"You do not care about people," she is saying, sombrely.
To which his reply is, "It is not to be found in people."
"And yet from people it must come!" she insists.
He answers, "They do not even know what I mean; and they have no humility."
"It is a problem," Lloyd continues, after a pause. "Shall one go on alone, or wait and bring others with him?—You have brought that problem into my life."
She answers to this, "I cannot see how my love will hinder you."
He replies, "If you love me, who will love my art?"
So it goes—until the professors return with their freight of the world's Philistinism. And here came a scene, over which Thyrsis shook for many a day with merriment. The accounts of the concert are read; Moses awakens and comes in; and as the agony increases, the members of the family appear, one by one, clad in their dressing-gowns, and adding their lamentations to the chorus. Gone is all the prestige of the two professors, gone all the profits of Moses, gone all the visions of social triumphs in the city of the middle West!
To all of which uproar the two listen patiently; until at last the mother, in a transport of vexation, turns upon Helena, and accuses her of ensnaring the boy. And then—the climax of the scene—Lloyd springs up;
all that Genius in him, which has so far gone into music, turns now into rage and scorn. He pictures these people—pawing over his inspiration with their unclean hands—peering at it, weighing it, chaffering over it— taking it into the market-place to be hawked about. He shows them what they are, and what that "world" is, to which they would offer his muse as a whore. And then at the climax of his speech, as he is waving his violin in the air, the Herr Prof, von Arne ventures to put in a word; and the boy whirls upon him, and brings down the three thousand-dollar treasure upon the eminent psychiatrist's head!
§ 5. THE third act, which was the hardest of all to write, was to take place in a garret. Lloyd has gone away alone, and three years have passed, and now he lies dying of a wasting disease. Helena has come to him again—and still they are fighting the duel. "A woman will do anything for a man but renounce him," says Lloyd; and she cannot understand this fierce instinct of his.
She has come and found him; and he lies gasping for breath, and speaking in broken sentences. Yet he will not have her bring grief into his chamber; he has fought his way through grief, and through hatred and contempt, and now he lies at peace upon the bosom of nature. No longer is he wrapped up in his own vision; he has learned from the million suns in the sky and the million trees of the forest. He tells her that the thing called "Genius" springs ceaselessly from the heart of life.
He has cast out fear; and with it he has cast out love. "What are you?" he asks. "What am I?" And he sets forth in blazing words his vision of the soul,
which is as a flash of light in a raindrop, and yet one with the eternal process. As the fruit of his life he leaves one symphony in manuscript, and some pages of writing in which he has summed up his faith. That is enough, he says—that is victory; for that he fled away, and killed his love.
The two professors come, having learned that Lloyd is dying. But even they cannot divert him. He tells von Arne that his learning will submit itself, and that scientists will be as gardeners, tending the young flowers of faith. His mother and father come, and he whispers that even for them there is hope—that in the deepest mire of respectability the spark of the soul still glows. His mother bursts into weeping by his bed, and he tells her that even from the dungeon of pride there may be deliverance. So he sends them all away to pray.
Then Helena sits at the piano and plays a few bars of that sonata of Beethoven's which is an utterance of most poignant grief, and which some publisher has cruelly misnamed the "Moonlight". And after long silence, the dying man communes with his muse. A light suffuses the room, and he whispers, "Take thine own time; for the seeds of thy glories are planted in the hearts of men!"
§ 6. OVER these things Thyrsis would work for six hours at a stretch, sitting without moving a muscle; for days and nights he would wander about at random in the woods. He ate irregularly, of such things as he could put his hands upon; and sleep fled from him like a mistress spurned. When, after a couple of months, he had finished the task, there was an incessant throbbing in his forehead, and—alas for the sudden
tumble from the heights of Parnassus!—he had lost almost entirely the power of digesting food.
But the play was done. He sent it off to be copied, and wrote paeans of thanksgiving to Corydon. Once more he had a weapon, newly-forged and sharpened, wherewith to pierce that tough hide of the world!
There remained the practical question: What did one do when he had a play completed? What was the first step to be taken? Thyrsis pondered the problem for several days; and then, as chance would have it, his eye was caught by a newspaper paragraph to the effect that "Ethelynda Lewis, the popular comedienne, is to be starred in a serious drama next season, under the management of Robertson Jones. Miss Lewis's play has not yet been selected." Now, as it happened, "Ethelynda Lewis" had been on the play-bill of "The Princess of Prague", that tragic "musical comedy" to which Thyrsis had been taken; but he never noticed the names of actors and actresses, and had no suspicions. He sent his manuscript to this future star; and a week later came a note, written on scented monogram paper in a tall and distinguished chirography, acknowledging the receipt of his play and promising to read it.
Then Thyrsis turned to attack the manuscripts which had been accumulating while he was writing. They were coming more frequently now—apparently Mr. Ardsley liked his work. To Corydon, who had gone to the country with her parents, he wrote that he was getting some money ahead, and so she might join him before long.
This brought him a deluge of letters; and it forced him to another swift descent into the world of reality. "I have told you nothing of my sufferings," wrote Corydon. "At least a score of times I have written you long
letters and then torn them up, saying that your work must not be disturbed. But oh, Thyrsis, I do not think I can stand it much longer! Can you imagine what it means to be shut up in a boarding-house, without one living soul to understand about me?"
She would go on to tell of her griefs and humiliations, her longings and rages and despairs. Then, too, Cedric was not growing as he should. "He is beautiful," she wrote, "and every one loves him. But he makes not the least attempt to sit up, and I am very much worried. I fear that I ought not to go on nursing him—I am too nervous to eat as I should. And then I think of the winter, and that we may still be separated, and I do not see how I am to ctand it. It is as if I were in a prison. I think of you, and I cannot make you real to me."
To all of which Thyrsis could only reply with vague hopes—and then go away for a tramp in the forest, and call to his soul for new courage. He had still troubles enough of his own. For one thing, the fiend in his stomach was not to be exorcised by any spell he knew. It was all very picturesque to portray one's hero as dying of disease; but in reality it was not at all satisfactory. Thyrsis did not die, he merely ate a bowl of bread and milk, and then went about for several hours, feeling as if there were a football blown up inside of him.
He had a touching faith in the medical profession in those days, and whenever there was anything wrong with him, he would turn the problem over to a doctor and his soul would be at rest. In this case the doctor told him that he had dyspepsia—not a very difficult diagnosis—and gave him a bottle full of a red liquid to be taken after meals. To Thyrsis this seemed an
example of the marvels of science, of the adjustment of means to ends; for behold, when he had taken the red liquid, the bread and milk disappeared as if by magic! And he might go on and eat anything else—if there was trouble, he had only to take more of the red liquid! So he plunged into work on a pot-boiler, and wrote Cory-don to be of cheer, that the dawn was breaking.