It was a time of agony. Should he try to creep back to his gun, or should he make a sudden dash? He started to try the latter, and had a pang of despair as the deer whirled and bolted away. He leaped to the camp and grabbed his gun and sprang out into sight again--and there, off to the right, was another deer. It was a huge buck, with wide-spreading antlers, rising out of the bushes where it stood. It saw Thyrsis, and started away; and in a flash he raised his gun and fired. He saw the deer stumble, and he fired the other barrel; and then he started in wild pursuit.

He had been warned to beware of a wounded deer; but he forgot that--he forgot also that he had no more sh.e.l.ls upon him. He ran madly through the forest, springing over fallen logs, plunging through thickets--he would have seized hold of the animal with his bare hands, if only he could have caught up with it.

The deer was badly hurt. It would leap ahead, and then stumble, half falling, and then leap again. Even in this way, the distance it covered was amazing; Thyrsis was appalled at the power of the creature, its tremendous bounds, the shock of its fall, and the crashing of the underbrush before it. It seemed like a huge boulder, leaping down a precipice; and Thyrsis stood at a safe distance and watched it.

According to the poetry-books he should have been ashamed--perhaps moved to tears by the reproachful look in the great creature's eyes. But a.s.suredly the makers of the poetry-books had never needed the price of a railroad-ticket as badly as Thyrsis did!

He only realized that night how desperate his need had been. He lay in his berth on board a train for the city--while back at his "open-camp"

a wild blizzard was raging, and the thermometer stood at forty degrees below zero. But Thyrsis was warm and comfortable; and also he was brown and rugged, once more full of health and eagerness for life. All night he listened to the pounding of the flying train; and fast as the music of it went, it was not fast enough for his imagination. It seemed as if the rails were speaking--saying to him, over and over and over again, "Ethelynda Lewis! Ethelynda Lewis! Ethelynda Lewis!"

BOOK X

THE END OF THE TETHER

_They sat still watching upon the hill-top, drinking in the scent of the clover.

"Ah, if only we might have come back here!" she sighed. "If only tee had never had to leave!"

"That way lies unhappiness" he said.

"Perhaps," she answered; and then quoted--

'Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour In the old haunt, and find our tree-topp'd hill!

Who, if not I, for questing here hath power?"

"I wonder," said he, "if the poet put as much into these stanzas as we find in them!"_

Section 1. Through the summer Corydon had been living week by week upon the hope that her husband would be able to send for her; all through the fall she had been dreaming of the arrangements they would make for the winter. But by now it had become clear that they would have to be separated for a part of the winter as well. She had sent him long letters, full of hopes and yearnings, anxieties and rebellions; but in the end she had brought herself to face the inevitable. And then it transpired that even a greater sacrifice was required of her--she was to be forbidden to see Thyrsis at all! If a man did not support his wife, said the world, it was common-sense that he should not have any wife; that was the quickest way to bring him to his senses. And so the two had threshed out that problem, and chosen their course; they would live in the same city, and yet confine themselves to writing letters!

A curious feeling it gave Thyrsis, to know that she was so near to him, and yet not to be going to meet her! He could not endure any part of the city where he had been with her, and got himself a hall bedroom on the edge of a tenement-district far up town. Then he had his shoes shined, and purchased a clean collar, and wrote Miss Ethelynda Lewis that he was ready to call. While he was waiting to hear from her, there came to him a strange adventure; a.s.suredly one of the strangest that ever befell a struggling poet, in a world where many strange adventures have befallen struggling poets.

For six months Thyrsis had not seen his baby; and there had come in the meantime so many letters, telling so many miraculous things about that baby! So many dreams he had dreamed about it, so many hopes and so many prayers were centered in it! Twenty-two hours had he sat by the bedside when it was born; and through all the trials that had come afterwards, how he had suffered and wept for it! Now his heart was wrung with longing to see it, to touch it--his child. He wrote Corydon that he could not stand it; and Corydon wrote back that he was right--he should surely see the baby. And so it was arranged between them that Thyrsis was to be at a certain place in the park, and she would send the nurse-girl there with little Cedric.

He went and sat upon a bench; and the hour came, and at last down the path strolled a nurse-girl, wheeling a baby-carriage. He looked at the girl--yes, she was Irish, as Cordon had said, and answered all specifications; and then he looked at the baby, and his heart sank into his boots. Oh, such a baby! With red hair and a pug-nose, plebeian and dull-looking--such a baby! Thyrsis stared at the maid again--and she smiled at him. Then she pa.s.sed on, and he sank down upon a bench. Great G.o.d, could it be that that was his child? That he would have to go through life with something so ugly, so alien to him? A terror seized him. It was like a nightmare. He was hardly able to move.

