The Silver Poppy Part 6

And so he lost, for like a sword Still in his bosom prest Her perilous face, and each soft word Like thorns still tore his breast.

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."

It's in the lulls of life that great things are lost and won....

You struggle against the tides that beset you, and you hold your own; but those tides never rest, and in the hour that you wait to call for peace--then the waters shall carry you back.--"The Silver Poppy."

Hartley dined frugally, though somewhat late, that night. Time had slipped away unnoticed in his close little room till he woke to the fact that he was extremely hungry. He was glad to get out into the open night air, but as he sniffed at it gingerly on his way back to his room once more there came to him, with a sudden pang, a memory of the evening odors that hung over the far-away valley of the Isis.

As he stepped in through the jail-like doorway he all but stumbled over Repellier, waiting for him there.

"I was down in this part of town," he explained, "so I decided to drop in on you for a while--I have a model who hangs out in Chatham Street."

"Come up; come up, by all means," cried Hartley, elated.

As the younger man and his visitor picked their way through the narrow halls of the tenement-house it was obvious to them both that the supper hour of that district was not yet over. For the smell of many cooking and overcooked meals, mingling with the odors that drifted at all times of the day up through the crowded building, was not altogether pleasing to the uninitiated nose. Repellier noticed, too, that Hartley looked listless and worn and tired, and in some way strangely altered.

This was the gilded youth he had once beheld in a cushion-bestrewn punt on the Isis, reading Anacreon. Groping after him up the odoriferous narrow stairs, with a sudden deeper note of sympathy he asked Hartley how he had been getting along of late.

"Five editorial rejections to-day," the young man answered half blithely, half solemnly.

"But are you getting--what you expected out of things down here?"

"As you see"--Hartley tried to laugh back, bravely enough--"I'm afraid I'm a sort of Zeno ground in my own mortar of squalidness."

Repellier knew as well as he how, with time, the novelty of such things could lose its early glitter. The old artist felt troubled in spirit.

"Will you take my advice for a second time?" he asked suddenly.

Hartley said he would, gladly.

"Well, I'd suggest that you migrate before long--I think you'd better change quarters, get where you'll have more sun and air. They're pretty wearing, these places; you've been getting too much of a good thing."

Then he smiled, but hesitated to say what was on his lips.

"I think I'll stick it out," said Hartley stoutly.

They were in the dingy, squalid room by this time, and for some unknown reason a constraint fell over them. The old artist noticed the Oxford photographs stuck up about the broken walls and the gaps in the sadly depleted shelf of books. He had never thought Hartley had it in him.

And again he felt troubled in spirit--he stood so helpless before the very man on whom he had pinned his faith. He wondered in what way he could reach a hand out to him--he knew only too well what any open offer of help would mean.

"I wish you'd use your friends a little more," he said, as they sat and smoked together.

"I've so jolly few, I've got to keep them," said Hartley, with his slow English smile.

"You're a punctilious beggar, Hartley! I'm beginning to believe the Dean of Worcester was right when he said you needed some of the Matthew Arnold knocked out of you."

When Repellier had taken his departure, leaving his host with a new-born, indefinite sense of unrest and discontent, Hartley thought it all over. Why did he not use his friends? Repellier had dropped that seed of interrogation on very open soil. Alone in his room Hartley recalled what Cordelia Vaughan had said to him in her soft contralto about nothing succeeding in America so much as success. After all, might there not be such a thing as an overscrupulous judgment of motive and action for the man of the world? Ethics, he tried to argue with himself, were suitable enough for Oxford. What he wanted now was opportunity. He demanded his chance. He had been too thin-skinned. He was in Rome, and he must do what the Romans do. It was all his Anglo-Saxon tendency to be stiff-necked. Why did he not make use of his friends? It was the very nature of such things that made all friendship valuable. It would simply be a matter of give and take between them. It would, too, never become a matter of sentiment--he prided himself that he had his heart too well in hand for that. He had too many great things still undone for any entanglements of that sort. And yet, and yet--as the lonely young author sat back on his hard-bottomed chair and recalled the soft contralto of the Southern voice the noisy rattle of the elevated trains went out of his ears. He was a stranger, and she had been very kind to him. The confusion of yellows that floated and drifted before his eyes darkened and deepened into gold, and the eyes that before had seemed cold to him grew warm and l.u.s.trous.

