My astral messenger then turned her eyesIn sad tranquillity unto that nightWherein the temple of the summit lies,And spake unto my ear:"'Tis more the fightThan all the idle guerdons to be won;It is the worship though the gods be mute;So keep thou still thy face unto the sun,Since art is not the goal, but the pursuit."
My astral messenger then turned her eyesIn sad tranquillity unto that nightWherein the temple of the summit lies,And spake unto my ear:"'Tis more the fightThan all the idle guerdons to be won;It is the worship though the gods be mute;So keep thou still thy face unto the sun,Since art is not the goal, but the pursuit."
John Hartley, "The Goddess Speaks."
Art is the china of sentiment packed in the sawdust of sense.—"The Silver Poppy."
"How would you like to make two hundred and fifty dollars this afternoon?" asked Cordelia calmly, as she stood before Hartley, comfortably muffled in her new chinchilla hat and coat.
"Oh, don't tempt me," he laughed, as he deferentially enthroned her in that great green-backed library chair, which by perhaps its mere voluminous somberness always seemed to touch her strangely into a new youth.
"But what would you do for it?" she asked teasingly, yet with a tacit seriousness of mind, for she felt that his new manner of life was more and more bringing about the necessity for a larger income.
"Do for it? I should be ashamed to say," he laughingly confessed, wondering at the troubled brow and the cold, judicial sobriety of her eyes.
She handed him a typewritten note, waiting in silence until he had finished reading it, and had looked up at her with an inquiring glance.
The letter was a hastily written request from the editorial office of one of New York's most variedly sensational newspapers, urgently asking for a few hundred words from the author of The Silver Poppy on the Influence of War. The newspaper in question had of late essayed to carry on what had become a somewhat heated controversy as to the relation between war and religion, while its eloquent young editor daily expounded his conviction that in the present corrupt condition of mankind war was not only quite reconcilable with true Christianity, but was actually a remedial agent, tending toward progress and civilization. He conceded that it might be an evil, yet was not evil.
"Now let me explain," broke in Cordelia. "This afternoon I suddenly remembered that you had just the thing they wanted—you brought it up and read it to me the other Sunday after we'd had dinner at the Casino."
He winced at the little irony of accident, yet remembering consolingly that even a Horace had framed his bucolic idyls sipping Falernian in citied ease within a stone's throw from the Palatine, he waited in silence for her to continue.
"I mean those lines, of course—I think you called them The Need of War—where you say collision is a law of progress and all life is warfare and that we're perpetually fighting, although we never dream it, and even our bodies themselves are eternal battle-grounds."
"But that thing would never do," he cried in astonishment.
"Oh, yes, it would," she answered easily. "All it needs is a change or two at the beginning, and perhaps a line here and there to make it more specifically local, or rather, American, in application."
"But it's not what newspapers print or care to print."
"It's a beautiful thing," she cried. "They'd jump at it." And then she added, as an after-thought, "If it had been written by any one with a name."
"That's just it," he explained. "The offer hasn't been made to me, you see."
"Yes, I know," she began. "And that's why I hesitated about suggesting the thing."
He seemed to be weighing the matter, and she waited for him to speak.
"Of course it's awfully good of you to extend the offer to me at the last moment, and all that sort of thing. But I know well enough this paper would never think of offeringmeany such sum for the lines."
She looked at him steadily.
"They would if it appeared over my name."
"But I couldn't ask you to do that—and for a mere matter of money," he cried.
"I would gladly, for you."
"But it would scarcely be fair, either to you or to me."
She almost hated him, she felt, when he stood so proudly behind that old-time integrity of character of his. Even as she argued, though, she secretly hoped against hope that he would hold out, that he would defeat her where she stood. Then remembering again more than one scene of inward humiliation over what he seemed to have accepted as her womanly proneness to tangle the devious skeins of ethics and expediency, a touch of the tyrant came to her once more.
"Iwantyou to have this money," she pleaded. "It's only right that you should. You need it—Ihave made you need it."
He turned to her suddenly as he paced up and down the room.
"Isn't there any possible way of obviating the—the deception?" he asked.
The mere utterance of that question told her that the problem had been solved. Perhaps the quiet and businesslike manner in which it had been presented to him had robbed it of its more abstract significance, had enabled it to be smuggled into him in the sheep's clothing of a commercial commonplace. Perhaps he was more embarrassed—in a financial way—than she had dreamed, and now that he had sunned himself on the warm sands of respectability, dreaded another plunge into the chilly depths of a second poverty.
"I don't see any way out of it," she answered. "I suppose, unless you have an inkling of newspaper ways, such things have a tendency to shock you?"
"I know alittleof their ways that are dark," he interpolated, thinking at the moment of the United News Bureau.
"But this is only one of the thousand and one tricks of a very tricky trade. And it really amounts to about the same thing as the signed article young reporters write for an illiterate prize-fighter or a rather stupid prima donna. At any rate, is it any worse?"
"But would there be any means of finally correcting the—the error of authorship?" he asked.
"Is it the loss of the poem?" she began.
"In one way it is, perhaps, and in another way it isn't."
But was this ethical Cæsarean section, he wondered, the only means of bringing his belated offspring to light?
"I can understand that; it's a beautiful thing."
"But if I have written one I still have the power to write another." It was the master losing himself in the message, the parent dying for the child.
"Of course, but you mustn't—pleasedon't think for one moment that I want to lay claim to it, now or at any time. I'm not a poetess, as you know, and never could be one."
He fell to pacing the room once more.
"I was only thinking," she went on with slightly compressed lips, "of you when I came to suggest the thing."
"I know, and it was very generous of you," he answered, as he began rummaging through his manuscripts for the lines.
"You've written this thing, and, as you say, it lies in your power to write something as good, or better. You've confessed you see no way of getting rid of it, so, after all," she said wearily, "it's only a matter of two hundred and fifty dollars."
