From the book to the battle we go,And it comes that we travel afarUnto marts that we do not know,Where a Philistine people are.
From the book to the battle we go,And it comes that we travel afarUnto marts that we do not know,Where a Philistine people are.
John Hartley, "The Market-Place."
"I'm not very big," she said wistfully; "I'm only one of those little harbor-tugs that wear the liners of life into their berths—for the port has its perils as well as the open sea."—"The Silver Poppy."
"I'm not very big," she said wistfully; "I'm only one of those little harbor-tugs that wear the liners of life into their berths—for the port has its perils as well as the open sea."—"The Silver Poppy."
Mrs. Spaulding usually breakfasted at half-past eleven, just four hours later than her husband. That gentleman, indeed, had passed through half a day of delirious Wall Street business before the plump and loosely gowned figure of his belated spouse rustled languidly down to the breakfast room.
Mrs. Spaulding—and at the breakfast hour above all other times—liked to believe that she was a very ill-used and lonely woman. If a touch of forlorn desolation did cling about her even days, it was a desolation quite different to her husband's. Through her loneliness she still groped for something tangible and material; he found little toward which he cared to reach.
He had first made his money in wheat, at Indianapolis. Later he had doubled a substantial fortune by prompt and shrewd investments in the then half-prospected iron-mines of the Lake Superior district. He was an honest and simple-minded man, with a straight-forward and workaday bent of mind, who still fretted at idleness, and was still wordlessly oppressed by the gaieties of life when they chanced to fall before the hour of the dinner gong and the Tuxedo coat.
It was not until his fortune had crept up to the million mark that he ventured to ask for the hand of the youthful and overpretty Lillian Bunting, a belle in her time, and a young lady, it was said, with marked social aspirations for the Middle West.
Then, as time went on and brought with it an increase of prosperity, she hungered, as a millionaire's wife, for that mystic urban El Dorado of the affluent American, New York. Though he felt that he was sacrificing a few hundred thousand by the migration, Alfred Spaulding finally came East and built a handsome home for himself and his wife on West Seventy-second Street.
It was all very dreary and very lonely for them both during their first two years in this new home. But little by little Alfred Spaulding drifted back to that world of business and strenuous effort which constituted life for him. And day by day Mrs. Spaulding hovered more and more closely about that high-walled garden where worldly wealth flowered into sensuous affluence, though as the mere wife of an unknown millionaire she seldom alighted on the borders of society, which to the end she insisted in describing as "The Four Hundred."
But if she could not dine and dance and drive with them, she still had left to her the compensating pleasures of dining and dancing and driving in their wake. She could still reserve their tables at the cafés on off evenings, and their boxes at the theaters when they were elsewhere. There was nothing to prevent their milliners from making hats for her own aspiring head, and she could still buy her jewelry and her flowers in the same shops with them, and even drive bewilderingly near them in the Park.
Then came the advent of Cordelia Vaughan. The young authoress from Kentucky was just at the zenith of her fame; The Silver Poppy had, as Mr. Henry Slater described it, "set the Hudson on fire"; her new-found friends were still reprovingly demanding why she held back her second volume, and publishers, it was said, were besieging her for manuscripts. The public press, too, was hinting from time to time that the new Kentucky beauty was laboring on a mysterious volume that was to shake society to its very foundations. Then it was whispered about that she wrote only from memory, that she was living the romance which later should appear in type. Photographers sent to her, begging for a sitting. Niccia, the sculptor, made a little bust of her, and declared she had the only Greek nose in America, and there was a poem or two indited to her "sad, sad crown of golden hair," as one melancholy versifier had put it.
Cordelia Vaughan was indeed a very much talked about young lady, and it was just at this juncture that Mrs. Alfred Spaulding had swooped down on her and triumphantly carried her off, very much like a plump hen-hawk making away with a homeless duckling. She was still delightfully childlike and ingenuous for one already so great. The poor girl, Mrs. Spaulding held, needed a mother's care. She was giving up too much to her work. She must have more amusement, more diversion. She should have a little den of her own, and she should work when she wanted to, and play when she wanted to. She should be as free as though she were in her own home. It was, too, in no way mildly hinted that under the roof of such a patroness she would have unrivaled opportunities for studying the foibles and weaknesses of New York's most exclusive circles. In fact, Mrs. Spaulding would give a series of receptions and teas and things for her, for she had always wanted to see more of those dear, untidy Bohemians with the long hair.
Though the young authoress from the South had been a willing enough captive, under what roof, indeed, did the eagle wings of genius ever unfurl with ease? Cordelia, however, had hungered for a little of the fulness of life. Her earlier New York existence, bright and attractive as it had seemed to the outer eye, had been an unutterably lonely and hollow one. Life in a Washington Square boarding-house had proved no better than a more irregular existence in a dilapidated old studio on lower Fifth Avenue, where for several months she invariably burned her own toast and regularly boiled her own tea, and where her callers were equally divided between overinquisitive reporters and impoverished authors looking for assistance.
So Mrs. Spaulding felt that she had taken a new grip on life when her timorous littleprotégéewas installed in the yellow-tinted study which had been made ready for her. It was an eminence by proxy, but it was better than nonentity; and in her silent gratitude she saw to it that Cordelia wanted for nothing, and, on the whole, was not unhappy.
