The Silver Poppy Part 22

"It's not that; it's what the verse and all that stands for. You know what The Silver Poppy says, 'A song in the heart is worth two in the book.'"

She looked up at him with almost a kindly light on her rough, mannish face as she said good-by.

"My poet, don't, don't let them break you on the golden wheel of their happiness!"

Hartley did not enjoy his cup of Golden Tip that afternoon with Cordelia and two voluminously over-dressed young ladies whom she spoke of as "the Slater girls." Their chatter irritated him, and for once there seemed something sickly, unnatural, exotic, about the overheated air of an overfurnished hotel which existed, as he remembered a compatriot of his had exclaimed, "to provide exclusiveness for the ma.s.ses."

He knew that it, and all it held, stood for those very conditions of life against which he had once rebelled so vigorously. With its glitter and gliding, did it, he asked himself bitterly--after all, did it represent the fulness of life?

"Why are you so quiet to-day?" Cordelia asked him, reprovingly, under her breath. He had noticed of late a certain outward hardening about her at times--she seemed to him like a judge steeling herself for some impending sentence that must be pa.s.sed.

"It's the ghost of a dead radical rising up against gold-leaf and cut gla.s.s," he laughed.

"Oh, yes, you used to be an anarchist, or something like that, didn't you?" she said wearily.

"Not _quite_ that."

"I wanted you to be nice to these two girls. I thought I told you they were my publisher's daughters?"

She noticed his half-sinister smile.

"Some day," she said almost angrily, "you'll learn that nothing succeeds like success, my moody young Hamlet." And for the rest of the afternoon she avoided him.

He was not sorry when a chance came for his escape. The very stale, dull flatness of the trite and contemptible spiritual drama in which he was playing an involuntary leading part depressed and sickened him of it all. It brought with it not even the consolation of largeness--it was all flaccid, neutral, outwardly insignificant. But he felt that unseen hands were building a wall between him and his freedom, even while, at the core of things, some miserably minute germ seemed tainting his life.

And if he could not still have health and liberty, he would at least have elbow-room. The startled question of Miss Short still rang in his ears: "My poet, my poet, what have they been doing to you?"

What, indeed, had they done to him?

Once out in the fresh air and alone, he felt more satisfied. Facing the rough wind, guiding his own course through the crowds--this gave him a flattering sense of momentary independence, a pa.s.sing taste of some liberty long proscribed. He turned up Fifth Avenue and made his way toward the Scholar's Gate, determined to walk off the last little demon of moroseness that hung at his heels.

It was a clear, sunny afternoon, yet with a touch of chilliness in the air, a premonition of winter in the wind. It made people step more briskly, and Hartley noticed that many of the women in the street, and also those in the pa.s.sing carriages that drifted up and down the Avenue in alternate tides, were already warmly wrapped in furs. The wind was westerly and biting, and its sudden blasts at the different cross-town street corners sent the dust eddying up and down the crowded sidewalks.

Beyond the comparative quietness and gloom of the regular brown-stone canons of the upper Forties, so uniform in aspect it seemed some mysterious fluvial erosion might have gorged them out of the one gigantic rock-bed, Hartley could see the familiar dim blue line of the Palisades, with the late afternoon sun dropping down crimson and big behind them, touching softly and into a golden mist the flying dust that hung over the city. And it could be a beautiful city, he thought, at times, as he gazed before him at the long line of airier, lighter, crowded architecture that overlooked the waning greenness of Central Park.

He threw himself with delight against the buffets of the wind and the sting of the cold. It seemed almost like an escape to that simpler and more strenuous life for which he had looked in his earlier years--those lost years of youth and liberalism. It brought back to his mind his many tramps over the Oxfords.h.i.+re hills, memories of journeys to Bagley Wood, to c.u.mnor village and Abingdon, to Iffley, and above all to Woodstock village, and the warmth and lights of the great hall after the hours of mist and coldness. A momentary pang of homesickness and longing for his beloved Oxford shot through him. The old gray city of bells and ivy seemed calling him through the alien twilight. Some day, he thought, should the worst come to the worst, he could creep back to the quietness of that old college town on the Isis, where it seemed always evening, and everything seemed always in the evening of life.

But could he ever go back? he suddenly asked himself. Could he creep back to the gray corridors and the quiet shadows and the little gardens?

Could he, indeed, after knowing that taste of the wider and more challenging life, after touching to his lips the intoxicating cup of the outer world?

He walked home through the gathering dusk still unhappy, but more quiet of mind and more resolute of spirit.

"When in doubt--work." That was what Repellier had said to him, and that was what he did. For all the next day the quietness and loneliness of his rooms weighed heavily upon him, but burying himself in his last revision of Cordelia's book, he remained at his desk, stoical and determined. Each night, though, oddly enough, before he turned out his lights and went to bed, he wrote to Cordelia. Just why he did this he scarcely knew. His letters were not love-letters in the strict sense of the word, though through them ran a strain of tenderness, alternating with a note of loneliness, that made them seem very beautiful letters to the author of The Silver Poppy, and, perhaps, accounted for more than one sleepless night on her part. She replied to them, sometimes almost against her will, in a note as tender, yet quite as restrained. She complained that she, too, was often lonely there in the Spauldings' big house, and felt that she would not be sorry when they came back once more. She was glad he had returned to his work. And she wanted him to feel that she had never in any way stood between him and his great dreams, and never willingly or knowingly would do so.

