The Silver Poppy Part 2

"And that crown of old gold and rose stands over Brooklyn, I know, and the lower bay."

An unknown city had always held vague terrors for Hartley; once, even, as a child, he had burst into sudden tears over an old atlas of the world; "it was so big and lonesome," he had tried to tell his uncomprehending nurse. But now, as he followed Repellier's finger with his eyes, he was dimly conscious of that sense of fugitive terror lifting and drifting away from the sea of scattered lights beneath him.

For a moment he felt more drawn toward the city than of old, though his first vivid, photographic impression of it floated mockingly back through his mind.

The smell of the willows of the Isis and the hyacinths of Holywell had scarcely fallen from him as he walked those first few miles of the New World--a New World which seemed to his timid and homesick eyes to be but streets of chaotic turbulence through which pulsed the ceaseless cry of Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! He recalled the blind beggar with his quick, shrill cry of "Please help the blind! Please help the blind!" tapping hideously along the crowded pavement. He remembered the groups of sallow-faced men, young, yet already old, lounging about the entrances of what seemed countless hotels; the cl.u.s.ter of swarthy, foreign-looking workmen tearing up the asphalt under the strong glare of gasoline torches; the cars and hansoms that rattled past; the two express-wagons that crashed together and locked wheels amid curses and loud cries; the pedlers and news-boys and fruit-venders barking and crying through the streets; the bilious-hued moon shining brokenly down through air heavy with dust; the serrated line of the distant sky-sc.r.a.pers that seemed to bite up at the darkness like teeth; and the white glare of the electric lights bunched so alluringly about the gilt-lettered, gaudy-faced corner saloons. It was not until afterward that he found he had traversed but one rough rind of the city itself; but it had all seemed so glaring, so blatant, so hopelessly unlovely to his bewildered eyes, that with the bitterness of a second Job he had asked: Is this, then, the soul of their republicanism? Is this the America of which the Old World had dreamed such envious, foolish, happy dreams?

Leaning there out of the lofty studio window, the young alien sighed with the burden of his youthful disappointments and his great things still undone. He looked less hopelessly down at the lights of a city which he had grown, in a softer mood, to think of as more beautiful.

Then he glanced at Repellier once more. This quiet man beside him, he felt, must have dreamed his way even more slowly into the heart of that turbulent life. For from a withered old hack writer on his news bureau Hartley had picked up a fragmentary story to the effect that Repellier had first come to New York a broken-hearted man, in search of a runaway sister. She had killed herself, he remembered the story went, when Repellier had tried to take her home, for she had pa.s.sed through things that are seldom forgiven, and never forgotten. Recalling this, Hartley peered through the gloom at the other man, as though to read his face more closely. But the past seemed to have left no trace.

"That disorderly, happy-go-lucky tangle and snarl of lights on your left," his companion was saying quietly, "is your East Side, and that sinister scar of brighter light across it like a sword-gash is the Bowery itself. You can see how different they are to these prim rows on the West Side!"

"Which stand for happiness, and, accordingly, more or less for dulness."

"There's a good deal of nonsense talked and written about the slums, Hartley, and they're wept and prayed and shuddered over, through lorgnettes, but, after all, you hear about as much laughing on Hester Street as you do on West End Avenue."

Hartley recalled the sounds that crept up to his little tenement room of a hot midsummer night. "And quite as much weeping."

"Perhaps a little more, for the Submerged Tenth has never been taught to nurse its sorrows in silence. But it's all taught me one big lesson--it's a truth so obvious that it puzzles me to think it should come so late in life. Wherever it beats," and here the older man's voice dropped into a sudden deeper tone of earnestness, "the old unchanging human heart runs with the same old unchanging human blood, and aches with the same old unchanging human aches. It's such a simple old truth, though, the world never accepts it."

The younger man shook his head in vague dissent. The even, dispa.s.sionate tones of this man who had looked deep into life fell like a cold hand on the throat of his lighter-pinioned ideality.

"The slum sins most," he protested, "and therefore suffers most."

"It sins openly, and suffers openly."