Alfred Spaulding himself had hoped to see grow up about him a family, but having no children, he drank deep of the anodyne of the dollar; and so, during the day at least, his loneliness was forgotten. In the evening, when not too tired, he dressed and went with his wife to the theater, enjoying it passively, but liking most of all those pieces "which had lots of music," especially those Broadway performances characterized as "Gaiety Successes." Sometimes they dined out, and sometimes he sent Cordelia and his wife off together and ate at home alone. In his earlier day he had looked toward his wife as the symbol and embodiment of that softer and, he thought, that higher life which was necessarily alien to him. Then as her prettiness passed away, and her limitations came poignantly home to him, he concluded with pious secrecy that womankind is the upholstery of life, wearing the soonest where it is the softest.
Cordelia Vaughan, when she became a member of his household, did not fail to realize the narrow and lonely existence he led. This touched her keenly in some way, and she did what she could to throw a little more of the lightness and color of life about his absent-minded coming and going. He saw and appreciated this generous effort, and if the two did not become fast friends, they at least grew into more or less good comrades. Often in the mornings she drove down with him as far as his office, for Southerner though she was, it was an inexorable rule of her life to rise early. In some way, though, she was finding her time of late less and less her own, and their morning drives had become more and more infrequent.
It was the thought of this, and the sudden pang of regret that came with it, that took her down to breakfast with Alfred Spaulding not many days after her first meeting with Hartley. All the way down through the crowded, narrow cañon of lower Broadway she talked to him with a wistful attentiveness that left him with his morning papers still contentedly jammed down in his overcoat pocket.
As she drove home alone in the bright, glimmering little yellow-bodied Victoria she wondered if it was the soft balminess of the September air that was stirring in her a new sense of something that she had been crowding out of her life. It was a morning on which one wished to be always young.
As the little Victoria swung from Broadway into Fourth Street, she suddenly caught sight of Hartley, and called for the coachman to pull up at the curb. Before the young Oxonian had quite realized who it was and before he had recovered his composure she was stretching a prettily gloved hand down to him.
"Isn't this lucky?" she cried joyfully.
"It is, indeed," he said, taking her hand and looking into her bright face, across which a tress or two of her hair had blown. There was something so airy and light and buoyant about her that she seemed to him like a bird of passage, alien to the roar and dust about her.
"Can't you steal an hour or two and run away from all this dust and rattle and noise down here?" she asked, bending over him with her tremulously wistful smile.
He hesitated.
"Do come, the air is so beautiful. You look worried and tired, and it'll do you so much good. Do come!"
Still Hartley hesitated. He asked himself why it was he always hesitated before this particular young woman. Then he looked at her again, and did not stop to answer to that inner questioning voice. The next moment he was sitting beside her and the carriage was bowling lightly across the strong sunlight of Washington Square and out under the arch, where the long undulating vista of Fifth Avenue melted into the distance.
As they passed an old studio building on the lower avenue she pointed to one of its highest little windows.
"That's where I used to live," she said simply, and then an involuntary sigh escaped her. "How soon we change, without knowing it!" she added.
"How?" said Hartley looking back at the window.
"Oh, we get hard and selfish and careless." There was a new note of tenderness in her voice when next she spoke. "I wish I could learn to love children and flowers more than I do. Haven't you ever felt that you'd like to be able to give and suffer and endure? That you'd like to throw something out of yourself? Well, that's how I feel sometimes when I think how people—I mean people with ambitions—have to live for themselves. But it can't always be helped."
He looked at her—it was a new facet to the stone.
"For instance, this very afternoon," she went on. "You know I've always wanted to bring my poor old father up to New York to be near me. He's so alone in the world—there's only him and old Mammy Dinah at home now; and week by week I've been putting off seeing about the little apartment I'm leasing for them. I promised to have it settled this afternoon, but at two I have to be at the rehearsal of that great drama they're making out of The Silver Poppy; at four I have to be interviewed for a Sunday paper; at five I have a tea and two receptions; and to-night we dine at the Carringtons."
"Let's see about the flat—is it a flat? Now, together," suggested Hartley, with a sudden impulse to share in her mood of passing softness.
She looked at him keenly for a moment or two as he told her he would like to feel that he was doing something for her father; the fleeting shadow of a fear crossed her face.
"No," she said, "let's have our morning together in the Park."
There was already a premonitory touch of autumn in the bright air. They passed through the dazzling, sunlit Plaza and entered the cool, green quietness of the Park itself. There the noises of the city faded down to a quiet rumble and the perfume of flowers and the smell of verdure took the place of the drifting street dust. There was something so detached, and pictorial, and spectacular about it that it seemed to Hartley as if a mental tourniquet was already holding dreamily back life's wasting energies. Thelegatoof hoofs, persistent and smooth as a waterfall, the tinkle and clatter of chains, the gloss and luster of the rumbling carriages, the shimmer and gleam of the flanks of perfect horses, the passing faces—proud, young, pale, flushed, weary, eager faces of women—the color and flash of millinery and gown against the cool dark greenness; it seemed to him the sheltered and alluring flowering of life, the quietness and repose of the twilight of accomplishment, never virginal and unconscious, but studied, autumnal, attained. It seemed to him a splendor unmellowed and unsoftened by age, not as it might have been in his own land.
