Thyrsis, meantime, was interviewing publishers—an old story in his life. Mitchell Kennerley had no use for Sylvia—it was not in the modern manner. Thyrsis’ fate was to wander from one publisher to another—since he would not obey the rules of their game. Literary works were turned out according to pattern, stamped with a trademark, and sold to customers who wanted another exactly like the last. A new publisher came forward, an old-fashioned one; but apparently the buyers of old-fashioned novels distrusted the Thyrsis label. Sylvia sold only moderately, and the sequel, Sylvia’s Marriage, hardly sold at all. Two thousand copies in America and a hundred thousand in Great Britain—that was a record for a prophet in his own country!
It was a time of stirring among the foreign-born workers in America, and Thyrsis and other young enthusiasts thought it was the beginning of the change for which they prayed. There was a strike of silkworkers in Paterson, New Jersey, and the intelligentsia of Greenwich Village made weekend pilgrimages for strike relief and oratory. Leading the strike were Bill Haywood, grim old one-eyed miners’ chief from the Rockies; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who had begun her rebel career as a high-school girl in New York; Carlo Tresca, his face and body scarred by the bullets of his masters’ gunmen; Joe Ettor and Arthur Giovannitti, fresh from a frame-up for murder in Massachusetts. Helping them, and at the same time studying them for copy, were budding young novelists such as Leroy Scott and Ernest Poole; a dramatist, Thompson Buchanan, who was later to employ his knowledge in the concoction of anti-Bolshevik nightmares; and John Reed, war correspondent, whose bones were destined to lie in the Kremlin in less than ten years.
They besought Thyrsis to join them; he yielded to the temptation, and once more saw the busy pencils of the newspaper reporters flying. Did they make up the false quotations themselves, or was their copy doctored in the office? Impossible to say; but Thyrsis saw himself quoted as advising violence, which he had never done in his life. He filed the clippings away, and filed the rage in his heart. It was still six years to the writing of The Brass Check.
A terrible thing to see tens of thousands of human beings starved into slavery, held down by policemen’s clubs and newspaper slanders. The young sympathizers were desperate, and in the hope of moving the heart of New York, they planned the “Paterson Pageant”—to bring two thousand silkworkers to the stage of Madison Square Garden and give a mass performance of the events of the strike, with special emphasis on speeches and singing. Over this scheme a group of twenty or thirty men and women slaved day and night for several weeks, and bled their pocketbooks empty—and then saw the New York papers hinting that they had stolen the money of the strikers! Two things out of that adventure will never pass from memory: first, the old warehouse in which rehearsals were held, and John Reed with his shirt sleeves rolled up, shouting through a megaphone, drilling those who were to serve as captains of the mass; and second, the arrival of that mass, two thousand half-starved strikers in Madison Square Garden rushing for the sandwiches and coffee!
XI
The elderly Judge in Mississippi would not change his decision once given; but the ladies of the family were more pliable, and by springtime it had become plain to them that they could not break the bonds that held their daughter to the dreaded socialist muckraker. Two of them came to New York on a pilgrimage to see what sort of man it might be that had woven this evil spell. The mother was a lady who refrained from boasting of being the seventh lineal descendant of that Lady Southworth who had come to Massachusetts to marry the second colonial governor; but who allowed herself a modest pride as founder of the Christian (Disciples) church of her home town and sponsor of no one knew how many monuments to Confederate heroes throughout the South. With her came a greataunt, one of the few “strong-minded women” the state of Mississippi had produced; she had gone to California, and become a schoolteacher, and married a pioneer, General Green, who was known as the “father of irrigation” and had left her a newspaper, the Colusa Sun, to manage.
These two reached New York in a state of trepidation hardly to be comprehended by irreverent intellectuals. Oh, fortunate chance that the socialist muckraker had been born close to Mason and Dixon’s line, and had so many Virginia ancestors he could talk about! Actually, there were cousins who were cousins of cousins! His mother had taught him exactly how to use a knife and fork; his bride-to-be had taught him that gloves do not go with tennis shoes! For these reasons, plus a lawyer’s assurance that the divorce was valid in the United States, it was decided that there should be a wedding.
But surely not in New York, swarming place of reporters! Let it be in some decent part of the world, where family and good breeding count! Mississippi was impossible, because the Judge forbade it; but in Virginia there were cousins who would lend the shelter of their name and homestead. So the party took a night train—one amused but attentive muckraker and three Southern ladies on the verge of a nervous crisis, seeing a newspaper reporter in every sleeping-car berth. “Oh, the reporters! What will the reporters say!” Thyrsis heard this for a week, until he could stand it no more and suddenly exploded in a masculine cry: “Oh, damn the reporters!” There followed an awe-stricken silence—but in their secret hearts the two elderly ladies were relieved. It was a real man, after all!
Fredericksburg, scene of the slaughter of some fifteen thousand Yankees. The old-maid cousins knew Craig, because she had been sent to them to recuperate after dancing seasons; they now welcomed this romantic expedition with open arms. There was a tremendous scurrying about, and the respectable mother set out to persuade the pastor of her respectable kind of church to officiate. But, alas, that dread stigma of a divorce! Thyrsis had to seek out an Episcopal clergyman and persuade him. Having been brought up in that church, he knew how to talk to such a clergyman; having been the innocent party in the divorce, he had under the church law the right to be remarried.
But the clergyman required evidence that Thyrsis had been the innocent party; so the would-be bridegroom came back to the hotel to get the divorce certificate. As it happened, in the hurry of packing, the proper document had been overlooked; instead, there was another and subsequent document, giving Thyrsis the custody of his son. It was in the Dutch language, and the author, who was no Dutchman, took it and translated it, with the elderly clergyman looking over his shoulder. Somehow the legal formulas became confused, and a certificate of custody underwent a mysterious transmogrification—it became a certificate of divorce based on the wife’s admitted infidelity.