The younger man, looking down over the dim city, with his chin on his hand, did not reply. He was saying to himself that they had not taught them these things over in Oxford, and was wondering how often, ages and ages ago, in old Athenian gardens, some young Platonist and some aged Aristotelian had wrangled over the same ancient problem. Through the murmurous night air he dreamily noted the creeping hansoms and the crawling L trains and the street-cars, the minute corpuscles of the now languid life-blood with which the huge city would soon run so feverishly.

The unrest, the haste, the movement of the momentarily lulled life beneath him took on a strangeness, a mystery, an inscrutable element that filled him with a wordless disquiet. What was the end of it all?

And what did it all stand for? And whither was it trending? His mind went back to one calm night when he and another stood under the white Italian stars, up under the olives and chestnuts of Fiesole, and asked the same questions of life. Then his thoughts drifted again to his last days in Oxford, when he and a young scholar of Magdalen went out by night to Boars Hill to listen to the nightingales. From the shadowy hillside of the quiet wood they had watched the lights of Oxford swarming luminously in the dark little valley of the Isis below, glimmering through the humid English spring night like pearls in a goblet of wine. How strangely full and deep and good life had seemed to them that lyric night, as they walked home through the moonlight, with all the world before them!

But to Hartley the great restless New World city seemed so bewilderingly different. The spirit of it was so elusive! It so engulfed one with its pa.s.sionate movement! It made man such a microscopic unit! It held life so cheap, and youth so lightly! He had been nearly four months in New York; it had swallowed him up as a maelstrom might, and he had accomplished nothing, or what stood as good as nothing. He remembered half bitterly how he had broken disconsolately away from the twilight languor of his sleepy old university town, and with his few carefully h.o.a.rded pounds had turned to America, young yet already old, hopeful and yet already heart-weary, in search of more strenuous effort and struggle. That London evening paper which at times printed his copy, he recalled, had rather grandiloquently announced that Mr. John Hartley, M.A., was to do for the East Side of New York what Besant had done for the East Side of London, and even ventured to prophesy that a great number of Mr. Hartley's friends and admirers would await his book with interest. From the first he felt that there had been something ominous in that initial deception. And now he had foundered in the very sea from which he was to sweep both gold and glory--even, as he told himself, after tossing overboard his jetsam of undergraduate dreams. Now, indeed, he was thankful enough for his daily bread; and there were, he knew, hundreds and thousands like him--thousands of aspiring men and women whom the great city had called from the towns and farms of the West, from the wide Dominion above the Lakes, from the South, from the Old World itself.

As he gazed wonderingly down through the darkness he thought of the friendlier, more intimate voice that had groped out through the housetop gloom to him that night. He wondered into what corner of the sleeping vastness of the city that wistful voice had crept. The mere thought and memory of it seemed to give a warm spot to the meaningless, shadowy solitude beneath him, like one small ember in a waste of ashes.

He turned to Repellier.

"Who is Cordelia Vaughan?" he asked.

Repellier drew back from the window and stood in the dim light of the studio lamps.

"Miss Vaughan--Cordelia Vaughan--is a young Kentucky woman who writes books, and I understand one of her dramatized novels is soon to be put on the stage. People are petting her--petting her a good deal too much, this season--but still, she seems to stand it well."

"I suppose she has written quite a bit?" Hartley casually inquired.

"I've known her only since last year, and I don't read, you know. But they tell me she's clever--when she writes, I mean, for most of these bookish women, unfortunately, are trimmed back and stunted for the sake of the fruit."

Hartley looked round at Repellier, missing from the other's voice some note of enthusiasm which he had expected to be there. The older man's succeeding question, however, bridging as it apparently did some disrupted line of thought, adequately accounted for his judicial coldness of tone.

"Are you getting broken in to work over here, Hartley--to good, hard work?"

The younger man smiled. With him Euterpe and Eros, obviously, must not house together.

"Jolly well broken in," was all he answered.

"Work is our eternal redemption," Repellier said, with his hand on the younger man's shoulder. Then he sighed wearily. "But to a good many of us Americans a life of hurry, I guess, has become the only life of ease."

