The lute forgetful of its note;The wing remembering not to flyIn some sweet flight's mad ecstasy;The heart that failed to carve the formSince once the musing soul grew warmWith love for her who sat for himOf too alluring moonbeam limb.
The lute forgetful of its note;The wing remembering not to flyIn some sweet flight's mad ecstasy;The heart that failed to carve the formSince once the musing soul grew warmWith love for her who sat for himOf too alluring moonbeam limb.
John Hartley, "The Lost Voice."
"The defeated heart," sighed the woman in black, "has the habit of burying its own dead!"—"The Silver Poppy."
For one virtue alone Cordelia Vaughan was looked on as a rare acquisition by Mrs. Alfred Spaulding. That virtue was her young ward's punctilious attention to all those social duties with regard to which she herself was prone to be deplorably careless. With the accession of Cordelia, therefore, she reveled in a vicarious ceremoniousness that wiped out many discomforting memories, ranging all the way from forgotten dinners to neglected dentist's engagements.
It was but a little after eleven, on the morning following Repellier's birthday gathering, when Cordelia Vaughan alighted from the Spauldings' brougham and once more climbed the long stairs to the old artist's studio. Both she and Mrs. Spaulding had begged to come and help Repellier "clear up." Mrs. Spaulding, however, no longer dazzled by the glow that radiated, to her eyes, from the brow of that great artist, found in the depths of a soft pillow and a darkened room that the spirit was willing but the flesh lamentably weak. She told Cordelia to run along by herself; she had a headache to sleep off.
And as Cordelia mounted lightly to the upper regions of Repellier's workrooms she felt in no way sorry for the promise. Some rudimentary simplicity in her character could always blithely sweep away the cobwebs of either propriety or impropriety—cobwebs so potentially tantalizing to one less ingenuous. Her late hours, too, seemed to have left no depression of spirits, no reaction ofennui, and she floated in before Repellier bright, buoyant, smiling, like a breath of the open morning itself, a confusion of mellow autumnal colors in her wine-colored gown and hat of roses and mottled leaves.
But before she had so much as drawn off her gloves—and they were always the most spotless of white gloves—she glanced about in mock dismay and saw that the last of the righting-up had already been done. There was not even a book for her to replace, or a plaque to tuck away. She pouted at this, prettily and girlishly; she had hurried away from her coffee and rolls just to help him.
Repellier, in his lighter moods, had an affectionate and quite fatherly way about him that was all-conquering. He penitently pinned a long-stemmed American Beauty rose on her wine-tinted gown, and shaking his head dolefully over the color combination, replaced it with a cluster of gardenias. She fluttered femininely to a mirror, to view the result of the added touch, and then bowed her gratitude with arch solemnity. She was not slow to realize the lighter mood in Repellier, and was glad of it. Then, talking the while of the night before, she went over to his book-table, and hovered restlessly over the different volumes scattered about, scarcely knowing just how to wear the conversation through its tides of change into that particular slip where it was to be hawsered. To Repellier she seemed like a humming-bird darting about a little high-walled garden, ready to be off like a flash when the last flower had been rifled.
He watched her, smiling, while she hovered on from topic to topic, looking up at him now and then; now and then nervously turning over the books on the table before her, and wondering within herself just why it was this man had always vaguely intimidated her. She was about to open her lips when he suddenly stopped her.
"Did you know that that's Hartley's book you have there?"
For one quick, searching second she looked up at him, and then casually opened the little volume upon which her hand had fallen by accident. Repellier had once thought her the sort of woman that never blushed.
"'Atalanta and Other Poems, by John Hartley,'" she read aloud idly, with raised eyebrows. "And a dedication as well: 'To C. M.' Did he leave it last night, or is he the kind that always sends them round next day?"
"Hartley's not that sort at all."
The woman slipped into a chair, and with her chin on her hand, meditatively turned over a page or two. Then she closed the book nonchalantly, almost disdainfully. She confessed that she had no particular love for poetry.
"Tell me about him, though," she finally said quite seriously and quite openly. "I'd like to know something about him—allabout him."
Repellier, who had been adjusting a great paint-besplattered easel, came over and took up the thin, green volume.
"This is what I want to knock out of him," he said, tapping the little book, "for a while, at least. And I think, Miss Vaughan, you are the happy possessor of a lot I'd like to pound into him."
"And that is——"
"Oh, I mean poise and balance—good, practical judgment."
"Thank you." She caught up her skirts and courtesied.
Repellier raised a deprecating hand, and laughed.
"Well, you know what I mean. And that's why I'm glad you like him."
"I hardly said that."
"I mean all he wants is ballasting with a little of that business spirit which we call American push."
"Thanks," she murmured. "But tell me about him."
"Well, there isn't much to tell—at least not much that I know."
"But you knew him abroad?"
"Yes, I met him two years ago at Lady Meredith's—those were the Woodstock Merediths of Meredith Hall. I was doing a portrait of Connie Meredith—that's the 'C. M.' of the book—and he used to tramp over from Oxford now and then. His father was Sir Harry Hartley, who was killed in the Dunstable Hunt four or five years ago. Hartley himself was wasting his time about Oxford, unsettled, unsatisfied, impecunious, and unrecognized. As I said, I saw a good deal of him at the Merediths'. He was to have married the girl—it was she who gave me that volume—but she was always delicate. In fact, they had to pack her off to the south of England, and then to Italy. She died at Fiesole. On my way back from the Continent I ran across Hartley again, and asked him why he didn't try America."
