The Silver Poppy Part 7

Alfred Spaulding himself had hoped to see grow up about him a family, but having no children, he drank deep of the anodyne of the dollar; and so, during the day at least, his loneliness was forgotten. In the evening, when not too tired, he dressed and went with his wife to the theater, enjoying it pa.s.sively, but liking most of all those pieces "which had lots of music," especially those Broadway performances characterized as "Gaiety Successes." Sometimes they dined out, and sometimes he sent Cordelia and his wife off together and ate at home alone. In his earlier day he had looked toward his wife as the symbol and embodiment of that softer and, he thought, that higher life which was necessarily alien to him. Then as her prettiness pa.s.sed away, and her limitations came poignantly home to him, he concluded with pious secrecy that womankind is the upholstery of life, wearing the soonest where it is the softest.

Cordelia Vaughan, when she became a member of his household, did not fail to realize the narrow and lonely existence he led. This touched her keenly in some way, and she did what she could to throw a little more of the lightness and color of life about his absent-minded coming and going. He saw and appreciated this generous effort, and if the two did not become fast friends, they at least grew into more or less good comrades. Often in the mornings she drove down with him as far as his office, for Southerner though she was, it was an inexorable rule of her life to rise early. In some way, though, she was finding her time of late less and less her own, and their morning drives had become more and more infrequent.

It was the thought of this, and the sudden pang of regret that came with it, that took her down to breakfast with Alfred Spaulding not many days after her first meeting with Hartley. All the way down through the crowded, narrow canon of lower Broadway she talked to him with a wistful attentiveness that left him with his morning papers still contentedly jammed down in his overcoat pocket.

As she drove home alone in the bright, glimmering little yellow-bodied Victoria she wondered if it was the soft balminess of the September air that was stirring in her a new sense of something that she had been crowding out of her life. It was a morning on which one wished to be always young.

As the little Victoria swung from Broadway into Fourth Street, she suddenly caught sight of Hartley, and called for the coachman to pull up at the curb. Before the young Oxonian had quite realized who it was and before he had recovered his composure she was stretching a prettily gloved hand down to him.

"Isn't this lucky?" she cried joyfully.

"It is, indeed," he said, taking her hand and looking into her bright face, across which a tress or two of her hair had blown. There was something so airy and light and buoyant about her that she seemed to him like a bird of pa.s.sage, alien to the roar and dust about her.

"Can't you steal an hour or two and run away from all this dust and rattle and noise down here?" she asked, bending over him with her tremulously wistful smile.

He hesitated.

"Do come, the air is so beautiful. You look worried and tired, and it'll do you so much good. Do come!"

Still Hartley hesitated. He asked himself why it was he always hesitated before this particular young woman. Then he looked at her again, and did not stop to answer to that inner questioning voice. The next moment he was sitting beside her and the carriage was bowling lightly across the strong sunlight of Washington Square and out under the arch, where the long undulating vista of Fifth Avenue melted into the distance.

As they pa.s.sed an old studio building on the lower avenue she pointed to one of its highest little windows.

"That's where I used to live," she said simply, and then an involuntary sigh escaped her. "How soon we change, without knowing it!" she added.

"How?" said Hartley looking back at the window.

"Oh, we get hard and selfish and careless." There was a new note of tenderness in her voice when next she spoke. "I wish I could learn to love children and flowers more than I do. Haven't you ever felt that you'd like to be able to give and suffer and endure? That you'd like to throw something out of yourself? Well, that's how I feel sometimes when I think how people--I mean people with ambitions--have to live for themselves. But it can't always be helped."

He looked at her--it was a new facet to the stone.

"For instance, this very afternoon," she went on. "You know I've always wanted to bring my poor old father up to New York to be near me. He's so alone in the world--there's only him and old Mammy Dinah at home now; and week by week I've been putting off seeing about the little apartment I'm leasing for them. I promised to have it settled this afternoon, but at two I have to be at the rehearsal of that great drama they're making out of The Silver Poppy; at four I have to be interviewed for a Sunday paper; at five I have a tea and two receptions; and to-night we dine at the Carringtons."

