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
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT 1
II. THE SPIRIT OF THE CITY 18
III. AN INTERLUDE OF ENLIGHTENMENT 27
IV. THE WORLD AND THE WOMAN 33
V. BETWEEN BLOSSOM AND FRUIT 48
VI. THE TWO VOICES 58
VII. THE APRIL OF LOVE 65
VIII. LIFE'S IRON CROWN 80
IX. THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODDESS 86
X. BROKEN LINKS 93
XI. THE STONIER UPLANDS 103
XII. EROS THE RELUCTANT 111
XIII. THE FETTERED RELEASE 120
XIV. THE FIRE IN THE CLEARING 130
XV. THE MILL AND ITS GRIST 144
XVI. REINFORCEMENTS 157
XVII. INEFFECTUAL FLUTTERS 164
XVIII. THE FULNESS OF LIFE 170
XIX. WAS EVER POETESS THUS MADE? 182
XX. A POWER NOT HERSELF 188
XXI. THE SIGNS OF BLIGHT 192
XXII. THE BLOT ON THE 'SCUTCHEON 203
XXIII. TATTERED COLORS 212
XXIV. ROSES AND THORNS 224
XXV. TARNISHED GOLD 235
XXVI. AUTUMN SUNLIGHT 241
XXVII. THE SCARS OF SLAVERY 248
XXVIII. THE ALTAR OF EMINENCE 257
XXIX. DESINAT IN PISCEM, MULIER FORMOSA SUPERNE 269
XXX. THE WORLD AND THE MAN 282
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.