THE SILVER POPPY

A NOVEL

BY ARTHUR STRINGER

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
MCMIII

Copyright, 1903, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Published, August, 1903

CONTENTS

THE SILVER POPPY

CHAPTER I

THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT

From her dark towers she lightly threw
To him three roses red;
He spake no word, but pale he grew,
And bowed his troubled head.

John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."

To make your heart, you must first break your heart! —"The Silver Poppy."

It was a warm, humid evening of early September, and every window and skylight of Repellier's huge studio was open its widest. Between the muffled rhythm and beat of an orchestra the sound of laughter and merriment, and the murmur of many voices, floated out on the hot night air.

Of a sudden the throb of the music and the hum of voices ceased, expectantly, for it had been whispered from group to group that the supreme event of an evening of surprises was about to occur.

Then out from its hiding-place behind a bank of azaleas there floated into the crowded, hushed studio a Venetian gondola of black and gold. Three slim young girls, in the brightest of red and yellow silk, reclined with studied languor on the boat's curved prow, and to the music of guitars suddenly broke out into an Italian boat-song. The strange craft, piloted with much skill by Hanchett, the portrait-painter, glided slowly up and down the great, high-ceilinged room with its rows of canvases and tapestries and Daghestan rugs, with its methodic litter of small-arms and casts and trophies and costumes, cruising cautiously in and out over a flashing, many-tinted course of applauding men and women.

It was not until the barcarole had all but come to a close that the gondola was discovered to be nothing more than Mrs. Alfred Spaulding's motor runabout, deftly enclosed in a canvas-covered framework. And although, at the last, something went wrong with the steering-gear and the automobile had to be shouldered ignominiously back into its corner, it was unhesitatingly agreed that its short-lived cruise had been a triumph of novelty. The patter of a hundred clapping hands showed, indeed, that the bizarrerie of Repellier's entr' acte was a success, and a success with an audience sadly used to novelties.

For of those who stood about and approved so applaudingly many had that day come down from Newport, or reluctantly forsaken the coolness of Sound and seashore, while a diplomat or two—who chanced to have been friends of Repellier abroad—had even journeyed up through the heat from Washington. Yet no one who knew Repellier cared to miss one of this old artist's birthday gatherings. Many among the crowds that swarmed and buzzed about the studio, it is true, were artists and workers whom the fall of the first leaf had brought flocking back to the city, and actresses and leading men whom the rise of the first curtain had brought scurrying back from Europe, though that vaguely denominated element Society itself was not averse to come panting up Repellier's long stairs with a secret sense of bravado in what seemed a decorous enough ascent into the bewildering freedom of Bohemianism.

"But poets are my penchant!" a florid woman with a mannish but kindly face, that blossomed incongruously out of a gown of turquoise-blue, was declaring to John Hartley, who as a young man fresh from Oxford had been brought over to the corner wherein she held sway. It had startled her a little, obviously, to learn that this wide-shouldered young giant was a disciple of what she knew to be an exigent master, the ink-pot.

"But not in the wild state," parried the young man, who still wore his metrical spurs somewhat awkwardly. That night he had felt for the first time that poetry was a thing to be lived down.

"That's just it!" lamented the lady in turquoise-blue. "We can't get at you wild—you're all as unsatisfying as—as the caribou up in the Park. You either get blue-penciled out of existence or pink-teaed and petted out of decency!"

The group of men clustered about Miss Short laughed encouragingly, for she was both well known and well liked, a personage most outspoken of opinion and most prodigal of epigram, relishing not a little her undisputed reputation for bluntness, lamenting even more her lapses into a quixotic soft-heartedness which left her the easy prey of those fellow-workers in a profession where mendicancy is not unheard of. Yet among those who knew her best her flashing wit seemed to save her to the last, for it was, to her, a sort of spade-bayonet with which she in some way entrenched herself when not piercing her enemy.

"You're like our California plums," she went on genially; "you have all the bloom rubbed off before we can get hold of you."

"But that's the trouble with genius in our age," interrupted Henry Slater, who declared himself to be a publisher and therefore to know whereof he spoke; "it has to be picked green, like watermelons, so as not to spoil on the market."

"Still, I don't believe you're spoiled yet, Mr. Hartley. That's why I believe I'm going to like you," Miss Short added, with even more disconcerting candor. "And that's why I'm going to take you off and give you some good advice." There was a murmur of simulated jealousy.

"The first of which should be a word or two about wearing the hair longer," said a tired-looking young man with a Turkish cigarette.

"Right enough, Wheelock," said the publisher. "Heaven has given the snake his rattles, and the poet his hair. So that when we hear the one, Miss Short, and see the other, we all know what to do!"

"And you might drop a hint about the Mills House often being the avenue to the Hall of Fame." It was Clive Hodge, the dramatist, speaking in his startlingly thin and girlish voice.

"And why not a word about sneaking back to London and landing on us again in velvet and ruffles and a pre-Raphaelite get-up—with a hint to the reporters beforehand?"

"And a warning, a sorrowful warning, Miss Short, to cultivate the camel-like capacity for hoofing the Desert of Dreams on, say, three square meals a week."

Miss Short turned and looked at them scornfully.

"All acidulated nonsense, my dears—and there are too many little home-made Aristophaneses running around America already."

Then she turned back, good-naturedly, to Hartley, who had been puzzled just how to take it all. It was, in a way, the first time he had seen Celebrity on parade. There was a self-consciousness and a somewhat bewildering flashiness about it that he had not counted on. He was most eager to appear among them anything but ponderous, yet he felt some insurmountable paling of prejudice to be shutting him out from them.

"I guess that's what you Oxford men call ragging," his champion went on conciliatingly. "But I suppose you've been taught not to take New Yorkers too seriously long before this. You see, we Americans have never learned to irrigate the alkali out of our humor."

