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Love\'s Pilgrimage

U >> Upton Sinclair >> Love\'s Pilgrimage



Charles Franks, Charles Aldarondo, and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.



LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

A NOVEL

Upton Sinclair

NEW YORK AND LONDON






CONTENTS





PART I

Love's Entaglement

BOOK I THE VICTIM
BOOK II THE SNARE
BOOK III THE VICTIM HESITATES
BOOK IV THE VICTIM APPROACHES
BOOK V THE BAIT IS SEIZED
BOOK VI THE CORDS ARE TIGHTENED
BOOK VII THE CAPTURE IS COMPLETED

PART II

Love's Captivity

BOOK VIII THE CAPTIVE BOUND
BOOK IX THE CAPTIVE IN LEASH
BOOK X THE END OF THE TETHER
BOOK XI THE TORTURE-HOUSE
BOOK XII THE TREADMILL
BOOK XIII THE MASTERS OF THE SNARE
BOOK XIV THE PRICE OF RANSOM
BOOK XV THE CAPTIVE FAINTS
BOOK XVI THE BREAK FOR FREEDOM






LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE

PART I

Loves Entanglement

BOOK I

THE VICTIM





It was in a little woodland glen, with a streamlet tumbling through
it. She sat with her back to a snowy birch-tree, gazing into the
eddies of a pool below; and he lay beside her, upon the soft, mossy
ground, reading out of a book of poems. Images of joy were passing
before them; and there came four lines with a picture--

"Hard by, a cottage-chimney smokes,
From betwixt two aged oaks,
Where Corydon and Thyrsis, met,
Are at their savory dinner set."

"Ah!" said she. "I always loved that. Let us be Corydon and
Thyrsis!"

He smiled. "They were both of them men," he said.

"Let us change it," she responded--"just between ourselves!"

"Very well--Corydon!" said he.

Then, after a moment's thought, she added, "But we didn't have the
cottage."

"No," said he--"nor even the dinner!"

Section 1. It was the Highway of Lost Men. They shivered, and drew
their shoulders together as they walked, for it was night, and a
cold, sleety rain was falling. The lights from saloons and
pawn-shops fell upon their faces--faces haggard and gaunt with
misery, or bloated with disease and sin. Some stared before them
fixedly; some gazed about with furtive and hungry eyes as they
shuffled on. Here and there a policeman stood in the shelter,
swinging his club and watching them as they passed. Music called to
them from dives and dance-halls, and lighted signs and flaring-
colored pictures tempted them in the entrances of cheap museums and
theatres; they lingered before these, glad of even a moment's
shelter. Overhead the elevated trains pounded by; and from the
windows one could see men crowded about the stoves in the rooms of
lodging-houses, where the steam from their garments made a blur in
the air.

Down this highway walked a lad, about fifteen years of age, pale of
face, and with delicate and sensitive features. His overcoat was
buttoned tightly about his neck, and his hands thrust into his
pockets; he gazed around him swiftly as he walked. He came to this
place every now and then, but he never grew used to what he saw.

He eyed the men who passed him; and when he came to a saloon he
would push open the door and gaze about. Sometimes he would enter,
and hurry through, to peer into the compartments in the back; and
then go out again, giving a wide berth to the drinkers, and
shrinking from their glances. Once a girl appeared in a doorway, and
smiled and nodded to him; he started and hurried out, shuddering.
Her wanton black eyes haunted him, hinting unimaginable things.

Then, on a corner, he stopped and spoke to a policeman. "Hello!"
said the man, and shook his head--"No, not this time." So the boy
went on; there were several miles of this Highway, and each block of
it the same.

At last, in a dingy bar-room, with saw-dust strewn upon the floor,
and the odor of stale beer and tobacco-smoke in the air--here
suddenly the boy sprang forward, with a cry: "Father!" And a man who
sat with bowed head in a corner gave a start, and lifted a white
face and stared at him. He rose unsteadily to his feet, and
staggered to the other, and fell upon his shoulder, sobbing, "My
son! My son!"

How many times had Thyrsis heard those words--in how many hours of
anguish! They sank into the deeps of him, waking echoes like the
clang of a bell: they voiced all the terror and grief of defeated
life--"My son! My son!"

The man clung to him, weeping, and pouring out the flood of his
shame. "I have fallen again--I am lost--I am lost!"

The occupants of the place were watching the scene with dull
curiosity; and the boy was trembling like a wild deer trapped.

