The Silver Poppy Part 9

He could not pride himself on either great experience or great accomplishment. But the enthusiasm of the true disciple was in him; a youth of isolation had been building in him those silent fires which smelt experience and mood into art and expression. He had been a desultory yet rapacious reader. Through an erratic and none too studious college course he had fed hungrily on the older literature of his own tongue, and had also mastered the poets of a tongue which he could never force himself to look on as dead. He had come out of these excursions with a sensitized taste and the gift of a sort of literary bletonism, intuitively responding to any sign of the artist beyond the effort. And now, with the touch refined and the hand trained, he, as an artist, stood idle, pounding the anvil of journalism when he might be wielding the chisel of the gold-smith.

He followed his first impulse and went to Cordelia herself, at once. She had just come in from the florist's, and she greeted him over an armful of white roses, which she still held unconsciously before her as she let her eyes linger for a studious minute on his face. He felt vaguely sorry for her--there was an inalienable touch of pathos in the thought of the stricken hand of the master. It seemed to leave her so hopeless and alone--for all along he had more than half felt that she was not altogether at rest in the life into which success had forced her.

She led him timidly up to the little yellow study, and waited for him to speak. She had noticed the ma.n.u.script in his hand.

He found it very hard to begin.

"You don't like it, I know," she said, tearing a flower to pieces. She looked up at him almost appealingly, and then went on.

"I don't like it myself. I think I've lost my grip on it. It keeps running away from me, and throwing me out, and dragging me after it."

As he looked at her in her helplessness, he tried to tell himself that he had been unduly harsh in his first judgment. Then he turned to her and attempted to explain how with a possible touch or two it might be remodeled, how splendid it would be, once it was whipped into shape.

She only shook her head dolefully.

"I'm tired of it," she said.

Hartley seemed unable to explain to himself why a mere mood of temporary inadequacy should crush her into hopelessness.

"Then let me do it," he suggested.

"Dear friend," she said gratefully but sorrowfully, "what time have you for such things?"

"I couldn't give my days to it, of course," he confessed. "But I have my nights. With a couple of hours in the morning, why, a few weeks ought to see it finished."

She shook her head with childlike dolefulness.

"Then what will you do with it?" he asked her.

The question seemed to frighten her. She scarcely knew, she said. They had been clamoring for it so long. She thought she would put it aside and take it up again with a fresh hand.

"Then let me take it in the meantime," Hartley pleaded.

She made a proposal to him--it seemed to come to her in the form of a sudden inspiration.

"Let's collaborate on it," she cried.

"I would much rather simply help you a bit if I could."

"But don't you see, we can divvy--as we say over here--on the royalties.

I've refused twenty per cent and a thousand dollars down. That means two or three thousand dollars, anyway."

Hartley would not hear of it. Cordelia hovered over him and pleaded with him and coaxed him, but he was obdurate to the end. He dreaded to think of that dainty little yellow study ever being converted, to him, into a bookseller's counting-house. A sudden hot sense of dissatisfaction with himself, and with things as they were, crept over him; he felt that he ought to be going, wondering why, during all that visit, Cordelia appeared so far away from him, so unreal and phantasmal.

"There was something I was going to speak to you about," she said, as he rose to go. "You know I've done simply nothing in return for all the things you've done for me." Then she smiled with her wistful smile. "You know, it isn't quite playing fair. As soon as you get home I want you to send me three or four of your short stories. Will you?"

"It's no use--they have been everywhere," said Hartley grimly.

"Perhaps they have, but I feel that I can place them for you--at least some of them."

Hartley shook his head. "I know most of the editors here," Cordelia went on; "there are three or four who have been bothering me for things for months. It makes a world of difference just how a ma.n.u.script comes into their hands; they say it doesn't, but they're human, after all. So, you see, I may be able to say a good word or two for you."

"Thank you, no," he answered gently. "When I think of you I want it to be in every sense but a business sense."

Her hand still remained unconsciously in his. He felt the pulsing warmth of it, and without a word raised it to his lips and kissed it. Cordelia, with her head turned away, gazed out of the open window. And there he left her, and stepped out into the freedom of the open air, neither elated nor cast down. He was thinking forlornly how month by month he had sent out those different hopeless, useless ma.n.u.scripts, and how they had been as persistently returned to him. And still again the artist in him cried out for its opportunity. Yet he felt, in his youthfully candid, self-conscious way, that they were not altogether bad, those stories of his. Perhaps it was the work of the file that they showed too much. Perhaps it was the seriousness of purpose which pervaded them, when everywhere the call was for the airier and lighter effort.

