So avid of these earthly crumbs of praise,Behold, how in her need,From door to door of fame she crawls and praysOne crust to glut her greed.
So avid of these earthly crumbs of praise,Behold, how in her need,From door to door of fame she crawls and praysOne crust to glut her greed.
John Hartley, "The Mendicant."
Upward through illusion and onward through error, that is life.—"The Silver Poppy."
Hartley was in a dilemma. He counted his money with some trepidation, and found that he possessed, all told, just four dollars and ninety cents, one dollar of which was to go for a month's rent of his typewriter. Seldom before had such things troubled him. If they were not, he felt that they ought to be, the mere accidents, the immaterial phases, of life.
Placing the little pile of money out before him on his worn old work-table, he realized, as he gazed down at it, that it made a very low wall between him and starvation.
Yet he did not altogether regret his breaking away from the United News Bureau. He had never nursed much love for that Grub Street of the New World. He had always realized, too, that journalism in any form could hold out no great hopes for him. He had not the news instinct, that great gift which to an editor, he had learned, only too amply covered the multitudinous sins of illiteracy. Nor had he that patience of spirit which would permit of his ever becoming a humble laborer with the pen of the "pot-boiler."
He recalled to his mind poor old Sissons, who so often had drifted into the bureau office—who for years had written his four books a season, under contract, for his paltry one hundred and forty dollars a volume. Sissons? Sissons? Who was Sissons? The name had not gone ringing down the avenues of fame, and yet few men in New York had written so much, none so laboriously.
In his dilemma Hartley remembered that he had once before earned three dollars a week as a super-numerary in one of the upper Broadway theaters. If the worst came to the worst, he could go back and be a "super"—it would be the refinement of cruelty, he thought, to be cast for a "thinking part" in one of the drawing-room scenes in Cordelia Vaughan's forth-coming comedy. He decided, in the end, though, that he would prefer unloading freight on the East River wharves. Many a day he had watched those ruddy wharf laborers, half enviously; and their lot, to him, had seemed incomparably happier than that of the pale shadows who shambled weakly about the broken old desks of the United News Bureau. And since the day Stevenson's old lodging-house had been pointed out to him he had felt a warmer feeling for both that ragged river front and for that vanished velvet-jacketed vagabond and dreamer of great dreams. Only—there was the inevitable "only"—only if he had never had that intoxicating first taste of another life.
His one glimmer of hope was that Cordelia might yet be able to sell a short story or two for him. And with that glimmer came a sudden passion to repay her in full for anything she might do. For once, and at last, his time and energy were his own. Remembering this, he read again his copy of The Unwise Virgins, and before noon of his first free day he was deep at work on his reconstruction of that halting story.
The sense of freedom that came with such work appealed to him. His liberated mind raced like a colt up and down the unfamiliar uplands of the imagination. For three delirious, fleeting days he struggled and battled with the manuscript, writing late into the night, losing himself in his work, medicining his little worries with the great balm of creation, with the unction of tangible accomplishment.
On the morning of the fourth day—a bright September morning with the sparrows twittering and bustling busily about the sunlit housetops, he received an unlooked-for note from Cordelia. He turned it over many times wonderingly, and then opened it over his modest breakfast of coffee and oatmeal porridge. In it was a crisp, spotless check for one hundred and ten dollars and a playfully peremptory command to send on another story at once. She ended with a line or two of congratulations, and casually asked when she was to see him again.
These closing sentences were skimmed over almost unnoticed by Hartley. One hundred and ten dollars! Never before had he been paid so handsomely. He looked at the check again, and wondered just where he could get it cashed. And still again he held it up to the light and looked at it, and a great content stole over him. It was the beginning.
How bright that morning the sun lay on the housetops and chimneys, and how the elevated trains whisked and danced and frolicked past his vibrating window! The dust that hung over the city seemed a mantle of soft gold. The smell of the open street was a new perfume to him.
He went back to his work happy, light-hearted, assured. He felt come over him a new sense of power and freedom. With it the fires of creation seemed to burn and rage within him. For all time the week that followed remained a blurred and vague memory to him—a memory of hurried and half-eaten meals of chuck steak and strong coffee, of much tobacco-smoke, of feverish snatches at the fresh air by night, of unsettled sleep and an aching anxiety to be once more at work. His brain seemed to have taken the bit in its teeth and run away with him, though not, he knew, as Cordelia's had once bolted despairingly over the same pages.
When several days later he received a plaintive little note from that lady herself, it remained unnoticed. Little Pietro Salvatore crept timidly up to see him, but was not admitted. He could give no time to the empty graces and accidents of life. He was in the world of the spirit. The man in him flickered and went out; and the creator, the artist, awoke, and taking possession of his soul, claimed its own.
How long this mood, or madness—he did not stop to ask which it was—might have lasted he could never tell. But early one day a sharp pounding on his door angered him unreasonably. When it had sounded for the third time he answered it, and found a uniformed messenger-boy with a note from Cordelia. He tossed it aside, and plunged once more into his work. But three hours later he was interrupted again. This time it was a telegram. He opened it belligerently and read it. It was from Cordelia. He remembered that her note had asked something about when he could get up to see her. Now she had wired, "You must come at once."
Hartley sighed wearily. Then he walked his room resentfully. Then, like one awakening from a long sleep, he rubbed his eyes and looked abstractedly up and down his litter of manuscript and notes. He tried to go back to them, but some hand seemed leashing in his whimpering ideas. The spell was broken. He sat back in his chair and stretched himself wearily. He pictured a pale oval face, with its abundance of massed golden-yellow hair like a great crown, and remembered the little hands that seemed to flutter about like butterfly wings. And all at once his room stood before him an unspeakably squalid and lonely place. He wondered why he had been penning himself up for so long.