Turning to the silent girl at his side, he spoke of the difference between Central Park and the avenues of Hyde Park of an early summer afternoon. He tried to describe to her the forsaken aspect of London's West End during August and the first part of September, when the fashionable world of his own land was, as it were, closed for repairs. He told her of the forlornness of the Drive and the Row, and how at that season only summer tourists invaded Hyde Park, and even then only north of the Serpentine.
Cordelia listened to him, contented and happy—listened almost raptly, as though she was making the most of her day. It was not until he had rambled joyously on and described to her a London summer and the advent of what they called "the silly season" that she asked him a pointed question or two about English scenery and English country life. She had always been greatly puzzled about the peerage, she confessed, and wanted to know why one was just the Countess of Somebody at one time and then Lady Somebody at another. She had met Lady Aberdeen once, in Chicago, she said, at an Irish-lace store there. She had been afraid to say a word to her, she confessed prettily, because she hadn't known just how to address her. And were all the upper classes as simple and unaffected as Lady Aberdeen? And was London so different from New York? And would she ever, she wondered, see the Old Country, and Oxford, and all the other beautiful places he had spoken of? And she asked him if he could believe that at one time she had hated England, and everything English—hated it blindly—which is the worst of all hatreds.
Hartley tried to paint before her eyes the panorama of London from Waterloo Bridge, with its imperial sweep and mass of river front huddling from the Houses of Parliament to the Tower. He tried to make her feel the sober, low-hung English sky, the softened lights, and the more ordered and solemn lines of London's architecture, where New York's almost universal newness of things was not to be found, and where the dry, hard tones of the New World's brown-stone fronts were likewise happily absent.
She listened intently, and some of her questions were so innocently childlike, and were asked with such a winning ingenuousness that he laughed now and then. It was not until he had finished that she confessed the real cause of her dilemma.
"You see, the book I've been working on so long is partly laid in London, and of course I've never been there. And when you haven't even passed through a place on a train it's pretty hard to get the right local color, isn't it?"
Hartley assumed that it was.
"And I've tried reading it up, but it's no use. I'm afraid I haven't the absorbent mind; some people come out of a book, you see, like a spaniel out of water, scattering a shower of ideas all over you. Well, I can't do that; and what makes it so much harder for me," she added plaintively, "I've known so few nice Englishmen."
Hartley was studying Cleopatra's Needle. As some remote mental vision of the Old Serpent of the Nile drifted through his mind he thought how few nice Americans he had met before.
"That's where they're so ready to catch me up—the critics, you know," she went on.
She looked very pretty and flower-like under her big hat.
"You can imagine how hard it is, can't you?" she added.
He turned to her with a sudden great purpose in his face. The thought of it warmed and glowed through him like wine.
"Why couldn't I help you with it?" he asked eagerly.
Her fluttering eyes rested on him warmly, but only for a moment. Then she shook her head plaintively. "That'stoomuch," she murmured.
But he asked her again, humbly.
Unconsciously her gloved fingers touched his arm; there was a confession of deeper things in the movement.
"Would you?" she asked in her soft contralto.
Hartley tried to tell her how happy and proud it would make him. He wondered at the note of humility in her voice, at her half-tristful hesitancy.
"I should love to think it was you who had helped me in a thing like that," she said gratefully. And he could see by the luminous eyes that it was true, and for the rest of that drive no sunlight had sifted through more golden air, no flowers had ever been so odorous, and no green had ever looked so deep to him.
Cordelia insisted that he should drive back and meet Mrs. Spaulding. If he cared to, he could get her own copy of The Silver Poppy and also the manuscript of her new book. She had rather, she said, that he went over the manuscript alone; in that way he could judge it more impartially. And she turned homeward, feeling that her day was over and done.
Mrs. Spaulding greeted Hartley with an effusiveness that almost bewildered that somewhat dignified young man, particularly as he could detect in it no lack of genuineness. She had been told what a promising man he was, and how he was going to write a great book some day. She understood he was a great friend of Mr. Repellier's, and she hoped he would make a regular home of their house, and drop in whenever he felt like it. She pressed him to remain for luncheon, "for pot-luck," she called it, but as he was unable to do that she genially brought down a box of her husband's cigars and protested that both she and Cordelia loved smoke.
Hartley—dare it be confessed—was all this time hoping against hope that she was not noticing the too-often clipped fringe about his trouser heels. And the truth was this shrewd and sharp-eyed lady had noticed the tell-tale fringe, but she also had seen a clean-limbed and clear-featured young man, who carried himself with an air of quiet dignity that was well worth studying, and that would look uncommonly well in a theater-box.
It all ended in a promise from him that he would run up some morning and exercise one of her horses with Cordelia. Cordelia, standing silent and aloof, remembered what Hartley had said during their drive about English reticence, and threw him a glance which he could see was meant as a silent palliation of what she could not prevent. For a moment it awoke in him an inner voice of distrust, of perplexity, that left him with the feeling that a softening veil had been lifted from between them. It was as though some hand had shaken a shower of petals from the blossoming tree of enchantment and left it half bare and empty.
As he said good-by, depressed in spirits and scarcely understanding why it was, Cordelia slipped into his hand a delicately perfumed package tied with blue silk ribbon, together with a copy of The Silver Poppy.
"I want you to keep this; it was the first copy from the press," she told him. And she added that she hoped he wouldn't waste too much of his time over the manuscript. She knew he would find it all wrong, that there would be a thousand things to disappoint him. And she begged him to make whatever changes he would; she trusted him implicitly.