But he did not altogether despair. Again and again he wondered on his way home why he had kissed her hand, and only her hand. And the nearer he drew to Chatham Square the more he was tempted to change his mind and send at least one ma.n.u.script to Cordelia.

CHAPTER X

BROKEN LINKS

And vain and empty stole away Their little seasons, one by one; And wearied while it yet was day They fell asleep beneath the sun, Ere once the dream or magic word Could swing the gates of life apart, Ere once some greater pa.s.sion stirred The dust from each impa.s.sive heart.

JOHN HARTLEY, "Pale Souls."

What are more desolate than life's moral Great Divides.--"The Silver Poppy."

The grimy offices of the United News Bureau were on William Street, almost under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. In four years this bureau had known three failures and had existed, as well, under three different names. Uneasy on his desk ever rested the heels of its managing editor. There was a tradition, in fact, that this official had, perforce, to take his chair out to lunch with him--otherwise a new man occupied it on his return.

In dusty little pens about the august editorial chair toiled some ten or twelve sadly dilapidated literary hacks, waifs of the sea of journalism that had been washed up on the inhospitable sh.o.r.es of the syndicate bureau. They were, as a rule, old men eking out a simple existence on their few dollars a week, and, after frugal repasts at the noonday hour, when the wheels of creative imagination suspended for luncheon, dilating pensively on the old days, the good old palmy days of Greeley and Dana and G.o.dkin, when to wield the pen was a labor of love and honor, when a newspaper man was not a walking sweat-shop of letters, whereby literature was turned out in job lots and articles were manufactured at so much the dozen.

It had not taken Hartley long to find that the United News Bureau was looked on with considerable contempt, with even hatred, by the ordinary New York newspaper writer. These upholders of sometimes dubiously conventional journalism made it a rule always to refer to the bureau as "the Boiler-Plate Factory," and night and day they watched it with suspicious eyes for evidences of violated copyright. But the bureau knew its business, and the different members of its staff had long since been schooled in the deft execution of what was not inappropriately termed a "plate sneak." This form of literary gymnastics consisted in the bodily appropriation of any desired article, sermon, story, or essay, the copy purloined being neatly disguised by a false face, as it were, in the subst.i.tution of a freshly written introduction. An original paragraph or two was attached to the end, with, perhaps, the interpolation of an occasional new sentence throughout the body of the thing purloined. As the bureau dealt in everything from anniversary poetry to syndicated political addresses, the field for its predatory activities was practically unlimited. A short story could be made by transplanting a De Maupa.s.sant peasant to a New England farm, or the interjection of a Kipling recruit into an Arizona mining-camp. The old-time action was jealously preserved in the transformation, the only alterations being those essential to a change of climate and conditions--and, presto, one had a new tale as bright and glittering as a freshly minted penny.

The bureau had a Menu Page, too, made up by a very lean and hungry-looking old gentleman who lunched sparingly on a sandwich each noon, and a Religious Thought Page, edited by a very stout individual who kept a brandy-flask standing beside his ink-bottle. A profitable branch of its business was the preparation of obituaries of eminent men still living, and it is on record that one editor had made it his cheerful practise to submit these touching studies to the different gentlemen whom they most intimately concerned, naively asking if anything further remained to be said. What the bureau fattened on, however, was the uncopyrighted in general, and for all such morsels it watched with hawk-like intensity. An English novel or any less substantial publication which came to it unprotected by the arm of the law was pounced on at once, rapaciously and gleefully. It was renamed, abridged or expanded as the case might require, and in less time than it took the original author to indite his first chapter, it was on the market as a new and thrilling serial, "secured by special arrangement."

The bureau, among other things, paid particular attention to the wants of the farmer, and issued a Dairy Page, edited by an elderly maiden lady who made Brooklyn her home and beheld a cow not more than once a year.

The expert who edited the Agricultural Page, it might be added, had prepared himself for such tasks by many years' labor as an insurance agent. The bureau also boasted of a professional poet, who ran strongly to patriotism, but as his rhymes were manufactured for the convenience of the rather undiscriminating bucolic editor and later on for the delectation of the bucolic reader, his Gems in Verse usually went unchallenged.

