Also, alas, they had not been free to select the opera. It was “La Traviata”; and there was not much food for their hungry souls in this farrago of artificiality and sham sentiment. They shut their eyes and tried to enjoy the music, forgetting the gallant young men of fashion and their fascinating mistresses. But even the music, it seemed, was tainted; or could it be, Thyrsis wondered, that he could no longer lose himself in the pure joy of melody? Many kinds of corruption he had by this time learned about; the corruption of men, and of women, and of children; the corruption of painting and sculpture, of poetry and the drama. But the corruption of music was something which even yet he could not face; for music was the very voice of the soul—the well-spring from which life itself was derived. Thyrsis thought, as he and Corydon wandered about in the foyers of this palatial opera-house, was there anywhere on earth a place in which heaven and hell came so close together. A place where the lust and pride of the flesh displayed themselves in all their glory; and in contrast with the purest ecstasies the human spirit had attained! He pointed out one rich dowager who swept past them; her breasts all but jostling out of her corsage as she walked, her stomach squeezed into a sort of armor-plate of jewels, her cheeks powdered and painted, her head weighted with false hair and a tiara of diamonds, her face like a mask of pride and scorn. And then, in juxtaposition with that, the Waldweben and the Feuerzauber, or the grim and awful tragedy of the Siegfried funeral-march! There were people in this opera-house who knew what such music meant; Thyrsis had read it in their faces, in that suffocating top-gallery. He wondered if some day the demons that were evoked by the music might not call to them and lead them in revolt, to drive the money-changers from the temple once again!
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?”