"Let's see about the flat--is it a flat? Now, together," suggested Hartley, with a sudden impulse to share in her mood of pa.s.sing softness.

She looked at him keenly for a moment or two as he told her he would like to feel that he was doing something for her father; the fleeting shadow of a fear crossed her face.

"No," she said, "let's have our morning together in the Park."

There was already a premonitory touch of autumn in the bright air. They pa.s.sed through the dazzling, sunlit Plaza and entered the cool, green quietness of the Park itself. There the noises of the city faded down to a quiet rumble and the perfume of flowers and the smell of verdure took the place of the drifting street dust. There was something so detached, and pictorial, and spectacular about it that it seemed to Hartley as if a mental tourniquet was already holding dreamily back life's wasting energies. The _legato_ of hoofs, persistent and smooth as a waterfall, the tinkle and clatter of chains, the gloss and l.u.s.ter of the rumbling carriages, the shimmer and gleam of the flanks of perfect horses, the pa.s.sing faces--proud, young, pale, flushed, weary, eager faces of women--the color and flash of millinery and gown against the cool dark greenness; it seemed to him the sheltered and alluring flowering of life, the quietness and repose of the twilight of accomplishment, never virginal and unconscious, but studied, autumnal, attained. It seemed to him a splendor unmellowed and unsoftened by age, not as it might have been in his own land.

Turning to the silent girl at his side, he spoke of the difference between Central Park and the avenues of Hyde Park of an early summer afternoon. He tried to describe to her the forsaken aspect of London's West End during August and the first part of September, when the fashionable world of his own land was, as it were, closed for repairs.

He told her of the forlornness of the Drive and the Row, and how at that season only summer tourists invaded Hyde Park, and even then only north of the Serpentine.

Cordelia listened to him, contented and happy--listened almost raptly, as though she was making the most of her day. It was not until he had rambled joyously on and described to her a London summer and the advent of what they called "the silly season" that she asked him a pointed question or two about English scenery and English country life. She had always been greatly puzzled about the peerage, she confessed, and wanted to know why one was just the Countess of Somebody at one time and then Lady Somebody at another. She had met Lady Aberdeen once, in Chicago, she said, at an Irish-lace store there. She had been afraid to say a word to her, she confessed prettily, because she hadn't known just how to address her. And were all the upper cla.s.ses as simple and unaffected as Lady Aberdeen? And was London so different from New York? And would she ever, she wondered, see the Old Country, and Oxford, and all the other beautiful places he had spoken of? And she asked him if he could believe that at one time she had hated England, and everything English--hated it blindly--which is the worst of all hatreds.

Hartley tried to paint before her eyes the panorama of London from Waterloo Bridge, with its imperial sweep and ma.s.s of river front huddling from the Houses of Parliament to the Tower. He tried to make her feel the sober, low-hung English sky, the softened lights, and the more ordered and solemn lines of London's architecture, where New York's almost universal newness of things was not to be found, and where the dry, hard tones of the New World's brown-stone fronts were likewise happily absent.

She listened intently, and some of her questions were so innocently childlike, and were asked with such a winning ingenuousness that he laughed now and then. It was not until he had finished that she confessed the real cause of her dilemma.

"You see, the book I've been working on so long is partly laid in London, and of course I've never been there. And when you haven't even pa.s.sed through a place on a train it's pretty hard to get the right local color, isn't it?"

Hartley a.s.sumed that it was.

"And I've tried reading it up, but it's no use. I'm afraid I haven't the absorbent mind; some people come out of a book, you see, like a spaniel out of water, scattering a shower of ideas all over you. Well, I can't do that; and what makes it so much harder for me," she added plaintively, "I've known so few nice Englishmen."

Hartley was studying Cleopatra's Needle. As some remote mental vision of the Old Serpent of the Nile drifted through his mind he thought how few nice Americans he had met before.