"Yes, father, yes! Let us go home."

"Home--home, my son? Will you take me home? Oh, I couldn't bear to
go!"

"But you must come home."

"Do you mean that you still love me, son?"

"Yes, father, I still love you. I want to try to help you. Come with
me."

Then the boy would gaze about and ask, "Where is your hat?"

"Hat, my son? I don't know. I have lost it." The boy would see his
torn and mud-stained clothing, and the poor old pitiful face, with
the eyes blood-shot and swollen, and the skin, that had been rosy,
and was now a ghastly, ashen gray. He would choke back his feelings,
and grip his hands to keep himself together.

"Come, father, take my hat, and let us go."

"No, my son. I don't need any hat. Nothing can hurt me--I am lost!
Lost!"

So they would go out, arm in arm; and while they made their progress
up the Highway, the man would pour out his remorse, and tell the
story of his weeks of horror.

Then, after a mile or so, he would halt.

"My son!"

"What is it, father?"

"I must stop here, son."

"Why, father?"

"I must have something to drink."

"_No_, father!"

"But, my boy, I can't go on! I can't walk! You don't know what I'm
suffering!"

"No, father!"

"I've got the money left--I'm not asking you. I'll come right with
you--on my word of honor I will!"

And so they would fight it out--all the way back to the
lodging-house where they lived, and where the mother sat and wept.
And here they would put him to bed, and lock up his clothing to keep
him in; and here, with drugs and mineral-waters, and perhaps a
doctor to help, they would struggle with him, and tend him until he
was on his feet again. Then, with clothing newly-brushed and face
newly-shaven he would go back to the world of men; and the boy would
go back to his dreams.

Section 2. Such was the life of Thyrsis, from earliest childhood to
maturity. His father's was a heritage of gentle breeding and high
traditions--his forefathers were cavaliers, and had served the
State. And now it had come to this--to hall bedrooms in
lodging-houses, and a life-and-death grapple with destruction! And
when Thyrsis came to study the problem, he found that it was a
struggle without hope; his father was a man in a trap.

He was what people called a "drummer". He was dependent for his
living upon the favor of certain merchants--men for the most part of
low ideals, who came to the city in search of their low pleasures.
One met them by waiting about in the lobbies of hotels, and in the
bar-rooms which they frequented; and always the first sign of
fellowship with them was to have a drink. And this was the field on
which the battle had to be fought!

He would hold out for months--half a year, perhaps--drinking
lemonade and putting up with their raillery. And then he would begin
with ginger-ale; and then it would come to beer; and then to
whiskey. He was always devising new plans to control himself; always
persuading himself that he had solved the problem. He would not
drink in the morning; he would not drink until after dinner; he
would not drink alone--and so on without end. His whole life was
drink, and all his thoughts were of drink--the odor of it always in
his nostrils, the image of it always before his eyes.

And the grimness of his fate lay here--that it was by his best
qualities that he was betrayed. If he had been hard and mercenary,
like some of those who preyed upon him, there might have been hope.
But he was generous and free-hearted, a slave to his impulses of
friendship. And this was what made the struggle such a cruel one to
Thyrsis; it was like the sight of some noble animal basely snared.

From his earliest days the boy had watched these forces working
themselves out. The gentleman and the "drummer" fought for
supremacy, and step by step the soul of the man was fashioned to the
work he did. To succeed with his customers he must share their ideas
and their tastes; and so he was bitter against reformers, who
interfered with the gaieties of the city, with no consideration for
the tastes of "buyers." But then, on the other hand, would come a
time of renunciation, when he would be all enthusiasm for
temperance.

He was full of old-fashioned ideas, which would take the quaintest
turns of reactionism; his politics were summed up in the phrase that
he "would rather vote for a nigger than a Republican"; but then, in
the same breath, he would announce some fine and noble sentiment,
out of the traditions of a forgotten past. He was the soul of
courtesy to women, and of loyalty to friends. He worshipped General
Lee and the old time "Virginia gentleman"; and those with whom he
lived, and for whose unclean profits he sold himself, never guessed
the depths of his contempt for all they stood for. They had the
dollars, they were on top; but some day the nemesis of Good-breeding
would smite them--the army of the ghosts of Gentility would rise,
and with "Marse Robert" and "Jeb" Stuart at their head, would sweep
away the hordes of commercialdom.