"I'm afraid you'll not like it," she said timidly, coming with him to the door. She had slipped one of Mrs. Spaulding's hothouse rosebuds into his button-hole, and she touched it with her fingers with a gesture that meant much. He would have taken her hand, but she drew it back quickly.
"It's been so hard for me to write things this time," she lamented. "I feel that it's all going to fall flat. But whatever happens," and her eyes were eloquent with something more than gratitude, "I've had the happiest morning of my life."
And she closed the door quietly, and left him there. As he stepped out into the hard light of noonday, once more he felt that vague impression of unrest, that reaction of despondency which he had often enough felt when emerging from the music and romance of a theater and passing out into the garish lights and noises of a workaday world. He, too, felt that his day was over and done.
Deep in its ancient center weHad dreamed its aging heart should be;Yet there, where should have slept its soul,Was only darkness and a hollowed bole!
Deep in its ancient center weHad dreamed its aging heart should be;Yet there, where should have slept its soul,Was only darkness and a hollowed bole!
John Hartley, "The Old Yew at Iffley."
Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow.—"The Silver Poppy."
When Hartley turned the last page of The Silver Poppy he closed the book meditatively but amazed. In it he had found the golden key to a long-closed mystery. In it he had seen revealed the great heart and mind of a misunderstood woman. He had caught the substance where before he had beheld only the shadow. It was as if from the shuttered windows of an empty house he had heard unexpected music. He had found the deeper and truer woman. All suspicion and dread of some elusive element he had never been able to fathom in Cordelia Vaughan at one stroke vanished away. Thereafter he was determined to read her and accept her as she lay revealed in the pages before him.
For he saw that into those pages had escaped some mellower, softer, profounder part of her, a part which when face to face with her at different times he had groped for in vain. For he could see, as plain as his hand, that The Silver Poppy was not a book of the moment. It had in it elements of greatness that startled him, and left him gasping. There was a whimsical turn to its tendernesses, a quiet reserve to its humor and pathos so adroitly blended, a quaintness and ingenuous freshness of touch, and, above all, an impersonal, judicial aloofness from life that spoke, at first sight, more of the hand of a man than that of a woman, and a woman still in her youth—at any rate, in her youth as an artist and a creator.
It was this flood of new feeling that bore him, elated and fired with enthusiasm, to the first of Cordelia's and Mrs. Spaulding's receptions late that afternoon. Long beforehand he had determined not to attend this reception. Besides cutting into time which was not altogether his own, he was beginning to see the impossibility of any further incongruous vacillating between the sordidness of Chatham Square and the splendor of the upper West Side; the grim irony in those contrasting pictures of life stung him too unpleasantly. But in his hour of new enlightenment he overcame his older scruples. He had a stern duty of self-humiliation to perform and a once wavering integrity to redeem. And he fell to remembering little speeches that Cordelia Vaughan once had made, and little ways that clung to her, and the tints of her hair and the many little variable intonations of her voice. And thinking of these things he made his way up through the city toward her once more.
A fluttering striped awning and a strip of crimson carpet ran from the Spauldings' doorway to the curb, where forty carriages half blocked the street. It was clear to Hartley that Cordelia's first reception was not to be a failure. That he came conspicuously unadorned and unknown and on foot in no way troubled him as he made his way through the crowd of heterogeneous loungers that fringed the strip of crimson carpet. In other days he had been used to such things. Some touch of the scholar in him, too, contributed to his bearing that sense of remoteness which elevated him above such perturbations.
It was the memory for the second time of his pendulum-like alternating between two such strangely opposing existences, and the cutting, keen irony of the thing that heightened his color as he hurried in from liveried servant to servant, and suddenly found himself in a crush of flowers and waving plumes and rich gowns, with here and there the sober black of a dissonant and desolate-looking man. And above it all the hum of many voices and the breath of many perfumes rose and mingled.
The next moment he caught sight of Cordelia herself, where she stood beside Mrs. Spaulding, greeting her guests one by one and smiling her gratitude for each prettiness of speech borne to her by that tide of new-found friends. Hartley, across the intervening crush, noticed that she looked almost exquisite and flower-like in a gown of white stuff that seemed to accentuate her note of frailty. She reminded him, as he looked, of a pale yellow clicquot.
He noticed, too, that she received her homage with all the girlish dignity of an imperious young queen, a little too coldly and too haughtily, perhaps, and yet with a mild composure that was causing the honest-eyed Mrs. Spaulding to turn more than once in secret wonderment, and gaze at her admiringly. There was nothing in Cordelia's bearing to reveal any inner ruffling of a spirit tranquil and detached—nothing beyond the pale rose-like flush that had mounted to her softly undulating, almost gently hollowed cheeks, and the luminosity of her outwardly calm eyes.
Cordelia did not see Hartley in the odorous, rustling stream that was slowly bearing him toward her until he was almost at her side. Then she paled a little, and let her eyes rest on him keenly, speaking smilingly, as she looked, to a florid woman confronting her.
In a minute or two he himself was before her and had taken her hand. She had not expected him that afternoon.
"It was so charming of you to come, Mr. Hartley," she murmured. It was the same phrase he had already heard her say at least half a dozen times over; the formality of her welcome chilled him. He had forgotten there were a dozen persons at his heels.
