The Silver Poppy Part 16

"With a snub-nosed Helen, my boy," Repellier had once said, "there would never have been a Trojan war." Hartley, valiant with the wine of his new resolve, straightway began to wonder how or why he had so recently posed as a second Schopenhauer to this same Repellier, and cried in disgust that everything had already been sufficiently cursed or sufficiently sung. His pa.s.sion for work came back to him with a bound. The Cyrus of unrest that had diverted his better thoughts from their natural channel seemed to have marched on and left the Euphrates of his heart in full flood once more. He knew that his vague mental acrisia had at last come to a turn, and was to be followed by its violent fever to create, to build.

In one illuminating moment he saw that the modern life about which it was now his task to write was no less strenuous and no less varied than the life of those earlier days toward which he had fallen into the habit of looking back so regretfully. But it was in the inner rather than in the outer life, he felt, that the greater intensity and interest were now to be found. It was the mental career of men and women that was becoming more complex and more varied; and it was in this, he saw, that the broader and more enduring field of the novelist lay. At times, indeed, the alluring complexity and bewildering activity of this inner subjective world spread before him like an endless valley of untrodden twilight, shot through with some emotional golden glory of retrospection. And he longed for some fuller power to pierce into it, and grasp it, and interpret it.

With this elemental touch of rapture still clinging about him he went back to his ma.n.u.script of The Unwise Virgins. The spell of The Silver Poppy too seemed, in some way, still pregnantly close to him, and through some little trick of the hand or mind he found himself from time to time dropping into the touch of that earlier effort.

He began at the first and rewrote the entire book. Whipping his earlier erratic chapters into line, he quirted and corralled the herd of them into one unified, crowded whole. He went at his ma.n.u.script with a trace, almost, of the madman in him as he worked. Sometimes he ate, and sometimes he forgot to, or refused to spare time for it. He worked late into the night; sometimes all night long. He worked as he had seen Oxfordshire farmers working at raising bees, under stress and the cry of excitement, lifting and heaving beyond his natural strength, with an ardor that was to leave him stiff and sore, yet with the balm of knowing that one hour of exhilaration, to the artist, was worth its day of depression.

When his brain balked he lashed it on with strong coffee and stimulants, living, most of the time, on tobacco and innumerable milk-punches. He saw no one, and he wanted to see no one. It lasted two, almost three weeks; he was not sure, for toward the end he lost count of the days.

But the end came at last, and he awoke one evening and discovered that his face had been unshaved for days, that his eyes were bloodshot and sunken, that he was hollow of cheek and shaken of nerve, and that he was unspeakably hungry. His brain seemed a sponge that had been squeezed dry, to the last bitter drop, and he felt old, listless, worn out. But even through that dull pain of fatigue he felt the mysterious and inextinguishable flame of happiness, of triumph in accomplishment.

All his work, he knew, was not yet done, but the pill was there, as he put it, and the sugar coating could be applied later, and at his leisure. The structure was there; he could take his own time and go in his own way about the removal of the scaffolding. But the days of sweat and noise were done.

That was the way, he felt, that he would always have to write, racing on to the end, with the wind in his ears while it lasted. It was a costly way, perhaps, and an unsafe one; but with him it would always have to be the only way. A sense of the mystery of creation had seized him at times, the thought that the thing born of the travail of the mind came not from within, but from some unknown source without; that it was inspirational; that it was the cry of a voice not always his own.

With the hand of this mystery Hartley tried to brush away the incongruity that existed between The Silver Poppy and the character of the woman who had written it. Cordelia herself, he argued, might have known her moments of spiritual metamorphosis. Into her fingers, too, might have been thrust a tool more potent than the hand that held it.

Yet he felt that his work was his own, and as his own he took an indefinable, jealous pride of ownership in it. But it had been done for another; and if in this case the tool had fallen to him and had been denied her, how little less hers than his, he tried to tell himself, were the pages before him.

Some busy little spider of delusion seemed to have woven its web across a corner of his mind, and he could not think the problem out as he wished to.

Then the reaction set in. He went out into the freshness of the night air, hoping to brush away that tenuous film of doubt and bewilderment that still teased his thoughts. His face was flushed and hot, but a chill, beginning in his limbs, had seized his body, and tingling little feet of ice seemed running up and down his back. He sniffed at the fresh river air, and remembered that he had taken no exercise of late, that the engine, as Repellier called it, had been overdriven and neglected.