Hartley looked up at her coldly.
"No, it's a great deal more than that," he said gravely, turning away from her again. "Much more. But to be candid, just at the present moment I am painfully in need of—of money. And I don't feel like arguing the ethics of it all out to-day as I ought to do." Then he sighed heavily, and added, "But I wish I were free."
So the offer was accepted and Cordelia carried away with her the manuscript of The Need of War, troubled and weighed down with an indeterminate sense of humiliation, yet feeling that out of the ashes of that humiliation might ultimately rise the towers of a new strength.
As for the poem itself, she thought little about it; she was no lover of blank verse. Her one consolation seemed to be a feelings—tragically feminine—that she had drawn down to her a figure that before had always seemed to shadow and chill her with its shadowy immaculacy.
Yet life's long silence, after song,Can do thy lyric heart no wrong.Once broken music fell from thee,While now—now thou art harmony.Those notes that soared from thee of old,Wrapt in dusk wings they ne'er unfold,Brood vocal in thy clouded eyes;And in thy bosom's fall and rise—O poor, sad, sea-like surging breast—Is song itself made manifest!
Yet life's long silence, after song,Can do thy lyric heart no wrong.Once broken music fell from thee,While now—now thou art harmony.Those notes that soared from thee of old,Wrapt in dusk wings they ne'er unfold,Brood vocal in thy clouded eyes;And in thy bosom's fall and rise—O poor, sad, sea-like surging breast—Is song itself made manifest!
John Hartley, "The Lost Voice."
A song in the heart is worth two in the book.—"The Silver Poppy."
An astonished city awoke one morning to find that Cordelia Vaughan was a poetess. For some time it had been rumored persistently about that the beautiful young authoress from Kentucky was soon to place a new and wonderful novel of modern life and manners before the reading world. At a time, too, when the talk of her play was on every tongue, the public press was seldom without an anticipatory note or two about Cordelia's next effort. But when, instead of either novel or study, the Sunday issue of a commendably enterprising New York newspaper came out with her now well-known The Need of War, those admiring followers—and they were, indeed, no small army—whom she had won over by the strength and charm of her first book, turned to one another bewildered and asked what new token of versatility and genius this wonderful girl writer from the South would next fling before them.
The Need of War, with a striking portrait of its author in a black velvet and Irish point gown, a loose Russian coat of pale gray Venetian cloth, surmounted by an immense plumed hat of beaver, occupied, with a luridly symbolic figure of "War" in the background, an entire page of the newspaper in which it first appeared.
While The Need of War was, perhaps, slightly above the heads of the audience to which that particular journal appealed, the more discerning critics and paragraphers soon saw that the poem was in reality an emotional and vitalized appreciation of the divinity of struggle, and, seeming to strike, as it did, the key-note of our American strenuous life, the lines crept from city to city, appeared by special arrangement in one of the popular magazines, and eventually percolated throughout the country. The power and vigor of the flowing blank verse could not be denied—in fact, there were those who regarded it as remarkable that such metrical skill could be shown by a hand unknown to years of patient and laborious exercise. The beauty of the poem, however, continued to evoke comment from the press, and even those more academic periodicals which had not deigned to take notice of her earlier work in the field of prose now opened their pages to an occasional discussion of Cordelia Vaughan's new treatment of an old problem.
It all resulted in a very unlooked-for shower of newspaper articles from Cordelia's clipping agency. These told in many incongruously different ways just how the poem came to be written, just what its author had planned it should mean, and just how remarkable it was that the thundering forth of such a sermon should fall to the lot of a young and fragile American girl.
Cordelia, remembering the source of all this unlooked-for publicity, sat in melancholy apprehension amid these notices, frightened a little at the stir she had made, and made so unwittingly, in the world of letters. Hartley, too, she soon found, fully shared in her own depression of spirits over the episode. So she decided it was best not even to speak of it, when it could be avoided, before him. While alone with her own thoughts she vainly attempted to school herself to regard it all in the words of one of her critics, "as only the musicalentr' actein the drama of a busy literary life."
When Repellier looked searchingly at Cordelia, and asked her, while speaking of The Need of War, how she had ever come by a touch so decisive and so powerful, she smiled quietly and said:
"Did you ever hear of Ægles?"
Repellier had not.
"Well, according to that old Greek myth, Mr. Repellier, Ægles was a wrestler. He was born dumb, they say, and hadn't ever uttered a word in all his life. But one day in the arena he saw an athlete resort to some piece of dishonest trickery—I can't remember just what it was. Then, in his passion to denounce that trickery, he broke the strings of his tongue, and suddenly spoke."
Some love your songs, but I who knowThe happier touch of lips whence flowThese notes that all men turn to praiseLoved you, the singer, all my days;And longing, listening, loving, IHave waited till the song should die—Till you, the singer, came to blessMy lips with your own lips' caress.
Some love your songs, but I who knowThe happier touch of lips whence flowThese notes that all men turn to praiseLoved you, the singer, all my days;And longing, listening, loving, IHave waited till the song should die—Till you, the singer, came to blessMy lips with your own lips' caress.
John Hartley, "The Silent Hour."
Amid all his chaff were phrases that got down the neck of one's memory and tickled like barley-beards.—"The Silver Poppy."
Amid all his chaff were phrases that got down the neck of one's memory and tickled like barley-beards.—"The Silver Poppy."
"Oh, my poet, my poet, what have they been doing to you?"
It was Miss Short who spoke, looking up at Hartley with surprised and honestly reproving eyes. They had met by accident on upper Broadway, as he was on his way to the tea-room of a Fifth Avenue hotel. Both her tone and manner nettled him.
"Am I so changed?" And he laughed uneasily.