She bore him away, like a harbor-tug swinging out a liner, and looked with him from one of the broad-silled studio windows. Hartley was half afraid of women; they saw it, and liked him for it. "It's so much keener chasing the bee than having the bee chase you," the Dean of Worcester's daughter had confessed one afternoon—for now and then the children of wisdom are given to wilfulness—after four fruitlessly challenging hours with him in a punt on the Cherwell.

"Mr. Repellier tells me he knew you in Oxford—he hopes you're going to do something worth while."

Hartley flushed youthfully. He was becoming de-anglicized with difficulty; he was still of that nation where reticence is a convention.

"Yes, I believe I was pointed out to him by the master of my college as the man who was sure to make a mess of life."

Miss Short raised her bushy eyebrows interrogatively.

"He said I had an overdose of ideality to work off, and was hard-headed enough to declare that epicureanism on one hundred and fifteen pounds a year was an absurdity."

"And to show him how wrong he was you're flinging yourself into this silly settlement work over here? Well, I don't see why you crawl into America by our back door!"

Hartley hesitated about explaining that to the destitute this back door came cheaper, for even the one hundred and fifteen pounds were now a thing of the past.

"I'm not really doing settlement work," he corrected, however. "It turned out that I wasn't orthodox enough for our East London Anglican Order to make room for me. Your own university settlement shut its doors on me as an outlander, and the only public institution that offered to take me in was a convalescent home in Harlem; they wanted a janitor. It would never have done, of course, to turn tail at the last moment, so I made the plunge alone. And now I'm simply trying to look at life in the raw; to get near it, you know; and understand it; and make the most of it."

He spoke lightly, but there was an undertone of bitterness in his words, a hint of the claws under the velvet of unconcern. For the first time Miss Short forgot the broad shoulders, and noticed the unlooked-for sternness about the young man's mouth, the hitherto uncaught thin chiseling of the ascetic nose and the puzzling dreaminess of the calm eyes. He was a man who had not found himself.

"But I could never see the use of going about being a student of evil," she said gently enough. "For I assure you you'll never do our East Side any good—though, perhaps, in another way, it may do you a lot of good. Tell me, though, what started you at it?"

"Repellier, more than any one else, I think. He told me to get Americanized, to come out of the mud-pond and get into the rapids. He suspected, you know, that all I did was loaf about Oxford and write radical verse."

"Well, perhaps it's best you did give up your poetry, and all that. We haven't much time for mooning over here, and if you'd come among us with the writing habit you'd soon have seen what a pitiful, pot-boiling lot we are, and you'd have got soured, and gone on one of the dailies, or dropped into translating, or drifted into a syndicate, and ended up by being still another young Israelite looking for an impossible promised land of American literature!"

Hartley winced a little and remained silent.

"It wouldn't have taken you long to find out what a lot of fakirs we are. Don't look shocked—fakirs is the only word; I'm one myself."

"But a fakir never confesses, does he?"

"Fifteen years ago I was earnest, ambitious, penniless, and proud-spirited. I imagined I was going to write the great American novel. Now I'm a silly, egotistical, spoiled old woman, writing advertisements for a Brooklyn soap-maker, publishing Sunday-school stories under seven different names, grinding out short stories and verses that I despise, and concocting a novel now and then that I abominate! That is the crown of thorns the city puts on your head. If I'd only stayed out in my little Wisconsin village, and gone hungry, and been unhappy, and waited, some day I might have written my great book!"

"Then why not go back, and wait, and be unhappy, and hungry, even, and write it?"

"It's too late; I can't. And that's the worst of it all. You see that bent, tired-looking old man sitting by the woman in gray? Well, he's the editor of 'The Republic.' For twenty years now he's been talking about the little peach-farm he's going to buy somewhere back in the New Jersey hills. He's never done it, poor old fellow! And he'll never do it. That's only his fata morgana, for he's foredoomed to die in harness. He couldn't break away from this life if he wanted to; he'd get homesick for the glare and noise and rush and rattle of it in a week, and perish of loneliness. But still he goes grinding away, dreaming about his peach-farm among the hills, and putting it continually off for one year more, and then still one year more. But there—you're beginning to think I'm a regular Jeremiah wailing in the desert of American mediocrity, so I'm going to leave you here alone to think it all over."

From the shadowy quietness of his window-seat Hartley looked out on the shifting, bewildering scene before him, a panorama of movement and color and energy that seemed to lose none of its unrest as midnight approached and waned. The young Oxonian felt that it was all a more or less disturbing glimpse of a new world that was opening up before him. He seemed able to catch at no order or meaning in the trend of it. At his Old World university, and in London itself, he had come more or less in touch with many of the great men of his age. About these Old World men there had always seemed to be an atmosphere—an almost repellent atmosphere—of academic calm, of intellectual reserve. When need be, they seemed able to surround themselves with a cuttlefish cloud of austerity. At that late day, a little to his distress, he was learning that eminence was not always august, that now and then even a lion could gambol. He wondered, in his perplexity, if it was some unexpected and belated blossoming of American humor, of that American humor which still so puzzled him. He did not condemn what seemed the eternal facetiousness of the American—he was still too avid of impression and too open-minded for that—but it disquieted him, and made him feel ill at ease.