He had been a very lonely young man. In his head fermented a dozen great things still unaccomplished; chance had broken no clean channel through the sour stagnation of those fermenting cross-purposes. And now the artist in him aspired desperately for freedom. Again he wondered if, after all, his older, uncompromising ideality, his older rigid sense of right and wrong, was not the result of mingled priggishness and petulance. Even though he had to stoop a little for this first start, after all, it was a start. And once under way surely some new and unforeseen avenue of escape would offer itself. And if for a time he felt a half-caged conscience beating against its bars, he m.u.f.fled that last tremulous flutter in his cry for some release from the sordid drudgery and the stultifying gloom that was holding him down.

Sitting up late into the night, Hartley rewrote his article on Cordelia Vaughan. The insinuation of the personal equation into his work was easier than it had looked. Time was, he knew, when he had rejoiced in attacking these seven-day wonders of the world of letters, the noisy idols with their posings and world-old impositions. He himself for months had been doing miserable hack work in the services of an unscrupulous syndicate, for a few paltry dollars a week, that he might hold unpolluted from all that was sordid and commercial that inner and more sacred fount. He had thrown his coat in the mire that his G.o.ddess might still walk with white feet. He had never confounded his serious work with the work of the moment. He had not asked for much; he could live on little, very little indeed. He was willing to work humbly, so long as he might only see some ultimate opportunity to labor on unharra.s.sed by the worries and impecuniosities that now hung over him, and all but stifled him. With the Muse there must be no divided love. He had long since learned that while the work of the creative mind is joyous enough, it is likewise exhausting. All he cried out for was opportunity. It was the artist aspiring for his freedom. It was the creator casting about for his chance to create.

There were men in the city, Hartley knew, who were making fortunes by their pen. But they were men who, only too often, had allowed the temporary interest to intervene, men who had sought the immediate reward of the dollar, men who put their finger, adroitly enough, on the pulse of the world and gave it what it asked for, regardless of conscience and consequence. Was he, too, to become one of these? Was this fragile and pale-faced priestess of Mnemosyne, whose friendship had promised so much for him, insidiously to forge the first link in that golden chain which was to bind him down? Yet he had done nothing that was dishonorable.

After all, even the artist must have his modern ideas of the business side of life. It was the law of the land.

So Hartley rewrote his article on Cordelia Vaughan. If there was any little rift in the throbbing lute of his enthusiasm he solaced himself with the thought that he was moving with the times, that he was growing more politic, that being down on his luck had knocked some of the sensitiveness out of him. He felt, too, that life of late had been making him more humble. "You're so d.a.m.ned hopelessly honest!" his editor had once disgustedly said of him. But now, as he wrote late into the night, page after page, The Silver Poppy, though still unread by him, paragraph by paragraph grew into a wonderful and still more wonderful work, and Cordelia Vaughan, if not the openly accredited George Eliot of America, was at least the apostle of that newer upward movement which was to carry the American novel from the valley of mental mediocrity to the clearest heights of the intellectual.

CHAPTER VII

THE APRIL OF LOVE

From the book to the battle we go, And it comes that we travel afar Unto marts that we do not know, Where a Philistine people are.

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Market-Place."

"I'm not very big," she said wistfully; "I'm only one of those little harbor-tugs that wear the liners of life into their berths--for the port has its perils as well as the open sea."--"The Silver Poppy."

Mrs. Spaulding usually breakfasted at half-past eleven, just four hours later than her husband. That gentleman, indeed, had pa.s.sed through half a day of delirious Wall Street business before the plump and loosely gowned figure of his belated spouse rustled languidly down to the breakfast room.

Mrs. Spaulding--and at the breakfast hour above all other times--liked to believe that she was a very ill-used and lonely woman. If a touch of forlorn desolation did cling about her even days, it was a desolation quite different to her husband's. Through her loneliness she still groped for something tangible and material; he found little toward which he cared to reach.

