Читать книгу The Silver Poppy - Stringer Arthur - Страница 11

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Leave not thy slumbering melodies

To dream too long within thine eyes;

Let not all time thy bosom hold

Song in that overfragrant fold,

Lest thou a tardy gleaner prove

And thy reluctant hand but move

The overgoldened sheaf, to find

Thy tenderest touch can never bind

These thoughts too long unharvested—

Lest on some byway stern be shed

That golden, sad, ungarnered grain,

When thou canst sow nor reap again.

John Hartley, "The Lost Voice."

These souls of ours are like railway bridges—they can be reconstructed even when the trains of temptation and trial are creeping over them.—"The Silver Poppy."

Hartley's first impression of Cordelia Vaughan was a happy confusion of yellows. Her hair, luxuriant and heavily massed on the small head, was a sort of tawny gold. Her skin, which more than once had been described as like old ivory, was in truth neither ivory nor olive, but almost a pale, rose-like yellow with a transfusing warmth to its pallor, as though the lights of an open fire were playing upon it. The eyes themselves seemed, at times, a soft, jade-like yellowish green, muffled, unsatisfied, often mournful, with a latent hint of tragedy, shading off in strong lights to a sea gray; by lamplight showing a deep violet. In moments of excitement or exaltation they were slightly phosphorescent, glowing with an almost animal-like luminosity that temporarily relieved and illumined the ascetically cold chiseling of the face itself, suggesting a possible emotional power that might be stronger at times than the shell which housed it. Yet they were eyes that looked out on the world with quiet, brooding melancholy, wistful in repose, with some fugitive sadness—eyes that suggested, to the young poet at least, some wayward note of autumn, of twilight, of woodland loneliness. They seemed to betoken the dreamer in life more than the pioneer and the actor, in periods of weariness taking on a heavy, languorous, indolent look of half-careless defiance, like a tired and wilful child's.

At one moment, indeed, Cordelia Vaughan reminded Hartley of an old-fashioned tea-rose, quaintly anachronistic in her modish twentieth-century gown; at another moment she brought insistently to his mind the thought of a piece of fragile chinaware with which the slag of every-day life had not yet been infused, sadly to convert it into the ironstone of ordinary mortality.

"I find I am not very strong," she had confessed to him. "My work seems to take a great deal out of me." And the thought that some great internal fire was burning away both the youth and beauty of a pale priestess of Mnemosyne seemed to give to her pallor a new and redeeming touch of poignancy. For in Cordelia's days of weariness envious women, lacking her own strange resiliency of vigor, now and then maliciously declared that on such occasions she "looked her age."

"I am sure I can help you a little," she was saying now, looking up at Hartley. "But first you must tell me something about yourself and your work."

He was but four-and-twenty, and accustomed to the coldness and the reserve of his own older-fashioned countrywomen. So the open warmth and directness of his companion's manner at first embarrassed him a little.

"That's jolly good of you; but really, you know, I haven't done anything worth talking about."

"But you've got it in you; I can see you have," said the other, on her cushion of Princeton orange, looking back unhesitatingly into his searching eyes. "And then Repellier says so, too," she added encouragingly.

For a releasing moment or two the young man basked in the sunlight of the tawny gold hair and the half-pleading eyes, wondering the while why her face should be so wistfully melancholy. It had its allurements, this finding in a great city a strange girl ready to take an interest in one's secret aspirations, a being willing to repose in one such immediate woman's faith. Hartley's four months of loneliness and solitude had been weighing heavily on his exuberant young soul. His first impulse was to pour out his heart to her, little as she might understand, and drain the momentary cup of new-found comradeship to its last dregs. He fumbled irresolutely with his note-book, then finally decided that the doctrine of silence was best. He preferred men, he told himself, who could consume their own smoke.

"You're very kind, and all that," he said almost stiffly, smiling an embarrassed smile, "but we have this promised interview of ours to finish, you know."

He took up his note-book again—which he was still reportorial amateur enough to lean on in such cases.

"I have your first book, and its title, and that you are a Southerner. Your girlhood was spent in Kentucky, but you say your family is really a Virginia one. I have you here as passionately fond of horses and hunting, and all that. Am I right in saying that it was your mother who rode through the Northern lines on a Kentucky thoroughbred to save that Confederate captive's life you spoke of? Good; I'll jot down a note of his name here. I think that will make an excellent little story. Then I have the anecdote about Judge Wilder and The Silver Poppy; and I can make a paragraph of your New York success, and about the novel being dramatized. Oh, yes, you would like the social element brought out, of course. There's just one other thing our editor usually asks for—if you don't mind—the age, you know," he added tentatively.

"I am almost twenty-three," answered the woman.

The young Oxonian buried himself in his note-book.

"Yes, twenty-three," he repeated, as he penciled a note of it. He felt, as he wrote, that for some unknown reason she was laughing at him.

"Why have you never written a second book?" he asked her.

"I am writing one," she answered quietly, he thought rather wearily, as the smile faded from her face.

"Then I'd better put that in."

"If you like," she added, as if uninterested. He liked her better for that second touch of diffidence.

"Now there is just one point I'm not clear about. You mentioned the fact that you and Mrs. Spaulding were about to give a series of receptions—er—literary receptions, I think you called them—during the coming season. Pardon my asking, but is Mrs. Spaulding also devoted to the writing of books?"

"Oh, dear me, no!" she answered. "She's only devoted to the people who happen to be doing the writing."

"Then you are her guest at present?"

"Mrs. Spaulding has asked me to live with her, for the winter, at any rate. She was more than kind, when I came, about fixing up this little den for me to work in. You can see, she has made me only too comfortable."

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 authoress; "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 butterfly 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 butterfly 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 attitude 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 manuscripts 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 gratitude 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.

She had an engagement to dine out, but it could be broken, she said. And with a puzzling resumption of coldness she rang for the Spauldings' footman, who ceremoniously showed her visitor to the door.

With a quickening heart he stepped down into the prim respectability of Seventy-second Street, and in one little hour life seemed to have grown more hopeful to him. For the first time, too, the streets of New York took on a home-like look to his alien eyes.

He walked eastward to the Park, where he caught a south-bound car. From the Circle he could see the long line of Eighth Avenue stretching out into the hazy distance. It lay before him indistinct and golden and misty, with the late afternoon sun slanting transformingly on its dust and smoke and commotion. There was a smell about it that seemed good. It stirred something dormant in him. It seemed like the dust of battle—like the drifting incense of man to all his gods of endeavor. Already a phantasmal shoulder seemed crowding and pushing him out into its untried turbulence.

Hartley decided that Repellier was right when he had said that this great city of the New World could wring out of a man all that was best in him. As he sped southward through the noise and the dust and the crowds, with his thoughts far into the future, he seemed to find some pleasing felicitousness in the very ambiguity of Repellier's phrase. But must the price of success, he asked himself, always be so great?

"Do you know," said Cordelia Vaughan musingly to the Spauldings that night as they drove down through the darkness of Riverside Park on their way home from dining at the Claremont—"do you know, I feel like work, hard work, once more?"