"And will he ever do anything—anything worth while, I mean?"
She still held the thin, green volume of verse in her hand, almost contemptuously—suddenly depressed in spirits, she could not fathom why.
"He has already done something worth while."
"What is it?"
"Small things, I mean, but of the right sort."
"I never heard of him before," murmured the woman, closing the volume with a gentle little snap of finality.
"But you will," said Repellier as his guest slowly drew on her white gloves and arranged her hair before his mirror as she passed.
"You will," he repeated as he swung his easel around to the light, and opening a door on his left called his model in for what was to be a morning of work for both of them.
Leave not thy slumbering melodiesTo dream too long within thine eyes;Let not all time thy bosom holdSong in that overfragrant fold,Lest thou a tardy gleaner proveAnd thy reluctant hand but moveThe overgoldened sheaf, to findThy tenderest touch can never bindThese thoughts too long unharvested—Lest on some byway stern be shedThat golden, sad, ungarnered grain,When thou canst sow nor reap again.
Leave not thy slumbering melodiesTo dream too long within thine eyes;Let not all time thy bosom holdSong in that overfragrant fold,Lest thou a tardy gleaner proveAnd thy reluctant hand but moveThe overgoldened sheaf, to findThy tenderest touch can never bindThese thoughts too long unharvested—Lest on some byway stern be shedThat golden, sad, ungarnered grain,When thou canst sow nor reap again.
John Hartley, "The Lost Voice."
These souls of ours are like railway bridges—they can be reconstructed even when the trains of temptation and trial are creeping over them.—"The Silver Poppy."
These souls of ours are like railway bridges—they can be reconstructed even when the trains of temptation and trial are creeping over them.—"The Silver Poppy."
Hartley's first impression of Cordelia Vaughan was a happy confusion of yellows. Her hair, luxuriant and heavily massed on the small head, was a sort of tawny gold. Her skin, which more than once had been described as like old ivory, was in truth neither ivory nor olive, but almost a pale, rose-like yellow with a transfusing warmth to its pallor, as though the lights of an open fire were playing upon it. The eyes themselves seemed, at times, a soft, jade-like yellowish green, muffled, unsatisfied, often mournful, with a latent hint of tragedy, shading off in strong lights to a sea gray; by lamplight showing a deep violet. In moments of excitement or exaltation they were slightly phosphorescent, glowing with an almost animal-like luminosity that temporarily relieved and illumined the ascetically cold chiseling of the face itself, suggesting a possible emotional power that might be stronger at times than the shell which housed it. Yet they were eyes that looked out on the world with quiet, brooding melancholy, wistful in repose, with some fugitive sadness—eyes that suggested, to the young poet at least, some wayward note of autumn, of twilight, of woodland loneliness. They seemed to betoken the dreamer in life more than the pioneer and the actor, in periods of weariness taking on a heavy, languorous, indolent look of half-careless defiance, like a tired and wilful child's.
At one moment, indeed, Cordelia Vaughan reminded Hartley of an old-fashioned tea-rose, quaintly anachronistic in her modish twentieth-century gown; at another moment she brought insistently to his mind the thought of a piece of fragile chinaware with which the slag of every-day life had not yet been infused, sadly to convert it into the ironstone of ordinary mortality.
"I find I am not very strong," she had confessed to him. "My work seems to take a great deal out of me." And the thought that some great internal fire was burning away both the youth and beauty of a pale priestess of Mnemosyne seemed to give to her pallor a new and redeeming touch of poignancy. For in Cordelia's days of weariness envious women, lacking her own strange resiliency of vigor, now and then maliciously declared that on such occasions she "looked her age."
"I am sure I can help you a little," she was saying now, looking up at Hartley. "But first you must tell me something about yourself and your work."
He was but four-and-twenty, and accustomed to the coldness and the reserve of his own older-fashioned countrywomen. So the open warmth and directness of his companion's manner at first embarrassed him a little.
"That's jolly good of you; but really, you know, I haven't done anything worth talking about."
"But you've got it in you; I can see you have," said the other, on her cushion of Princeton orange, looking back unhesitatingly into his searching eyes. "And then Repellier says so, too," she added encouragingly.
For a releasing moment or two the young man basked in the sunlight of the tawny gold hair and the half-pleading eyes, wondering the while why her face should be so wistfully melancholy. It had its allurements, this finding in a great city a strange girl ready to take an interest in one's secret aspirations, a being willing to repose in one such immediate woman's faith. Hartley's four months of loneliness and solitude had been weighing heavily on his exuberant young soul. His first impulse was to pour out his heart to her, little as she might understand, and drain the momentary cup of new-found comradeship to its last dregs. He fumbled irresolutely with his note-book, then finally decided that the doctrine of silence was best. He preferred men, he told himself, who could consume their own smoke.
"You're very kind, and all that," he said almost stiffly, smiling an embarrassed smile, "but we have this promised interview of ours to finish, you know."
He took up his note-book again—which he was still reportorial amateur enough to lean on in such cases.