"That's where they're so ready to catch me up--the critics, you know,"

she went on.

She looked very pretty and flower-like under her big hat.

"You can imagine how hard it is, can't you?" she added.

He turned to her with a sudden great purpose in his face. The thought of it warmed and glowed through him like wine.

"Why couldn't I help you with it?" he asked eagerly.

Her fluttering eyes rested on him warmly, but only for a moment. Then she shook her head plaintively. "That's _too_ much," she murmured.

But he asked her again, humbly.

Unconsciously her gloved fingers touched his arm; there was a confession of deeper things in the movement.

"Would you?" she asked in her soft contralto.

Hartley tried to tell her how happy and proud it would make him. He wondered at the note of humility in her voice, at her half-tristful hesitancy.

"I should love to think it was you who had helped me in a thing like that," she said gratefully. And he could see by the luminous eyes that it was true, and for the rest of that drive no sunlight had sifted through more golden air, no flowers had ever been so odorous, and no green had ever looked so deep to him.

Cordelia insisted that he should drive back and meet Mrs. Spaulding. If he cared to, he could get her own copy of The Silver Poppy and also the ma.n.u.script of her new book. She had rather, she said, that he went over the ma.n.u.script alone; in that way he could judge it more impartially.

And she turned homeward, feeling that her day was over and done.

Mrs. Spaulding greeted Hartley with an effusiveness that almost bewildered that somewhat dignified young man, particularly as he could detect in it no lack of genuineness. She had been told what a promising man he was, and how he was going to write a great book some day. She understood he was a great friend of Mr. Repellier's, and she hoped he would make a regular home of their house, and drop in whenever he felt like it. She pressed him to remain for luncheon, "for pot-luck," she called it, but as he was unable to do that she genially brought down a box of her husband's cigars and protested that both she and Cordelia loved smoke.

Hartley--dare it be confessed--was all this time hoping against hope that she was not noticing the too-often clipped fringe about his trouser heels. And the truth was this shrewd and sharp-eyed lady had noticed the tell-tale fringe, but she also had seen a clean-limbed and clear-featured young man, who carried himself with an air of quiet dignity that was well worth studying, and that would look uncommonly well in a theater-box.

It all ended in a promise from him that he would run up some morning and exercise one of her horses with Cordelia. Cordelia, standing silent and aloof, remembered what Hartley had said during their drive about English reticence, and threw him a glance which he could see was meant as a silent palliation of what she could not prevent. For a moment it awoke in him an inner voice of distrust, of perplexity, that left him with the feeling that a softening veil had been lifted from between them. It was as though some hand had shaken a shower of petals from the blossoming tree of enchantment and left it half bare and empty.

As he said good-by, depressed in spirits and scarcely understanding why it was, Cordelia slipped into his hand a delicately perfumed package tied with blue silk ribbon, together with a copy of The Silver Poppy.

"I want you to keep this; it was the first copy from the press," she told him. And she added that she hoped he wouldn't waste too much of his time over the ma.n.u.script. She knew he would find it all wrong, that there would be a thousand things to disappoint him. And she begged him to make whatever changes he would; she trusted him implicitly.

"I'm afraid you'll not like it," she said timidly, coming with him to the door. She had slipped one of Mrs. Spaulding's hothouse rosebuds into his b.u.t.ton-hole, and she touched it with her fingers with a gesture that meant much. He would have taken her hand, but she drew it back quickly.

"It's been so hard for me to write things this time," she lamented. "I feel that it's all going to fall flat. But whatever happens," and her eyes were eloquent with something more than grat.i.tude, "I've had the happiest morning of my life."

And she closed the door quietly, and left him there. As he stepped out into the hard light of noonday, once more he felt that vague impression of unrest, that reaction of despondency which he had often enough felt when emerging from the music and romance of a theater and pa.s.sing out into the garish lights and noises of a workaday world. He, too, felt that his day was over and done.