel, Sylvia’s Marriage, hardly sold at all. Two thousand copies in America and a hundred thousand in Great Britain—that was a record for a prophet in his own country!
It was a time of stirring among the foreign-born workers in America, and Thyrsis and other young enthusiasts thought it was the beginning of the change for which they prayed. There was a strike of silkworkers in Paterson, New Jersey, and the intelligentsia of Greenwich Village made weekend pilgrimages for strike relief and oratory. Leading the strike were Bill Haywood, grim old one-eyed miners’ chief from the Rockies; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who had begun her rebel career as a high-school girl in New York; Carlo Tresca, his face and body scarred by the bullets of his masters’ gunmen; Joe Ettor and Arthur Giovannitti, fresh from a frame-up for murder in Massachusetts. Helping them, and at the same time studying them for copy, were budding young novelists such as Leroy Scott and Ernest Poole; a dramatist, Thompson Buchanan, who was later to employ his knowledge in the concoction of anti-Bolshevik nightmares; and John Reed, war correspondent, whose bones were destined to lie in the Kremlin in less than ten years.
They besought Thyrsis to join them; he yielded to the temptation, and once more saw the busy pencils of the newspaper reporters flying. Did they make up the false quotations themselves, or was their copy doctored in the office? Impossible to say; but Thyrsis saw himself quoted as advising violence, which he had never done in his life. He filed the clippings away, and filed the rage in his heart. It was still six years to the writing of The Brass Check.
A terrible thing to see tens of thousands of human beings starved into slavery, held down by policemen’s clubs and newspaper slanders. The young sympathizers were desperate, and in the hope of moving the heart of New York, they planned the “Paterson Pageant”—to bring two thousand silkworkers to the stage of Madison Square Garden and give a mass performance of the events of the strike, with special emphasis on speeches and singing. Over this scheme a group of twenty or thirty men and women slaved day and night for several weeks, and bled their pocketbooks empty—and then saw the New York papers hinting that they had stolen the money of the strikers! Two things out of that adventure will never pass from memory: first, the old warehouse in which rehearsals were held, and John Reed with his shirt sleeves rolled up, shouting through a megaphone, drilling those who were to serve as captains of the mass; and second, the arrival of that mass, two thousand half-starved strikers in Madison Square Garden rushing for the sandwiches and coffee!