Since it took several days for the dissemination of the bureau's material, as everything went from its offices made up into plates and boxed for express, all of its offerings had to be prepared with a wholesome disregard as to dates. This somewhat handicapped the dramatic editor, who found it necessary to write bright and ingenious criticisms of plays without first witnessing their performance--although, it must be confessed, any difficulty on this score was usually obviated by making all notices unreservedly eulogistic--otherwise remote editors later on wrote in complaining of the loss of pa.s.ses for those same performances when they ventured out on the road and joined hands with the bureau in that common and most commendable pursuit of stimulating the imagination of the ma.s.ses.

Midsummer in the bureau always saw the staff in the midst of their Christmas literature, which, like its other anniversary material, was made up into pages, with a generous sprinkling of highly appropriate pictures of snow scenes and swinging bells and smiling Santa Clauses.

Year after year these same pictures were taken down from their dusty shelves, and then year after year were duly stored away again for another season's use. Summer fiction, in the same way, was always manufactured during the winter months, by writers crouching forlornly over cheerless little gas-heaters. The bureau possessed a couple of "hands" surprisingly expert at this novelette work, who labored with the a.s.sistance of the back numbers of the less prominent magazines, and seemed possessed of the pleasing thought that what the world most loved was an old friend in new clothes.

One of Hartley's first lessons--and there were many of them to be learned--had been that no article, editorial, or story must "slop over."

This phrase was interpreted to him as meaning that no article must be one line longer than the strictly allotted s.p.a.ce. If such proved the case the editorial blue pencil performed the necessary amputation, and the child of the expansive mind was crowded into its page sadly bereft of limbs, and often enough of all genuine sense and coherence. Hartley had acquired the art, too, of writing poetry to order, suitable for the bureau's stock ill.u.s.trations, while the compositor waited at his elbow, with his make-up suspended until the necessary lines were duly indited.

The young scholar from Oxford had been not a little amused, in secret, at the duties of the person who was known as the comic editor. The chief task of this editor seemed to be a ruthless scalping of the foreign humorous weeklies and a conscientious and often laborious adjustment of the witticisms of Punch to the American understanding. He was equally amused to find that the Republican editor and the Democratic editor were one and the same person, a mild-mannered and kindly faced old gentleman in a faded green suit, who on alternate days furiously wrote the most scathing political leaders back at himself.

Hartley himself had been carefully warned never to touch on religion, politics, or even locality in any of his contributions. It had also been impressed on his bewildered brain that there existed in American public life a mysterious factor known as the "Irish element," and that under no circ.u.mstances must he express any opinion or make any allusion which might be interpreted as offensive to this element. If in doubt, his editor commanded, he must be as Anglophobic as possible. He was also to make it a point to wax gently sarcastic, even playfully malicious, when speaking of that effete and overluxurious city New York--the name of which, it appeared, was bitter in the mouth of all outsiders. Hartley could never fathom why this was, but it was. And that seemed enough. He learned to feel less uncomfortable masquerading under his different pen-names after discovering that the heavily bearded old German who smoked bad tobacco at the desk next to his own flourished in the columns of the Woman's and Fashion Page as Daisy Dineen, the unquestioned authority on dumpling recipes in ten thousand unsuspecting homes.

These were the offices and this was the atmosphere into which Hartley listlessly came the morning after his interview with Cordelia Vaughan, when he had faltered in telling her his real verdict on The Unwise Virgins. This was the bitter gateway through which he had once dreamed he could enter some Eden of eminence.

As he pa.s.sed to his desk and mopped the dust from it with an old newspaper, the place and all it stood for filled him with a sudden new-born disgust and weariness, a feeling more reckless than any which had before taken possession of him. He was sick of the smell of turpentine and printers' ink. He was sick of the unventilated rooms and the bad light. Daisy Dineen's tobacco-smoke drifted smotheringly about him. A plaintive minor note seemed to creep into the tinkling chorus of the many busy typewriters behind many little wooden part.i.tions. There seemed something ghoulish and subterranean in the stooped, dimly lighted crooked figures of the patient writers about him. If earth's voracious readers beyond the pale only knew and understood!