"Why, yes, my poor lost hero, and you're getting fat—no, not exactly fat, but prosperous looking. But a fat poet—it is awful! It sounds worse than a Hercules with French heels. It's as incongruous as an angel eating corn-mush. And who wants a fat poet? His corpulency would always be hinting to you that he was too trimly built, too well ballasted, to be in danger. He's too contented to be interesting. Who's going to thrill with anxiety over a mud-scow swinging in three feet of oily water?"
"Thank you," said Hartley coldly.
"But seriously, you haven't given up the—the open sea?" Miss Short asked him in a softer voice. This grandiloquence of metaphor wearied him.
"Yes, I think I have. It's all very fine out there, but it doesn't pay for the wear and tear on the hawsers. And then there's one's bread and butter; and in New York they can give you so many nice jams to go with it."
"I knew it, I knew it! I never saw a boy come to this city yet who didn't have the rose-tint taken out of his dreams about the same time the rose-tint was taken out of his cheeks. Isaidyour accent wouldn't be as broad when you'd finished with us—nor your views, either."
"No man can live by verse alone."
"It's not that; it's what the verse and all that stands for. You know what The Silver Poppy says, 'A song in the heart is worth two in the book.'"
She looked up at him with almost a kindly light on her rough, mannish face as she said good-by.
"My poet, don't, don't let them break you on the golden wheel of their happiness!"
Hartley did not enjoy his cup of Golden Tip that afternoon with Cordelia and two voluminously over-dressed young ladies whom she spoke of as "the Slater girls." Their chatter irritated him, and for once there seemed something sickly, unnatural, exotic, about the overheated air of an overfurnished hotel which existed, as he remembered a compatriot of his had exclaimed, "to provide exclusiveness for the masses."
He knew that it, and all it held, stood for those very conditions of life against which he had once rebelled so vigorously. With its glitter and gliding, did it, he asked himself bitterly—after all, did it represent the fulness of life?
"Why are you so quiet to-day?" Cordelia asked him, reprovingly, under her breath. He had noticed of late a certain outward hardening about her at times—she seemed to him like a judge steeling herself for some impending sentence that must be passed.
"It's the ghost of a dead radical rising up against gold-leaf and cut glass," he laughed.
"Oh, yes, you used to be an anarchist, or something like that, didn't you?" she said wearily.
"Notquitethat."
"I wanted you to be nice to these two girls. I thought I told you they were my publisher's daughters?"
She noticed his half-sinister smile.
"Some day," she said almost angrily, "you'll learn that nothing succeeds like success, my moody young Hamlet." And for the rest of the afternoon she avoided him.
He was not sorry when a chance came for his escape. The very stale, dull flatness of the trite and contemptible spiritual drama in which he was playing an involuntary leading part depressed and sickened him of it all. It brought with it not even the consolation of largeness—it was all flaccid, neutral, outwardly insignificant. But he felt that unseen hands were building a wall between him and his freedom, even while, at the core of things, some miserably minute germ seemed tainting his life. And if he could not still have health and liberty, he would at least have elbow-room. The startled question of Miss Short still rang in his ears: "My poet, my poet, what have they been doing to you?"
What, indeed, had they done to him?
Once out in the fresh air and alone, he felt more satisfied. Facing the rough wind, guiding his own course through the crowds—this gave him a flattering sense of momentary independence, a passing taste of some liberty long proscribed. He turned up Fifth Avenue and made his way toward the Scholar's Gate, determined to walk off the last little demon of moroseness that hung at his heels.
It was a clear, sunny afternoon, yet with a touch of chilliness in the air, a premonition of winter in the wind. It made people step more briskly, and Hartley noticed that many of the women in the street, and also those in the passing carriages that drifted up and down the Avenue in alternate tides, were already warmly wrapped in furs. The wind was westerly and biting, and its sudden blasts at the different cross-town street corners sent the dust eddying up and down the crowded sidewalks. Beyond the comparative quietness and gloom of the regular brown-stone cañons of the upper Forties, so uniform in aspect it seemed some mysterious fluvial erosion might have gorged them out of the one gigantic rock-bed, Hartley could see the familiar dim blue line of the Palisades, with the late afternoon sun dropping down crimson and big behind them, touching softly and into a golden mist the flying dust that hung over the city. And it could be a beautiful city, he thought, at times, as he gazed before him at the long line of airier, lighter, crowded architecture that overlooked the waning greenness of Central Park.
He threw himself with delight against the buffets of the wind and the sting of the cold. It seemed almost like an escape to that simpler and more strenuous life for which he had looked in his earlier years—those lost years of youth and liberalism. It brought back to his mind his many tramps over the Oxfordshire hills, memories of journeys to Bagley Wood, to Cumnor village and Abingdon, to Iffley, and above all to Woodstock village, and the warmth and lights of the great hall after the hours of mist and coldness. A momentary pang of homesickness and longing for his beloved Oxford shot through him. The old gray city of bells and ivy seemed calling him through the alien twilight. Some day, he thought, should the worst come to the worst, he could creep back to the quietness of that old college town on the Isis, where it seemed always evening, and everything seemed always in the evening of life.
But could he ever go back? he suddenly asked himself. Could he creep back to the gray corridors and the quiet shadows and the little gardens? Could he, indeed, after knowing that taste of the wider and more challenging life, after touching to his lips the intoxicating cup of the outer world?
He walked home through the gathering dusk still unhappy, but more quiet of mind and more resolute of spirit.