That afternoon, being unable to work, he walked twelve long miles and blistered his feet and tired his legs. He was in bed, weary of both mind and body before it was dark, and the sun was high before he wakened next morning. The world seemed gray and flat. The singing April of inspiration had passed. But he knew that he had broken the back of his work. The foundations of his labor had been laid, and thereafter he felt his toil on those half-completed twenty chapters of The Unwise Virgins must be that work which is done in cold blood, critical, calculating, dispassionate. But the thread of creation was snapped.
"I thought you were never coming," Cordelia lamented in her unconsciously soft contralto, as he stepped into the Spauldings' large, softly lighted library.
He laughed good-naturedly—he felt that a week of brain-work had burned out of him some excess of solemnity—and with boyish precipitancy thrust his twenty rough chapters of The Unwise Virgins into her arms.
"Behold my redemption!" he cried gaily, and felt that he should like to follow the twenty chapters and be held there as she held the crumpled leaves to her breast.
She had been waiting for him, and was dressed in a gown of old gold with yellow roses at her throat and in her hair. He threw his admiration of the picture she made into the glance he let linger abstractedly on her face. For the first time he noticed some touch of trouble about her quiet lips, a new tiredness about the pleading eyes.
"Why didn't you come?" she repeated, looking down as though half ashamed of a weakness she could not conceal.
"Upon my honor," he laughed back at her, "I don't believe I should have appeared within a month if it hadn't been for your message."
"How could you!" she said reprovingly.
"Well, a madness for work got hold of me, and I was up in the clouds. I always have to gallop through things—that's why I didn't want to break into the mood while it lasted."
"And it lasted?"
"Yes, until your wire came. Then I dropped down, I don't know how, with a bump. It confronted me with the fact that I was still a human being; it revitalized me, as it were, and reminded me that the softest voice in all the world had been calling for me, and the sweetest eyes in all the world had been looking for me."
Cordelia shrank back from him; he thought for a moment that he had wounded her. The widened pupils of her eyes had grown smaller again, and the shadow of something fugitive and far away flitted across her face. Was she, he wondered, still so afraid of love?
"Then, you didn't finish the story?" she asked diffidently. It seemed the first time that she had shown a desire to repel him.
He had stepped closer to her, warm with a feeling he tried neither to fathom nor withhold. At this change in her he stopped short, bewildered.
"No." He tried to explain to her. "You said that Imustcome."
"Oh!" said Cordelia coldly, vaguely; and all that evening Hartley wondered what unknown trouble was weighing upon her spirit. As at other times when similar inscrutable phases of her character had flashed before him, he let the teasing little mystery of the moment pass without attempting to probe more deeply into it. For he remembered that the real key to her inner and truer self lay between the covers of her first book, The Silver Poppy.
So many dreams must fail us, dear,So many springs to autumn turn,Let us, in one memorial year,Learn all there is of love to learn.
So many dreams must fail us, dear,So many springs to autumn turn,Let us, in one memorial year,Learn all there is of love to learn.
John Hartley, "Pale Souls."
A husband's jealousies, my dear, are the mushrooms on the beefsteak of matrimony.—"The Silver Poppy."
"My dear, are you falling in love?"
It was Mrs. Spaulding who suddenly asked this of Cordelia, tumbling a lump of sugar into the depths of her coffee-cup as a figure and symbol of some vaster emotional descent.
Cordelia looked across the breakfast table at her abstractedly.
"Why not?" she asked lazily.
Mrs. Spaulding looked up, about to speak. The right light, however, was not on Cordelia's brow, and there were certain bounds beyond which she had learned not to trespass. So she only sighed.
"Fall in love, my dear, a dozen times, if you like. But——"
And again Mrs. Spaulding sighed. Cordelia perhaps understood more than she pretended. Only that morning Mrs. Spaulding had read aloud to her a little note from Repellier—a most formal little note making excuses for being unable to join them in their box party at Wallack's.
From the first, almost, Cordelia had comprehended that silent unshifting drama, undreamed of by even its hero and central figure, the gentle, upright, honest old artist himself. At one time that patient but perverse adoration on the part of Mrs. Spaulding had impressed Cordelia as beautiful in its constancy, as ethereal in its very intangibility. But of late it was beginning to stand before her as the foolish caprice of a pertinacious and yet idle and dissatisfied woman.
But it was Mrs. Spaulding's one romance—wilful and unreasonable, yet none the less golden. Wealth had brought her many things, but out of the midst of her opulence she reached eagerly for the unattainable—seeking, without knowing it, for life's relieving burden of sorrow, for her woman's due heritage of tears.
"You ought to be happy," Cordelia one day had said to her; "youget everything you want." She had been trying to scold Cordelia out of a passing mood of discontent.
"I don't get anything I want," she had cried back at her bitterly. "We can't even have a Long Island place. We can't go to Aiken. We can't go abroad for a summer. Even if we did go, it would be on the wrong steamer, and we'd sit at the wrong table and meet the wrong people. And I can'tdragAlfred to a Waldorf dance, and Horse Show week I've always had to sit up alone in a box like a bump on a log. And he insists on driving in the Park on Sundays—Sundays, mind you—and he always wants to go to Sherry's or Martin's for Saturday dinner, and wear a Tuxedo coat at a cotillon. Why we've even bought our house here on the wrong street, and to make it even worse we're on the wrongsideof the street. We go and sit through those everlasting operas on the wrong night. When we leave town it's always at the wrong season. Then we come back wrong—about the time other people are leaving. Is it any wonder I feel like giving up? Why, Cordelia, my dear, you've met more people and got to be better known in five months than I have in five years!"
And she stirred her coffee with the vigor with which she had once dreamed to stir the social world.
