Thyrsis, in his agony, turned to Miss Lewis. "Will you let him break our bargain?" he cried.
"But what else is there to be done?" she answered.
"Don't you see that the play is a failure? And don't you see the plight you've got me in?"
Thyrsis was dumb with dismay. He stared from one of these people to another, and his heart went down— down. He saw that his case was hopeless. He had no one to help him or to advise him, and he had less than eleven dollars in his pocket.
"What do you propose to do?" he asked, weakly.
"I have already telegraphed to Richard Haberton," said Jones. "He will meet us and see the next two performances ; and then we'll lay the company off until we get some kind of a practical play."
And so the steam-roller rolled and the matter was settled; and Thyrsis, broken-hearted, bid the trio farewell, and took an early train back to New York.
He never saw any member of the company again— and he never saw the "practical play" which Mr. Richard Haberton made out of "The Genius". What was done he gathered from the press-clippings that came to him—the famous author of "The Rajah's Diamond" caused Helena to fall into Lloyd's arms at the end of the second act, and had them safely if not happily married at the beginning of the third. Also he wrote several "charming" scenes for Ethelynda Lewis, and two weeks later the play had a second opening in another manufacturing town of New England— where the critics, awed by the name of the distinguished dramatist upon the play-bills, were moved to faint praise. But perhaps it was that Mr. Richard Haberton required more than two weeks' time for the evolving of real "charm"; at any rate the audience came in no larger numbers to see this new version, and the misbegotten production lived for another six performances,
and died a peaceful death at the very gates of the metropolis.
And such was the end of Thyrsis' career as a playwright. In return for all his labors and his agonies he received some weeks later a note from Robertson Jones, Inc., to the effect that the books of "The Genius" showed a total deficit of six thousand seven hundred and forty-two dollars and seventeen cents; and accordingly, under the contract, there was nothing due to the author.
BOOK XI THE TORTURE-HOUSE
They sat in the darkness, watching where the starlight gleamed upon the water.
"We had always hope/' she was saying. "How endlessly we hoped!"
"Could we do it now?" he asked; and after a pause, he quoted from the poem—
"Unbreachable the fort Of the long-battered world uplifts its wall;
And strange and vain the earthly turmoil grows, And near and real the charm of thy repose, And night as welcome as a friend would fall!"
§ 1. THYRSIS came home beaten and crushed, worn out with overwork and worry, his heart black with rage and bitterness and despair. He met Corydon in the park, and she listened to his stor}^, white and terrified. She had swallowed all her disappointment, had stayed at home with the baby while he went with the play; and now the outcome of it all was this!
"What are you going to do?" she whispered; and he answered, "I don't know. I don't know."
She saw the terrible state he was in, and she dared not utter a single word of her own grief. She bit her lip, and choked back her tears. "This is my life," she thought to herself; "I must endure, endure—that is all!"
He could not afford even to sit and talk with her very long; there was no time to indulge in the luxury of despair. His money was gone, and he was in debt for some that he had borrowed. Since irregular eating had been telling upon him again, he had been getting his meals with an acquaintance of the family, who kept a boarding-house uptown. On the strength of his prospects, she had trusted him for four dollars a week; and now the play had failed, and he had to go and tell her, and listen to new protests as to his folly in refusing to "get a position". But in the end she bade him stay on; and so he was divided between his shame, and the need of something to eat day by day.
Time dragged on, and still there was no gleam of light. There were shameful hours in these weeks—
he touched the lowest point yet in his life. This was a typical cheap boarding-house, a place where the drudges of trade were herded; it. was a home of sordidness and ugliness—to Thyrsis its people seemed like carefully-selected types of all things that he hated in the world. There was a young broker's clerk, whose patter was of prices, and of fortunes made without service. There was a grey-haired bookkeeper for a giant "trust", a man who could not have had more pride in that great engine of exploitation, or more contempt for its victims, had he been the president and chief owner thereof. There was a young divinity-student, who made greedy reaches for the cake-plate, and who summed up for Thyrsis all the cant and commonness of the church. There was a dry-goods clerk, who wore flaring ties, and who played the role of a "masher" upon the avenue every evening. And finally there was a red-faced Irishman who wore large shiny cuffs and a false diamond, and who held some political job, and was voluble in behalf of "the organization".
Among these people Thyrsis sat three times a day, silent and tortured, paying a high price for each morsel of food he ate. But also he was lonely, and craving any sort of respite; and in the course of time he became acquainted with several of the younger men. One of the diversions in their pitiful and narrow lives was to gather in some room and indulge in petty gambling; sitting for hours upon hours with their faculties alert upon the attempt to get from each other some small fraction of that weekly stipend which kept them alive. Sometimes they played "penny-ante", and sometimes vingt et un; once, as it chanced, they needed another player, and they urged Thyrsis to join them.
And so, for the first time in his life, Thyrsis learned
what it meant to lay his soul upon the lap of the goddess of chance. From eight o'clock that evening until two the next morning, he sat in a suffocating room full of cigarette-smoke, trying in vain to win back the dollar or two he had lost at the outset; flushed and trembling with excitement, and hating himself with a bitter and tormenting hatred. And so he discovered his vice; he discovered that he had in him the soul of the gambler! And all the rest of the winter he had to wrestle with that shame. He would go to his dinner, tired and heartsick; and they would ask him to play again; and he—the man who carried a message for humanity in his heart—he would yield! Three times during that winter he fell into the mire; on Washington's birthday he began to play in the morning, and stopping only for meals, he played until long after midnight. Forever afterwards he was a humbler and a gentler man because of that experience; understanding how squalor abases one, and how swiftly and stealthily an evil passion closes its grasp about the soul.
§ 2. OF this shameful thing he said not a word to Corydon. But he avoided meeting her, because of the depths of his despair. And so at last there came a letter from her—a long and unusual one. Corydon, too, was having her troubles, it appeared.
"I am writing in haste," she said; "I shall mail the letter at once, before my resolution fails me. At least a dozen times I have made up my mind to tell you or to write you what is here, and each time I have turned back. But now I have got to a stage where I must have your help.
"I enclose a long letter which I wrote you years ago, before we were married. I was looking over some old
papers the other day and came upon it. Generally when I wrote you letters that I did not send, I tore them up; but something led me to keep this one—I had a feeling that some day it would be interesting as a curiosity. You see, I am always persuading myself that I can get over this trouble, and learn to laugh at it; and I am always succeeding—but only to have it crop up in some different form. I have told you a little of it now and then—but stop and read the enclosed, and you will see."