CHAPTER III

AN INTERLUDE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The lute forgetful of its note; The wing remembering not to fly In some sweet flight's mad ecstasy; The heart that failed to carve the form Since once the musing soul grew warm With love for her who sat for him Of too alluring moonbeam limb.

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Lost Voice."

"The defeated heart," sighed the woman in black, "has the habit of burying its own dead!"--"The Silver Poppy."

For one virtue alone Cordelia Vaughan was looked on as a rare acquisition by Mrs. Alfred Spaulding. That virtue was her young ward's punctilious attention to all those social duties with regard to which she herself was p.r.o.ne to be deplorably careless. With the accession of Cordelia, therefore, she reveled in a vicarious ceremoniousness that wiped out many discomforting memories, ranging all the way from forgotten dinners to neglected dentist's engagements.

It was but a little after eleven, on the morning following Repellier's birthday gathering, when Cordelia Vaughan alighted from the Spauldings'

brougham and once more climbed the long stairs to the old artist's studio. Both she and Mrs. Spaulding had begged to come and help Repellier "clear up." Mrs. Spaulding, however, no longer dazzled by the glow that radiated, to her eyes, from the brow of that great artist, found in the depths of a soft pillow and a darkened room that the spirit was willing but the flesh lamentably weak. She told Cordelia to run along by herself; she had a headache to sleep off.

And as Cordelia mounted lightly to the upper regions of Repellier's workrooms she felt in no way sorry for the promise. Some rudimentary simplicity in her character could always blithely sweep away the cobwebs of either propriety or impropriety--cobwebs so potentially tantalizing to one less ingenuous. Her late hours, too, seemed to have left no depression of spirits, no reaction of _ennui_, and she floated in before Repellier bright, buoyant, smiling, like a breath of the open morning itself, a confusion of mellow autumnal colors in her wine-colored gown and hat of roses and mottled leaves.

But before she had so much as drawn off her gloves--and they were always the most spotless of white gloves--she glanced about in mock dismay and saw that the last of the righting-up had already been done. There was not even a book for her to replace, or a plaque to tuck away. She pouted at this, prettily and girlishly; she had hurried away from her coffee and rolls just to help him.

Repellier, in his lighter moods, had an affectionate and quite fatherly way about him that was all-conquering. He penitently pinned a long-stemmed American Beauty rose on her wine-tinted gown, and shaking his head dolefully over the color combination, replaced it with a cl.u.s.ter of gardenias. She fluttered femininely to a mirror, to view the result of the added touch, and then bowed her grat.i.tude with arch solemnity. She was not slow to realize the lighter mood in Repellier, and was glad of it. Then, talking the while of the night before, she went over to his book-table, and hovered restlessly over the different volumes scattered about, scarcely knowing just how to wear the conversation through its tides of change into that particular slip where it was to be hawsered. To Repellier she seemed like a humming-bird darting about a little high-walled garden, ready to be off like a flash when the last flower had been rifled.

He watched her, smiling, while she hovered on from topic to topic, looking up at him now and then; now and then nervously turning over the books on the table before her, and wondering within herself just why it was this man had always vaguely intimidated her. She was about to open her lips when he suddenly stopped her.

"Did you know that that's Hartley's book you have there?"

For one quick, searching second she looked up at him, and then casually opened the little volume upon which her hand had fallen by accident.

Repellier had once thought her the sort of woman that never blushed.

"'Atalanta and Other Poems, by John Hartley,'" she read aloud idly, with raised eyebrows. "And a dedication as well: 'To C. M.' Did he leave it last night, or is he the kind that always sends them round next day?"

"Hartley's not that sort at all."

The woman slipped into a chair, and with her chin on her hand, meditatively turned over a page or two. Then she closed the book nonchalantly, almost disdainfully. She confessed that she had no particular love for poetry.

"Tell me about him, though," she finally said quite seriously and quite openly. "I'd like to know something about him--_all_ about him."

Repellier, who had been adjusting a great paint-besplattered easel, came over and took up the thin, green volume.