"I have your first book, and its title, and that you are a Southerner. Your girlhood was spent in Kentucky, but you say your family is really a Virginia one. I have you here as passionately fond of horses and hunting, and all that. Am I right in saying that it was your mother who rode through the Northern lines on a Kentucky thoroughbred to save that Confederate captive's life you spoke of? Good; I'll jot down a note of his name here. I think that will make an excellent little story. Then I have the anecdote about Judge Wilder and The Silver Poppy; and I can make a paragraph of your New York success, and about the novel being dramatized. Oh, yes, you would like the social element brought out, of course. There's just one other thing our editor usually asks for—if you don't mind—the age, you know," he added tentatively.
"I am almost twenty-three," answered the woman.
The young Oxonian buried himself in his note-book.
"Yes, twenty-three," he repeated, as he penciled a note of it. He felt, as he wrote, that for some unknown reason she was laughing at him.
"Why have you never written a second book?" he asked her.
"Iamwriting one," she answered quietly, he thought rather wearily, as the smile faded from her face.
"Then I'd better put that in."
"If you like," she added, as if uninterested. He liked her better for that second touch of diffidence.
"Now there is just one point I'm not clear about. You mentioned the fact that you and Mrs. Spaulding were about to give a series of receptions—er—literary receptions, I think you called them—during the coming season. Pardon my asking, but is Mrs. Spaulding also devoted to the writing of books?"
"Oh, dear me, no!" she answered. "She's only devoted to the people who happen to be doing the writing."
"Then you are her guest at present?"
"Mrs. Spaulding has asked me to live with her, for the winter, at any rate. She was more than kind, when I came, about fixing up this little den for me to work in. You can see, she has made me only too comfortable."
Hartley looked at her, puzzled.
"It's hard to work—in some places." She walked to the window and was looking out when next she spoke. "And I want to be free."
He thought that he understood, and he would have drawn back from any more intimate prying into an unfortunate environment, but Cordelia herself spoke on:
"Mrs. Spaulding, of course, has not exactly the artistic temperament, but she is the soul of goodness, and has wealth and position, and when she asked me to come with her, I was only too glad to have a real friend, and a friend who could be a sort of social patroness as well."
"After all, the patron is not the poor figure that history has made him out to be, do you think?" asked the young Oxford man, busy with his note-book. Yet it seemed one of life's keenest small ironies that out of such pale-tinted atmospheres should come the volumes which the turgid, hurrying, surging world was so ready to devour. It was no wonder, he felt, that she wanted to be free.
"It sounds odd to you, I suppose?" she went on. "But that's because you're an outsider. Here in New York you'll find plenty such persons, anxious enough to shine in the reflected light of the real workers. Mrs. Spaulding is different from the rest—she would be as true as steel, I know. But the ordinary kind are not easy to hold. Their whims change, and you have to change with them. They take you up just as they'd take up a new design in foulards, or a novelty in their stationery, or a new breed of Pomeranian. We all have our hobbies, you know," she added, with just the slightest touch of bitterness in her voice.
"Butyouhave been particularly happy," said her visitor, sweeping the expensively and tastefully furnished study with his quick eye. Then he wondered, as he looked at her, if already she was tired of publicity.
"It's nice to be free," she sighed, as in answer to his glance.
"The road that leads to freedom is always beautiful," agreed the young Oxonian. "But your cage seems rather a golden one."
"It has to be, or I'd eat through the bars. You see, there was really a Waterloo fought over me. Mrs. Simpson-Burgess wanted to capture me—yes, isn't it flattering?—and Mrs. Spaulding wanted me, so they had to fight it out."
"On which, some day, I should like to congratulate Mrs. Spaulding."
"Oh, thanks," sighed the other.
There was a moment of constrained silence. The young man felt that they had been treading on thin ice.
"You must be sure to meet Mrs. Spaulding," went on Cordelia. "I know she'll be interested in you. She'll probably be able to help you, too, in more ways than one. Oh, by the way, does your syndicate publish portraits at all?"
Hartley explained that it did; two pages a week—one of People of the Hour, and the other of Beautiful Women.
As the woman on the orange cushion said nothing for a moment or two, Hartley rose to go.
"Some day you'll have to do Mrs. Spaulding for me," she begged. "She would really be at home on your Beautiful Women page."
Then she looked up and saw that he was standing.
"But don't go; please, don't go!" she cried with the winning ingenuousness and command of a child. "I want you to stop and drink a cup of tea with me, at least."
There was something infectious and pretty, he felt, about her wayward little pout, a momentary mental rejuvenescence, as though her mind had been caught in the undress. Hartley had been almost ready to declare that his time was not his own—which was true enough—but he pulled himself up on the brink of this bruskness as he looked down in her eyes and wondered which was her truer side. With a sudden return of good-nature he took his seat again, and amiably remarked that it was not often he drank afternoon tea in New York—that, in fact, afternoon tea would take on the nature of a Dionysian festivity in the neighborhood of Chatham Square.
"Then your homeisEngland?" asked the other.
He confessed that his English birth was one thing he had yet to live down.
"Oh, no," cried the young authoress; "you'll find it's going to help you a lot. Englishmen are always the vogue with us. And, remember, you must be sure not to waste your accent, and your chances."
