“Mother wants me to stay with her,” he said. “I’ve only got ten dollars left. But I’ll get some from the publisher.”
“Are you sure you can?” she asked.
“Oh, Corydon!” he cried, “you’ve no idea how wonderful it is—the book, I mean. You’ll be amazed! It kept growing on me all the time—I got new visions of it. That was why it took me so long. I didn’t dare to appreciate it, while I was doing it—I had to keep myself at work, you know; but now that it’s done, I can realize it. And oh, it’s a book the world will heed!”
“When can I see it, Thyrsis?”
“As soon as it’s copied—the manuscript is all a scrawl. But you know the minstrel’s song at the end? My Gethsemane, I called it! I found a new form for it—it’s all in free verse. I didn’t mean it to be that way, but it just wrote itself; it broke through the bars and ran away with me. Oh, it marches like the thunder!”
He pulled some papers from his coat-pocket. “I was going over it on the train this morning,” he said. “Listen!”
He read her the song, thrilling anew with the joy of its effect upon her. “Oh, Thyrsis!” she cried, in awe. “That is marvellous! Marvellous! How could you do it?”
And yet, for all the delight she expressed, Thyrsis was conscious of a chill of disappointment, of a doubt lurking in the background of his mind. It was inevitable, in the nature of things—how could the book mean to any human creature what it had meant to him? Seven long months he had toiled with it, he had been through the agonies of a child-birth for it. And another person would read it all in one day!—It was the old, old agony of the artist, who can communicate so small a part of what has been in his soul.
Section 2. He wanted to talk about his book, but Corydon wanted to talk about him. She had waited so long, and suffered so much—and now at last he was here! “Oh, Thyrsis!” she cried. “There’s just no use in my trying—I can’t do anything at all without you!”
“You won’t have to do it any more,” he said. “We shall not part again.”