"Ihadto come!" he confessed. Something earnest in his tone frightened her. She showed him by her glance that there were others hemming them in.
"Then you have read it?" she asked quickly, lowering her voice.
"Yes; and I have so much,somuch to tell you about it. It is all wonderful, and all beautiful."
She looked at him, startled. Her whole rapt face caught fire, and for a moment was suffused with a great light. Only in animals and wild things had he ever before seen that strange phosphorescence of the eyes.
Then she looked into his face once more, and all the color went out of her own. She saw her mistake.
"But which,which?" she cried in sudden anguish, under her breath. At first he did not understand. Then slowly he came to see just what she meant.
"The Silver Poppy," he answered her, wondering.
She put her four bent finger-tips up to her parted lips with a sudden odd little gesture, as though she was thrusting and holding back some involuntary small cry. It seemed a movement of both disappointment and despair.
It was all over in a minute, and before Hartley could realize why it was done, or what it had meant, the same stream that had borne him in to her as relentlessly had carried him away. Ebbing into flushed but cooler diffuseness, it left him in another room, where he beheld rustling, laughing groups of women, and palms, and heard the sounds of muffled music and broken snatches of talk.
He looked back toward Cordelia and tried to catch a glimpse of her, but a sea of plumed heads waved between them.
"But life is only a vaudeville, with hunger and love for top-liners," he heard a gaunt tragedian disclaiming to a woman with penciled eyebrows and obviously rouged cheeks and lips.
"Yes, but think how many times we can love!" the rouged lips laughed back at him. Hartley moved on through the crush.
"A woman's eyes," a long-haired young man at his elbow was declaring to a group of listening women, "a woman's eyes are the index of her soul."
An elderly lady in mauve caught him up.
"But our souls, you see, are like the magazines—they mostly come uncut. And that's why only the paper-knife of matrimony really finds us out."
Hartley looked at the group, crestfallen, disappointed, vaguely disgusted. Their brilliance seemed to him the brilliance of tinsel and paper roses. And he asked himself in sudden indeterminate terror if this was the sort of thing he was to waste his days over.
She from her rose-grown turrets cameAnd laughed up in his eyes;He flushed to his pale brow with shame,And spake unto the skies:"To Christ this woman yet shall bow,Or be cast down," he said,"And where she flaunts her scarlet nowShall float the Cross instead."
She from her rose-grown turrets cameAnd laughed up in his eyes;He flushed to his pale brow with shame,And spake unto the skies:
"To Christ this woman yet shall bow,Or be cast down," he said,"And where she flaunts her scarlet nowShall float the Cross instead."
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
Put a touch of spring in the air, the thought of a woman in the heart, and keep from poetry if you can.—"The Silver Poppy."
Put a touch of spring in the air, the thought of a woman in the heart, and keep from poetry if you can.—"The Silver Poppy."
For the second time Cordelia Vaughan had left Hartley stunned and amazed. Twice since he had first met her he looked up in bewilderment and found it necessary to readjust his estimate of her. This second readjustment, though, was somewhat different from the first.
It was not until he had left her (receiving her homage like the acknowledged and imperious young queen she was) that once more back in his dingy little lodging, stiflingly squalid after the richness of the Spauldings' crowded drawing-room, he had untied the blue silk ribbon that so daintily bound the manuscript of her second book. To lose himself in it would be a relief. He was glad to slip away into the unreal world which her hand had opened up to him.
Cordelia had named her story The Unwise Virgins. With the open manuscript once before him, Hartley read it through, from start to finish. And it was from that reading he emerged stunned and amazed.
The Unwise Virgins was a failure, a glittering but disheartening failure. Of that there could be no two opinions. The streets of the city had not been so kind to Cordelia Vaughan as had the open hills of Kentucky. Her second book had none of the power and movement of The Silver Poppy, none of those whimsical tendernesses and quaint touches of humor and pathos that had half muffled the razor edge of her earlier satiric touch.
From the first Hartley had been led to regard Cordelia as a woman without an affluent sense of humor. Then, after reading The Silver Poppy, he had wondered if she had not drained off, as it were, her vanished reservoirs of mirth; if her mental blitheness had not been lost with the too labored advent of her first-born. He had heard not infrequently of "men of one book." Could it be that Cordelia was a woman of one supreme effort? Or was it her newer life that was so altering and wasting and enervating her?
For, hard as he found it to confess to himself, The Unwise Virgins, as a whole, held neither accomplishment nor hope. In fact, with his child terror of the trite and the commonplace, and racked as he was by his "torture of form," he found in it nothing but energy miserably misspent. It was a heap of glittering particles that ran elusively through the fingers, a labored thing of shreds and patches. Its simulation of power was almost pedantry, its affectation offinessewas time and time again flaccid idling with words half understood.
Each time the wings of his admiration were about to unfold, the stroke of some little banality sent him tumbling down to earth again. Yet through the maze of all this energy misdirected he could get glimpses of the substantial enough central idea on which Cordelia had attempted to build. But on it she had built nothing but a misshapen, chaotic thing which tempted him, with his passion for form, to demolish and rebuild after his own fashion. It stood a challenge to him.