"When in doubt—work." That was what Repellier had said to him, and that was what he did. For all the next day the quietness and loneliness of his rooms weighed heavily upon him, but burying himself in his last revision of Cordelia's book, he remained at his desk, stoical and determined. Each night, though, oddly enough, before he turned out his lights and went to bed, he wrote to Cordelia. Just why he did this he scarcely knew. His letters were not love-letters in the strict sense of the word, though through them ran a strain of tenderness, alternating with a note of loneliness, that made them seem very beautiful letters to the author of The Silver Poppy, and, perhaps, accounted for more than one sleepless night on her part. She replied to them, sometimes almost against her will, in a note as tender, yet quite as restrained. She complained that she, too, was often lonely there in the Spauldings' big house, and felt that she would not be sorry when they came back once more. She was glad he had returned to his work. And she wanted him to feel that she had never in any way stood between him and his great dreams, and never willingly or knowingly would do so.
On the evening of the following Sunday Hartley was interrupted in his task of tying together the pages of his completed manuscript by the appearance of Repellier.
He seemed the same old Repellier to Hartley, with the same merry smile and the quiet eyes that had always silently reminded the younger man that he was still young and that youth can never know tranquillity. But about the older man on this occasion, for all his quietness of demeanor, there clung an air of unusual sternness.
"Are you busy?" he asked, as he beheld the paper-littered desk. "I only dropped up to borrow a book of yours that you've often spoken of—The Silver Poppy. I've been overworking, they tell me, and for the rest of the week I'm going to loaf."
He confessed, as Hartley gladly enough produced the volume, that he had never as yet read it—his days had all been so taken up that he got little time for the newer fiction. But only that morning he had picked up an old newspaper notice of the dramatized story and had been unusually interested by it.
"It's rather clever?" Repellier asked, taking the book and skimming through it where he stood. Something in his question seemed almost laughable to the younger man.
"It will open your eyes," was all he said, however.
"I hope it will," said Repellier, slowly closing the volume and slipping it meditatively into his pocket. Then he looked at the still smiling man and asked:
"Are you writing any short stories now?"
"Not now; but I want to."
"Any verse?"
"No—nothing worth while."
"Novels?"
"Not quite."
"Would you like a good plot for one?"
"That all depends," answered Hartley, motioning his visitor to an armchair.
"Well, let me tell it to you, anyway. Then you can think it over by yourself and see if there's anything in it. May I?"
"Indeed, yes."
"This story that I've picked up begins rather oddly, but it runs this way: On an island—I think it's called Muciana, at the mouth of the Amazon, a surveying party found a mysterious skeleton, or rather portions of a mysterious skeleton, half buried in a sand-bar. This skeleton puzzled biologists very much; it seemed to indicate there was some possibility that the once mythical creature known as the man-eating vampire really existed—that somewhere about the head waters of the Amazon actually lived or had lived pterodactyli of enormous size, much larger than the common enough blood-sucking bats of the lower river—which to-day, as you know, rather relish a sip or two of any warm-blooded animal. Many of these bones were strangely human in appearance, but attached to what remained of the skeleton were a pair of powerful and perfectly formed pterodactyl wings. All efforts to piece together this strange creature were a failure, and in the end it was given up as impossible. But am I boring you?"
"No; it's interesting."
"Well, now we have to go back to the beginning of our story, and perhaps to the most interesting part of it. We find a professor of zoology—a German—somewhere up about the head waters of that mysterious river. Devotion to his beloved science has brought him to that dark corner of the globe. We find him drifting happily about the twilight forests in search of the man-eating vampire about which he must have heard strange rumors from the natives of the lower Amazon. We find him alone in a small boat, making his desolate way along some unknown tributary of the upper river. I needn't stop to describe his loneliness or the hardships and suffering and days of doubt through which he passed. But finally in some dark and undiscovered land of solitude he and his vampire came face to face. They closed in on one another, and he in the end captured it, though only after a bitter struggle. Yet, gently as he had treated his foe in that struggle, he could not help injuring it a little—in fact, ithadto be subdued. His one object then was to get down to the seacoast and back to the world with his prize, of course, while it was still alive. And his one fear was that it would die on his hands. He took it in his little boat with him and treated its wounds and fed it, and together the strange couple made their way down the river. But the journey was a long one. Before it was half over his provisions began to give out. He had not counted on the vampire, you see. But still he kept on, hoping against hope that he would reach help in time. His one dread still was that his prize would die. So day by day he ate a little less and gave a little more to his prize. But day by day his strength was failing him, and day by day, I suppose, he grew more afraid of the vampire. Then the time came when he had to decide whether he or the other should have the last scrap of his food. Finally he flung it to the Vampire. Then, in some way, he knew that he was no longer master; from that hour he was the captive. There was a brief, and I suppose, a bitter struggle. The man could no longer control that winged Hunger. It broke the cords that held it down, the two bat-like wings opened wide, and when they came together they enclosed the still struggling man. In that last battle for life the little boat was overturned. The two went down under the yellow water, and their descent, we'll say, was marked by nothing more than a line of bubbles. But even in death the wings of that man-eating creature did not draw back from the bones of its victim. Locked together, the two of them were washed down to the sea. The current carried them up on a sand-bar, and there they rested. There they found them, years afterward, I suppose it was, and when men tried to piece together what was left of the strange bones they failed. It was, as you know, not altogether either man or vampire."
There was a moment of unbroken silence.
"That's all," said the older man, getting up.
It was Hartley who spoke next.
"What the devil are you driving at, anyway?"
Then plant, by the right of the mind,By the power of the tome and scroll,Plant your heel on their neck, and grind,Or their millions will grind your soul.
Then plant, by the right of the mind,By the power of the tome and scroll,Plant your heel on their neck, and grind,Or their millions will grind your soul.
John Hartley, "The Siren City."
Oh, these towering aspirations—without a fire-escape of humor to all their sky-scrapers of endeavor!—"The Silver Poppy."
Oh, these towering aspirations—without a fire-escape of humor to all their sky-scrapers of endeavor!—"The Silver Poppy."