"And you can hold people and make them like you," she went on. "And you aren't afraid to show people that you care for them."
It was Cordelia's turn to drive trouble from a softly rebellious breast.
"If he only guessed how sweet and good you are, some wise man I know would surely come and run off with you."
Mrs. Spaulding looked at her tragically and heaved a ponderous sigh. Then her American saving sense of humor came to her rescue and she clung to it, like the drowning to a raft.
"I'm a sentimental old fool, my dear," was all she said. And Cordelia was left to her own troubled thoughts.
More than once the author of The Silver Poppy had been heard to say that she was a greatly misjudged woman. The world accepted her as austere and impassive. The myriad readers of her book thought of her as clever but chilly, as talented but retiring. Yet "upon the stern and somber loom of passion and love," her publisher's announcement had read, "the girlish hand of this fair daughter of Dixie has wielded a shuttle wound with the odorous warmth of the Southland and dyed with the bright fancy of one who has loved and known and suffered. From the story of one woman's tenderest devotion and one man's deepest love this young hand has intuitively woven the magic woof of many-hued romance."
Precisely what it meant no one attempted to define, but it sounded very well, and what was more, it seemed to hint that the pale young authoress from the hills of Kentucky had once known her own romance of the heart, and that the gates of feeling had thereafter been closed to all supplicants. This was a deduction so natural that the elderly maiden lady who conducted a column of society chatter on one of the back pages of a daily newspaper had even ventured to print—this was after a very substantial dinner at Sherry's, where-at Cordelia herself was the gracious and generous hostess—that many a stout heart of Manhattan had reason to lament the fact that the feelings of a certain golden-haired daughter of Kentucky were impregnable to all assault. The lady, indeed, was so closely allied to literature that, unlike the philosopher of the Rubaiyat, she could never be divorced from barren reason and make a second marriage. This was all put with a slyness so adroit and yet with an application so undoubted that it had once more been whispered about that the beautiful young Kentucky genius preferred great dreams to Dan Cupid. Her studious maiden-hood seemed hedged about by a bulwark of half-written books. It was a sad example of beauty sacrificed on the altar of bookishness.
And yet, it was argued, this precocious child of letters at some time during her career must have learned to love, and love deeply; one critic declared her pen to have been dipped not in ink, but "in the ruddy flood of a warm and palpitating heart." If, in truth, she had never loved, how, then, had that fluent pen of hers ever learned to write so movingly and so masterfully of the divine passion?
How, indeed? That was the riddle which more than one puzzled mind had to leave unread. That was a thought, too, that had troubled Hartley not a little; there were times when he felt vaguely envious of that unknown, mysterious, shrouded past. He had read also that Cordelia had declared that she could never marry, that devotion to her art precluded any such worldly consummation. It had even crept into print that Iscaro, the Egyptian palmist, had sealed her girlhood decision by prophesying that she was to achieve immortality only through a life of celibacy.
Yet such are the cross-threads of fate. For Hartley, puzzling over these things as others before him had done, had built up in his consciousness an incongruous, self-contradictory, impossible character of a woman who seemed to him always warm to the eye and was yet destined to prove marble cold to the touch.
It was for Cordelia, perhaps, the penalty of eminence. For little as she had ever shown any sign of sacrificing her artistic aspirations in the rose-grown temple of matrimony, the hunger of the unmated and maturing animal, the wavering passion that arises at times involuntarily in the breast of the coldest priestess amid her coldest marbles, quiescent, but quiescent only as a tiger sleeping in its noonday cave, was now not unknown to the heart of Cordelia Vaughan. She wanted to be loved; but above all things, she wanted to love.
The cry of ripe womanhood for its mate awoke at times, but only of late, she knew, with an intensity that was sadly disturbing. Through her girlhood, she remembered, she had often said with a great air that she could never love. To love other than uprightly was even more impossible—yet she had secretly tired of the hollow part of an Aspasia without a Pericles. She had often tried to convince herself that she was too happily neutral, too indeterminate of temperament, to stray from the lonely heights to which she had so painfully climbed for the mere passing glint of a bubble. Now, for at least once in her life, half weary of all her comfortless basking at the too fierce fireside of her early fame she was beginning to ask more and more passionately for some touch of the mellow sun of actual affection, for some gentle warmth of disinterested tenderness.
For with all her activity and with all the attention she seemed to receive, Cordelia's life was still a desolately lonely one. An early girlish pose of protesting a fear of men had crystallized into a habit of evading them, except in not infrequent cases of late where they stepped before her as instruments of literary destiny. Good men, she had once said, are like good roads: made for walking over. As the belle of her little Kentucky town she had held herself proudly above each and all of her young suitors. As the successful author of a great book, as the woman of wit and reason, she had tended to repel that attention at the hand of the admiring male which such charm in woman as she might lay claim to invariably called for. She had known many courtships, though, in her own way. Yet she asked herself if she had ever known one absolute and unselfish love.
It was Mrs. Spaulding's lightly put question that drove her into a dreary retrospect of a youth she seldom cared to look back on. But was this love now coming to her on belated wings?
She wondered where the difference lay, wherein John Hartley was not like all other men. Why had she looked out on him with awakened eyes? She remembered how, at the first, that grave considerateness with which he had treated her had caused an immediate muffled fluttering in the sleeping cotes of affection. There was an answering seriousness in his steady gray eyes that had appealed to her. He was manly, and honest, and strong. Yet she knew that explained nothing. Nor did the fact that he had continuously eluded her, that in some way he stood above her in a masterfulness that caused dormant femininity ever dumbly to bow to it. And still she probed herself for reasons, and still she stood unsatisfied. Was it true, even, that she could ever be in love with him?
