The Silver Poppy Part 15

Scarcely a word had pa.s.sed between them until Cordelia had come to the draping of what Mrs. Spaulding had called the Turkish corner. Above a broad, low divan two heavy pistoleted Arabian spear-heads had been hung crosswise from the ceiling. Over these a pair of Bagdad _portieres_ were to be draped.

Standing on a chair, Cordelia tried twice to reach over the spear-heads, but they were too high for her.

"Let me try," said Hartley. He hung them, but they were badly draped, and had to be taken down again. Cordelia pointed out to him for the second time that there was one particular way in which they had to be swung. She herself made a last effort to reach the horizontal spear-bar.

In doing so her hair tumbled down over her face. She tossed it back with her free hand, and looked down at him for a moment, questioningly.

"Oh, I know!" she cried, with a sudden illuminating thought. "I know!

_You_ lift me up."

She laughed with childish _abandon_. He took her fragile, sinuous, pulsing body in his arms--she was very light--and lifted her till she was high above his head. She was laughing, and found it hard to balance her body with his arms so tightly about her knees. The _portiere_ fell from her hands, and lay in a huddled ma.s.s at their feet.

She fought bitterly with herself, in the s.p.a.ce of that one short gasp, but something--she scarcely knew what--confounded her better judgment.

She looked one second down into his white face and their eyes met. Then her body drooped limply down to him, deeper and deeper, into his arms; and her head, with all its wealth of tumbled gold, fell just over his shoulder, against his face.

The next moment _portiere_ and the world were forgotten, and without knowing it she was offering him her mouth, and he was holding her limp and sobbing body close in his arms and kissing her warm lips again and again.

She struggled feebly against him at first, and tried to say that she must go. But the speech died down into a murmur, and she could only sob weakly:

"I can't help it! I can't help it!" For one last moment she panted to be free, and then the violet eyelids sank wearily over the happy eyes, and she lay even closer, and very still, in his arms.

A sudden knock on the outer door startled them both back to a forgotten world. She caught at her hair, and tried to twist it decently about her head once more. He went to the door and opened it.

It was Thomas, the coachman, come for Miss Cordelia.

CHAPTER XV

THE MILL AND ITS GRIST

She dreamed not of the fight he fought Till lo, he crept again To her, with all his vows forgot---- Then, then she knew his pain.

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."

Humor is the tail to the kite of affection.--"The Silver Poppy."

"Oh, I'm disgusted with myself, with everything," said Hartley, impatiently going to his window, where through the drifting rain he could see the misty gray Palisades of the Hudson and a little scattered fleet of sailing craft dropping down with the tide. Then he went as impatiently back to his chair again.

"What's gone wrong?" asked Repellier, who had run up for a few minutes when the darkness of the day had put a stop to his work to see how Hartley was taking to his new quarters. "Is it the engine itself out of order? Are you feeling fit, and all that?"

"Confound it, I don't know _what_ it is!"

"You're comfortable enough here?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"No disquieting neighbors?" asked the other, casually glancing at a new photograph of the author of The Silver Poppy in a heavy silver frame that stood on Hartley's mantelpiece. "You know you're too young to indulge in the luxuries--just yet."

"How do you mean?" asked Hartley, pulling himself together.

"I thought you might be falling in love. Young men have a habit of doing that, you know."

"No, no; it's not that."

He glanced up and caught the quizzical look in his friend's eyes. "In love, Repellier? I--in love! I couldn't be if I wanted to. I--without a farthing, with a name to make, and a living to make first."

"The living doesn't count; that's a mere accident--with the artist, I mean."

"Oh, yes; you successful fellows, who have covered yourself with glory--you find it easy enough to cover yourself with--with flannel and fine linen."

"But work only for the glory, the flannel and fine linen will take care of itself."

"It sounds very pretty, but it keeps one--well, rather lonely and hungry."

"Yes, but those things are all grist to your mill in the end.

Disappointment, loneliness, sorrow, every shred of experience, if you only look at it in the right way, it's all your grist--if you're the bigger and truer artist." Repellier himself went to the window and looked out for a moment before he turned and spoke again. "And, by the way, do you know the receipt for preserving a poet? It's very simple; an empty stomach, an empty pocketbook, and an empty bed."

"It doesn't always hold," demurred Hartley.

"No, but as a rule the less Laura and the more sonnets, my young Petrarch."

Before Repellier's musing and kindly old eyes at that moment drifted a hazy memory--the memory of a pale, fragile girl in a Bath chair, listening to the English skylarks on a terraced lawn. She had been speaking to him, tremulously yet pa.s.sionately, of her young Oxford scholar, her hero; she had been telling of her great hope in him, of her woman's fears for him, winning a friend for him there while she already saw before her the valley of the shadow. "Oh, be kind to him! Be kind to him!" she had cried impulsively, with her hand on her heart and the tears welling to her mournful eyes.

