Love's Pilgrimage: A Novel

by Upton Sinclair

Mrs. Jesse Dyckman inhabited an apartment in a “studio-building” not far from Central Park; and here was more luxury and charm—a dining-room done in dark red, with furniture of some black wood, and candles and silver and cut glass, quite after the fashion of the Macintyres. Thyrsis was admitted by a French maid-servant; and there was Mrs. Dyckman, resplendent in white shoulders and a necklace of pearls; and there was Dyckman himself, even more prosperous and contented-looking than his pictures, and even more brilliant and cynical than his tales. Also there was his sister, Mrs. Partridge, the writer of musical comedies; and a Miss Taylor, who filled the odd corners of the magazines with verses, which Corydon had once described as “cheap cheer-up stuff”.

So here was the cream of the “literary world”; and Thyrsis, as he watched and listened to it, was working out the formula of magazine success. Mrs. Dyckman sat next to him, displaying her shoulders and her culture; it seemed to him that she must have spent all her spare time picking up phrases about the books and pictures and plays and music of the hour, so as to be ready for possible mention of them at her dinner-parties. She had opinions on tap about everything; opinions just enough “advanced” to be striking and original, and yet not too far “advanced” for good form. Jesse Dyckman’s short stories were the sort in which you read how the hero handled his cigarette, and were told that the heroine was clad in “dimity en princesse”. You learned the names of the latest fashionable drinks, and the technicalities of automobiles, and met with references to far-off and intricate standards of social excellence.

To Thyrsis it appeared that he could see before him the whole career of such a man. He had trained himself by years of apprenticeship in snobbery; he had studied the fashions not only in costume and manners, but also in books and opinions. He had been educated in a “fraternity”, and had chosen a wife who had been educated in a “sorority”; they had set up in this apartment, with silver service and three French servants, and proceeded to give dinners, and cultivate people who “counted.” And so had come the pleasant berth with the “Beau Monde”; one or two stories every month, and one thousand dollars for each story—as one might read in all newspaper accounts of the “earnings of authors”.

The “Beau Monde” might have been described as a magazine for the standardizing of the newly-rich. A group of these existed in every town in the country, and had their “society” in every little city. They would come to New York and put up at expensive hotels, and get their education in theatres and opera-houses and “lobster-palaces”; in addition they had this weekly messenger of good form. In its advertising-columns one read of the latest things in cigarettes and highballs and haberdashery and candies and autos; and in its reading-matter one found the leisure-class world, and the leisure-class idea of all other worlds. Young Blanchard himself was in the most “exclusive” society; and if one stayed close to him, one might worm his way past the warders. Among the regular contributors to the “Beau Monde” and to “Macintyre’s”, there were a dozen men who had risen by this method; and some of them had been real writers at the outset—had started with a fund of vigor, at least. But now they spent their evenings at dinner-parties, and their days lounging about in two or three expensive cafés, reading the afternoon papers, exchanging gossip, and acquiring the necessary stock of cynicism for their next picture of leisure-class life.

It was what might have been described as the “court method” of literary achievement. The centre of it was the young prince who held the purse-strings; and the court was a coterie of bookish men of fashion and rich women whose husbands were occupied in the stock-market. They set the tone and dispensed the favors; one who stood in their good graces would be practically immune to criticism, no matter how seedy his work might come to be. Nobody liked to “roast” a man with whom he had played golf at a week-end party; and who could be so impolite as to slight the work of a lady-poetess whom he had taken in to dinner?

Section 15. Thyrsis studied these people, and measured himself against them. He was not blinded by any vanity; he knew that it would not have taken him a week to turn out a short story which would have had the requisite qualities for Macintyre’s—which would have been clever and entertaining, would have had genuine sentiment, and as large a proportion of sincerity as the magazine admitted. He could have suggested that he thought it was worth five hundred dollars, and “Billy” Macintyre would have nodded and sent him a check. And then he could have moved up to town, and got a frock-coat, and paid another call upon Mrs. “Parmy” Patton. Then his friend Comings would have put him up for the “Thistle”, he would have got to know the men who made literary opinion, and so his career would have been secure.

Nor need he have made any apparent break with his convictions. In “society” one met all sorts of eccentrics—“babus” and “yogis”, Christian Scientists, spiritualists and theosophists, Fletcherites, vegetarians and “raw-fooders”. And there would be ample room for his fad—it was quite “English” to be touched with Socialism. All that one had to do was to be entertaining in one’s presentation of it, and to confine one’s self to its literary aspects—not setting forth plans for the expropriation of the house of Macintyre!

Thyrsis had one grievous handicap, of course. He would have had to keep his wife and child in the background; for Corydon, alas, would not have scored as a giver of dinner-parties. From a woman like Mrs. Jesse Dyckman, skilled in intellectual fence, and merciless to her inferiors, Corydon would have turned tail and fled. Thyrsis was able to sit by and let Mrs. Dyckman wave the plumes of her wit and spread the tail-feathers of her culture before his astonished eyes, and at the same time occupy his mind with studying her, and working out her “economic interpretation”. But Corydon took life too intensely, and people too personally for that.

But she would have let him go, if he had told her that it was best. So why should he not do it—why should he turn his back upon this opportunity, and return to the “soap-box in a marsh” to wrestle with loneliness and want? The fact of the matter was that the thing which seemed so easy to his intellect, was impossible to his character. Thyrsis could not have anything to do with these people without hypocrisy; merely to sit and talk pleasantly with them was to lie. They were to him the enemy, the thing he was in life to fight. And he hated all that they stood for in the world—he hated their ideas and their institutions, their virtues as well as their vices.

He had been down into the bottom-most pit of hell, and the sights that he had seen there had withered him up. How could he derive enjoyment from silks and jewels, from rich foods and fine wines, when he heard in his ears the cries of agony of the millions he had left behind him in that seething abyss? And should he trample upon their faces, as so many others had trampled? Should he make a ladder of their murdered hopes, to climb out to fame and fortune? Not he!