Cordelia, during a troubled night, dreamed that she had been captured by Indians and bound on two huge wild horses. These horses, she saw to her horror, refused to gallop off in line, and were slowly pulling her tortured body to pieces. But failing in this, she thought her Indians had retaken her and burned her at the stake, and that there was but one oil in all the wide world that could soothe the stinging agony that consumed her. She was seeking, naked, frenzied, alone, for this unfound ointment, when she suddenly wakened and found the autumn sun shining wholesomely on the clean high chimneys and housetops of the city.
Cordelia looked on that dream as an omen, and thinking it over, she was startled by it out of a mood of indecision and inactivity which for days had been hanging over her. Some vague sense of impending evil benumbed her. Sitting amid the torn and scattered feathers of a thousand disconsolate Cupids, she had asked herself again and again if the game was worth the candle, if the crown was worth the sweat and tears.
Acting under some sudden impulse, she made a personal call on Henry Slater, the senior member of the publishing house of Slater & Slater, of 148 Fifth Avenue. It was this firm which had handled so successfully, and, it might be added, so profitably to both themselves and the author, her earlier volume, The Silver Poppy. It was not unnatural, therefore, that from time to time the senior member of this business house should duly and most solicitously inquire of Miss Vaughan just when he should have the privilege and pleasure of considering another volume from her pen. Of late these inquiries had grown no less frequent, though, perhaps less hopeful. In the inspirational lull, when the town was still agog over the dramatization of the novel, he had made the most of his chance by reissuing the book in anédition de luxe, handsomely illustrated and signed by the author—a hastily ordered voluntary to appease the wrath of a long waiting and impatient audience.
When Cordelia, accordingly, was ushered into the private office of Mr. Henry Slater, that gentleman received her with every sign of cordiality. She could not help recalling her first visit to the same office, an awkward and overawed girl from the country, who had been kept waiting a long half-hour before the very gentleman who now cordially placed a chair for her so much as asked her what her business might be. And she felt once more that after all there was nothing that succeeds like success.
She stated the purpose of her visit, and gave him as favorable and as graphic an outline of the new book as she was able. Her quick memory served her well, and there were few points of importance which she omitted from the movement of the story.
"This appeals to me strongly, very strongly indeed, Miss Vaughan. In fact, I see no reason in the world, none whatever, why such a book should not be the success of the season. I say season because, of course, you know our best books live only a season nowadays. But how soon did you say I might see the manuscript?"
"It might be a few days, it might be even a few weeks."
"H-m-m! That is unfortunate. You see, we have already closed our list for this year, and, as you must know, the season is already well advanced."
She looked studiously into his cold green eyes; she gazed at the high, shiny, narrowing forehead, and the long line of the thin, meditating lips that so seldom relaxed, and the sharp, narrow nose with its touch of quiet cruelty. But she knew him now better than she had once known him. She rose to go, languidly.
He looked at her disconcerted, even alarmed.
"But please be seated. Rather than hold a book over until the spring, we could, of course, reopen our list and hold back other matter. What would be the earliest date—the assured date—that we could go over the manuscript?"
Cordelia could not say, but she boldly assumed it would be within a week's time.
"Hm-m-m-m! Then, I presume, Miss Vaughan, there is no reason that we should not handle the new story on practically the same basis as your earlier book; provided, of course, that it is satisfactory to our readers in every respect?"
Cordelia smiled quietly.
"I'm afraid not," she said.
"They were exceptionally generous terms."
"But this time I have an exceptional book," she retorted quite impassively. In the smoke of battle Ney had forgotten there was a Napoleon. For the moment she felt that the book was one of her own making.
"That may be quite true, but—" Mr. Henry Slater checked himself, and then asked more suavely: "What new terms would you suggest, Miss Vaughan?"
"My terms would be one thousand dollars down, with a royalty of twelve per cent on all copies up to the tenth thousand, and a royalty on all copies over the tenth thousand of twenty per cent."
An amused, sympathetic, and incredulous smile crept over Mr. Henry Slater's face.
"Miss Vaughan, our house, during all its career, has never published a book on any such conditions. And I'm afraid it never will. For months now the book market has been greatly embarrassed, greatly disturbed; competition has been most keen, and we——"
"Then I shall not impose on your time any longer." She drew her furs about her with a touch of finality. "Good morning, Mr. Slater."
"Couldn't you leave the matter open for our consideration?" he asked, going with her to the door.
"It could only be on the terms I mentioned—and already I have been keeping a number of publishers waiting."
"Well, let me have a day or two to think the matter out. If my colleagues can possibly be won over, and if anything can be done, you will hear from me to-morrow, or the next day at the latest. Will that be satisfactory?"
Cordelia thought it would, and as she stepped triumphantly out to the waiting carriage she felt that she had won her terms. And she gloried in her conquest—she found it almost a joy, this parrying with the forces that opposed her. As she sat back in the cushions of the Spauldings' bright little yellow-bodied Victoria and threaded her way through the crowded traffic of the lower avenue she could not help once more thinking of her first visit to a publisher—how overawed she had been by his lofty manner, how she had been bathed in a fine perspiration at the thought of her all too noticeable rusticity, how she had burned with silent rage at the stare of open admiration with which he had swept her from top to toe. But now, she knew, the tables were turned. Power! Power—what wine was ever half so intoxicating! That was the thought which rang through her mind as she circled homeward by way of avenue and park, bowing here and there in response to many admiring smiles and not a few obsequiously doffed hats.
She sent a note to Hartley, after much thought on the matter, asking if he could let her have the manuscript at once. The book was brought back to her by the same messenger-boy who carried her note.
On the following morning she received a contract from Slater & Slater, duly made out and awaiting her signature. It called for a royalty of twelve per cent on all copies sold, and made no mention of a cash deposit.
This contract was at once sent back by Cordelia, unsigned.
