Then a smile of mischief crossed her face, and she asked, “Which Daphnis?”
Section 1. Thyrsis came back to his home in the country, divided between satisfaction over the four hundred dollars worth of booty he had captured, and a great uneasiness concerning his novel. It had had with the critics all the success that he could have asked, but unfortunately it did not seem to be selling. Already it had been out three weeks, and the sales had been only a thousand copies. The publisher confessed himself disappointed, but said that it was too early to be certain; they must allow time for the book to make its way, for the opinions of the reviews to take effect.
And so, for week after week, Thyrsis watched and hoped against hope—the old, heart-sickening experience. In the end he came to realize that he had achieved that most cruel of all literary ironies, the succés d’estime. The critics agreed that he had written a most unusual book; but then, the critics did not really count—they had no way of making their verdict effective. What determined success or failure was the department-store public. It would take a whim for a certain novel; and when a novel had once begun to sell, it would be advertised and pushed to the front, and everything else would give way before it, quite regardless of what the critic’s had said. A book-review appeared only once, but an advertisement might appear a score of times, and be read all over the country. So the public would have pounded into its consciousness the statement that “Hearts Aflame”, by Dorothy Dimple, was a masterpiece of character-drawing, full of thrilling incident and alive with pulsing passion. The department-store public, which was not intelligent enough to distinguish between a criticism and an advertisement, would accept all these opinions at their face-value. And that was success; even the critics bowed to it in the end—as you might note by the change in their tone when they came to review the next work by this “popular” novelist.
So Thyrsis faced the ghastly truth that another year and a half of toiling and waiting had gone for nothing—the heights of opportunity were almost as far away as ever. He had to summon up his courage and nerve himself for yet another climb; and Corydon would have to face the prospect of another winter in the “soap-box in a marsh”.
It was now November, and Thyrsis had written nothing but Socialist manifestoes for six months. He was restless and chafing again; but living in distress as they were, he could not get his thoughts together at all. He must have been a trying person to live in the house with at such a time. “You ask me to take love for granted,” said Corydon to him once; “but how can I, when your every expression is contradictory to love?”
How could he explain to her his trouble? Here again was the pressure of that dreadful “economic screw”, that was crushing their love, and all beauty and joy and hope in their hearts. They might fight against it with all the power of their beings; they might fall down upon their knees together, and pledge themselves with anguish in their voices and tears in their eyes; but still the remorseless pressure would go on, day and night, week after week, without a moment’s respite.
There was this little house, for instance. It was all that Thyrsis wanted, and all that he would ever have wanted; and yet he could not be happy in it, because Corydon was not happy in it. He must be plotting and planning and worrying, straining every nerve to get to another house; he might not even think of any other possibility—that would be treason to her. So always it seemed—he had to turn his face a way that he did not wish to travel, he had to go on against every instinct of his own nature. His love for Corydon was such that he would be ashamed whenever his own instincts showed themselves. But then he would go alone, and try to do his work, and then discover the havoc this had wrought in his own being.
Just now the tension had reached the breaking point; the craving for solitude and peace was eating him up.
“What is it that you want?” asked Corydon, one day.
“I want to be where I don’t have to see anybody,” he cried. “I want to rough it in a tent, as I did once before.”