When she leaned down and asked herself, in the mirror, that strange and disturbing question, one gray day late in September, she neither smiled nor sighed. For she tried to tell herself that it was not love, but loneliness. She, too, like Mrs. Spaulding, had never been given all that her heart desired.
It was not until Cordelia had read and reread Hartley's first twenty chapters of his reconstructed version of The Unwise Virgins—and what wondrous chapters, she saw, he had made them—that her plaintive and unconfessed longing for companionship, by some strange caprice of impression, deepened into a stronger and more compelling emotion. She felt then, of a sudden, that he held the reins of her destiny in his hands. She wanted him near her. Not only in her loneliness, but also in her weakness, she needed him to lean upon. The little that she had already asked of him she would repay a thousandfold.
And as the result of that day's silent questioning of herself she went in person from editor to editor, as she had never done before, with a bundle of his manuscripts. And before many days, after numerous disappointments and more than one humiliation, she succeeded in disposing of no less than five of his stories. If, as a distributer of his wares she had moments of suffering, she learned to take an incongruous joy out of them, and no word of what she passed through ever reached Hartley's ears.
She, when all her maids were gone,With her cheek upon her hand,Gazed across a terraced lawnDown a twilit valley-landWhere a white road twined and curledThrough the hills that barred the west,Where some unknown outland worldFilled her with a strange unrest.
She, when all her maids were gone,With her cheek upon her hand,Gazed across a terraced lawnDown a twilit valley-landWhere a white road twined and curledThrough the hills that barred the west,Where some unknown outland worldFilled her with a strange unrest.
John Hartley, "The Valley Princess."
It is the under crust of motive that is the test of the moral pie.—"The Silver Poppy."
Cordelia turned the letter over and over in her hands. Something of late always depressed her when she received these letters from home, in her father's stiff, ungainly hand and his none too perfect spelling.
"Poor old dad, he won't come, after all!" Cordelia found it hard to look as miserable as she ought.
"I told you he wouldn't, my dear," said Mrs. Spaulding, with rigid retrospective conviction of mind.
"But I've leased the flat."
"And I told you not to do that, too."
"Yes; but he promised."
"Only because he thought you wanted him to."
"But Ididwant him to."
"Then you don't now?"
Cordelia looked up at her companion quickly.
"Yes, yes; I do. But for some reason, you see, he's changed his mind."
"My dear, that was all a big, soft-hearted, foolish idea of yours. What would your poor old father at his age do in New York? How could he be happy or contented in a four-roomed flat after forty acres of hills? How long would he leave his own country for a howling wilderness of brick and mortar like this?"
"He would be near me," said Cordelia valiantly.
"Which probably wouldn't be so pleasant, after all, for either of you. Do you ever stop to think, my dear, just how much you've changed in the last year or so?"
For a few moments Cordelia was thoughtfully silent. She felt and knew that she had changed.
"But what shall I do with it?" she asked.
"Has it never occurred to you?" Mrs. Spaulding at that precise moment sincerely wished that she possessed the psychic power of mind-reading. She half suspected that Cordelia might be concealing more than she had need to.
"Let John Hartley have it," the older woman said bluntly. And she had the inward satisfaction of seeing Cordelia color under her direct gaze. But she recovered herself at a stroke.
"He would never take it," Cordelia said.
"Then you should make him."
"That's something I couldn't do," murmured the other, shaking her head.
"Well,somebodyought to haul him out of that hole down in—in Chinatown, or the Bowery, or wherever it is."
"I know it," agreed Cordelia.
"Then we shall do it ourselves, my dear," said Mrs. Spaulding with a note of finality that was born of a touch of impatience. And Cordelia tried to see the futility of saying anything further.
In fact, before the day was over even her nominal hesitation had vanished, and the two women had decided on many of their plans for the redemption of Hartley. From the hour of that decision both Mrs. Spaulding and Cordelia made numerous excursions to the little apartment on lower Riverside Drive, and during the next few days the portly footman of the former enthusiastic lady was directed to carry up sundry parcels of hangings and knickknacks and small furniture.
It was a novel experience for both of them, in a way, and both of them were wringing out of it their own secret enjoyment—one retrospective, one anticipatory. Cordelia, once openly wedded to the idea, fluttered about the apartment as proudly as an April robin building a nest. The lighter touches were not overlooked; a desk was not forgotten, nor were prints and books and those many little things which were reputed to appeal to the student. Mrs. Spaulding, indeed, had given Cordelia an open order on her furniture dealer, and the fruits of her shopping tours had added much to the solid comfort of the place. She herself contributed a silver chafing-dish and a little set of Dresden china, matching her own, which had taken her fancy.
Then, when everything had been made comfortable and home-like, even to the addition of many clusters of carnations and roses about the rooms, a change suddenly came over Cordelia. An unaccountable mood of bashfulness took possession of her, a fear as to just how the intended and all unconscious guest would accept such boldly proffered hospitality, a haunting dread that perhaps he would refuse everything, and fail to understand the balm which she had so artfully made ready to take the sting from the gratuity—that he might leave her humiliated and misunderstood.
At the last moment she disappeared, and hid with a sort of bird-like timidity; and it was Mrs. Spaulding who had to take the somewhat astounded Hartley by the hand and lead him from one room to the other and introduce him to what she prettily called his new home.
Hartley took it all much more genially than they had expected. There was no scene, and but a moment's remonstrance and hesitation. It is true that at first he flushed hotly, and would have said something, but the eager light on Mrs. Spaulding's face kept him silent while he listened to her half-laughing explanation of how a useless flat had fallen into their hands.
"And it's so ridiculously cheap—only sixty dollars a month!"