Hartley could recall no occasion on which his Anglican origin had materially helped him. But, looking up, he caught her smile, and again he dimly felt that she might still be making fun of him. Yet in the twinkling of an eye she was all soberness once more.
"The moment I saw that study of yours in Stetson's—the Dunes of Sorrow, wasn't it?—I knew that I was finding a new man. The only thing I felt sorry about was that you hadn't placed it with one of the better magazines."
"It was my first and only success, over here," admitted Hartley, catching at those crumbs of praise, the first that had been flung before him during four long months of ceaseless endeavor.
The woman busied herself at the little tea-table, saying that she had always made it a habit to have afternoon tea at her home in the South, and chattering lightly on, in her rich, soft contralto, about Kentucky, and the fineness of its horses, and the beauty of its scenery, and how homesick she sometimes got for it all. Hartley noticed her thin, white hands, so frail that they were almost translucent between the delicate phalanges. He watched them as they fluttered about the tea-things, like pale butterfly wings over a little bed of tulips. In that warming afterglow of appreciation he gathered up boldness enough to tell her how much they did look like butterfly wings.
"How nice!" said the woman at the cups. "That's so good I'm going to use it," she added gratefully. "Do you know you've given me quite a number of ideas for my book already?"
He wondered just what those ideas could have been, and failed utterly to recall anything worthy of remembrance in their talk.
"That idea about the road to liberty being beautiful, especially," she explained. "It's splendid."
"But I'm afraid it's very, very old," said Hartley.
She took the statement as mere self-derogation.
"I know you're going to be a novelist some day," she cried inconsequentially. "Or a poet, at least."
Hartley winced at the after-thought, and remembered his three little thin green volumes so carefully hidden away this many a month.
"Butdobe good and tell me more about yourself, and your work, and what you intend to do. We've been talking about me and my book, and the things I'm to do—and leave undone—and all the time I feel sure you're a man with amagnum opus—isn't that what you call it?—somewhere up your sleeve."
She had an odd little bird-like way of holding her head on one side—an attitude that not only suggested a sort of timorous alertness, but endowed her at the same time with a certain flattering, half-ingratiating, dreamy-eyed attentiveness.
When Hartley thought it over in cold blood he could never adequately explain to himself just why it was he had entered into that long and exhaustive revelation of his aims and ambitions, of his great works undone, of his huge books unwritten, of his visionary tasks as yet unbegun. Perhaps it was because the woman beside him listened with such quiet yet unctuous attention. Perhaps it was the suggestion of literary atmosphere which hung over that secluded little many-tinted study, making it stand as a temple of letters and a place not unfit for the confession of those most intimate and sacred dreams of the heart and brain which heretofore he had so carefully guarded in his own reticent bosom.
However that may be, over the little Dresden tea-cups he unbosomed himself unreservedly to his new-found friend. He described to her how and why he had come to New York, of his desperate struggle to get his first position on a daily paper, of his still more desperate struggle to keep that position, of his precarious existence as a "free-lance," of his discoveries in the lore of living on two dollars a week, and of his final grounding on the shoals of the United News Bureau, where he now wrote on probation under thirteen different names and posed as a special correspondent in four different parts of the world on four different days of the week.
He even grew so bold as to tell her of his still unfinished novel, giving a brief but, he thought, impressive outline of its odd plot and its even odder characters. He confessed, too, that he had always believed his best work had been done in verse.
The author of The Silver Poppy seemed to lose no word of all he said. Hartley himself, lost for the time being in the outpouring of his own hopes and aims and aspirations, only half appreciated the quiet intensity with which the young woman followed his every sentence. It tempted him to go even farther, and confide in her the secrets of his one great effort, his Nausicaa. Into the five hundred lines of this blank-verse poem he was sure he had poured all that was best in him, and he told her how one magazine editor had accepted it, on condition that he take out two hundred lines—an offer which he had indignantly refused. Later, though, he felt it had been a mistake; America was so different to what it was at home.
The woman looked at him for several seconds in silence, as though some new and better side of him had slowly dawned on her consciousness. In that look the free heart of the young scholar felt there was something to half fear and yet something in which to glory. She dropped her eyes and was still for a moment.
"I hope we two shall be friends," she said in her dreamy, half-wistful intonation.
"Why can't we?" he asked, with his grave but boyish smile. She looked at him with eyes that for the time being did not seem to see him.
"We all have to go through the sort of thing you've been speaking of," she said with a sigh, standing before him at the open window, with the sunlight on her hair. "But one person, you know, can so often help another—at least over the rougher places. I feel that already I've a great deal to do to repay you for what you'll make out of this interview. I know you'll say the right thing and it'll help me a lot. I guess, though, Icouldhelp you a good deal;" she looked at him. "If you'd only let me," she added. She was speaking very humbly and very earnestly, and her voice moved him almost uncomfortably. There was something so direct, so honest, so open in her kindliness that he hesitated before it, disconcerted, despising himself at the time for his very hesitancy.
"I know that I can get rid of some of your things for you," she continued, as though such tasks were a commonplace. "And I want you to meet editors, too, and people of influence. It all counts so much, unfortunately," she added, smiling wearily. Then she seemed to meditate for a second or two. "Couldn't you bring me up a few manuscripts to look over—so that I could know what they were like, you know? I mean what vein they were in?"
