The story of Corydon and Thyrsis comes to an end in the year 1911. George Sterling was coming from California, Harry Kemp from Kansas; Mary Craig Kimbrough was in New York to consult with a publisher, and Corydon had come with her.
George Sterling, the day of his arrival, came to call upon Corydon in her father’s home. There he met the young lady from Mississippi and promptly fell upon his knees before her, after the fashion of romantic poets, even after they are forty. She was pale from a winter’s labor over manuscript, and George called her a “star in alabaster” and other extravagant things that moved her to merry laughter. Later on, Thyrsis met the couple walking on the street and stopped to greet them. Said Thyrsis matter-of-factly: “You don’t look well, Craig. Really, you look like a skull!” George raged, “I am going to kill that man some day!” But Craig replied, “There is the first man in the world who ever told me the truth.”
George Sterling, an unhappily married man, wanted to marry Craig. She told him, “I can never love any man.” When he demanded to know the reason, she told him that her heart had been broken by an early love affair at home; she knew she would never love again. But the poet could not accept that statement; he began writing sonnets to her—more than a hundred in the course of the next year. Eighteen years later it was my sad duty to edit these Sonnets to Craig for publication, and they were received by the high-brow literary world with some uncertainty. They have a fatal defect—it is possible to understand what they mean. Literary tastes move in cycles, and just now poetry lovers are impressed by eccentricities of language and punctuation. But the day will come when they care about real feelings, expressed in musical language, and then they will thrill to such lines as these:
All gracious things, and delicate and sweet,
Within the spaces of thy beauty meet
And again:
Sweet in this love are terrors that beguile
And joys that make a hazard of my breath.
And again:
Stand back from me! Have mercy for a space,
Lest madness break thine image in my mind!
In connection with this unhappy love affair, there was another curious tangle of circumstances. The girlhood sweetheart of Craig in the Far South had brought to her a poem so sad that it had moved her to tears, and she had carried it ever since in her memory. “The Man I Might Have Been” was its title—the grief-stricken cry of those who fall into the trap of John Barleycorn. Now here was the author of that poem, in love with the same woman; and both the unhappy suitors—the Southern boy and the crowned poet of California—were fated to end their lives by their own hands, and those of John Barleycorn.
Thyrsis was invited up to New York to give advice about the life of Winnie Davis. It was April and happened to be warm, so he wore tennis shoes because they were comfortable; to make up for this informality he added kid gloves—which seemed to Mary Craig Kimbrough of Mississippi the funniest combination ever heard of. She said nothing, being the soul of politeness; but her lively red-brown eyes took in everything. She was learning about these strange new creatures called radicals, and their ideas, some of which appeared sensible and others crazy. Watching Thyrsis, she thought, “The funny, funny man!” She watched him, thinking the same thought for a matter of half a century; but she did not always have to be polite about it.