Love's Pilgrimage: A Novel

by Upton Sinclair

Section 1. Through the summer Corydon had been living week by week upon the hope that her husband would be able to send for her; all through the fall she had been dreaming of the arrangements they would make for the winter. But by now it had become clear that they would have to be separated for a part of the winter as well. She had sent him long letters, full of hopes and yearnings, anxieties and rebellions; but in the end she had brought herself to face the inevitable. And then it transpired that even a greater sacrifice was required of her—she was to be forbidden to see Thyrsis at all! If a man did not support his wife, said the world, it was common-sense that he should not have any wife; that was the quickest way to bring him to his senses. And so the two had threshed out that problem, and chosen their course; they would live in the same city, and yet confine themselves to writing letters!

A curious feeling it gave Thyrsis, to know that she was so near to him, and yet not to be going to meet her! He could not endure any part of the city where he had been with her, and got himself a hall bedroom on the edge of a tenement-district far up town. Then he had his shoes shined, and purchased a clean collar, and wrote Miss Ethelynda Lewis that he was ready to call. While he was waiting to hear from her, there came to him a strange adventure; assuredly one of the strangest that ever befell a struggling poet, in a world where many strange adventures have befallen struggling poets.

For six months Thyrsis had not seen his baby; and there had come in the meantime so many letters, telling so many miraculous things about that baby! So many dreams he had dreamed about it, so many hopes and so many prayers were centered in it! Twenty-two hours had he sat by the bedside when it was born; and through all the trials that had come afterwards, how he had suffered and wept for it! Now his heart was wrung with longing to see it, to touch it—his child. He wrote Corydon that he could not stand it; and Corydon wrote back that he was right—he should surely see the baby. And so it was arranged between them that Thyrsis was to be at a certain place in the park, and she would send the nurse-girl there with little Cedric.

He went and sat upon a bench; and the hour came, and at last down the path strolled a nurse-girl, wheeling a baby-carriage. He looked at the girl—yes, she was Irish, as Cordon had said, and answered all specifications; and then he looked at the baby, and his heart sank into his boots. Oh, such a baby! With red hair and a pug-nose, plebeian and dull-looking—such a baby! Thyrsis stared at the maid again—and she smiled at him. Then she passed on, and he sank down upon a bench. Great God, could it be that that was his child? That he would have to go through life with something so ugly, so alien to him? A terror seized him. It was like a nightmare. He was hardly able to move.

But then he told himself it could not be! Corydon had written him all about the baby; it was beautiful, with a noble head; everyone loved it. But then, were not mothers notoriously blind? Had there ever been a mother dissatisfied with her child? Or a father either, for that matter? Was it not a kind of treason for him to be so disgusted with this one—since it so clearly must be his?

There was none other in sight; and though he waited half an hour, none came. At last he could stand it no more, but hurried away to the nearest telegraph-office. “Has baby red hair?” he wrote. “Did he come to the park?” And then he went to his room and waited, and soon after came the reply: “Baby has golden hair. Nurse was ill. Could not come.”

Thyrsis read this, and then shut the door upon the messenger-boy, and burst into wild, hilarious laughter. He stood there with his arms stretched out, invoking all posterity to witness—“What do you think of that? What do you think of that?”

And a full hour later he was sitting by his bedside, his chin supported on his hands, and still invoking posterity. “Will you ever know what I went through?” he was saying. “Will you ever realize what my books have cost?” Then he smiled grimly, thinking of Voltaire’s cruel epigram—that “letters addressed to posterity seldom reach their destination!”

Section 2. Thyrsis received a reply to his note, and went to call upon Miss Ethelynda Lewis. Miss Lewis dwelt in a luxurious apartment-house on Riverside Drive, where a colored maid showed him into a big parlor, full of spindle-legged gilt furniture upholstered in flowered silk. Also the room contained an ebony grand piano, and a bookcase, in which he had time to notice the works of Maupassant and Marie Corelli.

Then Miss Lewis entered, clad in a morning-gown of crimson “liberty”. She was petite and exquisite, full of alluring dimples—and apparently just out of a perfumed bath. Thyrsis sat on the edge of his chair and gazed at her, feeling quite out of his element.