Again Hartley vacillated between gratitude and doubt, hating to impose on her what might be the penalty for a moment's too generous impulse. As he hesitated before her Cordelia looked at him studiously, taking note that there was something challengingly dominant and robust about the still boyish stranger whom many such meetings might bring so intimately into her life. He possessed an incipient strength that appealed to her, while at heart she remained half in fear of it. She had always held in her own hands the reins of her destiny. The devious way she had already tooled for herself through life had not been all smoothness, but she had at least been the arbiter of her broken course.
As she thought of these things her visitor rose to go, and she did not further press him for a reluctant decision in one way or the other. But she held her hand out to him, swept by a sudden unreasoning hunger to feel the warmth of his clasp on hers. The actual significance of hand-shaking, the time-worn symbolism of the rite, had never before entered her mind.
"When can you come?" was all she asked, while each once more had the feeling of something portentous in their parting.
"Will you be at home to-morrow at eight?" he asked, still holding her hand.
She had an engagement to dine out, but it could be broken, she said. And with a puzzling resumption of coldness she rang for the Spauldings' footman, who ceremoniously showed her visitor to the door.
With a quickening heart he stepped down into the prim respectability of Seventy-second Street, and in one little hour life seemed to have grown more hopeful to him. For the first time, too, the streets of New York took on a home-like look to his alien eyes.
He walked eastward to the Park, where he caught a south-bound car. From the Circle he could see the long line of Eighth Avenue stretching out into the hazy distance. It lay before him indistinct and golden and misty, with the late afternoon sun slanting transformingly on its dust and smoke and commotion. There was a smell about it that seemed good. It stirred something dormant in him. It seemed like the dust of battle—like the drifting incense of man to all his gods of endeavor. Already a phantasmal shoulder seemed crowding and pushing him out into its untried turbulence.
Hartley decided that Repellier was right when he had said that this great city of the New World could wring out of a man all that was best in him. As he sped southward through the noise and the dust and the crowds, with his thoughts far into the future, he seemed to find some pleasing felicitousness in the very ambiguity of Repellier's phrase. But must the price of success, he asked himself, always be so great?
"Do you know," said Cordelia Vaughan musingly to the Spauldings that night as they drove down through the darkness of Riverside Park on their way home from dining at the Claremont—"do you know, I feel like work, hard work, once more?"
Take heed, for the sake of your soul,Of the song that the city sings—Of its bantering lip, and its bowl,And its flutter of fallen wings.
Take heed, for the sake of your soul,Of the song that the city sings—Of its bantering lip, and its bowl,And its flutter of fallen wings.
John Hartley, "The Siren City."
These Lilliputian temptations—they remind us that the threads which kept Gulliver down were very small threads, but then there were so many of them!—"The Silver Poppy."
These Lilliputian temptations—they remind us that the threads which kept Gulliver down were very small threads, but then there were so many of them!—"The Silver Poppy."
"How much space shall I give Miss Vaughan?" Hartley asked of his editor. It was the end of the day following the interview, and the gentleman addressed was enjoying what he called a dry smoke, contentedly chewing a black cigar-end into obviously delectable rags and shreds. He allowed his questioner to wait for a minute or two before answering.
"Who's Miss Vaughan?"
Just who that lady was he knew quite well, but he took a secret delight in baiting his probationers—and Hartley above all others.
"She is the lady," and the irate young man laid particular stress on the word, "the lady whom I suggested to you as being more or less before the public, as you may recall—the lady who wrote The Silver Poppy, and——"
"Yes, I know all that. 'Bout how much time did you give her yesterday? The whole afternoon, I guess, wasn't it?"
"I don't see what that has to do with my question," retorted Hartley.
"You don't, eh! H'm; I guess you don't." He seemed bent on provoking beyond endurance the young man with the accent. And the young man with the accent could foresee that it was going to lead to but one end. He swallowed his wrath, however, and his editor swung round in his swivel chair, and replacing his cigar in its accustomed corner of a mouth that seemed to Hartley belligerently dog-like, looked at him shrewdly.
"Give 'er half a column," he said sharply.
"That's not very much, is it?"
"What d'you want to give 'er?"
"It's outside work, you know—work that I'm doing quite gratuitously," he added significantly.
"Well, how much d'you want?"
"Two columns of brevier—without the adornment of the usual line-cut."
The character of the line-cuts used by the bureau, seldom remarkable for their beauty, was a standing joke about the office. The editor smiled enigmatically.
"All right; go ahead and kill your friend with kindness if y' want to." For as a young man he himself had been a dramatic reporter in his time and more than once had been dazzled by the passing refulgence of musical comedy stars—stars with hair not half so golden as Cordelia Vaughan's.
Hartley hurried home through the dingy lower-town streets, turning over many new thoughts in his mind. A revulsion of feeling had come over him. He had not as yet read The Silver Poppy, but he took a sudden, passing, unreasonable dislike to it, wondering within himself how much Cordelia Vaughan's success had been due to caprice and accident.