Thyrsis saw a great deal of this forgotten chivalry. His nursery had
been haunted by such musty phantoms; and when he first came to the
Northern city, he stayed at a hotel which was frequented by people
who lived in this past--old ladies who were proud and prim, and old
gentlemen who were quixotic and humorous, young ladies who were
"belles," and young gentlemen who aspired to be "blades". It was a
world that would have made happy the soul of any writer of romances;
but to Thyrsis in earliest childhood the fates had given the gift of
seeing beneath the shams of things, and to him this dead Aristocracy
cried out loudly for burial. There was an incredible amount of
drunkenness, and of debauchery scarcely hidden; there was pretense
strutting like a peacock, and avarice skulking like a hound; there
were jealousy, and base snobbery, and raging spite, and a breath of
suspicion and scandal hanging like a poisonous cloud over
everything. These people came and went, an endless procession of
them; they laughed and danced and gossiped and drank their way
through the boy's life, and unconsciously he judged them, and hated
them and feared them. It was not by such that his destiny was to be
shaped.

Most of them were poor; not an honest poverty, but a sham and
artificial poverty--the inability to dress as others did, and to
lose money at "bridge" and "poker", and to pay the costs of their
self-indulgences. As for Thyrsis and his parents, they always paid
what they owed; but they were not always able to pay it when they
owed it, and they suffered all the agonies and humiliations of those
who did not pay at all. There was scarcely ever a week when this
canker of want did not gnaw at them; their life was one endless and
sordid struggle to make last year's clothing look like new, and to
find some boarding-house that was cheaper and yet respectable. There
was endless wrangling and strife and worry over money; and every
year the task was harder, the standards lower, the case more
hopeless.

There were rich relatives, a world of real luxury up above--the
thing that called itself "Society". And Thyrsis was a student and a
bright lad, and he was welcome there; he might have spread his wings
and flown away from this sordidness. But duty held him, and love and
memory held him still tighter. For his father worshipped him, and
craved his help; to the last hour of his dreadful battle, he fought
to keep his son's regard--he prayed for it, with tears in his eyes
and anguish in his voice. And so the boy had to stand by. And that
meant that he grew up in a torture-house, he drank a cup of poison
to its bitter dregs. To others his father was merely a gross little
man, with sordid ideas and low tastes; but to Thyrsis he was a man
with the terror of the hunted creatures in his soul, and the furies
of madness cracking their whips about his ears.

There was only one ending possible--it worked itself out with the
remorseless precision of a machine. The soul that fought was
smothered and stifled, its voice grew fainter and feebler; the agony
and the shame grew hotter, the suffering more cruel, the despair
more black. Until at last they found him in a delirium, and took him
to a private hospital; and thither went Thyrsis, now grown to be a
man, and sat in a dingy reception-room, and a dingy doctor came to
him and said, "Do you wish to see the body?" And Thyrsis answered,
in a low voice, "No."

Section 3. So it was that the soul of this lad had grown sombre, and
taken to brooding upon the mysteries of fate. Life was no jest and
no holiday, it was no place for shams and self-deceptions. It was a
place where cruel enemies set traps for the unwary; a field where
blind and merciless forces ranged, unhindered by man or God.

Thyrsis could not have told how soon in life this sense had come to
him. In his earliest childhood he had known that his father was
preyed upon, just as certainly as any wild thing in the forest. At
first the enemies had been saloon-keepers, and wicked men who
tempted him to drink with them. The names of these men were
household words to him, portents of terror; they peopled his
imagination as epic figures, such as Black Douglas must have been to
the children of the Northern Border.

But then, with widening intelligence, it became certain social forces,
at first dimly apprehended. It was the god of "business"--before which
all things fair and noble went down. It was "business" that kept vice
triumphant in the city; it was because of "business" that the saloons
could not be closed even on Sunday, so that the father might be at home
one day in seven. And was it not in search of "business" that he was
driven forth to loaf in hotel-lobbies and bar-rooms?

Who was to blame for this, Thyrsis did not know; but certain men
made profit of it--and these, too, were ignoble men. He knew this;
for now and then his father's employers would honor the little
family with some kind of an invitation, and they would have to
swallow their pride and go. So Thyrsis grew up, with the sense of a
great evil loose in the world; a wrong, of which the world did not
know. And within him grew a passionate longing to cry aloud to
others, to open their eyes to this truth!