Yet, disturbed as he was in spirit, Hartley felt not altogether unthankful for being thrown in with Repellier and his friends. As he looked out on them he even forgot, for the time being, how he had first come to Repellier, a forlorn and somewhat shabbily dressed young foreigner—forgot how the two of them had first met in America, by accident, under the maples of Madison Square. It was the very morning that Hartley had lost the Platt interview for the United News Bureau, and after his polite ejection from the crowded committee rooms in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, when he walked hot and indignant up and down the shade of the open square. There the two friends had met, and Hartley had grimly confessed that his first week on a New York newspaper had resulted in prompt dismissal, that his efforts as a literary free-lance had been equally disastrous, and that he had finally drifted into one of those literary syndicates which dispose of news and delectable sensation in copper-plate, by the column, gratuitously typed and boxed for the rural reader. He also dolefully confessed that he had been sent out to pick up interviews—"With any old guy worth while, only put ginger in 'em," were the somewhat disconcerting instructions to the young man to whom New York still stood as a sealed book. Repellier had thought the thing over for a moment. "Why not come and interview me?" he had asked, though Hartley little dreamed the old artist in doing so was breaking a lifelong principle of reticence. It was this interview which, in the words of his managing editor, had saved his scalp.

Hartley had, accordingly, reason to be drawn toward Repellier, and to nurse as well a vicarious affection for the numerous enough friends of the old artist now gathered about him. The humiliating memory, too, of his own ignominy and the meagerness of his own accomplishments prompted the young scholar from Oxford again and again to tell himself that he was a lucky beggar, that he ought to be only too glad to rub elbows with these obviously successful men and women of the world, even though they did chance, at that particular moment, to be frolicking about like a band of undergraduates after a bump-race, and variedly shocking his youthful sense of propriety.

For the old artist's army of friends had brought along with them armfuls of gifts, many of them costly, many of them ingeniously grotesque, and the traditional formality of presenting these tokens, with many cheers and shouts of laughter and much clapping of hands, again left Hartley puzzling over a phase of American humor which is, perhaps, always incomprehensible to the outlander.

The proceedings began when a slip of a girl—who had been pointed out to Hartley as the author of no less than three lugubrious historical romances—timidly approached the old artist, and blushingly thrust her great armful of Jacque roses into his hands. "There's one for every year," she said prettily enough, "and one over, sir, to grow on." Then the white-haired old editor of "The Republic" came marching up with a toy drum, beating a vigorous tattoo thereon, and with even more solemnity bestowed it in turn upon the artist. After him came an attenuated novelist in spectacles, bearing an old horseshoe and a chocolate pig. A stout, florid-looking man, with all the earmarks of the musician, soberly produced a huge tin trumpet, and a demure and quite shy-looking young lady, who had been pointed out as Frohman's new leading woman, tripped over to her host with a bag of pink candies and a jumping-jack. Of the agility of the jumping-jack she gave a sober and conscientious exhibition, after which came a Noah's ark from some one else, with a solemn caution that the paint was not to be sucked off, and then a portrait of Repellier himself, done in yellow and indigo blue, with cotton-wool hair attached to the canvas and eyes that rolled automatically.

Then the entire gathering lined up in a final laughing procession, and the horn was tooted, and the drum was beaten, and the orchestra struck up For he's a Jolly Good Fellow, and Repellier himself was taken possession of, and carried triumphantly off on the shoulders of the men. They hoisted him bodily up into a chair on the studio table, and all joined hands and danced round him, men and women alike, as children dance about a May-pole. Then they crowded in on him and clamored for a speech. It was not a very good speech, and it had many interruptions, but it was delivered in time and agreed to, point by point, and vigorously applauded. The great depleted punch-bowls were brought over to the table, and glasses, cups, vases, and steins were seized on for a final toast, in which the artists themselves led, with up-poised glasses, singing the while the reminiscent lines of a Parisian cabaret song. Then the men filed past, one by one, all wringing his hand, some patting him familiarly and affectionately on his stooping old shoulder. Then a body of women and girls suddenly seized on him, and amid hostile demonstrations and much mockery of envy, fluttered up boldly, one by one, and kissed him fearlessly. Then back behind its bank of azaleas the muffled orchestra once more broke out with Auld Lang Syne, and they sang it together, with joined hands, till there was just the suspicion of a tear or two in Repellier's kindly gray eyes as he turned to the bewildered Hartley and said it was all very, very nearly worth growing old for.

Then somebody discovered a way to the roof, and nothing would do but every one must go climbing and scrambling gaily up a rickety old ladder to the fresh night air, where Hartley noticed that a number of the women were taking advantage of the gloom of the housetop to steal a quiet puff or two at a cigarette. And while he was noting this lamentable lapse from what was fit and proper somewhere in the half light behind him he heard a woman's voice say: "Mr. Repellier, won't you introduce me to that nice, big, clean-looking boy you have here?"

There was a moment's silence, while Repellier seemed to be looking down at her.

"If you promise not to break his heart, Miss Vaughan."

A woman's low, quiet little laugh drifted softly through the night air. Hartley tried to look at the Great Bear, and not listen to more.

"Here's my hand on it." Then the jesting voice grew suddenly serious. "But women's hearts never break nowadays, do they? They only wither." Hartley, who had grown hot and cold through his six feet of embarrassed bone and nerve, was dimly conscious the next minute of Repellier's leading over to him a slim-looking figure in yellow.

Women accept the confusion of stalwart manhood, it has been said, as the profoundest tribute to their own power; and after Hartley had murmured something about the honor of meeting so eminent a novelist and in his honest embarrassment blurted out that he had often seen her name on the city ash-barrels, Cordelia Vaughan forgot her hazily indefinite yet deep-rooted hatred of everything English, and waited a moment for his next words.

"They've dramatized a book of mine—that explains the ash-barrels," she explained deprecatively, seeing that he stood silent, laughing at her contempt of the ash-barrels. Hartley liked her the better for that touch of modesty.

Her eyes had followed Repellier's retreating figure through the gloom. "Do you know, I always felt half afraid of Mr. Repellier, in some way? I wonder why it is?"

"We always are half afraid of great men; they're so apt to be rugged and lonely."

"Yes, rugged and lonely, like lighthouses—but very useful."

Hartley waited for her voice again. By moonlight all waters and all women may look the same, but Luna had no such leveling power, he knew, with voices.

