The Silver Poppy Part 4

Hartley looked at her, puzzled.

"It's hard to work--in some places." She walked to the window and was looking out when next she spoke. "And I want to be free."

He thought that he understood, and he would have drawn back from any more intimate prying into an unfortunate environment, but Cordelia herself spoke on:

"Mrs. Spaulding, of course, has not exactly the artistic temperament, but she is the soul of goodness, and has wealth and position, and when she asked me to come with her, I was only too glad to have a real friend, and a friend who could be a sort of social patroness as well."

"After all, the patron is not the poor figure that history has made him out to be, do you think?" asked the young Oxford man, busy with his note-book. Yet it seemed one of life's keenest small ironies that out of such pale-tinted atmospheres should come the volumes which the turgid, hurrying, surging world was so ready to devour. It was no wonder, he felt, that she wanted to be free.

"It sounds odd to you, I suppose?" she went on. "But that's because you're an outsider. Here in New York you'll find plenty such persons, anxious enough to shine in the reflected light of the real workers. Mrs.

Spaulding is different from the rest--she would be as true as steel, I know. But the ordinary kind are not easy to hold. Their whims change, and you have to change with them. They take you up just as they'd take up a new design in foulards, or a novelty in their stationery, or a new breed of Pomeranian. We all have our hobbies, you know," she added, with just the slightest touch of bitterness in her voice.

"But _you_ have been particularly happy," said her visitor, sweeping the expensively and tastefully furnished study with his quick eye. Then he wondered, as he looked at her, if already she was tired of publicity.

"It's nice to be free," she sighed, as in answer to his glance.

"The road that leads to freedom is always beautiful," agreed the young Oxonian. "But your cage seems rather a golden one."

"It has to be, or I'd eat through the bars. You see, there was really a Waterloo fought over me. Mrs. Simpson-Burgess wanted to capture me--yes, isn't it flattering?--and Mrs. Spaulding wanted me, so they had to fight it out."

"On which, some day, I should like to congratulate Mrs. Spaulding."

"Oh, thanks," sighed the other.

There was a moment of constrained silence. The young man felt that they had been treading on thin ice.

"You must be sure to meet Mrs. Spaulding," went on Cordelia. "I know she'll be interested in you. She'll probably be able to help you, too, in more ways than one. Oh, by the way, does your syndicate publish portraits at all?"

Hartley explained that it did; two pages a week--one of People of the Hour, and the other of Beautiful Women.

As the woman on the orange cushion said nothing for a moment or two, Hartley rose to go.

"Some day you'll have to do Mrs. Spaulding for me," she begged. "She would really be at home on your Beautiful Women page."

Then she looked up and saw that he was standing.

"But don't go; please, don't go!" she cried with the winning ingenuousness and command of a child. "I want you to stop and drink a cup of tea with me, at least."

There was something infectious and pretty, he felt, about her wayward little pout, a momentary mental rejuvenescence, as though her mind had been caught in the undress. Hartley had been almost ready to declare that his time was not his own--which was true enough--but he pulled himself up on the brink of this bruskness as he looked down in her eyes and wondered which was her truer side. With a sudden return of good-nature he took his seat again, and amiably remarked that it was not often he drank afternoon tea in New York--that, in fact, afternoon tea would take on the nature of a Dionysian festivity in the neighborhood of Chatham Square.

"Then your home _is_ England?" asked the other.

He confessed that his English birth was one thing he had yet to live down.

"Oh, no," cried the young auth.o.r.ess; "you'll find it's going to help you a lot. Englishmen are always the vogue with us. And, remember, you must be sure not to waste your accent, and your chances."

Hartley could recall no occasion on which his Anglican origin had materially helped him. But, looking up, he caught her smile, and again he dimly felt that she might still be making fun of him. Yet in the twinkling of an eye she was all soberness once more.

"The moment I saw that study of yours in Stetson's--the Dunes of Sorrow, wasn't it?--I knew that I was finding a new man. The only thing I felt sorry about was that you hadn't placed it with one of the better magazines."

"It was my first and only success, over here," admitted Hartley, catching at those crumbs of praise, the first that had been flung before him during four long months of ceaseless endeavor.

The woman busied herself at the little tea-table, saying that she had always made it a habit to have afternoon tea at her home in the South, and chattering lightly on, in her rich, soft contralto, about Kentucky, and the fineness of its horses, and the beauty of its scenery, and how homesick she sometimes got for it all. Hartley noticed her thin, white hands, so frail that they were almost translucent between the delicate phalanges. He watched them as they fluttered about the tea-things, like pale b.u.t.terfly wings over a little bed of tulips. In that warming afterglow of appreciation he gathered up boldness enough to tell her how much they did look like b.u.t.terfly wings.

"How nice!" said the woman at the cups. "That's so good I'm going to use it," she added gratefully. "Do you know you've given me quite a number of ideas for my book already?"

He wondered just what those ideas could have been, and failed utterly to recall anything worthy of remembrance in their talk.

