As a result of their farm-hunting expeditions, they had in mind a place which was a compromise between their different requirements. It had a good barn and plenty of fruit, and at the same time a view, and a house with comfortable rooms, and wall-paper that was not altogether unendurable. It was offered for four thousand dollars, of which nearly three-quarters might remain upon mortgage; so they had agreed that their future happiness would depend upon the war-book’s bringing them in a thousand dollars. Since this hope had failed, he had applied to Darrell, and to Paret, but neither of them had the money to spare. It now fell out, that just as he was at the point of desperation, he received a letter from the clergyman who had married them, Dr. Hamilton. This worthy man had been reading Thyrsis’ manuscripts and following his career; and he now wrote to tell how greatly he had been impressed by the new novel. Whereupon the author was seized by a sudden resolve, and packed up a hand-satchel and set out for the city, with all the forces of his being nerved for an assault upon this ill-fated clergyman.
Dr. Hamilton sat in his little office, looking pale and worn, his face deeply seamed with lines of care. As the poet thought of it in later years, he realized that this man’s function in life was to be a clearing-house for human misery—the wrecks of the competitive system in all classes and grades of society came to him to pour out their troubles and beg for help. It was not so very long afterwards that he went to pieces from overwork and nervous strain; and Thyrsis wondered with a guilty feeling how much his own assault had contributed to this result. Assuredly it could not happen often that a clergyman had to listen to a more harrowing tale than this “murdered artist” had to tell.
The doctor heard it out, and then began to argue: like the philanthropist in Boston, he was greatly troubled by the fear of “weakening the springs of character”. Being an “advanced” clergyman, he was familiar with the pat phrases of evolutionary science—his mind was a queer jumble of the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and that of Thomas à Kempis. But Thyrsis just now was in a mood which might have moved even Spencer himself; he was almost frantic because of Corydon, whom he had left half-ill at home. He was not pleading for himself, he said—he could always get along; but oh, the horror of having to kill his wife for the sake of his books! To have to sit by day by day and watch her dying! He told about that night when Corydon had tried to kill herself; and now another winter was upon them, and he knew that unless something were done, the spring-time would not find her alive.
The suicide story turned the balance with the clergyman; Herbert Spencer was put back upon the shelf, and Thomas à Kempis ruled the day. Dr. Hamilton said that he would see one of his rich parishioners, and persuade him to take a second mortgage on the farm. And so Thyrsis went back, a messenger of wondrous tidings.
A few days later came the check. The deed had been got ready; and Thyrsis drove to the farm, and carried off the farmer and his wife to the nearest notary-public. The old man pleaded to stay in his home until the new year, but Thyrsis was obdurate, allowing him only a week in which to get himself and his belongings to another place. And meantime he and Corydon were packing up. They drove to another “vandew”, and purchased more odds and ends of household stuff; and Thyrsis had his little study loaded upon a wagon, and taken to the new place.
A wonderful adventure was this moving! To enter a real house, with two stories, and two pairs of stairs, and eight rooms, and a cellar, and regular plastered walls, and no end of closets and shelves and such-like domestic luxuries! To be able to set apart a whole room in which the baby might spread himself with his toys and marbles and dolls and picture-books—and without any one’s having to stumble over them, and break their owner’s heart! To have a real parlor, with a stove to sit by, and a table for a lamp, and shelves for books; and yet another room to eat in, and another to cook in! To be able to have a woman come to wash the dishes without making a bosom friend of her, and having her hear all the conversation! To be able to walk through fields and orchards and woodland, and know that they belonged to one’s self, and would some day shed their coat of snow and blossom into new life! Thyrsis wished that he could have the book out of his mind for a month, so that he might be properly thrilled by this experience.
It was at the Christmas season, and therefore an appropriate times for celebrating. He went down into the “wood-lot”—their own “wood-lot”—and cut a spruce tree, and set it up in the dining-room; they hung thereon all the contrivances which the associated grandparents had sent down to commemorate an occasion which was not only Christmas and house-warming, but the baby’s third birthday as well. Because of the triple conjunction, they invested in a fat goose, to be roasted in the new kitchen-range; and besides this there were some spare-ribs and home-made sausages with which a neighbor had tempted them. It was a regular storybook Christmas, with a snow-storm raging outside, and the wind howling down the chimney, and an odor of molasses-taffy pervading the house.
Section 6. After which festivities Thyrsis bid farewell to his family once more, and went away to wrestle with his angel. Weeks of failure and struggle it cost him before he could get back what he had lost—before he could recall those phrases that had once blazed white-hot in his brain, and could see again the whole gigantic form and figure of his undertaking. Many an hour he spent pacing his little eight-foot piazza—four steps and a half each way, back and forth; many a night he would sit before his little fourteen-inch stove, so lost in his meditations that the stove would lose its red-hot glow, and the icy gale which raged outside and rattled the door would steal in through the cracks and set him to shivering.
Other times he would trudge through the snow and mud to the town, spending the day in the library, and then bringing out an armful of books to last him through the night. Thyrsis had read pretty thoroughly the literature of the six languages he knew; but now—this was the appalling nature of his task—he had to go back and read it over again. He did not realize, until he got actually at the work, what an utter overturning there would be in all his ideas. How strange it was to return and read the “classics” of one’s youth! What oceans of futility one discovered, what mountains of pretense—and with what forests of scholarship grown over them! It seemed to Thyrsis that everywhere he turned the search-light of his new truth, the structure of his opinions would topple like a house of cards. Truly, here was a “Götzendämmerung”, an “Umwertung aller Werthe”!
The worst of it was that he had to read, not only literature, but also history—often his own kind of history, that had not yet been written. If he wished to know the Shakespearean dramas as a product of the aristocratic and imperialist ideal in the glory and intoxication of its youth, he had to study, not only Shakespeare’s poetry, but the cultural and social life of the Elizabethan people. And he could not take any man’s word for the truth; he had to know for himself. The thing that would avail him in this battle was not eloquence and fervor, not the flashes of his irony and the white-hot shafts of his scorn. What he must have were facts, and more facts—and then again facts!