"He confessed to me you were the Hartley who wrote a study of slum life for Stetson's," the flute-like contralto was saying again. "Then you do write?"

The darkness of the night made it impossible for him to catch even the slightest outline of her face, but as he listened to her gloom-encompassed voice he wondered, in a sudden inner fury, just what she had meant by calling him clean-looking. He had a sense, nevertheless, of losing himself in the sweep of eddying breakers.

"It always seemed to me," the soft contralto was murmuring once more, "that writers and artists should never be viewed at close range. They're like sugar; they should be left to sweeten life, without being put under the microscope, to show all their poor little writhing realities. So in one way it's just as well that we two will never know each other when next we meet."

He felt certain, as she ended with her warm little laugh, that she was looking up at him through the darkness, and he vehemently asked himself if she was still making fun of him.

"I wonder if we two will know each other again?"

"I want to, so much!" said Hartley. He was very human.

"Then you may interview me," she said gaily, infecting him with the sudden romance of the situation. "Then you can tear me to pieces afterward." And they both laughed youthfully as he told her of his last assignment, a request to demand five of New York's most eminent men to draw a pig with their eyes shut, for an illustrated page of the United News Bureau.

They grew serious once more, and he asked if there was nothing in which he could help her.

"Couldn't I, in any way?" he begged, the darkness helping him out.

"Would you?" she said, quite gravely now, leaning imperceptibly closer to him in the muffling twilight. Her flash of woman's intuition had not misled her; there was much about him that she liked.

"Won't you let me?" he asked again even more earnestly. He was still half afraid it was all mere play, but his artistic soul's sense of dramatic values chained him to the part.

"Yes," she said simply, "I will." Her voice carried with it a timorous and tacit something, a something which flashed over the heads of a hundred dancing maskers in the hall of the Capulets when a young Montague first met the glance of his Juliet.

They shook hands in parting, and brief as that hand-clasp was, it appeared portentous to both of them. To Hartley himself it seemed almost as if his fingers had pressed the hidden button of an incandescent light, for, at the moment, he noticed the fleeting, half-phosphorescent luminousness of the other's eyes, even through the dusk that clung about them and divided them. Then the young woman gathered up her rustling yellow skirts and hurried down the ladder to join the others, taking themselves off by twos and threes.

CHAPTER II

THE SPIRIT OF THE CITY

All clad in mail he rode for Christ,
And his strait pathway trod;
Nor scorned he to be sacrificed
For his most jealous God.

John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."

Our Manhattans of the mind always have their Boweries of the blood.—"The Silver Poppy."

"Wonderful, isn't it?" cried Hartley, leaning out of the wide-silled studio window where Repellier sat smoking wearily. He sniffed eagerly at the warm night air, with its mingled odors of asphalt and dust and cooling masonry.

The last of the evening's guests were gone. Hartley had been only too glad to linger on for a while with Repellier alone, seizing as an excuse the chance for one last look at his Motherhood picture, which was to be carried off to Paris by the next steamer. It was a canvas in the artist's newest style, a Hester Street mother suckling her child in the dusk of a little shaded doorstep, brooding there grave-eyed, deep-bosomed, and calm-souled, while the turgid life of the slums flowed back and forth about her, unfelt, unthought of, unseen.

Now they both looked down in silence to where the city lay beneath them, a garden of glimmering lights—pearl and opal and amethyst, with a flickering ruby or two in the remoter velvety blackness.

"Yes," said the older man, "it is wonderful."

"And what a place you have here to work! Where one can be alone, and yet dip into life, just as one would dip one's wrist into a stream."

The dull sounds of the midnight streets, broken, as they looked, by the sharp clanging of an ambulance bell, the rumbling of car-wheels mingled with the rattle of a pavement sweeper and the intermittent patter of hoofs on the asphalt came up faintly through the odorous, calm air. There was a mysterious charm about the great, incongruous, huddled city, picturesque in its very defiance of symmetry and beauty.

"That's Broadway, isn't it," said Hartley, pointing with his finger, "still looking like a Milky Way of lights?"

"Yes; and those glowing crowns of light are the roof-gardens; and there's Fifth Avenue, spangled with its twin rows of white electric globes, for all the world like a double thread of pearls hanging down the breast of the city. Those crawling snakes with the golden scales are the L trains. That cobweb of light is Brooklyn Bridge, and those little ruby fireflies are the ferries on the North River."

"And that crown of old gold and rose stands over Brooklyn, I know, and the lower bay."

An unknown city had always held vague terrors for Hartley; once, even, as a child, he had burst into sudden tears over an old atlas of the world; "it was so big and lonesome," he had tried to tell his uncomprehending nurse. But now, as he followed Repellier's finger with his eyes, he was dimly conscious of that sense of fugitive terror lifting and drifting away from the sea of scattered lights beneath him. For a moment he felt more drawn toward the city than of old, though his first vivid, photographic impression of it floated mockingly back through his mind.

The smell of the willows of the Isis and the hyacinths of Holywell had scarcely fallen from him as he walked those first few miles of the New World—a New World which seemed to his timid and homesick eyes to be but streets of chaotic turbulence through which pulsed the ceaseless cry of Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! He recalled the blind beggar with his quick, shrill cry of "Please help the blind! Please help the blind!" tapping hideously along the crowded pavement. He remembered the groups of sallow-faced men, young, yet already old, lounging about the entrances of what seemed countless hotels; the cluster of swarthy, foreign-looking workmen tearing up the asphalt under the strong glare of gasoline torches; the cars and hansoms that rattled past; the two express-wagons that crashed together and locked wheels amid curses and loud cries; the pedlers and news-boys and fruit-venders barking and crying through the streets; the bilious-hued moon shining brokenly down through air heavy with dust; the serrated line of the distant sky-scrapers that seemed to bite up at the darkness like teeth; and the white glare of the electric lights bunched so alluringly about the gilt-lettered, gaudy-faced corner saloons. It was not until afterward that he found he had traversed but one rough rind of the city itself; but it had all seemed so glaring, so blatant, so hopelessly unlovely to his bewildered eyes, that with the bitterness of a second Job he had asked: Is this, then, the soul of their republicanism? Is this the America of which the Old World had dreamed such envious, foolish, happy dreams?

