The Silver Poppy Part 21

"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 Caesarean 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--_please_ don'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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.script 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.

CHAPTER XX

A POWER NOT HERSELF

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 auth.o.r.ess 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 antic.i.p.atory 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 musical _entr' acte_ in 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 aegles?"

Repellier had not.

"Well, according to that old Greek myth, Mr. Repellier, aegles 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 pa.s.sion to denounce that trickery, he broke the strings of his tongue, and suddenly spoke."

CHAPTER XXI

THE SIGNS OF BLIGHT

Some love your songs, but I who know The happier touch of lips whence flow These notes that all men turn to praise Loved you, the singer, all my days; And longing, listening, loving, I Have waited till the song should die-- Till you, the singer, came to bless My 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."

"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 b.u.t.ter; 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. I _said_ your accent wouldn't be as broad when you'd finished with us--nor your views, either."

"No man can live by verse alone."