His thoughts went back to her luxuriously furnished little study, with the writing-desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the little gold pen which she had proudly pointed out to him as her mascot—the only pen with which she could compose—the trim rows of handsomely bound books of reference, the huge dictionary on its highly polished revolving stand, the current magazines all so temptingly at hand, the quiet atmosphere and seclusion of the place that in itself was a stimulus to creation. He thought, not a little wistfully, how good it must be to have a circle of intelligently appreciative friends, an audience to whom to direct one's sincerest and best work, and, above all, to nurse to one's breast the knowledge of some tangible influence in the circle of letters. He remembered that she had told him her gift for writing had come to her unheralded and unlooked for; that one morning she had wakened and rubbed her eyes and found herself famous. How much of it, he wondered, lay in sheer luck, or, at most, in happy coincident? He recalled, not unenviously, his own years of ceaseless effort that had culminated in nothing. It was a gift, this swinging round to the tides of the time, this writing with the ear to the ground. With that gift he felt he might never have been left drifting so aimlessly and so fruitlessly about a world in which there still seemed to be for him no ultimate islands of contentment.
He tried to solace himself with the thought that his failure was the result of his years of undergraduate abstraction; that it was the penalty of the too cloistral life.
The taste of those days when the world has failed to find youth because youth has not yet found itself is unspeakably bitter in the mouth of the young man who knows his strength. And Hartley, striding homeward through the hot, noisy, evening streets, was not altogether happy.
As he noticed, on the stroke of six, the warehouses and shops and factories of the lower East Side disgorging their tides of hurrying, bustling men and women and boys and girls, some alleviating sense of the nobility of labor crept over him, like a breath of cool air from the river front.
In this mood he climbed his steep stairs, and sat down at his little deal table, glowing with the ideas that flowered out of his touch of revolt. The author of The Silver Poppy would have opened her gray-green eyes in wonder had she read those sheets which he flung off under his quick, nervous pen. How were these women, he asked himself as he wrote, who wasted so lightly when there were so many in want, how were these women who knew nothing of real life, rustling so well clad through their softly lighted libraries, to know anything of the great tragic, turgid, naked world, of the storm and stress of life? What did they, sitting secluded behind their roses, know of the dust and tumult and tragedy of the street? Let them go out and suffer and learn, and if through hunger and tears and loneliness they found some hidden meaning and purpose in the dark undercurrents of adversity and defeat, then let them in all patience and humility speak what they had to say. Willingly enough the world would listen, without their thousand and one artifices to catch its languid ear. But until then they should get no help from him.
And when he had finished his article on Cordelia Vaughan he sat back in his hard chair and felt more at peace with the world and with himself. He felt, as he glanced around at his broken walls and his ragged furniture, that he had justified himself; for he was at heart still buoyant and young. It is a sorrowful day when the eyes of youth can gaze openly into the eyes of defeat.
Hartley, as a graduate of Oxford and a regenerator of mankind, could not boast unduly of his New World lodgings—he had not yet learned to speak of them as apartments. He still wrote to three or four of his older college friends from time to time, and to these old friends he half-heartedly enlarged on how a few months in the poorer quarters would help him on with his work. He said nothing, however, of the advantages of a furnished room at three dollars a month, with a shop conveniently below where Italian bread—which was perhaps tough of fiber, but still marvelously sustaining—could be bought for three cents a loaf, and coffee at two cents a cup. He did not confess either that there were days when the sights and smells of the place sickened him, and times when the wailing of small children and sick babies kept him feverishly awake through the long, hot summer nights, and the sounds of brutal quarrels drove him distracted into the open streets for hours at a time. Even with himself he still tried to excuse his unsightly surroundings by the sophistry that the stern quest of experience demanded such environment, that these were the refining fires which were to burn away the dross of his dilettanteism.
Hartley had taken up his abode in the very heart of the lower East Side. On that part of Division Street where the Second Avenue elevated railway curls bustlingly into Chatham Square, very much as a busy little brook curls round a bit of rock, stands one of those crowded hives of toiling men and women known as a sweat-shop. In a little back room at the top of this building Hartley subletted his New York home. The jail-like doorway of this building opened on a street of eternal twilight—a street barred above like a dungeon by the iron girders of the overhead railway, through which only the noonday sun could fret for an hour or two. It was a tunnel of a thousand odors, and over it whimpered and frolicked the elevated trains as they went scurrying up to the open sunlight of the higher city.
Long before the sun crept up over the East River this tenement hummed like a beehive with its hundreds of busy sewing-machines, and in and out of its gloomy doorway women came and went at all times of the day with great bundles poised on their heads. It seemed from without only a gloomy building of windows and red bricks, with crazily littered fire-escapes breaking the line of its dull walls. At its center, strangely enough, it formed a little triangular court, after the fashion of its sisters of the Old World, and round this little inner court rose dilapidated wooden galleries, tier after tier, until only a pitiable three-cornered scrap of blue sky could be seen at the top on clear days. At the bottom of this light-well, even gloomier and more odorous than the street without, there was always a tang of chloride of lime in the air. The broken flagstones forming its floor sloped to the center, where a hydrant-pump stood in a pool of tainted water. From each gallery of the court radiated a number of passages—many-sinked, low-ceilinged passages, tunneling through mysterious twilight for hundreds of feet, and opening through many narrow doors into hundreds of fetid and overcrowded rooms.
