And by these resolves he stood grimly. He walked the deck for hours every day; he watched the foaming green waters, and the gulls wheeling in the sky, and the sun setting over the sea, and the new moon showering its fire upon the waves. Gradually the air grew warm, and ice and snow became as an evil dream. A land of magic it seemed to which Thyrsis came—the beauty of it enfolded him like a clasp of love. He saw pine-forests, and swamps with alligators in them, and live oaks draped with trailing grey moss. The clumps of palmettos fascinated him—he had seen pictures of such trees in the tropics, and would hardly have been astonished to see a herd of elephants in their shadows.
He found a beach, snow-white and hard, upon which he walked for uncounted miles. He gathered strange shells and crabs, and watched the turkey-buzzards on the shore, and the slow procession of the pelicans, sailing past above the tops of the breakers. He saw the black fins of the grampuses cutting the water, and thought that they were sharks. He stood for hours at a time up to his waist in the surf, casting for sea-bass; he got few fish, but joy and excitement he got in abundance.
Then, back upon the hammocks—to walk upon the hard shell roads, and see orange and lemon-groves, and gardens filled with roses and magnolias, and orchards of mulberry and fig-trees. Truly this must have been the land which the poet had described—
“Where every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile.”
Thyrsis stayed in a humble boarding-house, but nearby was one of the famous winter-resorts of the Florida East Coast, and he was free to go there, and wander about the lobbies and piazzas of the palatial hotels, and watch the idle rich at their diversions. A strange society they were—it seemed as if the scum of the civilization of forty-five states had been blown into this bit of back-water. Here were society women, jaded with dissipation; stock-brokers and financiers, fleeing from the strain of the “Street”; here were parasites of every species, who, having nothing to do at home—or perhaps not even having any home—had come to this land of warmth to prolong their orgies. They raced over the roads and beaches in autos, and over the water in swift motor-boats; they dressed themselves half a dozen times a day, they fed themselves upon rich and costly foods, they gambled and gossiped and drank and wantoned their time away. As he watched them it was all that Thyrsis could do to keep himself from beginning another manifesto for the “Appeal to Reason”. Oh, if only the toilers of the nation could be brought here, and shown what became of the wealth they produced!
As if to complete his study of winter-resort manners and morals, Thyrsis encountered a college acquaintance whose father had become enormously rich through a mining speculation, and was here with a party of friends in a private-train. So he was whirled off in one of half a dozen automobiles, and rode for a hundred miles or so to an inland lake, and sat down to an al fresco luncheon of such delicacies as paté de fois gras and jellied grouse and champagne. Afterwards the young people wandered about and amused themselves, and the elders played “bridge”, in the face of all the raptures of this wonderland of nature.
A strange and sombre figure Thyrsis must have seemed to these people, with his brooding air and his worn clothing; he rode home in an auto with half a dozen youths and maidens, and while they flashed by lakes and rivers that gleamed in the golden moon-light, and by orchards and gardens from which the mingled scents of millions of blossoms were wafted to them, these voung people jested together and laughed and sang.
And Thyrsis lay back and watched them and studied them. Their music was what is called “rag-time”—they had apparently found nothing better to do with their lives than to learn hundreds of verses and melodies, of which the subject-matter was the whims and moods of the half-tamed African race—their vanities and their barbarous impulses, and above all their hot and lustful passions. Song after song they poured forth, the substance of which was summed up in one line that Thyrsis happened to carry away with him—
“Ah lubs you, mah honey, yes, Ah do!”
It seemed to him such a curious and striking commentary upon the stage which leisure-class culture had reached, in the course of its reversion to savagery.