But then he told himself it could not be! Corydon had written him all about the baby; it was beautiful, with a n.o.ble head; everyone loved it. But then, were not mothers notoriously blind? Had there ever been a mother dissatisfied with her child? Or a father either, for that matter?

Was it not a kind of treason for him to be so disgusted with this one--since it so clearly must be his?

There was none other in sight; and though he waited half an hour, none came. At last he could stand it no more, but hurried away to the nearest telegraph-office. "Has baby red hair?" he wrote. "Did he come to the park?" And then he went to his room and waited, and soon after came the reply: "Baby has golden hair. Nurse was ill. Could not come."

Thyrsis read this, and then shut the door upon the messenger-boy, and burst into wild, hilarious laughter. He stood there with his arms stretched out, invoking all posterity to witness--"What do you think of _that?_ What do you think of _that?_"

And a full hour later he was sitting by his bedside, his chin supported on his hands, and still invoking posterity. "Will you ever know what I went through?" he was saying. "Will you ever realize what my books have cost?" Then he smiled grimly, thinking of Voltaire's cruel epigram--that "letters addressed to posterity seldom reach their destination!"

Section 2. Thyrsis received a reply to his note, and went to call upon Miss Ethelynda Lewis. Miss Lewis dwelt in a luxurious apartment-house on Riverside Drive, where a colored maid showed him into a big parlor, full of spindle-legged gilt furniture upholstered in flowered silk. Also the room contained an ebony grand piano, and a bookcase, in which he had time to notice the works of Maupa.s.sant and Marie Corelli.

Then Miss Lewis entered, clad in a morning-gown of crimson "liberty".

She was _pet.i.te_ and exquisite, full of alluring dimples--and apparently just out of a perfumed bath. Thyrsis sat on the edge of his chair and gazed at her, feeling quite out of his element.

She placed herself on the flowered silk sofa and talked. "I am immensely interested in that play," she said. "It is _quite_ unique. And you are so young, too--why, you seem just a boy. Really, you know I think you must be a genius yourself."

Thyrsis murmured something, feeling uncomfortable.

"The only thing is," Miss Lewis went on, "it will need a lot of revision to make it practical."

"In what part?" he asked.

"The love-story, princ.i.p.ally," said the other. "You see, in that respect, you have simply thrown your chances away."

"I don't understand," said he.

"You have made your hero act so queerly. Everyone feels that he is in love with Helena--you meant him to be, didn't you? And yet he goes away from her and won't see her! Everyone will be disappointed at that--it's impossible, from every point of view. You'll have to have them married in the last act."

Thyrsis gasped for breath.

"You see," continued Miss Lewis, "I am to play the part of Helena, and I am to be the star. And obviously, it would never do for me to be rejected, and left all up in the air like that. I must have some sort of a love-scene."

"But"--protested the poet--"what you want me to change is what my play is _about!_"

"How do you mean?" asked the other.

"Why, it's a new kind of love," he stammered--"a different kind."

"But, people don't understand that kind of love."

"But, Miss Lewis, that's why I wrote my play! I want to _make_ them understand."

"But you can't do anything like that on the stage," said Miss Lewis.

"The public won't come to see your play." And then she went on to explain to him the conditions of success in the business of the theatre.

Thyrsis listened, with a clutch as of ice about his heart. "I am very sorry, Miss Lewis," he said, at last--"but I couldn't possibly do what you ask."

"Couldn't do it!" cried the other, amazed.

"It would not fit into my idea at all."

"But, don't you want to get your play produced?"

"That's just it, I want to get my play produced. If I did what you want me to, it wouldn't be my play. It would be somebody else's play."

And there he stood. The actress argued with him and protested. She showed him what a great chance he had here--one that came to a new and unknown writer but once in a lifetime. Here was a manager ready to give him a good contract, and to put his play on at once in a Broadway theatre; and here was a public favorite anxious to have the leading role. It would be everything he could ask--it would be fame and fortune at one stroke. But Thyrsis only shook his head--he could not do it. He was almost sick with disappointment; but it was a situation in which there was no use trying to compromise--he simply could not make a "love-story" out of "The Genius".

So at last there came a silence between them--there being nothing more for Miss Lewis to say.

"Then I suppose you won't want the play," said Thyrsis, faintly.

"I don't know," she answered, with vexation. "I'll have to think about it again, and talk to my manager. I had not counted on such a possibility as this."

And so they left it, and Thyrsis went away. The next morning he received a letter from "Robertson Jones, Inc.", asking him to call at once.