Not that Hartley looked on himself as a master workman in this respect. He could not pride himself on either great experience or great accomplishment. But the enthusiasm of the true disciple was in him; a youth of isolation had been building in him those silent fires which smelt experience and mood into art and expression. He had been a desultory yet rapacious reader. Through an erratic and none too studious college course he had fed hungrily on the older literature of his own tongue, and had also mastered the poets of a tongue which he could never force himself to look on as dead. He had come out of these excursions with a sensitized taste and the gift of a sort of literary bletonism, intuitively responding to any sign of the artist beyond the effort. And now, with the touch refined and the hand trained, he, as an artist, stood idle, pounding the anvil of journalism when he might be wielding the chisel of the gold-smith.
He followed his first impulse and went to Cordelia herself, at once. She had just come in from the florist's, and she greeted him over an armful of white roses, which she still held unconsciously before her as she let her eyes linger for a studious minute on his face. He felt vaguely sorry for her—there was an inalienable touch of pathos in the thought of the stricken hand of the master. It seemed to leave her so hopeless and alone—for all along he had more than half felt that she was not altogether at rest in the life into which success had forced her.
She led him timidly up to the little yellow study, and waited for him to speak. She had noticed the manuscript in his hand.
He found it very hard to begin.
"You don't like it, I know," she said, tearing a flower to pieces. She looked up at him almost appealingly, and then went on.
"I don't like it myself. I think I've lost my grip on it. It keeps running away from me, and throwing me out, and dragging me after it."
As he looked at her in her helplessness, he tried to tell himself that he had been unduly harsh in his first judgment. Then he turned to her and attempted to explain how with a possible touch or two it might be remodeled, how splendid it would be, once it was whipped into shape.
She only shook her head dolefully.
"I'm tired of it," she said.
Hartley seemed unable to explain to himself why a mere mood of temporary inadequacy should crush her into hopelessness.
"Then let me do it," he suggested.
"Dear friend," she said gratefully but sorrowfully, "what time have you for such things?"
"I couldn't give my days to it, of course," he confessed. "But I have my nights. With a couple of hours in the morning, why, a few weeks ought to see it finished."
She shook her head with childlike dolefulness.
"Then what will you do with it?" he asked her.
The question seemed to frighten her. She scarcely knew, she said. They had been clamoring for it so long. She thought she would put it aside and take it up again with a fresh hand.
"Then let me take it in the meantime," Hartley pleaded.
She made a proposal to him—it seemed to come to her in the form of a sudden inspiration.
"Let's collaborate on it," she cried.
"I would much rather simply help you a bit if I could."
"But don't you see, we can divvy—as we say over here—on the royalties. I've refused twenty per cent and a thousand dollars down. That means two or three thousand dollars, anyway."
Hartley would not hear of it. Cordelia hovered over him and pleaded with him and coaxed him, but he was obdurate to the end. He dreaded to think of that dainty little yellow study ever being converted, to him, into a bookseller's counting-house. A sudden hot sense of dissatisfaction with himself, and with things as they were, crept over him; he felt that he ought to be going, wondering why, during all that visit, Cordelia appeared so far away from him, so unreal and phantasmal.
"There was something I was going to speak to you about," she said, as he rose to go. "You know I've done simply nothing in return for all the things you've done for me." Then she smiled with her wistful smile. "You know, it isn't quite playing fair. As soon as you get home I want you to send me three or four of your short stories. Will you?"
"It's no use—they have been everywhere," said Hartley grimly.
"Perhaps they have, but I feel that I can place them for you—at least some of them."
Hartley shook his head. "I know most of the editors here," Cordelia went on; "there are three or four who have been bothering me for things for months. It makes a world of difference just how a manuscript comes into their hands; they say it doesn't, but they're human, after all. So, you see, I may be able to say a good word or two for you."
"Thank you, no," he answered gently. "When I think of you I want it to be in every sense but a business sense."
Her hand still remained unconsciously in his. He felt the pulsing warmth of it, and without a word raised it to his lips and kissed it. Cordelia, with her head turned away, gazed out of the open window. And there he left her, and stepped out into the freedom of the open air, neither elated nor cast down. He was thinking forlornly how month by month he had sent out those different hopeless, useless manuscripts, and how they had been as persistently returned to him. And still again the artist in him cried out for its opportunity. Yet he felt, in his youthfully candid, self-conscious way, that they were not altogether bad, those stories of his. Perhaps it was the work of the file that they showed too much. Perhaps it was the seriousness of purpose which pervaded them, when everywhere the call was for the airier and lighter effort.
But he did not altogether despair. Again and again he wondered on his way home why he had kissed her hand, and only her hand. And the nearer he drew to Chatham Square the more he was tempted to change his mind and send at least one manuscript to Cordelia.
And vain and empty stole awayTheir little seasons, one by one;And wearied while it yet was dayThey fell asleep beneath the sun,Ere once the dream or magic wordCould swing the gates of life apart,Ere once some greater passion stirredThe dust from each impassive heart.
And vain and empty stole awayTheir little seasons, one by one;And wearied while it yet was dayThey fell asleep beneath the sun,Ere once the dream or magic wordCould swing the gates of life apart,Ere once some greater passion stirredThe dust from each impassive heart.
John Hartley, "Pale Souls."
What are more desolate than life's moral Great Divides.—"The Silver Poppy."
The grimy offices of the United News Bureau were on William Street, almost under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. In four years this bureau had known three failures and had existed, as well, under three different names. Uneasy on his desk ever rested the heels of its managing editor. There was a tradition, in fact, that this official had, perforce, to take his chair out to lunch with him—otherwise a new man occupied it on his return.