The following morning the contract came back to her. It was, however, again returned unsigned by her, this time because of the stipulation that the one thousand dollars to be paid on publication was eventually to be deducted from the royalties on ten thousand copies sold.
Once more the contract was sent to her, but again she refused her signature.
Then Mr. Henry Slater came to her in person, and in a very sorrowful mien implored, almost tearfully, to know just what was still wrong. Cordelia calmly insisted on the deletion of the newly inserted paragraph surrendering the dramatic rights of the book. These, she stated, she intended to retain absolutely. When this paragraph had been reluctantly eliminated the contract was at last duly signed and witnessed. It was not until Henry Slater had carefully folded his copy of the document and placed it in his breast-pocket that Cordelia realized just how much he had wanted her book. But still she felt the hardest part of her battle lay before her—she had come out of her first reconnaissance successfully enough, but she wondered if she had made a mistake in leaving her one avenue of retreat uncovered.
"There is one thing more I have not mentioned"—she hesitated.
Her publisher looked at her more openly; they were now on the common basis of the commercial.
"I prefer that this book be published under a name other than my own."
Henry Slater looked at her again, this time with widening eyes. He was more or less used to the eccentricity of genius.
"This was not mentioned in our contract."
"No; but I must insist upon it!"
"But for what reasons?" he cried, bewildered.
"They are purely personal reasons—I might find it hard to make you understand them." Then she added weakly: "But it often helps a book, doesn't it, to come out under—under anom de plume?"
"Not in your case, Miss Vaughan!"
She caught at a last straw.
"But I have reason to believe—to believe that there may be a concerted attempt on the part of critics to attack me!"
He had already been looking over the manuscript, and still held it in his hand.
"I don't think they will be able to hurt us much," he said confidently.
"Then it must come outwithouta name!" she cried with sudden passion. He wished to avoid a scene; he failed to see just what her object was.
"Let me think over this, Miss Vaughan. I'll send you my decision by letter to-morrow."
She followed him weakly to the door.
"There are plenty of books," she half pleaded, "that have sold better for being brought out anonymously."
"I'll think over it, Miss Vaughan, and let you know definitely to-morrow."
Before his letter was written the printers were already at work on The Unwise Virgins. The note from him which eventually reached Cordelia was brief, but to the point. It said:
"My Dear Miss Vaughan: In reply to your inquiry of yesterday, I would state that we are reluctantly forced to abide strictly by the letter of our contract with you. It seems almost superfluous for us to point out that your name is now of such weight in the literary world that under no circumstances should we agree to any such terms as those you have been granted unless it had been most definitely understood the name of America's most illustrious author should go upon our season's lists. We are rushing work on the book; in fact, we hope to have it out by the end of the month."Very truly yours,"Henry H. Slater."
"My Dear Miss Vaughan: In reply to your inquiry of yesterday, I would state that we are reluctantly forced to abide strictly by the letter of our contract with you. It seems almost superfluous for us to point out that your name is now of such weight in the literary world that under no circumstances should we agree to any such terms as those you have been granted unless it had been most definitely understood the name of America's most illustrious author should go upon our season's lists. We are rushing work on the book; in fact, we hope to have it out by the end of the month.
"Very truly yours,
"Henry H. Slater."
Cordelia, as she read and reread this letter, dimly felt that they were crushing her to the wall. She cried out, in her bewilderment, that they were giving her no chance.
While she was still pondering over this confounding new turn of affairs she received a message from Repellier, asking if she would not drop up to his studio the following afternoon. She remembered that she and Hartley had planned to spend the afternoon in the Park. But some indefinite dread of yet meeting him face to face, a longing for some temporary escape from an ordeal which she had not the courage to go through, made her decide in favor of Repellier. But just why that stern-faced artist should want to see her she could not understand. Indeed, in her present mood she did not much care.
... We seeThe sorrowing gods regretfullyBar out the bird, but after allHow lightly song still leaps the wall!
... We seeThe sorrowing gods regretfullyBar out the bird, but after allHow lightly song still leaps the wall!
John Hartley, "The Lost Voice."
"But, after all, even without love, life is life," ventured Evelyn.The older woman sighed as she answered: "Yes, it is life, my child, but it is the axle of existence without grease."From an unpublished manuscript ofCordelia Vaughan.
"But, after all, even without love, life is life," ventured Evelyn.
The older woman sighed as she answered: "Yes, it is life, my child, but it is the axle of existence without grease."
From an unpublished manuscript ofCordelia Vaughan.
Cordelia failed to understand why she should feel so nervous. She half wished, as she climbed the long stairs leading up to Repellier's studio, that she had kept her promise with Hartley, and spent the afternoon in the open air, in the Park, with him. She idly wondered how many more rides they should have together—as she pulled the dangling rabbit's-foot which Repellier affected for a bell-rope—suddenly whimsically curious to know if Hartley was missing her that afternoon.
The old artist himself answered the ring, greeting her with a face that looked peculiarly aged and worn, she thought. As she stepped into the studio, notwithstanding her desire for perfect self-control, she could not help looking up at him with anxious and inquiring eyes—his solemnity frightened her.
"Why, I'm the only one," she said, inadequately, glancing round the large, airy-looking room, with its profusion of casts and sketches and scraps of costume and old armor about the walls.
"I thought from your note, you know, that there would be—be others," she went on, buttoning and unbuttoning the white glove on her slender wrist.
He asked her to be seated. "And won't you let me take your wraps?" he said, still quite impassively.
"Thank you, no," she answered coldly. "I can stay for just a minute or two."
"But this is important," he protested, still waiting dominantly, "and I fear I may detain you."
She surrendered them reluctantly, and seated herself in the chair stiffly, uncomfortably. She wondered why her heart should be beating at such a rate. But she looked out at him with coldly inquiring eyes, and with just a touch of indignation in the down-drawn corners of her thin lips.
