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?"