In dusty little pens about the august editorial chair toiled some ten or twelve sadly dilapidated literary hacks, waifs of the sea of journalism that had been washed up on the inhospitable shores of the syndicate bureau. They were, as a rule, old men eking out a simple existence on their few dollars a week, and, after frugal repasts at the noonday hour, when the wheels of creative imagination suspended for luncheon, dilating pensively on the old days, the good old palmy days of Greeley and Dana and Godkin, when to wield the pen was a labor of love and honor, when a newspaper man was not a walking sweat-shop of letters, whereby literature was turned out in job lots and articles were manufactured at so much the dozen.
It had not taken Hartley long to find that the United News Bureau was looked on with considerable contempt, with even hatred, by the ordinary New York newspaper writer. These upholders of sometimes dubiously conventional journalism made it a rule always to refer to the bureau as "the Boiler-Plate Factory," and night and day they watched it with suspicious eyes for evidences of violated copyright. But the bureau knew its business, and the different members of its staff had long since been schooled in the deft execution of what was not inappropriately termed a "plate sneak." This form of literary gymnastics consisted in the bodily appropriation of any desired article, sermon, story, or essay, the copy purloined being neatly disguised by a false face, as it were, in the substitution of a freshly written introduction. An original paragraph or two was attached to the end, with, perhaps, the interpolation of an occasional new sentence throughout the body of the thing purloined. As the bureau dealt in everything from anniversary poetry to syndicated political addresses, the field for its predatory activities was practically unlimited. A short story could be made by transplanting a De Maupassant peasant to a New England farm, or the interjection of a Kipling recruit into an Arizona mining-camp. The old-time action was jealously preserved in the transformation, the only alterations being those essential to a change of climate and conditions—and, presto, one had a new tale as bright and glittering as a freshly minted penny.
The bureau had a Menu Page, too, made up by a very lean and hungry-looking old gentleman who lunched sparingly on a sandwich each noon, and a Religious Thought Page, edited by a very stout individual who kept a brandy-flask standing beside his ink-bottle. A profitable branch of its business was the preparation of obituaries of eminent men still living, and it is on record that one editor had made it his cheerful practise to submit these touching studies to the different gentlemen whom they most intimately concerned, naively asking if anything further remained to be said. What the bureau fattened on, however, was the uncopyrighted in general, and for all such morsels it watched with hawk-like intensity. An English novel or any less substantial publication which came to it unprotected by the arm of the law was pounced on at once, rapaciously and gleefully. It was renamed, abridged or expanded as the case might require, and in less time than it took the original author to indite his first chapter, it was on the market as a new and thrilling serial, "secured by special arrangement."
The bureau, among other things, paid particular attention to the wants of the farmer, and issued a Dairy Page, edited by an elderly maiden lady who made Brooklyn her home and beheld a cow not more than once a year. The expert who edited the Agricultural Page, it might be added, had prepared himself for such tasks by many years' labor as an insurance agent. The bureau also boasted of a professional poet, who ran strongly to patriotism, but as his rhymes were manufactured for the convenience of the rather undiscriminating bucolic editor and later on for the delectation of the bucolic reader, his Gems in Verse usually went unchallenged.
Since it took several days for the dissemination of the bureau's material, as everything went from its offices made up into plates and boxed for express, all of its offerings had to be prepared with a wholesome disregard as to dates. This somewhat handicapped the dramatic editor, who found it necessary to write bright and ingenious criticisms of plays without first witnessing their performance—although, it must be confessed, any difficulty on this score was usually obviated by making all notices unreservedly eulogistic—otherwise remote editors later on wrote in complaining of the loss of passes for those same performances when they ventured out on the road and joined hands with the bureau in that common and most commendable pursuit of stimulating the imagination of the masses.
Midsummer in the bureau always saw the staff in the midst of their Christmas literature, which, like its other anniversary material, was made up into pages, with a generous sprinkling of highly appropriate pictures of snow scenes and swinging bells and smiling Santa Clauses. Year after year these same pictures were taken down from their dusty shelves, and then year after year were duly stored away again for another season's use. Summer fiction, in the same way, was always manufactured during the winter months, by writers crouching forlornly over cheerless little gas-heaters. The bureau possessed a couple of "hands" surprisingly expert at this novelette work, who labored with the assistance of the back numbers of the less prominent magazines, and seemed possessed of the pleasing thought that what the world most loved was an old friend in new clothes.
One of Hartley's first lessons—and there were many of them to be learned—had been that no article, editorial, or story must "slop over." This phrase was interpreted to him as meaning that no article must be one line longer than the strictly allotted space. If such proved the case the editorial blue pencil performed the necessary amputation, and the child of the expansive mind was crowded into its page sadly bereft of limbs, and often enough of all genuine sense and coherence. Hartley had acquired the art, too, of writing poetry to order, suitable for the bureau's stock illustrations, while the compositor waited at his elbow, with his make-up suspended until the necessary lines were duly indited.
The young scholar from Oxford had been not a little amused, in secret, at the duties of the person who was known as the comic editor. The chief task of this editor seemed to be a ruthless scalping of the foreign humorous weeklies and a conscientious and often laborious adjustment of the witticisms of Punch to the American understanding. He was equally amused to find that the Republican editor and the Democratic editor were one and the same person, a mild-mannered and kindly faced old gentleman in a faded green suit, who on alternate days furiously wrote the most scathing political leaders back at himself.