"The truth is, Miss Vaughan," he began slowly, "I want you to help me out of a very great difficulty."
"Concerning what?" she asked nervously.
She was sitting in the full light of one of the broad-silled windows of the studio, and the afternoon sun worried her eyes. She tried to shade them with her daintily gloved hand.
"How long have you been writing, Miss Vaughan?"
"Almost two years; twowholeyears, I mean. It's that long since I really wrote my first book. Why?" Her eyebrows lifted superciliously.
"Would you mind telling me the name of that first book?"
"Of course not. It was The Silver Poppy."
The sun still worried her eyes, and she moved her chair uneasily.
"That was your only book?"
"Yes, so far."
He reached over to the table beside him.
"Did you write that book alone—I mean without help or guidance?"
"Quite alone!" she said distinctly.
He picked up a book from the table. It was Hartley's copy of The Silver Poppy. A mounting wave of crimson swept over Cordelia's face, leaving it, in turn, almost a dead white.
"One writes nothing quite alone," she added, smiling hastily. "Ididhave a little help, perhaps, but it was very little!"
"That's better. Could you tell me just how much?"
"Every author, I think, absorbs things that—But am I a prisoner before the bar?" she suddenly flashed back at him angrily. Then she saw his quiet smile, and an answering smile came to her own pale lips. "Or is it a—a joke?" she added.
"No," he said, "I'm afraid it's almost a tragedy."
"I don't understand," she said feebly.
"Perhaps I can help you to," he answered. "I have, for the first time, just finished reading The Silver Poppy. Miss Vaughan, The Silver Poppy was not written by you!"
She gave a little smothered cry of indignation, and started to her feet. Repellier's stern eyes were looking closely, challengingly, into hers, and she sank back in her chair again. Then she laughed a pitiable little laugh, and a touch of color came into her pale lips.
"Mr. Repellier, I must beg of you not to play these practical jokes on me. They are stupid, and besides, my nerves are not of the strongest. The next thing, and you'll be declaring I have some rhetoricalalter egomanufacturing my manuscripts for me!" Cordelia laughed again.
Repellier's eyes were not pleasant to look into as he gazed down at the woman in the chair. She once more moved farther back out of the glare of the lowering sun that still streamed irritatingly in through the window. She opened her lips as though to speak, but remained silent. She was thinking both hard and fast.
"This is far from a joke, Miss Vaughan. I repeat that you did not write The Silver Poppy."
"Then—then why does it bear my name?" It seemed a fair enough question.
"Because you stole it!" he thundered at her.
"Mr. Repellier!" She drew herself up, flaming, flashing at him unspeakable indignation.
"You—you are a coward!" she cried, as a gush of tears came to her eyes.
"Then I am mistaken?" he asked, icily, but more quietly.
"It is all too ridiculous," she said brokenly, over her handkerchief. "You are more than mistaken. But I should like to know whether you mean this for a joke, or an insult!"
"And on your word of honor as a woman, The Silver Poppy is your rightful property?"
"It is my rightful property."
"And you wrote it out of your own head, with your own hand?"
"I wrote every word of it," was the low response.
"Would you mind telling me, please, just where and at what time you did so?" he asked.
Cordelia rose to her feet impatiently.
"I did not come here, Mr. Repellier, to go into a criminal's witness-box," she said tremulously, "and I cannot stay to answer questions that are neither courteous nor rational. I'm afraid that I really must be going."
She swept to the door.
"One moment, I beg of you, Miss Vaughan," cried Repellier after her. She turned and faced him.
"You are misunderstanding me entirely. I haven't the slightest wish to hurt or offend you in any way. I only want to clear up this mystery, so that my knowledge of the facts may be a protection to you yourself, should the occasion arise."
"A protection tome?"
"Yes, to you," he repeated. He motioned her toward the chair again. She hesitated.
"Couldn't you write this to me? Couldn't you put it down on paper, and then I could answer it in the same way. I hate mysteries, and I'm tired this afternoon."
She looked at him almost appealingly.
"It will have to be talked over by us, face to face," he replied. And there was nothing for her to do but to go back to her chair once more.
"Will you let me explain away the mystery as clearly and frankly as I can?" he asked her.
"Certainly!"
Repellier, seating himself opposite her and still looking closely into her face, could see the pupils of the now pale-green eyes contract oddly.
"Three years ago one of the brightest and most scholarly editorial writers on all Park Row was practically thrown into the street by the paper for which he wrote, simply because they regarded him as a man who had gone stale, who had written himself out. To his paper he was a sucked lemon—a squeezed sponge. He was careless, good-natured, and easy-going; and when he came to me for my advice I asked him: Why not make a plunge, and write a book? He was not strong, however; in fact, I had always suspected that he was consumptive, and before his book was half written I saw clearly enough that he could not last long—at least not here in the East. So I, among others, persuaded him to go South—indeed, his doctor and his friends had todrivehim away. So off the lonely, broken fellow went to a little town in Kentucky to finish his beloved book. Ah, I see you follow me! I myself was on the point of sailing for Europe—I had to go—and was abroad for over a year. But during that last night we were together in New York he read to me what he had already written of his Great Work. I remember it more or less well—certain things about it stand out distinctly. Long before I came back to New York he was dead, poor fellow. I always thought that his book had died with him. For the first time yesterday I read The Silver Poppy."
He paused, and looked at her searchingly.
"Miss Vaughan, this dead man's book and The Silver Poppy are one and the same creation!"
Her eyes were luminous, and were riveted on his face. All color had faded out of her cheek, and in the dim light her skin looked greenish-yellow and dead. She did not speak for several minutes.
So it was all to end like this! That was the thought which pirouetted insanely up and down the foreground of her consciousness.