He had first made his money in wheat, at Indianapolis. Later he had doubled a substantial fortune by prompt and shrewd investments in the then half-prospected iron-mines of the Lake Superior district. He was an honest and simple-minded man, with a straight-forward and workaday bent of mind, who still fretted at idleness, and was still wordlessly oppressed by the gaieties of life when they chanced to fall before the hour of the dinner gong and the Tuxedo coat.

It was not until his fortune had crept up to the million mark that he ventured to ask for the hand of the youthful and overpretty Lillian Bunting, a belle in her time, and a young lady, it was said, with marked social aspirations for the Middle West.

Then, as time went on and brought with it an increase of prosperity, she hungered, as a millionaire's wife, for that mystic urban El Dorado of the affluent American, New York. Though he felt that he was sacrificing a few hundred thousand by the migration, Alfred Spaulding finally came East and built a handsome home for himself and his wife on West Seventy-second Street.

It was all very dreary and very lonely for them both during their first two years in this new home. But little by little Alfred Spaulding drifted back to that world of business and strenuous effort which const.i.tuted life for him. And day by day Mrs. Spaulding hovered more and more closely about that high-walled garden where worldly wealth flowered into sensuous affluence, though as the mere wife of an unknown millionaire she seldom alighted on the borders of society, which to the end she insisted in describing as "The Four Hundred."

But if she could not dine and dance and drive with them, she still had left to her the compensating pleasures of dining and dancing and driving in their wake. She could still reserve their tables at the cafes on off evenings, and their boxes at the theaters when they were elsewhere.

There was nothing to prevent their milliners from making hats for her own aspiring head, and she could still buy her jewelry and her flowers in the same shops with them, and even drive bewilderingly near them in the Park.

Then came the advent of Cordelia Vaughan. The young auth.o.r.ess from Kentucky was just at the zenith of her fame; The Silver Poppy had, as Mr. Henry Slater described it, "set the Hudson on fire"; her new-found friends were still reprovingly demanding why she held back her second volume, and publishers, it was said, were besieging her for ma.n.u.scripts.

The public press, too, was hinting from time to time that the new Kentucky beauty was laboring on a mysterious volume that was to shake society to its very foundations. Then it was whispered about that she wrote only from memory, that she was living the romance which later should appear in type. Photographers sent to her, begging for a sitting.

Niccia, the sculptor, made a little bust of her, and declared she had the only Greek nose in America, and there was a poem or two indited to her "sad, sad crown of golden hair," as one melancholy versifier had put it.

Cordelia Vaughan was indeed a very much talked about young lady, and it was just at this juncture that Mrs. Alfred Spaulding had swooped down on her and triumphantly carried her off, very much like a plump hen-hawk making away with a homeless duckling. She was still delightfully childlike and ingenuous for one already so great. The poor girl, Mrs.

Spaulding held, needed a mother's care. She was giving up too much to her work. She must have more amus.e.m.e.nt, more diversion. She should have a little den of her own, and she should work when she wanted to, and play when she wanted to. She should be as free as though she were in her own home. It was, too, in no way mildly hinted that under the roof of such a patroness she would have unrivaled opportunities for studying the foibles and weaknesses of New York's most exclusive circles. In fact, Mrs. Spaulding would give a series of receptions and teas and things for her, for she had always wanted to see more of those dear, untidy Bohemians with the long hair.

Though the young auth.o.r.ess from the South had been a willing enough captive, under what roof, indeed, did the eagle wings of genius ever unfurl with ease? Cordelia, however, had hungered for a little of the fulness of life. Her earlier New York existence, bright and attractive as it had seemed to the outer eye, had been an unutterably lonely and hollow one. Life in a Washington Square boarding-house had proved no better than a more irregular existence in a dilapidated old studio on lower Fifth Avenue, where for several months she invariably burned her own toast and regularly boiled her own tea, and where her callers were equally divided between overinquisitive reporters and impoverished authors looking for a.s.sistance.

So Mrs. Spaulding felt that she had taken a new grip on life when her timorous little _protegee_ was installed in the yellow-tinted study which had been made ready for her. It was an eminence by proxy, but it was better than nonent.i.ty; and in her silent grat.i.tude she saw to it that Cordelia wanted for nothing, and, on the whole, was not unhappy.