Outwardly he was like other boys, eager and cheerful, even
boisterous; but within was this hidden thing, which brooded and
questioned. Life had made him into an ascetic. He must be stern,
even merciless, with himself--because of the fear that was in him,
and in his mother as well. The fear that self-indulgence might lay
its grisly paws upon him! The fear that he, too, might fall into the
trap!

It was not merely that he never touched stimulants; he had an
instinct against all things that were softening and enervating, all
things that tempted and enslaved. For him was the morning-air, and
the shock of cold water, and the hardness of the wild things of the
open. Other people did not feel this way; other people pampered
themselves and defiled themselves--and so Thyrsis went apart. He
lived quite alone with his thoughts, he had never a chum, scarcely
even any friends. Where in the long procession of lodging and
boarding-houses and summer-resorts should he meet people who knew
what he knew about life? Where in all the world should he meet them,
save in the books of great men in times past?

There was not much of what is called "culture" in his family; no
music at all, and no poetry. But there were novels, and there were
libraries where one could get more of these, so Thyrsis became a
devourer of stories; he would disappear, and they would find him at
meal-times, hidden in a clump of bushes, or in a corner behind a
sofa--anywhere out of the world. He read whole libraries of
adventure: Mayne-Reid and Henty, and then Cooper and Stevenson and
Scott. And then came more serious novels--"Don Quixote" and "Les
Misérables," George Eliot, whom he loved, and Dickens, whose social
protest thrilled him; and chiefest of all Thackeray, who moulded his
thought. Thackeray knew the world that he knew, Thackeray saw to the
heart of it; and no high-souled lad who had read him and worshipped
him was ever after to be lured by the glamor of the "great" world--a
world whose greatness was based upon selfishness and greed.

Thyrsis knew no foreign language, and fate or instinct kept him from
those writers who jested with uncleanness; so he was virginal, and
pure in all his imaginings. Other lads exchanged confidences in
forbidden things, they broke down the barriers and tore away the
veils; but Thyrsis had never breathed a word about matters of sex to
any living creature. He pondered and guessed, but no one knew his
thoughts; and this was a crucial thing, the secret of much of his
aloofness.

Section 4. In one of the early boarding-houses there had been a
little girl, and the families had become intimate. But the two
children disliked each other, and kept apart all they could. Thyrsis
was domineering and imperious, and things must always be his way. He
was given to rebellion, whereas Corydon was gentle and meek, and
submitted to confinements and prohibitions in a quite disgraceful
manner. She was a pretty little girl, with great black eyes; and
because she was silent and shy, he set her down as "stupid", and
went his way.

They spent a summer in the country together, where Thyrsis possessed
himself of a sling-shot, and took to collecting the skins of
squirrels and chipmunks. Corydon was horrified at this; and by way
of helping her to overcome her squeamishness he would make her carry
home the bleeding corpses. He took to raising, young birds, also,
and soon had quite an aviary--two robins, and a crow, and a survivor
from a brood of "cherry-birds." The feeding of these nestlings was
no small task, but Thyrsis went fishing when the spirit moved him,
secure in the certainty that the calls of the hungry creatures would
keep Corydon at home.

This was the way of it, until Corydon began to blossom into a young
lady, beautiful and tenderly-fashioned. Thyrsis still saw her now
and then, and he made attempts to share his higher joys with her. He
had become a lover of poetry; once they walked by the seashore, and
he read her "Alexander's Feast", thrilling with delight in its
resounding phrases:

"Break his bands of sleep asunder,
And rouse him like a rattling peal of thunder!"

But Corydon had never heard of Timotheus, and she had not been
taught to exploit her emotions. She could only say that she did not
understand it very well.

And then, on another occasion, Thyrsis endeavored to tell her about
Berkeley, whom he had been reading. But Corydon did not take to the
sensational philosophy either; she would come back again and again
to the evasion of old Dr. Johnson--"When I kick a stone, I know the
stone is there!"

This girl was like a beautiful flower, Thyrsis told himself--like
all the flowers that had gone before her, and all those that would
come after, from generation to generation. She fitted so perfectly
into her environment, she grew so calmly and serenely; she wore
pretty dresses, and helped to serve tea, and was graceful and
sweet--and with never an idea that there was anything in life beyond
these things. So Thyrsis pondered as he went his way, complacent
over his own perspicacity; and got not even a whiff of smoke from
the volcano of rebellion and misery that was seething deep down in
her soul!

