The Silver Poppy Part 20

"Two authors always have to drive tandem in a case like this."

"How it will succeed!" she said dreamily. "You would hardly believe me if I should tell you how much we shall make out of this."

He turned and resolutely tied up the loose pages. The flush of a new energy was on him.

"What are you going to do?" she asked quickly.

"I'm going at it again--I've had a dozen ideas while you've been talking to me--I feel that I've _got_ to go at it tooth and nail again."

"And it's agreed that you take one-half the royalties?" she broke in.

"No, no; the name, the start--that's quite all I ask."

She did not understand. "The start?"

"Yes, I can wait until I write my own book for dollars and royalties, and all that sort of thing. _Now_ I'm glad enough to stand humbly beside you."

Still she did not seem to understand. He felt that she was tired and shaken.

"Why, I'm unknown, Cordelia, and you're famous. Think what it will mean for me--The Unwise Virgins, by Cordelia Vaughan and John Hartley!"

She turned toward him quickly. He caught the startled look in her eyes, and wondered at it. She tried to call up a smile; he could see her lips twitch uselessly, like a desperate pilot tugging at a broken signal-wire.

"Oh-h-h," she said softly, at last, "I hadn't thought of that!"

As he pa.s.sed under her window he looked back at her through the gathering darkness. She stood in the half-lighted window-square vacantly, wide-eyed, wondering. He waved his hand back at her, lightly, but she did not seem to see him. And he wondered what element in the picture which that half-lighted window framed made him think of Perseis as she watched the trireme of Ulysses swing up the sands of aeaea. He knew but one thing, and that he knew a.s.suredly. He loved her with all the strength of his heart.

CHAPTER XIX

WAS EVER POETESS THUS MADE?

My astral messenger then turned her eyes In sad tranquillity unto that night Wherein the temple of the summit lies, And spake unto my ear: "'Tis more the fight Than all the idle guerdons to be won; It is the worship though the G.o.ds be mute; So keep thou still thy face unto the sun, Since art is not the goal, but the pursuit."

JOHN HARTLEY, "The G.o.ddess 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 m.u.f.fled 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 offering _me_ any 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 p.r.o.neness to tangle the devious skeins of ethics and expediency, a touch of the tyrant came to her once more.

"I _want_ you to have this money," she pleaded. "It's only right that you should. You need it--_I_ have 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 embarra.s.sed--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 a _little_ of their ways that are dark," he interpolated, thinking at the moment of the United News Bureau.