Leaning there out of the lofty studio window, the young alien sighed with the burden of his youthful disappointments and his great things still undone. He looked less hopelessly down at the lights of a city which he had grown, in a softer mood, to think of as more beautiful.

Then he glanced at Repellier once more. This quiet man beside him, he felt, must have dreamed his way even more slowly into the heart of that turbulent life. For from a withered old hack writer on his news bureau Hartley had picked up a fragmentary story to the effect that Repellier had first come to New York a broken-hearted man, in search of a runaway sister. She had killed herself, he remembered the story went, when Repellier had tried to take her home, for she had passed through things that are seldom forgiven, and never forgotten. Recalling this, Hartley peered through the gloom at the other man, as though to read his face more closely. But the past seemed to have left no trace.

"That disorderly, happy-go-lucky tangle and snarl of lights on your left," his companion was saying quietly, "is your East Side, and that sinister scar of brighter light across it like a sword-gash is the Bowery itself. You can see how different they are to these prim rows on the West Side!"

"Which stand for happiness, and, accordingly, more or less for dulness."

"There's a good deal of nonsense talked and written about the slums, Hartley, and they're wept and prayed and shuddered over, through lorgnettes, but, after all, you hear about as much laughing on Hester Street as you do on West End Avenue."

Hartley recalled the sounds that crept up to his little tenement room of a hot midsummer night. "And quite as much weeping."

"Perhaps a little more, for the Submerged Tenth has never been taught to nurse its sorrows in silence. But it's all taught me one big lesson—it's a truth so obvious that it puzzles me to think it should come so late in life. Wherever it beats," and here the older man's voice dropped into a sudden deeper tone of earnestness, "the old unchanging human heart runs with the same old unchanging human blood, and aches with the same old unchanging human aches. It's such a simple old truth, though, the world never accepts it."

The younger man shook his head in vague dissent. The even, dispassionate tones of this man who had looked deep into life fell like a cold hand on the throat of his lighter-pinioned ideality.

"The slum sins most," he protested, "and therefore suffers most."

"It sins openly, and suffers openly."

The younger man, looking down over the dim city, with his chin on his hand, did not reply. He was saying to himself that they had not taught them these things over in Oxford, and was wondering how often, ages and ages ago, in old Athenian gardens, some young Platonist and some aged Aristotelian had wrangled over the same ancient problem. Through the murmurous night air he dreamily noted the creeping hansoms and the crawling L trains and the street-cars, the minute corpuscles of the now languid life-blood with which the huge city would soon run so feverishly.

The unrest, the haste, the movement of the momentarily lulled life beneath him took on a strangeness, a mystery, an inscrutable element that filled him with a wordless disquiet. What was the end of it all? And what did it all stand for? And whither was it trending? His mind went back to one calm night when he and another stood under the white Italian stars, up under the olives and chestnuts of Fiesole, and asked the same questions of life. Then his thoughts drifted again to his last days in Oxford, when he and a young scholar of Magdalen went out by night to Boars Hill to listen to the nightingales. From the shadowy hillside of the quiet wood they had watched the lights of Oxford swarming luminously in the dark little valley of the Isis below, glimmering through the humid English spring night like pearls in a goblet of wine. How strangely full and deep and good life had seemed to them that lyric night, as they walked home through the moonlight, with all the world before them!

But to Hartley the great restless New World city seemed so bewilderingly different. The spirit of it was so elusive! It so engulfed one with its passionate movement! It made man such a microscopic unit! It held life so cheap, and youth so lightly! He had been nearly four months in New York; it had swallowed him up as a maelstrom might, and he had accomplished nothing, or what stood as good as nothing. He remembered half bitterly how he had broken disconsolately away from the twilight languor of his sleepy old university town, and with his few carefully hoarded pounds had turned to America, young yet already old, hopeful and yet already heart-weary, in search of more strenuous effort and struggle. That London evening paper which at times printed his copy, he recalled, had rather grandiloquently announced that Mr. John Hartley, M.A., was to do for the East Side of New York what Besant had done for the East Side of London, and even ventured to prophesy that a great number of Mr. Hartley's friends and admirers would await his book with interest. From the first he felt that there had been something ominous in that initial deception. And now he had foundered in the very sea from which he was to sweep both gold and glory—even, as he told himself, after tossing overboard his jetsam of undergraduate dreams. Now, indeed, he was thankful enough for his daily bread; and there were, he knew, hundreds and thousands like him—thousands of aspiring men and women whom the great city had called from the towns and farms of the West, from the wide Dominion above the Lakes, from the South, from the Old World itself.

As he gazed wonderingly down through the darkness he thought of the friendlier, more intimate voice that had groped out through the housetop gloom to him that night. He wondered into what corner of the sleeping vastness of the city that wistful voice had crept. The mere thought and memory of it seemed to give a warm spot to the meaningless, shadowy solitude beneath him, like one small ember in a waste of ashes.

He turned to Repellier.

"Who is Cordelia Vaughan?" he asked.

Repellier drew back from the window and stood in the dim light of the studio lamps.

"Miss Vaughan—Cordelia Vaughan—is a young Kentucky woman who writes books, and I understand one of her dramatized novels is soon to be put on the stage. People are petting her—petting her a good deal too much, this season—but still, she seems to stand it well."

"I suppose she has written quite a bit?" Hartley casually inquired.

"I've known her only since last year, and I don't read, you know. But they tell me she's clever—when she writes, I mean, for most of these bookish women, unfortunately, are trimmed back and stunted for the sake of the fruit."

