The Silver Poppy Part 10

Hartley was leaning disconsolately on his elbow, thinking this thought, when the shrill and slightly nasal voice of the managing editor called him. He got up and went listlessly to the editorial desk, still hearing some note of latent pathos in the patient tinkling of the many typewriters.

"Look here, Lord Haughtly"--from his first day with the bureau they had dubbed him Lord Haughtly, the opprobriousness of which he had born with good-natured and smiling resignation--"what stuff have you turned in this last week?"

It seemed to the young disseminator of information that the question was asked in an unusually peremptory tone of voice. He was ready to overlook such things, however, for in days gone by this rough-and-ready man of affairs had not been altogether unkind to him, in his unconscious, careless way. He remembered, too, that he had come to the bureau an unknown and penniless youth, and that he was still one of the "probationers."

"Nothing much this week, I'm afraid," he answered.

"Nothing, eh?" said the controller of the destinies of journalistic literature, as he viewed the end of his cigar, which had all the appearance of a well-worn paint-brush. "You don't seem to be aching much to get on the pay-roll this week?"

"No, I rather didn't expect to," said Hartley quietly. He was beginning to scent danger ahead.

"Didn't, eh? Well, I guess I've been letting you off kind of easy lately. I've struck a new scheme, and I need a good chesty talker like you to push it through for me. Goin' to try you on a new line of work. I want you to go 'round to the different fancy outfitters and get anything flashy in fall styles for the Fashion Page. Then look up six or seven club-men--well-known club-men--and get me up a breezy two columns on expensive underwear for men of the Four Hundred. Find out what young Van Asteroid pays for his silk things and how many he's got, and all that kind of guff."

There was a moment's silence. The author of Nausicaa and Other Poems when anger took hold of him always went white and said little. He looked down at his enemy, outwardly calm. But an inner fire was burning away the last link of his bondage.

"I don't think I should care to undertake an a.s.signment of that nature."

The oppressor had not seen his face.

"Probably you wouldn't," retorted the unsuspecting editor. "But we ain't all here doing the things we want to. Everybody in this push, I guess, has his dirty work to do. We want that article by four to-morrow. That clear?"

"Quite clear. But I don't think you understand me," said the other, struggling in vain to rise above his rage.

"You--you mean to tell me you won't! Look here, young man, you were a sandwich-eating, no-account immigrant, starving in the gutters when I picked you up and tried to make a New York newspaper man out of you.

There's men from Maine to New Mexico hungering to get the chance I gave you--men who'd pay good money to get into this office. And you can do what I say or get out."

Hartley wondered what strange metamorphosis had taken place somewhere deep within his soul to give rise to the sudden new reckless spirit of independence which swept through him. Before it his anger melted away; he reveled only in a new sense of freedom.

"Very well, then; I get out," he replied, turning on his heel, almost smilingly.

The voice of the managing editor had risen high above the smaller noises of the office, and as Hartley walked to his dusty old desk and took up his hat and somewhat tattered gloves there was a moment of unbroken silence. He stood at the door and looked back. Timidly and nervously the busy typewriters behind the little part.i.tions started to tinkle out their doleful staccato again. The managing editor sat, half turned in his pivot chair, looking through the door after Hartley in amazement.

Then he swore at him l.u.s.tily, and declaring before all that was holy that it would do him good to go out and starve, he snorted the burden of his rage from his mind and savagely commanded Daisy Dineen to give him a match.

And that was the manner in which John Hartley left the services of the United News Bureau for all time.

CHAPTER XI

THE STONIER UPLANDS

So avid of these earthly crumbs of praise, Behold, how in her need, From door to door of fame she crawls and prays One 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 mult.i.tudinous 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 pa.s.sion 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 ma.n.u.script, 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, a.s.sured. 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 ma.n.u.script 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 ma.s.sed golden-yellow hair like a great crown, and remembered the little hands that seemed to flutter about like b.u.t.terfly 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 pa.s.sed. 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, dispa.s.sionate. 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."