Something in Hartley's face, a fleeting shadow of embarrassment, made her ask quickly: "That—that wouldn't be too much for you to pay?"
"Oh, no; of course not," he said, with ill-assumed indifference.
"Then you're not going to be stupid about it?" she demanded, with mock sternness. He was still standing ill at ease, scarcely knowing what to say.
"Oh, no, no; but still I don't quite understand why you should do this for me."
"There's nothing very puzzling about it. We both know very well it wasn't any too comfortable—was it?—down where you've been living. And artists have to have the right kind of place to work in. So we're simply going to chain you down, andmakeyou stay."
She looked at him with a smile he had seldom seen on her lips. Her face that afternoon seemed sadly golden with the afterglow of an almost girlish tenderness that had long dropped beyond the horizon of the years, dignified with a light that seldom dwelt on it.
"And I want you to be happy and enjoy it," she added.
"How could you, Mrs. Spaulding! How could you!" he cried impetuously, taking her hand. It was not often that his Anglican coldness crept away from him, but when it did he was delightfully boyish.
"Is there anything so dreadful in it?"
"Only because it is all so dreadfully undeserved."
"Dear me, it's been the greatest fun for us. And then it's going to be so jolly to drop in every now and then and see you. And poor, dear Cordelia has tried so hard to fix things to please you. So if you shatter our faith in you, sir," she added, going to the window and gazing out where the great silver bosom of the Hudson glimmered and shone in the autumnal sunlight, "or if you fail to write a great book here, then—well, we'll never forgive you, that's all."
He had no answer to make, for he too was looking out over the wide river and already thinking his own great thoughts of the future. Rung by rung he saw the ladder of success before him, and now that he had his foot on it—now he would show them. He would be, he told himself, none the less active; he would allow himself to lose none of his old aggressive discontent. Hereafter, though, he would do only that work which lay nearest his heart. There should be no yielding to transient interests, no bending to the voice of the moment. There was, of course, still his book to finish for Cordelia; that was but a matter of a few weeks. Then he would be free. Then the artist and his opportunity would be face to face.
One small cloud hovered over the clear horizon of his happiness. On the very threshold of his freedom he was finding the lightest of golden chains clinking thinly at his wrists. It was the disquieting sense of obligation toward Cordelia. His liberty had not come to him unqualified.
Hartley could not leave his humble East Side room without a pang or two of regret. One can never turn over such a page in life, he knew, without a touch of sorrow for the chapter that is closed. He felt that he was losing the companionship of those whom a common poverty had drawn closely about him. He felt, too, that it was the death of the democrat in him. He had grown to take an unworded pride in classing himself as one of the People. There could be no more of the "glad confident morning again." And if, at times, he had rebelled against the squalor and discomfort of that older life, yet now, when the hour for stepping out of and above it had arrived, he hesitated still again before taking the upper path into that new and untried world. The heat and dust and clangor of the busy streets, the cries and odors where men and women hived closely together, the wailing of young and neglected children, the sense of feverish movement and stir, the hum of the ceaseless machines—all these in the old days had entered into his life and had brought with them a riddle which he had not quite read, a lesson which he had not quite learned. And life there, too, had known its shreds and patches of color. With all its poverty there was a Southern air of gaiety and lightness about this New World East Side. It had none of the dismal and monotonous hideousness and the hopelessness of a Bethnal Green and a Whitechapel. He felt that he was stepping out to light and to liberty, yet taking with him a heavy heart—a heart that had almost grown to love its very cell. And after all, was it liberty? The softer side of life had not been unknown to him, and had not brought him happiness in the old days. A touch of the flagellant in him still turned his eyes toward the more buffeting existence, while at the same time the artist, the apostle for form, cried out in him for its leisured contemplation. Yet better to be the crystal and be broken, he felt, than the tile upon the housetop.
And John Hartley was not altogether and unrestrictedly happy during that first hour in his new apartment.
While these thoughts were running tumultuously through his mind Mrs. Spaulding, the embodiment, he felt, of the spirit of his newer existence, looked wonderingly out over her pearl-gray boa at him and waited for him to speak. He had taken it all very quietly. She did not know whether to be pleased or annoyed; Cordelia had accustomed her to gratitude in its more demonstrative form. She had expected, perhaps, a little more effusion on the part of her newprotégé. He, on his part, did not see that more remained to be said.
Mrs. Spaulding continued to look at him with musing eyes. He had always seemed to her to have the manners of another century. There were times when his stiffness irritated her.
"Are all Englishmen alike?" she asked.
"Why?"
"Because sometimes I feel that I'd like to give you a good shaking, just to joggle you out of your shell for a few minutes."
He laughed. "I only wish you would."
"Really? Then why do you let so many good times crawl under your Juggernaut of solemnity?"
"Because the Vishnu of the land of the glassy stare demands it, I suppose. I'm not altogether Americanized yet." And again he laughed.
"Does that mean you're saying anything against my country?" demanded Mrs. Spaulding.
"On the contrary, that I am looking to your country for my reformation. I'd really like to be shaken out of that shell you speak of."
"Well, New York ought to do that for you."
"I think it is doing it."
"But it's like your accent; it goes slowly." Mrs. Spaulding had seated herself, and was looking at him with her elbows on the table and a meditative chin buried in her thick boa.
"I think you ought to fall in love."
She repeated it, with conviction, and then suddenly, asked him: "Haven't you ever been that way?"
He looked at her with a face both serious and, she thought, unnecessarily chilling.
"There, I told you—the shell!" she cried warningly. "Tell me, now, weren't you ever in love?"
A barrier, impregnable as steel, a barrier beaten out by all the years of an existence uncomprehended and a secrecy unrespected, fell between them. A sense of his isolation, a touch of the sorrow of the alien, crept over him. And as he looked at the woman who thus questioned him it seemed very long ago, and very far away, that old life, and those old days amid the soft Oxfordshire hills.