In these rooms hundreds of patient backs bent over an equal number of pieces of sewing, most of them unbending only to eat and sleep, for all day long and far into the night sometimes the worn stairs creaked with tired feet as the bundle carriers went back and forth and the busy machines purred and whined for rest. There, kenneled in one small room, Hartley had found that men and women worked and slept and ate, there children were born and old men died, and young faces grew white and young backs grew bent. But the busy machines knew no rest, and night after night the young scholar from the city of bells and towers had thrown himself on his hard little bed with the rumble of their wheels in his ears. Yet more than once, too, in his darkest days, the mysterious companionship of those unseen laborers had strangely buoyed up his failing heart. There were other times, though, when he felt that the depressing poverty which so vividly surrounded him had momentarily paralyzed his creative faculties, that the hardness of life as it lay about him had taken the edge from his once keen fancy, that in time he was to be crushed, Tarpeia-like, by the very hand that was to have given him so much.
But there was something of the stoic in his make-up. He bore it as best he could, grimly chewing the cud of Repellier's advice that it would all prove a good antidote for Oxford. He still kept a keen eye open for the more picturesque elements in the life about him, and often took a quiet delight in his neighbors' somber gaiety. For with all its long hours of work Hartley had noticed that the tenement was not without its scenes of fleeting merriment. If the hive had its dark days little Pietro Salvatore still whistled away as merrily as ever while he sewed his buttons on boys' knickerbockers, fourteen to the piece, hemmed and ribboned at the back, for eleven cents the pair. And there were sly meetings and coy love-makings and gay marryings, and singing in many different tongues, and the feast-days and the christenings and the noisy enough children always playing about the dim corridors, and pale-faced girls flirting from the little wooden balconies, and the strains of concertinas and fiddles from open windows at night, and shrill laughter through the gloom when the midsummer heat drove the sleepers, men and women and children alike, up on the roof top in search of a breath of air—but always, everywhere, the dull undertone of the machines that buzzed so feverishly away. And there were little parties that sallied forth, all decked in hired finery, for a chowder party on the Sound, and there were excursions off to Paradise Park on a bright Sunday, and every now and then wonderful spreads of which the outside world knew nothing—feasts of green peppers, and grated Parmesan, and freckled bologna, and salame, and lupine beans, and macaroni cooked in oil, and spiced Neapolitan meal cakes, with maraschino sometimes, and fine rat-tail cigars, at a penny apiece, for the men at the finish.
Yes, indeed, there were feasts at times, wonderful feasts, that many a night made the disconsolate young scholar on the top floor envy his humbler-minded neighbors. And there were gardens, too—gardens that could be taken in when the policeman ordered it—tufts and shreds of green in tin cans and starch-boxes, as green almost as the grass in the Park. And there was color, bless you—color enough to dazzle one's eyes—on a windy Monday morning, when the pulley-lines that stretched from the windows fluttered and swayed with the week's myriad-tinted washings. But it was all strangely and sadly new to Hartley.
And so he lost, for like a swordStill in his bosom prestHer perilous face, and each soft wordLike thorns still tore his breast.
And so he lost, for like a swordStill in his bosom prestHer perilous face, and each soft wordLike thorns still tore his breast.
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
It's in the lulls of life that great things are lost and won.... You struggle against the tides that beset you, and you hold your own; but those tides never rest, and in the hour that you wait to call for peace—then the waters shall carry you back.—"The Silver Poppy."
It's in the lulls of life that great things are lost and won.... You struggle against the tides that beset you, and you hold your own; but those tides never rest, and in the hour that you wait to call for peace—then the waters shall carry you back.—"The Silver Poppy."
Hartley dined frugally, though somewhat late, that night. Time had slipped away unnoticed in his close little room till he woke to the fact that he was extremely hungry. He was glad to get out into the open night air, but as he sniffed at it gingerly on his way back to his room once more there came to him, with a sudden pang, a memory of the evening odors that hung over the far-away valley of the Isis.
As he stepped in through the jail-like doorway he all but stumbled over Repellier, waiting for him there.
"I was down in this part of town," he explained, "so I decided to drop in on you for a while—I have a model who hangs out in Chatham Street."
"Come up; come up, by all means," cried Hartley, elated.
As the younger man and his visitor picked their way through the narrow halls of the tenement-house it was obvious to them both that the supper hour of that district was not yet over. For the smell of many cooking and overcooked meals, mingling with the odors that drifted at all times of the day up through the crowded building, was not altogether pleasing to the uninitiated nose. Repellier noticed, too, that Hartley looked listless and worn and tired, and in some way strangely altered.
This was the gilded youth he had once beheld in a cushion-bestrewn punt on the Isis, reading Anacreon. Groping after him up the odoriferous narrow stairs, with a sudden deeper note of sympathy he asked Hartley how he had been getting along of late.
"Five editorial rejections to-day," the young man answered half blithely, half solemnly.
"But are you getting—what you expected out of things down here?"
"As you see"—Hartley tried to laugh back, bravely enough—"I'm afraid I'm a sort of Zeno ground in my own mortar of squalidness."
Repellier knew as well as he how, with time, the novelty of such things could lose its early glitter. The old artist felt troubled in spirit.
"Will you take my advice for a second time?" he asked suddenly.