"That idea about the road to liberty being beautiful, especially," she explained. "It's splendid."

"But I'm afraid it's very, very old," said Hartley.

She took the statement as mere self-derogation.

"I know you're going to be a novelist some day," she cried inconsequentially. "Or a poet, at least."

Hartley winced at the after-thought, and remembered his three little thin green volumes so carefully hidden away this many a month.

"But _do_ be good and tell me more about yourself, and your work, and what you intend to do. We've been talking about me and my book, and the things I'm to do--and leave undone--and all the time I feel sure you're a man with a _magnum opus_--isn't that what you call it?--somewhere up your sleeve."

She had an odd little bird-like way of holding her head on one side--an att.i.tude that not only suggested a sort of timorous alertness, but endowed her at the same time with a certain flattering, half-ingratiating, dreamy-eyed attentiveness.

When Hartley thought it over in cold blood he could never adequately explain to himself just why it was he had entered into that long and exhaustive revelation of his aims and ambitions, of his great works undone, of his huge books unwritten, of his visionary tasks as yet unbegun. Perhaps it was because the woman beside him listened with such quiet yet unctuous attention. Perhaps it was the suggestion of literary atmosphere which hung over that secluded little many-tinted study, making it stand as a temple of letters and a place not unfit for the confession of those most intimate and sacred dreams of the heart and brain which heretofore he had so carefully guarded in his own reticent bosom.

However that may be, over the little Dresden tea-cups he unbosomed himself unreservedly to his new-found friend. He described to her how and why he had come to New York, of his desperate struggle to get his first position on a daily paper, of his still more desperate struggle to keep that position, of his precarious existence as a "free-lance," of his discoveries in the lore of living on two dollars a week, and of his final grounding on the shoals of the United News Bureau, where he now wrote on probation under thirteen different names and posed as a special correspondent in four different parts of the world on four different days of the week.

He even grew so bold as to tell her of his still unfinished novel, giving a brief but, he thought, impressive outline of its odd plot and its even odder characters. He confessed, too, that he had always believed his best work had been done in verse.

The author of The Silver Poppy seemed to lose no word of all he said.

Hartley himself, lost for the time being in the outpouring of his own hopes and aims and aspirations, only half appreciated the quiet intensity with which the young woman followed his every sentence. It tempted him to go even farther, and confide in her the secrets of his one great effort, his Nausicaa. Into the five hundred lines of this blank-verse poem he was sure he had poured all that was best in him, and he told her how one magazine editor had accepted it, on condition that he take out two hundred lines--an offer which he had indignantly refused. Later, though, he felt it had been a mistake; America was so different to what it was at home.

The woman looked at him for several seconds in silence, as though some new and better side of him had slowly dawned on her consciousness. In that look the free heart of the young scholar felt there was something to half fear and yet something in which to glory. She dropped her eyes and was still for a moment.

"I hope we two shall be friends," she said in her dreamy, half-wistful intonation.

"Why can't we?" he asked, with his grave but boyish smile. She looked at him with eyes that for the time being did not seem to see him.

"We all have to go through the sort of thing you've been speaking of,"

she said with a sigh, standing before him at the open window, with the sunlight on her hair. "But one person, you know, can so often help another--at least over the rougher places. I feel that already I've a great deal to do to repay you for what you'll make out of this interview. I know you'll say the right thing and it'll help me a lot. I guess, though, I _could_ help you a good deal;" she looked at him. "If you'd only let me," she added. She was speaking very humbly and very earnestly, and her voice moved him almost uncomfortably. There was something so direct, so honest, so open in her kindliness that he hesitated before it, disconcerted, despising himself at the time for his very hesitancy.

"I know that I can get rid of some of your things for you," she continued, as though such tasks were a commonplace. "And I want you to meet editors, too, and people of influence. It all counts so much, unfortunately," she added, smiling wearily. Then she seemed to meditate for a second or two. "Couldn't you bring me up a few ma.n.u.scripts to look over--so that I could know what they were like, you know? I mean what vein they were in?"

Again Hartley vacillated between grat.i.tude and doubt, hating to impose on her what might be the penalty for a moment's too generous impulse. As he hesitated before her Cordelia looked at him studiously, taking note that there was something challengingly dominant and robust about the still boyish stranger whom many such meetings might bring so intimately into her life. He possessed an incipient strength that appealed to her, while at heart she remained half in fear of it. She had always held in her own hands the reins of her destiny. The devious way she had already tooled for herself through life had not been all smoothness, but she had at least been the arbiter of her broken course.

As she thought of these things her visitor rose to go, and she did not further press him for a reluctant decision in one way or the other. But she held her hand out to him, swept by a sudden unreasoning hunger to feel the warmth of his clasp on hers. The actual significance of hand-shaking, the time-worn symbolism of the rite, had never before entered her mind.

"When can you come?" was all she asked, while each once more had the feeling of something portentous in their parting.

"Will you be at home to-morrow at eight?" he asked, still holding her hand.