He went into a restaurant, and sat down; and in the
seat beside him, close at his elbow, was a man.
He was a fat man—eating roast pork, and
apple-sauce, and mashed potatoes, and bread. And
Thyrsis looked at him with wondering eyes. “Man,”
he imagined himself saying, “do you know how
you came into this world? A thing impish, demoniac—purple
and dripping with blood—a spectre of nightmare
dreams?”
“W-what?” the man gasped.
“And you know nothing of the pain that it cost!
You have no sense of the strangeness of it! You
never think what your coming meant to some woman!”
And then—in the seat opposite was a woman;
and Thyrsis watched her.
“You!” he thought, “a woman!
Can it be that you know what you are? The fate
that you play with—the power that dwells
in you! To create new life, that may be handed
down through endless ages!”
Thyrsis did not say these things; they were what he
wanted to say—what he thought that he ought
to say. But then he reminded himself that these
things were forbidden; these mighty facts of child-birth,
of life-creation—they might not be spoken
about! They must be kept hidden, veiled with
mystery—if one wished to refer to them,
he must employ metaphors and polite evasions.
And as Thyrsis sat and thought about this, he clenched
his hands. Some day the world would hear about
it—some day the world would think about
it! Some day people would behold life—would
realize what it was and what it meant. They did
not realize it now—else how could it be
that women, who bore the race with so much pain and
sorrow, should be drudges and slaves, or the ornaments
and playthings of men? Else how could it be that
life, which cost such a fearful price, should be so
cheap upon the earth? For every man that lived
and walked alive, some woman had had to bear this agony;
and yet men were pent up in mines and sweatshops,
they were ground up in accidents in factories and
mills—nay, worse than that, were dressed
up in gaudy uniforms, and armed with rifles and machine-guns,
and marched out to slaughter each other by tens and
hundreds of thousands!
So, as he walked the streets that night, Thyrsis made
a vow. Some day he would put before the world
this vision that had come to him, some day he would
blast men’s souls with it. He would shake
them with this horror, he would thrill them with this
sense of the infinite preciousness and holiness of
life! He would drive it into them like a barbed
arrow—that never afterwards in all their
lives would they be rid of. Never afterwards
would they dare to mock, never afterwards would they
be able to rest until these things had been done away
with, until these horrors had been driven from the
earth.
Love’s Captivity
THE CAPTIVE BOUND