Hartley said he would, gladly.
"Well, I'd suggest that you migrate before long—I think you'd better change quarters, get where you'll have more sun and air. They're pretty wearing, these places; you've been getting too much of a good thing." Then he smiled, but hesitated to say what was on his lips.
"I think I'll stick it out," said Hartley stoutly.
They were in the dingy, squalid room by this time, and for some unknown reason a constraint fell over them. The old artist noticed the Oxford photographs stuck up about the broken walls and the gaps in the sadly depleted shelf of books. He had never thought Hartley had it in him.
And again he felt troubled in spirit—he stood so helpless before the very man on whom he had pinned his faith. He wondered in what way he could reach a hand out to him—he knew only too well what any open offer of help would mean.
"I wish you'd use your friends a little more," he said, as they sat and smoked together.
"I've so jolly few, I've got to keep them," said Hartley, with his slow English smile.
"You're a punctilious beggar, Hartley! I'm beginning to believe the Dean of Worcester was right when he said you needed some of the Matthew Arnold knocked out of you."
When Repellier had taken his departure, leaving his host with a new-born, indefinite sense of unrest and discontent, Hartley thought it all over. Why did he not use his friends? Repellier had dropped that seed of interrogation on very open soil. Alone in his room Hartley recalled what Cordelia Vaughan had said to him in her soft contralto about nothing succeeding in America so much as success. After all, might there not be such a thing as an overscrupulous judgment of motive and action for the man of the world? Ethics, he tried to argue with himself, were suitable enough for Oxford. What he wanted now was opportunity. He demanded his chance. He had been too thin-skinned. He was in Rome, and he must do what the Romans do. It was all his Anglo-Saxon tendency to be stiff-necked. Why did he not make use of his friends? It was the very nature of such things that made all friendship valuable. It would simply be a matter of give and take between them. It would, too, never become a matter of sentiment—he prided himself that he had his heart too well in hand for that. He had too many great things still undone for any entanglements of that sort. And yet, and yet—as the lonely young author sat back on his hard-bottomed chair and recalled the soft contralto of the Southern voice the noisy rattle of the elevated trains went out of his ears. He was a stranger, and she had been very kind to him. The confusion of yellows that floated and drifted before his eyes darkened and deepened into gold, and the eyes that before had seemed cold to him grew warm and lustrous.
He had been a very lonely young man. In his head fermented a dozen great things still unaccomplished; chance had broken no clean channel through the sour stagnation of those fermenting cross-purposes. And now the artist in him aspired desperately for freedom. Again he wondered if, after all, his older, uncompromising ideality, his older rigid sense of right and wrong, was not the result of mingled priggishness and petulance. Even though he had to stoop a little for this first start, after all, it was a start. And once under way surely some new and unforeseen avenue of escape would offer itself. And if for a time he felt a half-caged conscience beating against its bars, he muffled that last tremulous flutter in his cry for some release from the sordid drudgery and the stultifying gloom that was holding him down.
Sitting up late into the night, Hartley rewrote his article on Cordelia Vaughan. The insinuation of the personal equation into his work was easier than it had looked. Time was, he knew, when he had rejoiced in attacking these seven-day wonders of the world of letters, the noisy idols with their posings and world-old impositions. He himself for months had been doing miserable hack work in the services of an unscrupulous syndicate, for a few paltry dollars a week, that he might hold unpolluted from all that was sordid and commercial that inner and more sacred fount. He had thrown his coat in the mire that his goddess might still walk with white feet. He had never confounded his serious work with the work of the moment. He had not asked for much; he could live on little, very little indeed. He was willing to work humbly, so long as he might only see some ultimate opportunity to labor on unharrassed by the worries and impecuniosities that now hung over him, and all but stifled him. With the Muse there must be no divided love. He had long since learned that while the work of the creative mind is joyous enough, it is likewise exhausting. All he cried out for was opportunity. It was the artist aspiring for his freedom. It was the creator casting about for his chance to create.
There were men in the city, Hartley knew, who were making fortunes by their pen. But they were men who, only too often, had allowed the temporary interest to intervene, men who had sought the immediate reward of the dollar, men who put their finger, adroitly enough, on the pulse of the world and gave it what it asked for, regardless of conscience and consequence. Was he, too, to become one of these? Was this fragile and pale-faced priestess of Mnemosyne, whose friendship had promised so much for him, insidiously to forge the first link in that golden chain which was to bind him down? Yet he had done nothing that was dishonorable. After all, even the artist must have his modern ideas of the business side of life. It was the law of the land.
So Hartley rewrote his article on Cordelia Vaughan. If there was any little rift in the throbbing lute of his enthusiasm he solaced himself with the thought that he was moving with the times, that he was growing more politic, that being down on his luck had knocked some of the sensitiveness out of him. He felt, too, that life of late had been making him more humble. "You're so damned hopelessly honest!" his editor had once disgustedly said of him. But now, as he wrote late into the night, page after page, The Silver Poppy, though still unread by him, paragraph by paragraph grew into a wonderful and still more wonderful work, and Cordelia Vaughan, if not the openly accredited George Eliot of America, was at least the apostle of that newer upward movement which was to carry the American novel from the valley of mental mediocrity to the clearest heights of the intellectual.