On the evening of the following Sunday Hartley was interrupted in his task of tying together the pages of his completed ma.n.u.script by the appearance of Repellier.

He seemed the same old Repellier to Hartley, with the same merry smile and the quiet eyes that had always silently reminded the younger man that he was still young and that youth can never know tranquillity. But about the older man on this occasion, for all his quietness of demeanor, there clung an air of unusual sternness.

"Are you busy?" he asked, as he beheld the paper-littered desk. "I only dropped up to borrow a book of yours that you've often spoken of--The Silver Poppy. I've been overworking, they tell me, and for the rest of the week I'm going to loaf."

He confessed, as Hartley gladly enough produced the volume, that he had never as yet read it--his days had all been so taken up that he got little time for the newer fiction. But only that morning he had picked up an old newspaper notice of the dramatized story and had been unusually interested by it.

"It's rather clever?" Repellier asked, taking the book and skimming through it where he stood. Something in his question seemed almost laughable to the younger man.

"It will open your eyes," was all he said, however.

"I hope it will," said Repellier, slowly closing the volume and slipping it meditatively into his pocket. Then he looked at the still smiling man and asked:

"Are you writing any short stories now?"

"Not now; but I want to."

"Any verse?"

"No--nothing worth while."

"Novels?"

"Not quite."

"Would you like a good plot for one?"

"That all depends," answered Hartley, motioning his visitor to an armchair.

"Well, let me tell it to you, anyway. Then you can think it over by yourself and see if there's anything in it. May I?"

"Indeed, yes."

"This story that I've picked up begins rather oddly, but it runs this way: On an island--I think it's called Muciana, at the mouth of the Amazon, a surveying party found a mysterious skeleton, or rather portions of a mysterious skeleton, half buried in a sand-bar. This skeleton puzzled biologists very much; it seemed to indicate there was some possibility that the once mythical creature known as the man-eating vampire really existed--that somewhere about the head waters of the Amazon actually lived or had lived pterodactyli of enormous size, much larger than the common enough blood-sucking bats of the lower river--which to-day, as you know, rather relish a sip or two of any warm-blooded animal. Many of these bones were strangely human in appearance, but attached to what remained of the skeleton were a pair of powerful and perfectly formed pterodactyl wings. All efforts to piece together this strange creature were a failure, and in the end it was given up as impossible. But am I boring you?"

"No; it's interesting."

"Well, now we have to go back to the beginning of our story, and perhaps to the most interesting part of it. We find a professor of zoology--a German--somewhere up about the head waters of that mysterious river.

Devotion to his beloved science has brought him to that dark corner of the globe. We find him drifting happily about the twilight forests in search of the man-eating vampire about which he must have heard strange rumors from the natives of the lower Amazon. We find him alone in a small boat, making his desolate way along some unknown tributary of the upper river. I needn't stop to describe his loneliness or the hards.h.i.+ps and suffering and days of doubt through which he pa.s.sed. But finally in some dark and undiscovered land of solitude he and his vampire came face to face. They closed in on one another, and he in the end captured it, though only after a bitter struggle. Yet, gently as he had treated his foe in that struggle, he could not help injuring it a little--in fact, it _had_ to be subdued. His one object then was to get down to the seacoast and back to the world with his prize, of course, while it was still alive. And his one fear was that it would die on his hands. He took it in his little boat with him and treated its wounds and fed it, and together the strange couple made their way down the river. But the journey was a long one. Before it was half over his provisions began to give out. He had not counted on the vampire, you see. But still he kept on, hoping against hope that he would reach help in time. His one dread still was that his prize would die. So day by day he ate a little less and gave a little more to his prize. But day by day his strength was failing him, and day by day, I suppose, he grew more afraid of the vampire. Then the time came when he had to decide whether he or the other should have the last sc.r.a.p of his food. Finally he flung it to the Vampire. Then, in some way, he knew that he was no longer master; from that hour he was the captive. There was a brief, and I suppose, a bitter struggle. The man could no longer control that winged Hunger. It broke the cords that held it down, the two bat-like wings opened wide, and when they came together they enclosed the still struggling man. In that last battle for life the little boat was overturned. The two went down under the yellow water, and their descent, we'll say, was marked by nothing more than a line of bubbles. But even in death the wings of that man-eating creature did not draw back from the bones of its victim.

Locked together, the two of them were washed down to the sea. The current carried them up on a sand-bar, and there they rested. There they found them, years afterward, I suppose it was, and when men tried to piece together what was left of the strange bones they failed. It was, as you know, not altogether either man or vampire."

There was a moment of unbroken silence.

"That's all," said the older man, getting up.

It was Hartley who spoke next.

"What the devil are you driving at, anyway?"

CHAPTER XXII

THE BLOT ON THE 'SCUTCHEON