Mrs. Spaulding put out her hand to him, unexpectedly.
"I'm afraid you're going to be very lonely here at first," she said.
"I have my work," he answered wearily—though the thought of it came almost with joy.
"But you can't live by work alone. And if you'll let us, I thought we might give you a little house-warming. Won't you let Cordelia and me join you in your first dinner here?"
Mrs. Spaulding had made a discovery. She had found that her scholar responded only to sincerity, but then, inevitably; and here she had been assailing him with her levity. She mentioned the many little details of how they should have their dinner prepared. Then she turned to him, and added, as an after-thought:
"Cordelia is a beautiful character, isn't she?" Whereupon, as though fearing his reply, she suddenly looked at her little jeweled watch, and cried with horror: "Good heavens, I'm late for my sitting!" and rustled out to her waiting carriage, not altogether unhappy to get away.
She in twined gold all helmeted,Cuirassed in yielding rose,Let fall from lips of wanton redThree little words, like blows;And laughed where swayed his spear aloft,For she no arms did wear,And her slim body white and softOf steel and mail was bare!
She in twined gold all helmeted,Cuirassed in yielding rose,Let fall from lips of wanton redThree little words, like blows;
And laughed where swayed his spear aloft,For she no arms did wear,And her slim body white and softOf steel and mail was bare!
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
We prefer our pessimists young and tender, like asparagus; ten years older and what a bore even Hamlet might have been!—"The Silver Poppy."
We prefer our pessimists young and tender, like asparagus; ten years older and what a bore even Hamlet might have been!—"The Silver Poppy."
Repellier had been prevailed upon to attempt a portrait of Mrs. Alfred Spaulding, and three times a week he came to her house to drink a cup of tea and to work, relaxingly, it is true, on a canvas which was progressing neither fast nor altogether favorably. He had undertaken the task only under gentle protest, for, since that day of mingled alarm and disgust when he beheld two pages of an illustrated weekly given over to what its editor had dared to call The Repellier Girl, the old artist had gone back to hisgenrework, declaring that he was tired of the American gigantic miniature. So, profitable as he might have found the painting of beautiful gowns and faces in Bishop's whole lengths, he preferred thereafter to regard all labor like that which he was now performing for Mrs. Spaulding as the avocation of a busy life, and not the vocation of an idle one. And in this instance, too, his fair sitter had confided to him that she would like the portrait to be done in secret. It was to be a Christmas present for her husband, and, as she added with an ambiguity that somewhat ruffled the usual equanimity of Repellier, "Alfred is such a jealous-minded creature, besides."
It was Cordelia who had finally persuaded him to undertake the picture, laughing all seriousness out of its rigid secrecy and holding it up to him as merely the passing whim of a very wealthy and very idle woman. It was she, too, who suggested a plan which he ultimately carried out—that the check he received in payment for his work be handed over to the chronically depleted funds of that East Side Convalescent Home of which he was a trustee.
Mrs. Spaulding, in turn, was not ungrateful for what she considered Cordelia's good offices in this case. She even confessed to her young ward the timid fear that a great artist like Repellier, reproducing on his canvas feature by feature the very face in which a vast but heroically hidden passion burned, might some day read the soul of the picture, where the soul of the woman had passed unnoticed. Cordelia agreed that such cases were not unknown, but honorably kept her own counsel in the matter and even bravely fought down within herself the last inner voice of flippancy.
When Repellier called that afternoon he found Cordelia down in the Spauldings' commodious kitchen, a cook and two busy maids about her.
"I had to call you down, it smells so fine," she cried happily, thrusting before his astonished nose a pan of sizzling English pheasant, which, after a long and tiring hunt throughout the city, she confided to him, she had found somewhere in cold storage.
"How domestic we are, and how charming we look!" said Repellier in reply, noting her bright eyes and flushed face.
"Yes, isn't it fine?"
"But," he asked, "what does it all mean?"
She told him of Hartley's change of apartments—it was the thought of relating these circumstances to Repellier more than to any one else that had troubled her for days—and how Mrs. Spaulding and she had promised to give him a little house-warming.
"And so we're going to give him a dinner, a most wonderful dinner!" she cried. "And I'm doing it all by myself!"
Repellier glanced interrogatively at the three busy servants.
"Of course I have to have a little help, but that's a secret. Our women at home—in the South—aren't taught to do this sort of thing, you know. Help, with us, is so easy to get, most of us never learn things. When I was a girl in Kentucky, I don't believe I ever went into a kitchen more than once a month. And now I've just discovered the fascination of the fryingpan."
Cordelia had what Repellier called "the dangerous gift of familiarity." As he looked at her he remembered how apt Miss Short's description of her had been: "the girl with the semaphore eyes." She could be as open and ingenuous as a child at times, and when caring to, could guilelessly brush aside all the restraining conventionalities with one airy sweep of the hand.
"I suppose you realize it's the oldest weapon you have in that eternal warfare of the elemental woman against the elemental man," half laughed Repellier.
"Feed the brutes," she laughed. Then she looked up quickly. "But I'm not arming for any particular engagement with the enemy." He had a way of giving generalities a specific application which she did not like.
"I suppose a few thousand years ago some shock-headed, hairy-bodied creature with a stone hatchet crawled on all fours into a cave and beheld a rat-browed, matted-haired she-thing stooping over a gory piece of toasting bear meat, and his heart went out to her at once."
"Or his hatchet," broke in Cordelia.
"And I suppose out of the mumbling delight of that hairy savage has come what we moderns call family love, and out of the way in which the she-thing groveled and thrust the hot meat on a slab of stone and crawled with it to her lord and master-to-be has flowered what we call courtship."