"You—you don't mean," she cried huskily, "you can't mean that you believe I—I stole this book?"
"You have refused to let me believe anything else," he answered, without a trace of feeling in his voice.
"But you would not—you dare not make any such—any such absurd belief public!" she cried, leaning closer toward him. The room grew unendurably hot and close, and the walls seemed reeling and swaying about her.
"You would not!" she cried again, in a higher key, putting her hand up to her head.
Their eyes met. She saw but one thing, and that thing was that there dwelt no touch of kindness or commiseration on his face.
"I have my duty to the dead to perform!"
"But they're lies, all lies!" she cried shrilly.
"That, you will have every chance to show when the time comes!"
"They are lies!" she echoed, dazed.
For just a moment he hesitated, perplexed, perhaps almost doubting. He stood before her with a face almost as white as her own.
"Will you swear before God, your Maker, that this is the truth, and nothing but the truth?"
She stood before him, with her eyes still fixed on his.
"I swear before God, my Maker, that this is the—No! No! I willnot!" she cried hysterically. "I will not! It is all some trick, some cowardly trap! Who are you—whoareyou, to degrade me in this way? Who are you, that I must answer to you as to a judge? You are detaining me here; you are holding me a prisoner against my will!"
He held up his hand restrainingly.
"Yes, who are you?" she went on wildly, catching ludicrously at ineffectual trifles, as the drowning do. "Who, indeed,areyou? You, with your pharasaical long face and your own underhand schemes? You, closeted alone with married women—with a woman who has made a fool of herself for you, who can't even hide her infatuation! Who are you, who have come into a home and stolen an honorable wife's love away from her husband—who are you to sit up and prate of honor and honesty?"
Again he threw up his hand, as though to ward back her termagancy, but she was not to be stopped.
"Yes, who are you to sit in judgment on me, a woman, alone in the world, a woman who has asked nothing of you! If you are so immaculate," she mocked, "if you are so above suspicion, denounce me as the thief you have said I am! Denounce me; but do not forget that you yourself will soon stand before the world in your true colors!"
He tried to silence her, but her passionate torrent was not to be stayed.
"No, of course not," she went on in her fury. "Of course it hurts when it's the other way! But when you strike atmyname you plume yourself on being a hero, and prate about your debt to the dead!"
She stopped, at last, panting, out of breath. Her thin hands were shaking with the paroxysm of her fury, and her lips were bloodless. "Oh, if I were a man!" she cried at him. Then she sank into her chair, still breathing heavily, scarcely knowing where her fierce torrent of vituperation had left her.
"But you wouldn't do this wrong, you wouldn't?" she almost pleaded, holding her hand over her heart. "You don't know how hard I've struggled for my place in the world; you don't know what I've gone through; what I have suffered and known! Do you—do you think I would give that all up now, lightly, and without a word—and for an empty mistake? Do you think," she cried with a rising and more defiant voice as her strength came back to her again, "do you think that I would let any one come and rob me of this, without fighting them to the end? Do you think that because I'm a woman I can't fight? that you can throw me down in the dirt and walk over me, without a word? Do you?You fool!"
Through that turbulent darkness a far-away glimmer of light came to her, and she clutched at it eagerly.
"Now I will tell you the truth," she cried. "I will give you the truth about your dead man and his book. It was I who worked and slaved for that dead man. Without me his book would never have been written. While you, who call yourself his friend, who rant about being his defender, were loitering about the continent, I was at his bedside, tending him and watching him, wearing myself out for him, and keeping the life in him hour by hour. And it was to me, on his last day, that he gave the book, with his own hands made me take it, what there was of it. It was as much mine as his, he declared, and he gave it to me with his own hand. Do you hear?—with his own hand! And it was I who worked over it, and rewrote it word for word, and took it and made it my own!"
Repellier looked at her in silence for many minutes.
"But why did you take it?" he asked.
"It was mine! I had earned it!" Her eyes shone out at him hatefully. "I had earned it, I tell you!"
Repellier seemed deep in thought; then a new firmness came about the lines of his mouth, and he looked up at her.
"What new insult now?" she cried, tauntingly.
"It may be too late to repair the injustice to the dead, Miss Vaughan; but I can and will at least step in to save the living!"
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean Hartley! Have you ever stopped to think how you're ruining that man's life?"
"Ruined?—hislife ruined?"
"Yes, or it soon will be! And for his sake, remember, for his sake alone I can make one final proposal to you. It is the only thing to do, and it is very simple. I can offer you the choice of giving up Hartley, of releasing him absolutely and completely, on the one hand, or of giving up The Silver Poppy, and all it stands for, on the other!"
She caught desperately at her last straw.
"I would," she said. "I would—and could do it, but he—hemay refuse to accept his freedom!"
"You must take the one or the other. As for Hartley himself, I think when everything is laid before him plainly, he will see just how to act!"
"You," she cried in horror, "you wouldn't do that? You wouldn't tell him this—this lie?"
"I should have to; you have made it necessary."
"Him! Tellhim!" she repeated, dazed. "You don't know how much he is to me," she added wistfully. It was no longer the face of a girl that looked up at Repellier. It was that of a woman, touched with age and sorrow.
"That is no reason whyhislife should be soured and broken, no reason why he should go on in the way he has been doing."
"But they're lies! He would know they were lies!" she cried, her anger seizing her once more.
"He would know they were lies! He knows and believes in me! He loves me! If I told him, he wouldkillyou! But you wouldn't tell him—you wouldn't tellhim!" she cried again, reading nothing but relentlessness in the other's face.
Repellier turned away from her, sick of it all, degraded by it, demeaned by her very passionate mendaciousness, but still resolute.
"I will give you two days to think it over," he said wearily, "and then—then I'll act on your decision!"
And she knew that he was in earnest.