Hartley looked round at Repellier, missing from the other's voice some note of enthusiasm which he had expected to be there. The older man's succeeding question, however, bridging as it apparently did some disrupted line of thought, adequately accounted for his judicial coldness of tone.

"Are you getting broken in to work over here, Hartley—to good, hard work?"

The younger man smiled. With him Euterpe and Eros, obviously, must not house together.

"Jolly well broken in," was all he answered.

"Work is our eternal redemption," Repellier said, with his hand on the younger man's shoulder. Then he sighed wearily. "But to a good many of us Americans a life of hurry, I guess, has become the only life of ease."

CHAPTER III

AN INTERLUDE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The lute forgetful of its note;
The wing remembering not to fly
In some sweet flight's mad ecstasy;
The heart that failed to carve the form
Since once the musing soul grew warm
With love for her who sat for him
Of too alluring moonbeam limb.

John Hartley, "The Lost Voice."

"The defeated heart," sighed the woman in black, "has the habit of burying its own dead!"—"The Silver Poppy."

For one virtue alone Cordelia Vaughan was looked on as a rare acquisition by Mrs. Alfred Spaulding. That virtue was her young ward's punctilious attention to all those social duties with regard to which she herself was prone to be deplorably careless. With the accession of Cordelia, therefore, she reveled in a vicarious ceremoniousness that wiped out many discomforting memories, ranging all the way from forgotten dinners to neglected dentist's engagements.

It was but a little after eleven, on the morning following Repellier's birthday gathering, when Cordelia Vaughan alighted from the Spauldings' brougham and once more climbed the long stairs to the old artist's studio. Both she and Mrs. Spaulding had begged to come and help Repellier "clear up." Mrs. Spaulding, however, no longer dazzled by the glow that radiated, to her eyes, from the brow of that great artist, found in the depths of a soft pillow and a darkened room that the spirit was willing but the flesh lamentably weak. She told Cordelia to run along by herself; she had a headache to sleep off.

And as Cordelia mounted lightly to the upper regions of Repellier's workrooms she felt in no way sorry for the promise. Some rudimentary simplicity in her character could always blithely sweep away the cobwebs of either propriety or impropriety—cobwebs so potentially tantalizing to one less ingenuous. Her late hours, too, seemed to have left no depression of spirits, no reaction of ennui, and she floated in before Repellier bright, buoyant, smiling, like a breath of the open morning itself, a confusion of mellow autumnal colors in her wine-colored gown and hat of roses and mottled leaves.

But before she had so much as drawn off her gloves—and they were always the most spotless of white gloves—she glanced about in mock dismay and saw that the last of the righting-up had already been done. There was not even a book for her to replace, or a plaque to tuck away. She pouted at this, prettily and girlishly; she had hurried away from her coffee and rolls just to help him.

Repellier, in his lighter moods, had an affectionate and quite fatherly way about him that was all-conquering. He penitently pinned a long-stemmed American Beauty rose on her wine-tinted gown, and shaking his head dolefully over the color combination, replaced it with a cluster of gardenias. She fluttered femininely to a mirror, to view the result of the added touch, and then bowed her gratitude with arch solemnity. She was not slow to realize the lighter mood in Repellier, and was glad of it. Then, talking the while of the night before, she went over to his book-table, and hovered restlessly over the different volumes scattered about, scarcely knowing just how to wear the conversation through its tides of change into that particular slip where it was to be hawsered. To Repellier she seemed like a humming-bird darting about a little high-walled garden, ready to be off like a flash when the last flower had been rifled.

He watched her, smiling, while she hovered on from topic to topic, looking up at him now and then; now and then nervously turning over the books on the table before her, and wondering within herself just why it was this man had always vaguely intimidated her. She was about to open her lips when he suddenly stopped her.

"Did you know that that's Hartley's book you have there?"

For one quick, searching second she looked up at him, and then casually opened the little volume upon which her hand had fallen by accident. Repellier had once thought her the sort of woman that never blushed.

"'Atalanta and Other Poems, by John Hartley,'" she read aloud idly, with raised eyebrows. "And a dedication as well: 'To C. M.' Did he leave it last night, or is he the kind that always sends them round next day?"

"Hartley's not that sort at all."

The woman slipped into a chair, and with her chin on her hand, meditatively turned over a page or two. Then she closed the book nonchalantly, almost disdainfully. She confessed that she had no particular love for poetry.

"Tell me about him, though," she finally said quite seriously and quite openly. "I'd like to know something about him—all about him."

Repellier, who had been adjusting a great paint-besplattered easel, came over and took up the thin, green volume.

"This is what I want to knock out of him," he said, tapping the little book, "for a while, at least. And I think, Miss Vaughan, you are the happy possessor of a lot I'd like to pound into him."

"And that is——"

"Oh, I mean poise and balance—good, practical judgment."

"Thank you." She caught up her skirts and courtesied.

Repellier raised a deprecating hand, and laughed.

"Well, you know what I mean. And that's why I'm glad you like him."

"I hardly said that."

"I mean all he wants is ballasting with a little of that business spirit which we call American push."

"Thanks," she murmured. "But tell me about him."

"Well, there isn't much to tell—at least not much that I know."

"But you knew him abroad?"

"Yes, I met him two years ago at Lady Meredith's—those were the Woodstock Merediths of Meredith Hall. I was doing a portrait of Connie Meredith—that's the 'C. M.' of the book—and he used to tramp over from Oxford now and then. His father was Sir Harry Hartley, who was killed in the Dunstable Hunt four or five years ago. Hartley himself was wasting his time about Oxford, unsettled, unsatisfied, impecunious, and unrecognized. As I said, I saw a good deal of him at the Merediths'. He was to have married the girl—it was she who gave me that volume—but she was always delicate. In fact, they had to pack her off to the south of England, and then to Italy. She died at Fiesole. On my way back from the Continent I ran across Hartley again, and asked him why he didn't try America."

