Let the fact be recorded that Thyrsis was capable of falling in love, and if he did not do it frequently, it was because he had so many other matters on his mind. There is a story having to do with this period, which ought to be told because of the satisfaction it will bring to the lovers of love, and to those who dislike the puritanical Thyrsis and will be pleased to see him “get his.”
It was the winter of 1910-11, when Corydon had gone south, having once more decided upon a divorce. Thyrsis was a free man, so he thought—and, incidentally, a lonely and restless one. He was thirty-two at this time, and went up to New York to attend a gathering in Carnegie Hall, where the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was acting as host to Victor Berger, socialist Congressman-elect. Thyrsis came early, and in one of the aisles came face to face with a lovely young woman of twenty-one or two, wearing the red badge of an usher. In those observant eyes and that frank open countenance was revealed something he had been seeking for a long time; there was a mental flash, and the two moved automatically toward each other. Said she, without hesitation: “You are Thyrsis?” Said he: “You are Inez Milholland?”
A Vassar girl, with a wealthy father, Inez had joined the Socialist Party and had become an active suffragette—all of which, of course, made a sensation in the newspapers. That evening, after the meeting, Thyrsis went with her to her hotel, and they sat in the lobby conversing until three o’clock in the morning, when the place was deserted by all but the night watchman. What did they not talk about, in the vast range of the socialist and suffrage movements in America, and in England, where Inez had been to school; the people they knew, the books they had read, the events that the future held behind its veil!
“I never met anyone I could talk to so easily,” said Thyrsis; and Inez returned the compliment. “But don’t fall in love with me,” she added. When he asked, “Why not?” she answered, “I am already in love, and you would only make yourself unhappy.” Later, she told him that she too was unhappy; it was a married man, and she would not break up another woman’s home but would only eat her heart out. Again that old, old story that Heine sings, and for which neither socialists nor suffragists have any remedy!
Es ist eine alte Geschichte
Doch klingt sie immer neu.
Inez desired to meet Berger, and he came next morning. The three of us went for a drive and had lunch at the Claremont. We spent the afternoon walking in the park, then had dinner at the hotel, and spent the evening together, solving all the problems of human society. It was another intellectual explosion, this time à trois. Said the socialist Congressman: “Thyrsis, if it wouldn’t be that I am a family man, I would run away with that girl so quick you would never see her once again.” Thyrsis repeated that to Inez, who smiled and said, “He is mistaken; it is not like that.”
Thyrsis disregarded the sisterly advice that had been given to him. He fell in love—with such desperate and terrifying violence as he had never conceived possible in his hard-working, sober life. He understood for the first time the meaning of that ancient symbol of the little archer with the bow and arrow. Commonplace as the metaphor seemed, there was no other to be used; it was like being shot—a convulsive pain, a sense of complete collapse, an anguish repeated, day after day, without any respite or hope of it.
He could not give up. It seemed to him that here was the woman who had been made for him, and the thought that he had to lose her was not to be borne. He would go back to Arden and write letters—such mad, wild, pain-distracted letters as would satisfy the most exacting intellectual, the most implacable hater of Puritans! Inez afterward assured him that she had destroyed these letters, which was kind of her. She was always kind, and straightforward, saying what she meant, as men and women will do in utopia.
The storm passed, as storms do, and new life came to Thyrsis. Four years afterward he met Inez Milholland again. She was now married, and it seemed to Thyrsis that the world had laid its paralyzing hand upon her; she was no longer simple, in the manner of the early gods. Was it that the spell was broken? Or was it that Thyrsis had an abnormal dislike for fashionable costumes, large picture hats, and long jade earrings? Another two years, and Inez, a suffrage politician, came out to California and broke her heart trying to carry the state for Hughes, on the theory that he would be more generous to the cause than Woodrow Wilson. This was supposed to be strategy, but to Thyrsis it seemed insanity. In any case, what a melancholy descent from the young ardors of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society! She died of exhaustion.