"And just as her happy yelping," went on Cordelia satirically, "was the root of our speech, I suppose that hunk of half-cooked flesh was the root of thisterrine de foie gras."
She sniffed at her delicacy appreciatively.
"How much nicer the modern way is," she added, dreamily, "marriage by capture transformed into marriage by chef."
"Buthasit changed so much, after all?" asked Repellier, looking about at the half-filled hampers.
Cordelia thought it over before her mirror that evening as she dressed, and she rediscovered two truths. One was that it really hadn't changed so much, and the other was that Mr. Repellier often said things with a sort of double meaning, which, she knew, was always going to fill her with a hazy distrust of him.
Her toilet was an exceptionally elaborate one, and it was almost seven before she tapped lightly on Mrs. Spaulding's door.
Dismay crept through her as she entered; she immediately recognized all the familiar symptoms.
"I've got one of my heads again, my dear. I'm sorry, but Ican'tgo."
Cordelia looked at her with compressed lips.
"You'llhaveto run along by yourself, my dear. It'll be all right, and I'll send Thomas with the brougham at nine."
Hartley was deep in a pile of disordered notes and manuscripts, trying to arrange them with some sort of method, when her tiny knock sounded on his apartment door. He did not hear it; it might never have been intended for his hearing, it was so light and timorous. Before he was even aware of her presence everything had been slipped in through the softly opened door. And when he suddenly looked up he saw her standing there laughing, expectant, radiant, a Lady Bountiful surrounded by her riches.
He started up and came quickly toward her. He had scarcely looked for them so soon. But she stopped him with a gesture.
"I've come alone," she warned him. And she told him how she had been deserted at the last moment. She was glad, and yet sorry—as she saw how his face lighted up—that he should look at it so joyously innocent.
"I have come to feed the lion," she cried. "Roar if you dare, sir!" She slipped off her wrap, and laying her hat and gloves aside, deftly placed a couple of Hartley's carnations in her hair. Noticing over her shoulder that he was watching her, she laughingly told him the different names the newspapers had given that poor head of hers—everything from "flame-washed" and "tawny russet" to "beaten bronze." Then she laughed again softly, and produced a mysterious parcel.
"Roll up my sleeves, sir!" she demanded prettily, standing before him. When this was done, and he had noticed how small but perfectly rounded her white arm was, she opened her parcel and shook out the whitest of white aprons.
"Dear, dear, isn't it fine?" she cried, jubilantly tiptoeing so that she could see herself in the mirror.
Hartley looked at her in wonder. The last little complaining voice of a disturbed conscience went scurrying back to its kennel. Any constraint that had hung over him disappeared. With one whisk of her silk skirt Cordelia seemed to have driven the quietness and loneliness from the little rooms.
It was the pale and fragile priestess of letters in a new and altogether unexpected light. He even had to confess to himself that he had never seen her make a more perfect picture. She seemed more softly womanly, more wistfully happy, than ever before. The missing note had been found. She herself was not unconscious of this, and it deepened the rose-tint on her usually pallid cheeks. And she took a strange joy in her novel tasks, as she bustled about laying out the things in a most housewifely manner.
She made a few blunders about it, for it was work that was new to her, but they laughed them off together. It all seemed to appeal to something dormant and primitive in her, and she was happy. It was the blossoming, in her, of the belated flower of domesticity. Gazing down at the white linen and the dishes, in a moment of abstraction, she resolved within herself thereafter to give more time and attention to such things, she even inwardly decided, some day, to take a course in cooking. It was, she felt, like finding a quaint old jewel in the folds of some neglected and long-forgotten gown, a flower in some forsaken garden.
"I suppose," said Cordelia dreamily, as she contemplated the results of her labors, "that the fryingpan is the oldest weapon we women have in that perpetual warfare of the elemental she against the elemental he. Did you ever think of it in that light? Can't you imagine a shock-headed creature with a stone hatchet in his hand crawling into a cave and finding a lady in a bearskin roasting a piece of bear meat, or something like that? And can't you imagine how his pagan heart went out to her at the sight?"
Hartley growled, savage-like; and they both laughed.
"But I suppose," she went on thoughtfully, "that out of his mumblings of delight has come what we call family love. And then do you realize, sir, that out of the way that female savage groveled and thrust that hot meat on a slab of stone before him came that beautiful thing we call courtship?"
"Fine!" cried Hartley; "and evolution in a nutshell."
"Yes," said Cordelia happily. "I think I'll have to use that in a book sometime."
And so, from the oysters that came carefully packed in chopped ice to the French coffee which Cordelia made on Hartley's little gas-range—from a recipe which she had carefully penciled on a slip of paper—the dinner proved the daintiest and most delectable of repasts. In a burst of confidence Cordelia even admitted that it was the happiest one she had ever eaten. Then a silence fell over them, and through the drifting smoke of the cigar which she had so carefully lighted for him he noticed how unusually luminous were the widened pupils of her "semaphore eyes," and how shell-like the soft tinting of her oval and finely chiseled face.
But still neither spoke, and neither seemed oppressed by the silence. It seemed so eloquent of quiet content.
"What good chums we make," she said at last, musingly. They had both begun to feel during that long silence the stir of something new and momentous in the air about them.
"And always shall make," he said, taking her hand across the table and holding it firmly and warmly in his own. She looked at him out of wistful and appealing eyes; she felt herself strangely touched into a new vitality—the vitality of the emerging elemental woman. A hand-clasp was the thing she had not asked for; it was the one inadequate touch she had not called for.