He had a sudden desire to get away from the quietness and loneliness that hung about him. He wanted to get down into the thick of the city and feel life pressing against his sides.

The wind chilled him, so he turned southward and walked aimlessly down through what had ever seemed to him the veritable backyard of all New York. The desolation of those quiet streets drove him Eastward, and dragging his way down the light-spangled, wave-like rise and fall of Amsterdam Avenue, he plodded onward until the flaring sign of a restaurant caught his eye. He went inside and sat down at a little table, and there he ate ravenously--he scarcely remembered what.

Then his spirit of unrest came over him again, and as he wore his way southward he felt that he should like to see Chatham Square once more; a caprice to smell the air of the slums came over him. But his old quarters, he remembered, were too far away to be seen that night. So he turned down into lower Fifth Avenue, and wandered idly on, gazing at times up at the quiet stars, and the great white cross of light that shone from the Mission House, over the Arch and tangled tree tops of Washington Square. Then the lure of lights to the south caught his eye, and he drifted into Thompson Street, turning once more erratically eastward, while for a moment a sudden dizziness came over him and he had to lean against an iron railing for support. Before him the cl.u.s.tered globes of an Italian music-hall chanced to flare its invitation to all pa.s.sers-by, and he stumbled in, glad of an opportunity to rest. He groped his way to the half-underground ill-smelling bar and asked for wine. There he drank three gla.s.ses of acid and biting Chianti, and felt better. He was still weak and dazed, however, so he stepped into the crowded music-hall at the rear, and sank limply into one of the vacant chairs.

The odor of tobacco and garlic reeked in the air, and an orchestra of a half-dozen pieces was crashing out a medley of operatic selections.

Olive-skinned venders of fruit, stoop-shouldered ragpickers, hard-handed organ-grinders, all sat and looked with rapt faces toward the diminutive proscenium-arch at the end of the hall, beyond which was a lurid painting of the Bay of Naples. When Signorina Elisa Venezia came to the footlights and sang a Venetian boat-song--it took Hartley back to the night of Repellier's birthday party--a low-browed Neapolitan sitting next to him pounded on the table with his beer-gla.s.s, and the sudden applause and shouting was deafening, volcanic. He wondered at the fire of their Latin enthusiasm. An ape-like old man tottered and mumbled through the gesticulating crowd, selling meal-cakes. When a corpulent woman in a tawdry yellow costume, swaying her huge body to the throb of the music, sang an Italian love-song that seemed familiar to the crowd, the ape-like old man crouched down on the edge of his blackened basket and listened to the end, with fixed, filmy, eager eyes.

The scene of a sordid and toil-hardened people finding solace in music brought home to Hartley how much he himself had been missing from life; how narrow, of late, his days had grown to be. The chance to wring out of existence its richest wine was before him, had been thrust upon him, and he had neglected it.

As he walked wearily home through the cold night air he determined, with a sudden pa.s.sionate clutching of his hands, to take what was his due, to grasp at what lay before him in life. He was tired of all empty and enslaving work; the tide had met its turn. A Nietzsche-like madness to throw open his man's a.r.s.enal of instinct, a longing to fling his weight against every iron law that seemed, at the moment, to choke and overrun and stultify life, filled him with a sense of tingling opposition. To battle Byronic-like against convention, to ride the whirlwind like the old G.o.ds of life, but to fight always, and for all things--that seemed to him life, and the best of life.

And in something that was almost delirium, in one white flash of inspirational, subliminal clearness, came to him the first ideas of his poem on War--a poem which he worked out feverishly, yet not unhappily, during the next few days of culminating weariness and illness, little dreaming of the part it was soon to play in lives other than his own.

CHAPTER XVI

REINFORCEMENTS

And though idle as scholars we stand, Where they pilfer and swarm in our home, The honey of power waits the hand But daring to pilfer the comb.

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Siren City."

A cynic, is he? Then take all he says with an ounce of civet and a grain of salt.--"The Silver Poppy."

To Cordelia over her coffee-cup Mrs. Spaulding confided a remarkable example of her husband's perversity.