Hartley remained moodily silent, and Repellier at last went over to him.

"Now before an old David leaves this tent of Saul, my boy, let me give you a little advice. Try hard work. It's G.o.d's own anodyne. When the heart gets down--and it will, you know--or the head goes wrong, work.

Work, man, work; that's my doctrine. You'll do your best when you are either very happy or very miserable. But when in doubt, work; work like a soldier, yet remember that the artist, like the soldier, can stand for the worst as well as the best in man."

Hartley, pacing his room alone when Repellier had taken his departure, knew all this to be true enough. But it could not do away with the canker of unrest and self-disgust that seemed gnawing at the core of his brain.

A dozen times that day he sat down at his desk, ready for work; and a dozen times he got up in despair. The mood of impotence, of dissatisfaction, was on him, and was not to be shaken off. He tried to tell himself that it was not of the heart, that it was not love. The very doubt brought its own answer. Eros, he felt, had a way of always claiming his own.

As the disturbing scenes of the night before kept crowding mockingly up into the foreground of his consciousness, he tried to hug to his remembrance some alleviating happier sense of escape that had flashed through him at the bathetic ending of it all. He persuaded himself that he was still heart-free; if there had been a time when he had ever questioned his att.i.tude toward Cordelia, that time, he insisted, was now past. If ever he should wander again, vehemently he told himself, it must be with his eyes open, and with no extenuating madness of romance to break his fall.

Those hours of cold reaction chilled him into something like his old-time austerity. He decided to write to Cordelia and make everything plain to her. It was a wandering and incoherent little note of contrition, the cry of a troubled Hamlet to a still trusting Ophelia. He had been entirely to blame. He had been thoughtless. He had been, too, ungenerous and unkind to her. He wanted only to be reinstated as her most loyal and truest friend. He did not deserve her trust, but he intended to show her the depths of his remorse--O repentant and heartless Adonis, how could you!--in the only way that lay open to him, by striving to the last for her success, by helping her in every way that he could, by laboring as he had never labored before on what should be her great book.

It may have been only that last sentence which saved the lady so sorrowfully addressed from tearing his letter into shreds. And the word "friend" had hurt her above all things. But hereafter he should be the supplicant.

Cordelia decided not to reply to his note. Restlessly and aimlessly all that day and all the next he waited, one moment even half hoping some impending estrangement would shake loose those ever-tightening shackles, which he had begun to feel weighing heavily upon him, and the next moment half dreading that any such freedom should come to him, cast down miserably by the thought that she had in any way pa.s.sed out of his life.

While this humor of unrest still hung over him he took down his brightly bound copy of The Silver Poppy and read it through studiously, from first to last. The sense of its exceptional power came to him once more, as a revelation reiterated. He found it a book where the gleaner caught at much which the more hurried harvester must miss, a book yielding, as he felt all good books should yield, a new and unexpected delight in its second reading. Outside the manifest strength and movement of the story there was the secondary charm of a quiet and masterly touch. Its satire was delightful and insidious, and through its merriest pages he found the Touchstone-like pensiveness of one who knew and understood a sad old wag of a world. He found in it, too--and this puzzled him most--still that sense of eternally saving humor of which he had seen so little in Cordelia herself. From page to page it flashed out at him, it tripped him up, and danced about him. He began to understand the better why The Silver Poppy had been called one of the novels of the year, even of the century. He thought he saw now just what Cordelia had meant when she had timorously asked him if he thought it possible that she had written herself out in one book. That early, crocus-like flowering of the spirit was no less beautiful because it was already over and gone with the April of life.

Where in that little body had such wisdom and power once been packed away? She had always seemed such a fragile, sh.e.l.l-tinted thing to him, the wonder was that she had written a book at all, that in one eloquent interval she had found a voice, and delivered her message. But was that one work alone to stand the key to that strangely reticent soul of hers?

Had she, as with those little East Side fruit-shops he knew so well, ranged all her stock in trade out on the public sidewalk, and left empty the store itself?

The thought of a bewildered but aspiring artist, caged in a body so incongruously frail and girlish, filled him with a pity for the sorrowing laborer struck helpless in the midst of her work--for the writing hand fallen helpless in the midst of its dreams. He suddenly felt that he should be willing to go through fire and water to bring one laurel leaf to that small, proudly poised head with its profusion of yellowish golden hair. And with this mood the grayness seemed to go out of the world. And still again he asked himself if this could be love.