"How cold you are!" she murmured plaintively. He looked up at her, half-enlightened, disturbed. He always had felt that she was something to be guarded and cherished. He wondered if it was her misleading air of fragility that had made her always appeal to his nurturing instinct, and had let the eternal he—as she had put it—in him go unchallenged.
"Would you like to see me—the other way?" he suddenly asked her, in a changed voice. He would have recalled that question, even as he would have held back the quick wave of recklessness that swept over him, if it had been in his power. Her words had sent the blood bounding back to his heart. For the first time she sat before him a living, breathing, alluring woman, and not the embodiment of all that was coldly intellectual. She seemed no longer the pale apostle of letters, but herself a woman throbbing and pulsing with mature life, eager, significant, almost challenging. And he, too, was a man, vigorous, full-blooded, not without his wayward impulses of the heart. The scholar in him, the dormant sense of propriety which rebelled against any disregard of the laws of the strong to the weak, of the host to his guest, had hitherto held a coldly restraining hand on him. She, like himself, was a being surging with desires and emotions, warm with forgotten moods and passions. And again he felt a flushing wave of irresponsibility sweep through him.
"Yes," she answered deliberately, pouring the last of the wine into his glass and sipping languidly at her own with her thin, gently curved, crimson lips. She waited for him to speak, but he was silent.
"I believe I'd love to shock you," she murmured in her fluty contralto. She was looking at him warmly now, with eyes that seemed golden green under the soft glow of the heavily shaded chandelier above their heads. Her hair was a crown of tangled gold. Her face seemed heavy, like a flower in the heat that comes before rain. A sudden tingling swept through all his nerves, and he looked at her with new eyes. At last he had awakened.
"Yes, what good chums we could have been," he said, it seemed to her almost regretfully.
"'But how interesting one man and one woman can make life,'" she answered slowly.
The sentence was a quotation from the second chapter of The Unwise Virgins as Cordelia had first written it. He remembered the line and the context, and it left him no room for doubt.
"There—there could be no going back," he said, feeling the old ground sinking abysmally from under his feet, and groping out in that last tumultuous moment for something substantial to which to cling. O doubting and pouting Adonis, how could you!
The flags and pennons of victory flamed softly in her triumphant eyes. In some way, she felt, she had at last drawn him down from his towers. Once she had been half afraid of him; that hour was gone for all time.
Cordelia slipped out of her chair and came over and stood close beside him. She thrust her pale fingers into his hair and gazed with mild but unhesitatingly candid eyes down into his own. His face looked up to hers, passionate, yet with a touch of pain. A sudden pallor swept over him, and before she knew it he had flung up his arms and drawn her down to him.
Some sudden enchaining fragrance and warmth about her overmastered him. For an intoxicating moment he could feel her very heart, in its wild beating. Then she writhed and twisted away from him, and shrank panting and frightened out of his reach. He went to her once, but she eluded him. And at last he remembered.
"Oh, I forgot, I forgot," she half cried and half sobbed. And then she seemed to grow frightened, both of him and of herself.
"No, no!" she cried as he returned to her, with outstretched arms. "No, we—we must go back and be as we were—before." And he could see that some subtle change had come over her. Until that moment she had, perhaps, been the pursuer. Now, and hereafter—well, she had become the child of uncounted ages of femininity.
She told him, again and again, that it would make no difference, that they should both forget that little blot on what had been their perfect happiness. And for the rest of her visit she busied herself about the apartment, fluttering from room to room with her bird-like activity. There was a strange smile in the corners of her mouth, a humanizing, maddening sort of smile, Hartley thought it, as he followed her gloomily about while she readjusted his furniture where it displeased her and here and there rearranged his flowers and prints and dishes with her deft fingers. From time to time, in hanging his pictures and curios about the walls, she called on him to help her. This he seemed to do submissively, almost repentantly.
Scarcely a word had passed between them until Cordelia had come to the draping of what Mrs. Spaulding had called the Turkish corner. Above a broad, low divan two heavy pistoleted Arabian spear-heads had been hung crosswise from the ceiling. Over these a pair of Bagdadportièreswere to be draped.
Standing on a chair, Cordelia tried twice to reach over the spear-heads, but they were too high for her.
"Let me try," said Hartley. He hung them, but they were badly draped, and had to be taken down again. Cordelia pointed out to him for the second time that there was one particular way in which they had to be swung. She herself made a last effort to reach the horizontal spear-bar. In doing so her hair tumbled down over her face. She tossed it back with her free hand, and looked down at him for a moment, questioningly.
"Oh, I know!" she cried, with a sudden illuminating thought. "I know!Youlift me up."
She laughed with childishabandon. He took her fragile, sinuous, pulsing body in his arms—she was very light—and lifted her till she was high above his head. She was laughing, and found it hard to balance her body with his arms so tightly about her knees. Theportièrefell from her hands, and lay in a huddled mass at their feet.
She fought bitterly with herself, in the space of that one short gasp, but something—she scarcely knew what—confounded her better judgment. She looked one second down into his white face and their eyes met. Then her body drooped limply down to him, deeper and deeper, into his arms; and her head, with all its wealth of tumbled gold, fell just over his shoulder, against his face.
The next momentportièreand the world were forgotten, and without knowing it she was offering him her mouth, and he was holding her limp and sobbing body close in his arms and kissing her warm lips again and again.
She struggled feebly against him at first, and tried to say that she must go. But the speech died down into a murmur, and she could only sob weakly:
"I can't help it! I can't help it!" For one last moment she panted to be free, and then the violet eyelids sank wearily over the happy eyes, and she lay even closer, and very still, in his arms.
A sudden knock on the outer door startled them both back to a forgotten world. She caught at her hair, and tried to twist it decently about her head once more. He went to the door and opened it.
It was Thomas, the coachman, come for Miss Cordelia.