Hartley himself had been carefully warned never to touch on religion, politics, or even locality in any of his contributions. It had also been impressed on his bewildered brain that there existed in American public life a mysterious factor known as the "Irish element," and that under no circumstances must he express any opinion or make any allusion which might be interpreted as offensive to this element. If in doubt, his editor commanded, he must be as Anglophobic as possible. He was also to make it a point to wax gently sarcastic, even playfully malicious, when speaking of that effete and overluxurious city New York—the name of which, it appeared, was bitter in the mouth of all outsiders. Hartley could never fathom why this was, but it was. And that seemed enough. He learned to feel less uncomfortable masquerading under his different pen-names after discovering that the heavily bearded old German who smoked bad tobacco at the desk next to his own flourished in the columns of the Woman's and Fashion Page as Daisy Dineen, the unquestioned authority on dumpling recipes in ten thousand unsuspecting homes.
These were the offices and this was the atmosphere into which Hartley listlessly came the morning after his interview with Cordelia Vaughan, when he had faltered in telling her his real verdict on The Unwise Virgins. This was the bitter gateway through which he had once dreamed he could enter some Eden of eminence.
As he passed to his desk and mopped the dust from it with an old newspaper, the place and all it stood for filled him with a sudden new-born disgust and weariness, a feeling more reckless than any which had before taken possession of him. He was sick of the smell of turpentine and printers' ink. He was sick of the unventilated rooms and the bad light. Daisy Dineen's tobacco-smoke drifted smotheringly about him. A plaintive minor note seemed to creep into the tinkling chorus of the many busy typewriters behind many little wooden partitions. There seemed something ghoulish and subterranean in the stooped, dimly lighted crooked figures of the patient writers about him. If earth's voracious readers beyond the pale only knew and understood!
Hartley was leaning disconsolately on his elbow, thinking this thought, when the shrill and slightly nasal voice of the managing editor called him. He got up and went listlessly to the editorial desk, still hearing some note of latent pathos in the patient tinkling of the many typewriters.
"Look here, Lord Haughtly"—from his first day with the bureau they had dubbed him Lord Haughtly, the opprobriousness of which he had born with good-natured and smiling resignation—"what stuff have you turned in this last week?"
It seemed to the young disseminator of information that the question was asked in an unusually peremptory tone of voice. He was ready to overlook such things, however, for in days gone by this rough-and-ready man of affairs had not been altogether unkind to him, in his unconscious, careless way. He remembered, too, that he had come to the bureau an unknown and penniless youth, and that he was still one of the "probationers."
"Nothing much this week, I'm afraid," he answered.
"Nothing, eh?" said the controller of the destinies of journalistic literature, as he viewed the end of his cigar, which had all the appearance of a well-worn paint-brush. "You don't seem to be aching much to get on the pay-roll this week?"
"No, I rather didn't expect to," said Hartley quietly. He was beginning to scent danger ahead.
"Didn't, eh? Well, I guess I've been letting you off kind of easy lately. I've struck a new scheme, and I need a good chesty talker like you to push it through for me. Goin' to try you on a new line of work. I want you to go 'round to the different fancy outfitters and get anything flashy in fall styles for the Fashion Page. Then look up six or seven club-men—well-known club-men—and get me up a breezy two columns on expensive underwear for men of the Four Hundred. Find out what young Van Asteroid pays for his silk things and how many he's got, and all that kind of guff."
There was a moment's silence. The author of Nausicaa and Other Poems when anger took hold of him always went white and said little. He looked down at his enemy, outwardly calm. But an inner fire was burning away the last link of his bondage.
"I don't think I should care to undertake an assignment of that nature." The oppressor had not seen his face.
"Probably you wouldn't," retorted the unsuspecting editor. "But we ain't all here doing the things we want to. Everybody in this push, I guess, has his dirty work to do. We want that article by four to-morrow. That clear?"
"Quite clear. But I don't think you understand me," said the other, struggling in vain to rise above his rage.
"You—you mean to tell me you won't! Look here, young man, you were a sandwich-eating, no-account immigrant, starving in the gutters when I picked you up and tried to make a New York newspaper man out of you. There's men from Maine to New Mexico hungering to get the chance I gave you—men who'd pay good money to get into this office. And you can do what I say or get out."
Hartley wondered what strange metamorphosis had taken place somewhere deep within his soul to give rise to the sudden new reckless spirit of independence which swept through him. Before it his anger melted away; he reveled only in a new sense of freedom.
"Very well, then; I get out," he replied, turning on his heel, almost smilingly.
The voice of the managing editor had risen high above the smaller noises of the office, and as Hartley walked to his dusty old desk and took up his hat and somewhat tattered gloves there was a moment of unbroken silence. He stood at the door and looked back. Timidly and nervously the busy typewriters behind the little partitions started to tinkle out their doleful staccato again. The managing editor sat, half turned in his pivot chair, looking through the door after Hartley in amazement. Then he swore at him lustily, and declaring before all that was holy that it would do him good to go out and starve, he snorted the burden of his rage from his mind and savagely commanded Daisy Dineen to give him a match.
And that was the manner in which John Hartley left the services of the United News Bureau for all time.