Their talk had drifted round to this point because of a scene, of which Cordelia had been an unfortunate witness, the night before. A flurry of unexpected bills had come in at the first of the month. After looking them over, the alert and ever-keen business instinct of Alfred Spaulding had at first gently and then quite vigorously rebelled against what seemed to him nothing but wanton extravagance. A florist's bill in particular--it was for eight hundred dollars--had startled him into indignation, though Mrs. Spaulding remained heroically silent as to the fact that the great bulk of that bill had been due to the unconsidered visits of Cordelia, and had been quite as much a surprise to her as it now was to her husband.

It was not often that his equable temper showed the effect of the storm and stress through which his tired nerves went day by day. Nor was it often that to his wife he spoke in anything stronger than an accent of mild protest. But on rare occasions his patience became exhausted, and at such times she was given to understand--with a display of great anger, always ultimately atoned for by the arrival of significant little boxes from the Spauldings' jeweler--that her husband was not altogether the pliant and pa.s.sive man which more than one of her friends, and even she herself at times, had been led to believe him.

Mrs. Spaulding sighed heavily.

"And Alfred _makes_ his money so easily!" she said.

"Why does he work so hard, anyway?" asked Cordelia.

"Oh, he says he's got the working habit, and can't shake it off. He gets lonely and restless when he's not busy. He always says it's too late for him to try to change now. But I can't see why he is always fussing about things this way," she went on fretfully, pushing back the little cl.u.s.ter of tradesmen's bills with a dimpled but disdainfully indignant hand, on which glittered not a few heavily jeweled rings. "He understands the market, and all he has to do is invest, and then just watch things, and--er--all that; and then take his money out again. That oughtn't to be such hard work, ought it?"

"And doesn't he ever lose?" Cordelia asked.

"Of course, my dear, sometimes. But Mrs. Herrington--her husband is in Wall Street, too--told me they never _have_ to lose unless they like; unless they want to lead the others on, and that sort of thing, you see.

But I never bother about business. Alfred doesn't seem to like it."

"It must take years to understand it all," Cordelia ventured, toying absent-mindedly with the sugar-tongs.

"I think some men are born businesslike, my dear, the same as they're born bow-legged, or with big feet."

She wondered why Cordelia smiled, and then went on: "Why, only a little over a month ago Alfred's brother Louis, you know, sent him three thousand dollars from Milwaukee, to invest. Alfred was going to send it back, but I just _made_ him do it. He put it in some kind of steel. Then he worried so much about it that he took it all out again in less than a week. Even then he made over eight hundred dollars for poor Louis. Just think what it might have been if he'd only left it in right along."

It was this innocent and quite accidental piece of information which gave a new turn to the tide of Cordelia's thoughts.

In her own little yellow-covered bank-book she had a balance of some nineteen hundred dollars. Why should not this, she asked herself, be sent to that mysterious land of magic, Wall Street, and in time come back to her doubled, perhaps trebled? For many months of late she had indefinitely felt the need of more substantial resource than that already at her command.

Why, indeed, could not Mr. Spaulding do for her what he had already done for his brother out in Milwaukee?

She said nothing of her plans, but little by little resumed her regular morning drives with Mr. Alfred Spaulding down to his office, a matter in which she had been more or less remiss of late. Alfred Spaulding, in fact, objected to taking his carriages into Wall Street at all, and had forsworn the elevated railway only because his more practical wife--more practical in this thing, at any rate--insisted that he should get at least half an hour's open air each day.

Cordelia greatly surprised that absent-minded gentleman one morning by timidly putting a little cut-gla.s.s vase on his desk, into which she slipped an American Beauty rose. Although she had talked to him a great deal, and about many things, it was nearly a week before she approached the matter that lay nearest her heart.

"Women sometimes--er--put their money into stocks, don't they?" Cordelia asked tentatively, as they bowled briskly down Fifth Avenue one bright morning.

"Yes, and nearly always lose it, too," was Mr. Spaulding's discouraging and somewhat curt reply.

"But if they are certain about the right thing?"

"They never are. No one is."

"But if they have a friend in Wall Street, a friend who knows--"

ventured Cordelia.

"Then the friend never knows. My advice is for women to keep out of Wall Street."