The choosers of the unborn souls had played a strange fantasy here;
they had stolen one of the daughters of ancient Greece, and set her
down in this metropolis of commercialdom. For Corydon might have
been Nausikaa herself; she might have marched in the Panathenaic
procession, with one of the sacred vessels in her hands; she might
have run in the Attic games, bare-limbed and fearless. Hers was a
soul that leaped to the call of joy, that thrilled at the faintest
touch of beauty. Above all else, she was born for music--she could
have sung so that the world would have remembered it. And she was
pent in a dingy boarding-house, with no point of contact with
anything about her--with no human soul to whom she could whisper her
despair!

They sent her to a public-school, where the sad-eyed drudges of the
traders came to be drilled for their tasks. They harrowed her with
arithmetic and grammar, which she abhorred; they taught her
patriotic songs, about a country to which she did not belong. And
also, they sent her to Sunday-school, which was worse yet. She had
the strangest, instinctive hatred of their religion, with all that
it stood for. The sight of a clergyman with his vestments and his
benedictions would make her fairly bristle with hostility. They
talked to her about her sins, and she did not know what they meant;
they pried into the state of her soul, and she shrunk from them as
if they had been hairy spiders. Here, too, they taught her to
sing--droning hymns that were a mockery of all the joys of life.

So Corydon devoured her own heart in secret; and in time a dreadful
thing came to happen--the stagnant soul beginning to fester. One day
the girl, whose heart was the quintessence of all innocence,
happened to see a low word scribbled upon a fence. And now--they had
urged her to discover sins, and she discovered them. Suppose that
word were to stay in her mind and haunt her--suppose that she were
not able to forget it, try as she would! And of course she tried;
and the more she tried, the less she succeeded; and so came the
discovery that she was a lost soul and a creature of depravity! The
thought occurred to her, that she might go on to think of other
words, and to think of images and actions as well; she might be
unable to forget any of them--her mind might become a storehouse of
such horrors! And so the maiden out of ancient Greece would lie
awake all night and wrestle with fiends, until she was bathed in a
perspiration.

Section 5. About this time Thyrsis was making his _début_ as an
author. He had discovered a curious knack in himself, a turn for
making verses of a sort which were pleasing to children. They came
from some little corner of his consciousness, he scarcely knew how;
but there was a paper that was willing to buy them, and to pay him
the princely sum of five dollars a week! This would pay for his food
and his hall bedroom, or for board at some farm in the summer; and
so for several years Thyrsis was free.

He told a falsehood about his age, and entered college, and buried
himself up to the eyes in work. This was a college in a city, and a
poor college, where the students all lived at home, and had nothing
to do but study; and so Thyrsis missed all that beneficent
illumination known as "student-life." He never hurrahed at foot-ball
contests, nor did he dress himself in honorific garments, nor
stupify himself at "smokers." Being democratic, and without thought
of setting himself up over others, he was unaware of his greatest
opportunities, and when they invited him into a fraternity, he
declined. Once or twice he found himself roaming the streets at
night with a crowd of students, emitting barbaric screechings; but
this made him feel silly, and so he lagged behind and went home.

The college served its purpose, in introducing him to the world of
knowledge; but that did not take long, and afterwards it was all in
his way. The mathematics were a discipline, and in them he rejoiced
as a strong man to run a race; and this was true also of the
sciences, and of history--the only trouble was that he would finish
the text-books in the first few weeks, and after that there was
nothing to do save to compose verses in class, and to make sketches
of the professors. But as for the "languages" and the "literatures"
they taught him--in the end Thyrsis came to forgive them, because he
saw that they did not know what languages and literatures were. On
this account he took to begging leave of absence on grounds of his
poverty; and then he would go home and spend his days and nights in
learning.

One could get so much for so little, in this wonderful world of
mind! For eight cents he picked up a paper volume of Emerson's
"Essays"; and in this shrewd and practical nobility was so much that
he was seeking in life! And then he stumbled upon a fifteen-cent
edition of "Sartor Resartus", and took that home and read it. It was
like the clash of trumpets and cymbals to him; it made his whole
being leap. Hour after hour he read, breathless, like a man
bewitched, the whole night through. He would cry aloud with delight,
or drop the book and pound his knee and laugh over the demoniac
power of it. The next day he began the "French Revolution"; and
after that, alas, he found there was no more--for Carlyle had turned
his back upon democracy, and so Thyrsis turned his back upon
Carlyle.

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