"And will he ever do anything—anything worth while, I mean?"

She still held the thin, green volume of verse in her hand, almost contemptuously—suddenly depressed in spirits, she could not fathom why.

"He has already done something worth while."

"What is it?"

"Small things, I mean, but of the right sort."

"I never heard of him before," murmured the woman, closing the volume with a gentle little snap of finality.

"But you will," said Repellier as his guest slowly drew on her white gloves and arranged her hair before his mirror as she passed.

"You will," he repeated as he swung his easel around to the light, and opening a door on his left called his model in for what was to be a morning of work for both of them.

CHAPTER IV

THE WORLD AND THE WOMAN

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?"

CHAPTER V

BETWEEN BLOSSOM AND FRUIT

Take heed, for the sake of your soul,
Of the song that the city sings—
Of its bantering lip, and its bowl,
And its flutter of fallen wings.

John Hartley, "The Siren City."

These Lilliputian temptations—they remind us that the threads which kept Gulliver down were very small threads, but then there were so many of them!—"The Silver Poppy."

"How much space shall I give Miss Vaughan?" Hartley asked of his editor. It was the end of the day following the interview, and the gentleman addressed was enjoying what he called a dry smoke, contentedly chewing a black cigar-end into obviously delectable rags and shreds. He allowed his questioner to wait for a minute or two before answering.

"Who's Miss Vaughan?"

Just who that lady was he knew quite well, but he took a secret delight in baiting his probationers—and Hartley above all others.

"She is the lady," and the irate young man laid particular stress on the word, "the lady whom I suggested to you as being more or less before the public, as you may recall—the lady who wrote The Silver Poppy, and——"

"Yes, I know all that. 'Bout how much time did you give her yesterday? The whole afternoon, I guess, wasn't it?"

"I don't see what that has to do with my question," retorted Hartley.

"You don't, eh! H'm; I guess you don't." He seemed bent on provoking beyond endurance the young man with the accent. And the young man with the accent could foresee that it was going to lead to but one end. He swallowed his wrath, however, and his editor swung round in his swivel chair, and replacing his cigar in its accustomed corner of a mouth that seemed to Hartley belligerently dog-like, looked at him shrewdly.

"Give 'er half a column," he said sharply.

"That's not very much, is it?"

"What d'you want to give 'er?"

"It's outside work, you know—work that I'm doing quite gratuitously," he added significantly.

"Well, how much d'you want?"

"Two columns of brevier—without the adornment of the usual line-cut."

The character of the line-cuts used by the bureau, seldom remarkable for their beauty, was a standing joke about the office. The editor smiled enigmatically.

"All right; go ahead and kill your friend with kindness if y' want to." For as a young man he himself had been a dramatic reporter in his time and more than once had been dazzled by the passing refulgence of musical comedy stars—stars with hair not half so golden as Cordelia Vaughan's.

Hartley hurried home through the dingy lower-town streets, turning over many new thoughts in his mind. A revulsion of feeling had come over him. He had not as yet read The Silver Poppy, but he took a sudden, passing, unreasonable dislike to it, wondering within himself how much Cordelia Vaughan's success had been due to caprice and accident.

His thoughts went back to her luxuriously furnished little study, with the writing-desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the little gold pen which she had proudly pointed out to him as her mascot—the only pen with which she could compose—the trim rows of handsomely bound books of reference, the huge dictionary on its highly polished revolving stand, the current magazines all so temptingly at hand, the quiet atmosphere and seclusion of the place that in itself was a stimulus to creation. He thought, not a little wistfully, how good it must be to have a circle of intelligently appreciative friends, an audience to whom to direct one's sincerest and best work, and, above all, to nurse to one's breast the knowledge of some tangible influence in the circle of letters. He remembered that she had told him her gift for writing had come to her unheralded and unlooked for; that one morning she had wakened and rubbed her eyes and found herself famous. How much of it, he wondered, lay in sheer luck, or, at most, in happy coincident? He recalled, not unenviously, his own years of ceaseless effort that had culminated in nothing. It was a gift, this swinging round to the tides of the time, this writing with the ear to the ground. With that gift he felt he might never have been left drifting so aimlessly and so fruitlessly about a world in which there still seemed to be for him no ultimate islands of contentment.

He tried to solace himself with the thought that his failure was the result of his years of undergraduate abstraction; that it was the penalty of the too cloistral life.

The taste of those days when the world has failed to find youth because youth has not yet found itself is unspeakably bitter in the mouth of the young man who knows his strength. And Hartley, striding homeward through the hot, noisy, evening streets, was not altogether happy.

As he noticed, on the stroke of six, the warehouses and shops and factories of the lower East Side disgorging their tides of hurrying, bustling men and women and boys and girls, some alleviating sense of the nobility of labor crept over him, like a breath of cool air from the river front.

In this mood he climbed his steep stairs, and sat down at his little deal table, glowing with the ideas that flowered out of his touch of revolt. The author of The Silver Poppy would have opened her gray-green eyes in wonder had she read those sheets which he flung off under his quick, nervous pen. How were these women, he asked himself as he wrote, who wasted so lightly when there were so many in want, how were these women who knew nothing of real life, rustling so well clad through their softly lighted libraries, to know anything of the great tragic, turgid, naked world, of the storm and stress of life? What did they, sitting secluded behind their roses, know of the dust and tumult and tragedy of the street? Let them go out and suffer and learn, and if through hunger and tears and loneliness they found some hidden meaning and purpose in the dark undercurrents of adversity and defeat, then let them in all patience and humility speak what they had to say. Willingly enough the world would listen, without their thousand and one artifices to catch its languid ear. But until then they should get no help from him.

