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.