And when he had finished his article on Cordelia Vaughan he sat back in his hard chair and felt more at peace with the world and with himself. He felt, as he glanced around at his broken walls and his ragged furniture, that he had justified himself; for he was at heart still buoyant and young. It is a sorrowful day when the eyes of youth can gaze openly into the eyes of defeat.

Hartley, as a graduate of Oxford and a regenerator of mankind, could not boast unduly of his New World lodgings—he had not yet learned to speak of them as apartments. He still wrote to three or four of his older college friends from time to time, and to these old friends he half-heartedly enlarged on how a few months in the poorer quarters would help him on with his work. He said nothing, however, of the advantages of a furnished room at three dollars a month, with a shop conveniently below where Italian bread—which was perhaps tough of fiber, but still marvelously sustaining—could be bought for three cents a loaf, and coffee at two cents a cup. He did not confess either that there were days when the sights and smells of the place sickened him, and times when the wailing of small children and sick babies kept him feverishly awake through the long, hot summer nights, and the sounds of brutal quarrels drove him distracted into the open streets for hours at a time. Even with himself he still tried to excuse his unsightly surroundings by the sophistry that the stern quest of experience demanded such environment, that these were the refining fires which were to burn away the dross of his dilettanteism.

Hartley had taken up his abode in the very heart of the lower East Side. On that part of Division Street where the Second Avenue elevated railway curls bustlingly into Chatham Square, very much as a busy little brook curls round a bit of rock, stands one of those crowded hives of toiling men and women known as a sweat-shop. In a little back room at the top of this building Hartley subletted his New York home. The jail-like doorway of this building opened on a street of eternal twilight—a street barred above like a dungeon by the iron girders of the overhead railway, through which only the noonday sun could fret for an hour or two. It was a tunnel of a thousand odors, and over it whimpered and frolicked the elevated trains as they went scurrying up to the open sunlight of the higher city.

Long before the sun crept up over the East River this tenement hummed like a beehive with its hundreds of busy sewing-machines, and in and out of its gloomy doorway women came and went at all times of the day with great bundles poised on their heads. It seemed from without only a gloomy building of windows and red bricks, with crazily littered fire-escapes breaking the line of its dull walls. At its center, strangely enough, it formed a little triangular court, after the fashion of its sisters of the Old World, and round this little inner court rose dilapidated wooden galleries, tier after tier, until only a pitiable three-cornered scrap of blue sky could be seen at the top on clear days. At the bottom of this light-well, even gloomier and more odorous than the street without, there was always a tang of chloride of lime in the air. The broken flagstones forming its floor sloped to the center, where a hydrant-pump stood in a pool of tainted water. From each gallery of the court radiated a number of passages—many-sinked, low-ceilinged passages, tunneling through mysterious twilight for hundreds of feet, and opening through many narrow doors into hundreds of fetid and overcrowded rooms.

In these rooms hundreds of patient backs bent over an equal number of pieces of sewing, most of them unbending only to eat and sleep, for all day long and far into the night sometimes the worn stairs creaked with tired feet as the bundle carriers went back and forth and the busy machines purred and whined for rest. There, kenneled in one small room, Hartley had found that men and women worked and slept and ate, there children were born and old men died, and young faces grew white and young backs grew bent. But the busy machines knew no rest, and night after night the young scholar from the city of bells and towers had thrown himself on his hard little bed with the rumble of their wheels in his ears. Yet more than once, too, in his darkest days, the mysterious companionship of those unseen laborers had strangely buoyed up his failing heart. There were other times, though, when he felt that the depressing poverty which so vividly surrounded him had momentarily paralyzed his creative faculties, that the hardness of life as it lay about him had taken the edge from his once keen fancy, that in time he was to be crushed, Tarpeia-like, by the very hand that was to have given him so much.

But there was something of the stoic in his make-up. He bore it as best he could, grimly chewing the cud of Repellier's advice that it would all prove a good antidote for Oxford. He still kept a keen eye open for the more picturesque elements in the life about him, and often took a quiet delight in his neighbors' somber gaiety. For with all its long hours of work Hartley had noticed that the tenement was not without its scenes of fleeting merriment. If the hive had its dark days little Pietro Salvatore still whistled away as merrily as ever while he sewed his buttons on boys' knickerbockers, fourteen to the piece, hemmed and ribboned at the back, for eleven cents the pair. And there were sly meetings and coy love-makings and gay marryings, and singing in many different tongues, and the feast-days and the christenings and the noisy enough children always playing about the dim corridors, and pale-faced girls flirting from the little wooden balconies, and the strains of concertinas and fiddles from open windows at night, and shrill laughter through the gloom when the midsummer heat drove the sleepers, men and women and children alike, up on the roof top in search of a breath of air—but always, everywhere, the dull undertone of the machines that buzzed so feverishly away. And there were little parties that sallied forth, all decked in hired finery, for a chowder party on the Sound, and there were excursions off to Paradise Park on a bright Sunday, and every now and then wonderful spreads of which the outside world knew nothing—feasts of green peppers, and grated Parmesan, and freckled bologna, and salame, and lupine beans, and macaroni cooked in oil, and spiced Neapolitan meal cakes, with maraschino sometimes, and fine rat-tail cigars, at a penny apiece, for the men at the finish.

Yes, indeed, there were feasts at times, wonderful feasts, that many a night made the disconsolate young scholar on the top floor envy his humbler-minded neighbors. And there were gardens, too—gardens that could be taken in when the policeman ordered it—tufts and shreds of green in tin cans and starch-boxes, as green almost as the grass in the Park. And there was color, bless you—color enough to dazzle one's eyes—on a windy Monday morning, when the pulley-lines that stretched from the windows fluttered and swayed with the week's myriad-tinted washings. But it was all strangely and sadly new to Hartley.

CHAPTER VI

THE TWO VOICES

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.